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Sharon Lockhart: Goshogaoka

Sharon Lockhart: Goshogaoka

© Sharon Lockhart, Goshogaoka, 1997 Courtesy the artist, neugerriemschneider, Berlin, and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

Thursday January 14, 2016, 7:00 pm

Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA presents

Sharon Lockhart: Goshogaoka

MOCA Grand Avenue, Ahmanson Auditorium, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Sharon Lockhart’s Goshogaoka (1997) portrays the exercise routines of a girls’ basketball team in suburban Japan in six uninterrupted, ten-minute long takes. As it unfolds, however, the drills reveal themselves to be subtly choreographed, creating a mesmerizing reflection on the musical, theatrical, and documentary qualities of cinema. With its elegant transformation of everyday movements into dance, Lockhart’s film simultaneously engages the traditions of experimental film, post-modern dance, and visual ethnography. Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA is proud to present Goshogaoka with Lockhart in person to introduce and discuss the film, preceded by Tacita Dean’s Merce Cunningham. First Performance of STILLNESS (In Three Movements) to John Cage's Composition 4'33" with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (2007), a riveting performance-portrait of the choreographer near the end of his career, prompting deep reflection on the passing of time.

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TICKETS $12 general admission, $7 students with valid ID

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Tickets available in advance at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/258310

Programmed by Madison Brookshire

Acknowledgements:

Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA is supported through both organizations by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. Additional support of Filmforum's screening series comes from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.

Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA furthers MOCA’s mission to question and adapt to the changing definitions of art and to care for the urgency of contemporary expression with bimonthly screenings of film and video organized and co-presented by Los Angeles Filmforum—the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation.

Merce Cunningham. First Performance of STILLNESS (In Three Movements) to John Cage's Composition 4'33" with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007

By Tacita Dean

2007, 16mm, color, sound, 5 minutes

This single screen version of what was to become a six film installation was originally made for 'Il Tempo de Postino' at the Manchester International Festival. In this static-camera take whose elegance belies its layered complexities, Tacita Dean films Merce Cunningham performing STILLNESS, a dance he choreographed for John Cage’s 4’33”, a work in three movements. Also known as the “silent sonata,” 4’33” is perhaps Cage’s most provocative composition, yet it is also quite modest. 4’33” asserts that the sounds that are always already given are equal to if not greater than any music that could cover them. Cunningham’s nearly motionless choreography mirrors Cage’s music, using the stillness of his body to call attention to both his form and the surrounding space: dance at its most elemental. In documenting this performance, Dean also creates a moving portrait of an artist near the end of his career. Far from empty, the time reveals itself to be full of affect. –Madison Brookshire

Goshogoaka 2

Goshogaoka, by Sharon Lockhart

Goshogaoka

By Sharon Lockhart

1997, 16mm, color, sound, 63 minutes

Filmed in a middle school gymnasium in suburban Japan, Goshogaoka takes as its ostensible subject the exercise routines and drills of a girls’ basketball team. The film consists of six ten-minute takes, shot with a fixed camera at court level, in which the various cadences of chanting voices and bodily movements digress into distinct studies. Taken together they construct a subtle and multi-layered social portrait, a portrait framed within a study of choreographed movements (the routines, etc.) and therefore one in which documentary values soon become inseparable from aesthetic ones. And as there are no games, scrimmages, or barking coaches here, just the girls and their routines, the image is not so much one of contest and gamesmanship but of individuation within a scene of group cooperation. A scene, by the way, where shyness, camera shyness included, goes hand in hand with an odd sense of social comfort. –Sharon Lockhart

Image © Sharon Lockhart, Goshogaoka, 1997
Courtesy the artist, neugerriemschneider, Berlin, and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.