Summer-Fall 2024
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The Root That Ate Roger Williams (2011), by Alee Peoples
Alee Peoples: Something Pretending To Be Something Else
Date: Jun 23, 2024 7:30PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesPlease join us for a program celebrating the weirdly transformative power of analog film as we attempt to elevate the mystical ordinary and conjure the ineffable through the work of the one and only Alee Peoples.
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American Fabulous
Date: Jun 29, 2024 1:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + Archives“Nobody could make this up, and even if they could…why would they want to?” Driven around Columbus, Ohio, in the back of a 1957 Cadillac, Jeffrey Strauth 'spontaneously' recounts his wild, hilarious, tumultuous, homosexual life story for one hundred and five minutes, and that is the entirety of Reno Dakota’s rarely screened cult documentary, American Fabulous (1992).
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Maggots and Men, by Cary Cronenwett
Gender Troublemakers: Trans Authorship, DIY, and Experimentation Through Film
Date: Jul 21, 2024 1:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesGuest-programmed by Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay (with Gardner in person) on the occasion of the release of the book they co-authored, Corpses, Fools, and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema. In celebration of the book’s publishing, the co-authors have curated a film program with the focus on trans authorship and experimental film touchstones covered in their expansive book.
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Richland, photo by Helki Frantzen
Richland
Date: Jul 28, 2024 7:30PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesFilmforum is delighted to welcome back Irene Lustzig with her latest feature. Richland offers a prismatic, placemaking portrait of a community staking its identity and future on its nuclear origin story, presenting a timely examination of the habits of thought that normalize the extraordinary violence of the past.
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disruption / aksama, by belit sağ
belit sağ: through an empathic lens
Date: Aug 11, 2024 7:30PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesFilmforum is honored to host filmmaker belit sağ in person from Amsterdam for her first single artist show in Los Angeles! Keenly challenging our sometimes jaded expectations of political filmmaking, belit sağ’s video work is remarkable and vital for its complex emotionality, deep engagement, and thoughtful, purposeful manipulation of the moving image. Through her subtle and varying interventions, she brings targets such as censorship, racism, corruption, fascism, oppression, and state-sanctioned violence into sharp and unexpectedly sensitive focus.
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The Easter Rain, by Milly Yencken
Wraiths and Reveries
Date: Aug 24, 2024 7:30PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesNew and old animated films, including 4 premieres, by Martha Colburn, Danski Tang, Annapurna Kumar, Jackie Turpin, MARAL, Ellie Thatcher, Petra Freeman, Brenna Murphy, Milly Yencken, Evelyn Jane Ross.
Join us for a cinematic journey through the melting pot of late summer's essence, where the familiar becomes strange and the strange becomes familiar. Embrace the blur, the uncertainty, and the beauty of these films as we melt together. We’re delighted that several of the filmmakers will be joining us in person!
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Pwdre Ser, the rot of stars, By Charlotte Pryce
Experimentations 1: Feminist Film Experiments with Science
Date: Sep 15, 2024 3:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesThe first program of Experimentations: Imag(In)ing Knowledge in Film, Filmforum’s expansive film series and upcoming publication that investigates the ways that experimental and scientific films produce and question the visualization of the world. Combining artist films utilizing scientific imagery, science and natural history films, and films of indigenous and traditional knowledge, the series examines how science, nature, and technology films shape our understanding of humans, nature, gender, knowledge, and progress. Part of the Getty Foundation initiative PST Art: Art & Science Collide!
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How Old Are You? How Old Were You? 入世 By Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu
Experimentations 2: Rethinking Bodies, Rethinking Gender: Biology’s Expansive Otherworlds
Date: Sep 15, 2024 7:30PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesExperimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 2: Bodies in flight, bodies in stasis. Our bodies are bound by both the current reality and aspirational future of science, but expand even further in the search for an otherwise. This program takes as its jumping-off point questions, experiments, and memories of the body, wrestling with history, memory, gender, social institutions. Part of the Getty Foundation initiative PST Art: Art & Science Collide!
