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Winter - Spring 2024

  • Her Violet Kiss, by Bill Morrison

    The Festival of (In)appropriation #13

    Date: Jan 14, 2024 7:30PM
    Location: 2220 Arts + Archives

    Founded in 2009, the Festival of (In)appropriation is a preeminent international showcase for experimental, found-media film and video. Every year, the Festival attracts artists working across an astonishing array of moving-image formats while probing the limits of collage, machinima, re-mix, détournement, mash-up, and more.  Lots of Los Angeles premieres; films from around the world!

  • It’s Raining Frogs Outside (Ampangabagat Nin Talakba Ha Likol), by Maria Estela Paiso

    Unsettling Landscape: Experimental Films by Southeast Asian Women Filmmakers

    Date: Jan 27, 2024 7:30PM
    Location: Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum

    Showcasing a collection of recent experimental works by Southeast Asian women filmmakers, Unsettling Landscape focuses on short films and videos that critically engage with questions of land, landscape and the myriad forms of mediation that have been used to capture their image. New works from Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and the Philippines.  Free!

  • Orlando: My Political Biography

    Orlando, My Political Biography

    Date: Feb 4, 2024 7:30PM
    Location: 2220 Arts + Archives

    Filmforum joins with Semiotext(e) and LA OLA to host a screening of one of the most highly acclaimed films of 2023, Orlando: My Political Biography, by Paul B. Preciado.  Its unique use of performance, costume, declamatory statement, language, personal revelation, and exploration of identity and trans-ness places it somewhere between the films of Straub & Huillet, Godard, and Sally Potter’s more conventionally theatrical Orlando.

  • The Crack Up (2017, 16mm->digital video, color, sound, 18:18)

    Seasonal Affects: Films of Jonathan Schwartz

    Date: Feb 18, 2024 7:30PM
    Location: 2220 Arts + Archives

    Jonathan Schwartz made films as he lived his life.  His short works are gestures of appreciation and awe towards the world and for those he loved.   In all his 16mm films, he gives expression to both the beauties of the concrete and the transience and potency of ineluctable time. A flower, a face, melting ice, a shift in light — Jonathan’s lens holds them with generosity and care, for his and our gaze.  Time becomes a palpable preoccupation through his filming of the seasons and their variations, and in his own cinematic processes.  Seasonal Affects is our overdue tribute program of nine of Jonathan’s films, made between 2005 and 2018.

  • Reckless Eyeballing (2004) by Christopher Harris

    Christopher Harris in person

    Date: Feb 25, 2024 7:30PM
    Location: 2220 Arts + Archives

    With support from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Filmforum has been honored to commission a new work from Christopher Harris, and this film – Speaking in Tongues: Take One - will have its premiere in our screening, along with most of his other short films, with the filmmaker in person to discuss his work.  Christopher Harris makes experimental films and video installations informed by Motown, P-Funk, bebop, free jazz and beyond. Often drawing on archival sounds and images, his work features staged re-enactments, hand-cranked cameras, rear-projection, close-focus cinematography, re-photography, photochemical manipulations, and screen captured video among other strategies.

  • DELIRIO GÜERO. 1825, 2018, 2211 y de vuelta, by Nina Höchtl

    Footprints of the Forgotten: Video Works on Immaterial Archives

    Date: Mar 3, 2024 7:30PM
    Location: 2220 Arts + Archives

    Taking Jenny Sharpe’s definition of “immaterial archives” as a departing point, this program showcases a constellation of video works exploring and counteracting the paucity of documented records concerning the lives of people omitted from the archiving process. Commencing with Hande Sever's "To Thread Air", and culminating with Ali El-Darsa's use of water as an allegory of journeys in "The Image Remains the Same", the films unearth formerly disconnected historical fragments.

  • La Région Centrale

    La Région Centrale, by Michael Snow

    Date: Mar 8, 2024 7:30PM
    Location: Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum

    La Région Centrale is a three-hour-long film that calls attention to the mechanics of filmmaking, using a computer-programmed, motorized tripod that rotates the camera 360 degrees in any direction, repeatedly, without dialogue or any other subject beyond the landscape, over the course of a day. The film demands concentration, while its movements become meditative. Rarely screened and if you are willing to engage, the experience is dizzying and technologically sublime. 

  • Luther Price: New Utopia and Light Fracture

    Date: Mar 16, 2024 1:00PM
    Location: 2220 Arts + Archives

    In celebration of Visual Studies Workshop’s publication of Luther Price: New Utopia and Light Fracture, Filmforum is delighted to welcome VSW’s Tara Merenda Nelson to present the slide work of Luther Price, along with 1 or 2 of his super 8mm films.

  • Gaza Ghetto

    Gaza Ghetto

    Date: Mar 24, 2024 7:30PM
    Location: 2220 Arts + Archives

    Rare 16mm screening!  In the first documentary film made in Gaza, Gaza Ghetto (1984) highlights the historical precedents that fuel the current cycles of violence and continue at the heart of the Israeli occupation. Intimate scenes of family life (a child born, a grandmother dies) in Jabalia, the largest Palestinian refugee camp, are intercut with visits to the architects of the Israeli military occupation. Ariel Sharon, Benyamin Beneliezar and soldiers on patrol candidly discuss their responsibilities.

  • Night Out of Song, 2 projector performance

    Scott Stark: Alternating Frames

    Date: Apr 2, 2024 7:30PM
    Location: 2220 Arts + Archives

    Filmforum welcomes back the wonderful filmmaker Scott Stark, whom we last hosted in 2013.  Scott has a couple of fantastic expanded cinema dual-projector works getting their Los Angeles premieres.  His ability to overlay images, cut rapidly between two different images, or find beautiful effects in two side-by-side images is unparalleled.  We hope you can join us on this rare Tuesday night screening, the only available night when we could catch him on a brief visit to LA.

  • Race d’Ep, by Lionel Soukaz and Guy Hocquenghem. Image courtesy Stéphane Gérard

    Race d'Ep

    Date: Apr 17, 2024 7:00PM
    Location: 2220 Arts + Archives

    Free.  Establishing a dialogue with Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality and underscoring the radical politics of queer activism after the May 68 Student Revolution, Soukaz’s film is an experimental documentary about the increasing visibility of gay culture in a pre-AIDS era.

  • The Concrete River, by Nora Sweeney. World Premiere!

    Nora Sweeney

    Date: Apr 21, 2024 1:00PM
    Location: 2220 Arts + Archives

    The subtle and absorbing camera of Nora Sweeney unfolds with care and wonder the extraordinary of our ordinary everyday. Her films ask us to create a relationship with reality. Her choice of using 16mm film to bring out the colors and textures of people and places she engages, serve as a slow reveal that frames into portraits and landscapes the life-lived by many in and around the confines of Los Angeles County, and beyond. Nora will be with us in person to discuss her work. 

  • Easyout, by Pat O'Neill

    Pat O'Neill Films and Live Music

    Date: Apr 28, 2024 7:30PM
    Location: 2220 Arts + Archives

    Classic films by Pat O’Neill with live music by Vinny Golia, Holden King, Tim Feeney, and Matt LeVeque!  Pat O’Neill first had a solo screening at Filmforum in 1979, and Vinny Golia played a concert at Filmforum in 1980!  And they are back and raring to go!  Full details to come.