Prismatic Ground: West Coast Showcase - Program 3
A Shifting Pattern, by Isaac Sherman
Los Angeles Filmforum and Rotations present
Prismatic Ground: West Coast Showcase
Sunday June 2, 2024, 7:30pm - Program 3
At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057
In person: Inney Prakash, Isaac Sherman
Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members
At https://link.dice.fm/t3aad1426fb1
Buy a pass for the day for $30: https://link.dice.fm/Ud490800dcc9
Screening followed by a conversation with Inney Prakash, Isaac Sherman in person, and Kamal al-Jafari by Zoom
Filmforum and Rotations are delighted to host curator Inney Prakash and multiple filmmakers for a showcase highlighting Prismatic Ground. Based in New York City, Prismatic Ground is centered on the best in contemporary and underseen classic cinema. This special west coast showcase features a selection of work by filmmakers featured in previous editions of the festival. From Palestine to India to Angola and Egypt— not to leave out the flowerbeds of Milwaukee— these artists address matters of personal grief, religious nationalism, settler-colonialism and capitalist excess with startlingly innovative and self-aware approaches to the moving image and its possibilities. www.prismaticground.com
Three different program s in one day at 2220, beautiful and powerful films demonstrating the breadth and depth of the curatorial vision of the festival, and bringing to Los Angeles some recent highlights of artist cinema, including the world premiere of Suneil Sanzgiri’s Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?). Please join us for the day.
Masks are highly recommended at Filmforum shows - N95 or KN95.
Inney Prakash is a film curator and critic based in New York City. He is the founder and artistic director of Prismatic Ground.
Isaac Sherman is a filmmaker, musician, projectionist and woodworker currently living in Los Angeles, California. His work is informed by direct engagement with the medium; dissecting frames, manipulating and obscuring the lens, rephotographing, hand-processing. He focuses largely on his immediate surroundings, prioritizing subjects and topics that feel inherently close. His work has been exhibited at festivals including Prismatic Ground, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Crossroads and Milwaukee Underground Film Festival.
Kamal Aljafari is a Palestinian filmmaker renowned for his distinctive approach to cinema. After studying at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, he now resides in Berlin, Germany. Aljafari has shared his expertise in filmmaking through teaching positions at The New School in New York and the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie in Berlin. His contributions to the field were recognised with fellowships at the Film Study Center - Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and most recently at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Columbia University 2024-2025.
In May 2024, IndieLisboa will highlight his contributions to cinema by dedicating its retrospective Section to his work and it will take place at the Portuguese cinematheque. Additionally, his installation “The Camera of the Dispossessed” was showcased at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023). His film ‘A Fidai Film’ won the grand jury prize at Visions du Réel 2024. He is currently developing a fiction film set to be shot in Jaffa. https://kamalaljafari.art/About
Los Angeles Filmforum is the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation. 2024 is our 49th year. www.lafilmforum.org
Rotations is an LA-based, occasional film series focused on experimental nonfiction filmmaking, artist and political cinema, and their detours, by living, transnational feminist practitioners and their collaborators.
A Shifting Pattern, by Isaac Sherman
A Shifting Pattern
By Isaac Sherman
USA, 2023, 16mm, color, sound, 6 min., Los Angeles premiere!
*Please note This film contains some strobing images.*
A collected geography of local flowers; appearing, disappearing, reappearing. Afterimage becomes before-image, physiology and pathology at play. An ode to the neighborhood, an entrapment that offers small opportunities for escape. The will to walk aimlessly is rejuvenated, as stasis turns to movement and back again. —Isaac Sherman
Across the first minute of Isaac Sherman’s A Shifting Pattern, brief filmic phrases—close views of flowers and buds, each between 1 and 5 frames—appear at irregular intervals, generally in the range of every two seconds, as the soundtrack hums with outdoor ambience. A single, quick synth tone signals a turn: the montage accelerates, drawing the Markopoulos-style opening into outright flicker (Sherman continues to make precise use of black frames, creating a dense composition of afterimages, layered and fugal), as saxophone and flute join the synthesizer and field recordings in a similarly accumulative arc that moves from sparse 3-note phrases into a full arrangement which sounds like the record Laurie Spiegel never released on Mego. The botanical world is among the more common subjects for the flicker film, but when matched with the witty sense of fleeting pleasure imbued by the soundtrack, Sherman’s sumptuous and extravagant floral still lives—with their deft handling of light and shadow, of contrasts in color and scale—feel appropriately fresh. —Phil Coldiron
Special Preview Screening of a new film by Kamal al-Jafari
Special Preview Screening of a new film by Kamal al-Jafari
Palestine, Germany, Qatar, Brasil, France, 2024, digital, color, sound, 78 min.
In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut. During this time, it raided the Palestinian Research Center and looted its entire archive. The archive contained historical documents of Palestine, including a collection of still and moving images. Taking this as a premise, A Fidai Film aims to create a counter-narrative to this loss, presenting a form of cinematic sabotage that seeks to reclaim and restore the looted memories of Palestinian history. It’s a poignant exploration of identity, memory, and resistance, told through a unique blend of documentary and experimental filmmaking techniques.