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Brilliant Noise, by Semiconductor
Experimentations 3: Between Land and Sky, Accounting for the In-Between
Date: Sep 19, 2024 7:30PM
Location: Eagle Theatre at VidiotsExperimentations: Imag(In)ing Knowledge in Film, program 3. Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light will be preceded by Solar Eclipse, the first known moving image captured of space as a way to orient the audience towards the wonders of our solar system before challenging the way it is romanticized in popular media, and Brilliant Noise, a granular and intimate look at the Sun. Part of the Getty Foundation initiative PST Art: Art & Science Collide!
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The Battle Over Mazepa, by Mykola Ridnyi
Mykola Ridnyi: The Past, Present
Date: Sep 22, 2024 7:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesFilmforum partners with Kyiv to LA to welcome the Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridnyi. Ridnyi’s video work finds powerful and widely-varying approaches to explore the impact of wars in Ukraine, from the distant past, through the Soviet era, to the invasions of 2014 and today. Throughout, he makes clear how the past suffuses the landscape and people caught in war.
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Yeelen
Experimentations 4: Repossessing the Spirit of Myths in Africa Through Cinema: Yeelen
Date: Oct 4, 2024 7:00PM
Location: Autry Museum of the American WestExperimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 4. This program examines the technical capacity of filmmaking to encode and organize new myths for the expansiveness of modern African people. Pairing legendary Malian film Yeelen (Souleymane Cissé, 1987) with contemporary Kenyan film Smoke Jumpers (Daniel Muchina, 2023), this program illuminates the intricate relationship between the structured systems of knowledge prevalent in ancient African societies and the creation of visual narrative forms as vehicles for disseminating this wisdom.
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DZATA: The Institute of Technological Consciousness (2022) Courtesy of Knoetze, Hlongwane and Wilson
Experimentations 5: Ritualizing Knowledge Systems
Date: Oct 6, 2024 7:30PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesExperimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 5. This program of short experimental films and videos expands on the process of ritualizing bodies of knowledge, highlighting the role film plays as a cultural interface that engages sacred reflections and revelations informing the performance of rituals for cultural inheritance. Films from Russel Hlongwane, Francois Knoetze & Amy Wilson, Jim Chuchu, Philippa Ndisi Herrmann, Adebukola Bodunrin & Ezra Clayton Daniels, and anaïs extend the limits of its artistic form to include divergent worldviews.
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The Wolf House
The Wolf House / La Casa Lobo
Date: Oct 20, 2024 7:30PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesThese three films explore the fragile intersection of motion, memory, and material, with decay etched into every layer. Creation and destruction blend as each frame clings to echoes of the past, constantly shifting but never fully wiped clean. Employing a range of non-traditional materials, from soot and charcoal to natural elements and glitter, these films construct worlds in which transformation is perpetual, and deterioration reveals deeper truths.
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Do You Believe? (Central Newsreel & Documentary Film Studio, China, 1980)
Experimentations 6: The Uncanny in 1980s Chinese Films
Date: Oct 27, 2024 7:30PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesExperimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, program 6. Showcasing three short films made by the Chinese state in the 1980s, this program ventures into the uncanny field between documentary and science fiction. As the socialist country stumbled into capitalism, nonfiction films gave forms to alternative epistemologies that reconfigure bodies, medicine, military, and education. The boundaries between documentary, science education film and fiction genres were constantly shifted according to specific political campaigns, resulting in hybrid and often experimental practices and the construction of a new national subjectivity that transcended modern western science.
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A Gente Rio (We River) (2016) By Carolina Caycedo, Iimage courtesy of the artist.
Experimentations 7: Carolina Caycedo: The Lives of Rivers
Date: Nov 3, 2024 7:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesExperimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 7. Filmforum hosts Carolina Caycedo in conjunction with We Place Life at the Center / Situamos la vida en el centro,the an art and environmental justice exhibition at the Vincent Price Art Museum. This film program showcases Caycedo’s film and video work, emphasizing the artist’s commitment to promoting the teachings of reciprocity with nature and personifying rivers, watersheds, plants, and other non-human beings as political agents.
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"Studies in Diagnostic Cinefluorography," By Dr. James Sibley Watson, and 'Sanctus," by Barbara Hammer
Experimentations 8: Beautiful Science
Date: Nov 10, 2024 7:30PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesExperimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 8. The utilization of prior footage, recontextualized, is a common practice in experimental filmmaking. This program highlights two supreme examples, both drawing on earlier “science” films utilizing remarkable photographic techniques to create new art, one utilizes cine-radiography to examine the interior of the human body in action; the other a meditative tribute to one of the primary pioneers of microscopic and time-lapse photography. Featuring "sanctus" by Barbara Hammer and Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith, by Stuart A. Staples of the band tindersticks, along with rarely screened source films for both.
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Save the Green Planet!
Seeing Is Not Believing: Tribulation 99 / Save the Green Planet!
Date: Nov 15, 2024 7:30PM
Location: Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer MuseumScience Fiction Against the Margins showcases filmmakers who occupy the “margins” of mainstream cinema in order to challenge and subvert the science fiction genre. Hollywood’s ubiquitous sci-fi story structure functions within the conventions of action-driven melodrama, resolving social issues in private, emotional and moral terms that reinforce the status quo. Science Fiction Against the Margins reimagines the relationship between science and art by challenging and sometimes finding new inspiration in old cinematic traditions. Filmforum is a community partner for this program which includes Craig Baldwin's Tribulation 99, which we screened long ago, and Jang Joon-hwan's Save the Green Planet! along with three short films.
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Looking for Siraya 尋找木柵女 (2013), by Li-Ming CHENG
Then<·>Now: Taiwan Experimental Film and Video Arts, Part 1
Start Date: Nov 17, 2024 7:30PM
End Date: Nov 17, 2024 9:45PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesExperimental films in Taiwan started around 1960 or even earlier. Many people found a connection with Dadaism or Surrealism, which opened a ray of hope for young students who had been oppressed by political history for a long time. Four filmmakers will join us for a Zoom Q&A from Taiwan after the screening: Chun-Hui Tony Wu, Ya-Li Huang, Tzu-An Wu, and Tsen-Chu Hsu. Moderated by Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu. Translated by Sonny Shieh. This is a unique opportunity for us to screen these works together. Many of the works have never been shown in the United States, or at least this is their West Coast or Los Angeles premiere.
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Cecelia Condit by Mark Escribano
Suburbs of Eden: The Films of Cecelia Condit
Date: Nov 20, 2024 7:00PM
Location: Philosophical Research SocietyThe first LA retrospective of the works of video artist Cecelia Condit – co-presented by Los Angeles Filmforum and co-hosted by JJ Stratford. This very special program features seven of Condit’s singular films, including her first five shot-on-video shorts spanning 1981 to 1996, as well as two more recent works, and will be co-hosted by LA based video artist Jennifer Juniper (JJ) Stratford – a huge fan of Condit’s who will join the filmmaker (beaming in via Zoom) in conversation for a post-screening Q&A!
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A Year in a Field
A Year in a Field - US Premiere!
Date: Nov 22, 2024 7:00PM
Location: Philosophical Research SocietyThe US premiere of the acclaimed and beautifully contemplative new documentary from BAFTA-winning documentarian Christopher Morris. Following the film’s premiere screening, the director will join us (live from Cornwall, via satellite) for a sure-to-be fascinating Q&A with author and musician Will Sheff (of Okkervil River, and of Cornish heritage).
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Proteus: A Nineteenth Century Vision
Experimentations 8.33: David Lebrun: Proteus
Date: Nov 24, 2024 3:00PM
Location: Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer MuseumExperimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 8.33. Filmforum is community partner for two screenings of works by David Lebrun at UCLA that also fit in our series Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film. From the hippie counterculture of the 1960s to Tibetan and Mayan mythologies, Lebrun seeks cinematic forms that draw out the radical specificity of his subjects while simultaneously revealing their interconnectedness across time and place. Proteus centers on the fascinating life and career of 19th century German naturalist Ernst Haeckel and his obsession with radiolarians, a species of microscopic marine protozoa.
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Transfigurations
Experimentations 8.67: David Lebrun: Transfigurations: Reanimating the Past
Date: Nov 24, 2024 7:00PM
Location: Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer MuseumExperimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 8.67. David Lebrun’s latest project is a large-scale, multi-year work in progress to create a transformative encounter between the present and the past through an immersive experience with change itself. Beginning with high-resolution images of artifacts, art objects and architectural details from different eras and photographed at various sites around the world, including museums, churches and temples, Lebrun animates the changes in their forms across millennia. The results are an awe-inspiring tour of human ingenuity, imagination, belief and craft as it expressed itself from the Paleolithic period through the Middle Ages, and from Mesoamerica to Europe, the Middle East and Indian Asia.
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The Tree House
Earthly Visions: The Tree House
Date: Dec 6, 2024 7:30PM
Location: The Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer MuseumPart of Science Fiction Against the Margins. This program’s films are documents of the Earth at its current stage mixed with dystopian speculations on the future. Moving through green spaces, caves and mountains, they remind us of the fragile rock that houses us, and that we must tend to in order to avoid catastrophic consequences.
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Photo by Robert Mearns Yerkes of one of his experimental subjects
Experimentations 9: Should We Look at Animals?
Date: Dec 8, 2024 3:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesExperimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 9. Should We Look at Animals?: The Perils and Pleasures of Nonfiction Animal Films. Comparisons between humans and animals are foundational to the experimental branches of medicine and psychology. Often treated as purely transparent scientific recordings, the films produced out of animal research are in fact deeply formalist works that tested what film could capture through the image of an animal—variously proposing that they could visualize pure thought, the processes of history and culture, and the influence of the environment on an organism. With special guest Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa from Seattle, in conversation with Thomas Pringle, Assistant Professor in Cinema & Media Studies at USC.
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Last Things, by Deborah Stratman
Experimentations 10: The Crystalline Entities
Date: Dec 8, 2024 7:00PM
Location:Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 10. Crystals are inherently beautiful. They form our world; they are part of chemical-based photography that images it. They take innumerable forms, their growth is hypnotic, the light they scatter creates amazing colors. Many filmmakers have looked at crystals in myriad ways, and this program strives to capture an element of how the filmic investigation of one subject results in a brilliant array of filmic forms. From a well-crafted educational film from the 1950s to a mysterious experimental film and one that positions crystals in a post-humanist world, the program highlights the range of scientific visions and the experimental reuse or repositioning of those visions.
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Nation Estate, by Larissa Sansour
An Evening with Larissa Sansour
Date: Dec 14, 2024 7:30PM
Location: Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer MuseumInterdisciplinary artist Larissa Sansour creates works that examine the collective memory and trauma of the Palestinian people through allegorical and experimental science fiction films. The program includes the three films in Sansour’s science fiction trilogy — A Space Exodus (2009), Nation Estate (2013) and In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain (2015) — along with her follow-up science fiction film In Vitro (2019). Though varied in aesthetic and approach, the films relate to one another in their examination of inherited history and identity, trauma and resistance.
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What About China?
What About China? with Trinh T. Minh-ha in person
Date: Dec 15, 2024 7:00PM
Location: 2220 Arts + ArchivesLos Angeles Premiere, with Trinh T. Minh-ha in person! Low-res video footage shot 30 years ago of Chinese rural life centering on women, children, labor, and family is reanimated and reframed through photomontage, oral histories, travelogues, poetry, and folk songs in order to interrogate what China has been, is, and could be.
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Taylor Mead in Ron Rice's "The Flower Thief"
The First Underground Movie Star: Taylor Mead at 100
Date: Dec 18, 2024 7:00PM
Location: Philosophical Research SocietyThe Philosophical Research Society and Los Angeles Filmforum are proud to celebrate the centennial of poet, actor, filmmaker and traveler, Taylor Mead. Poet, actor, filmmaker and traveler, Taylor Mead was a fixture of postwar America’s art and counterculture scenes, gleefully bridging the Beat movement and New York’s downtown scene. An uninhibited screen comedian and queer icon, Mead’s centennial will be celebrated tonight with a screening of The Flower Thief as well as some of his own, rarely screened 16mm “home movies” shot throughout his 60s journeys, plus a few other surprises from across his cinematic wanders. Introduced by William Kirkley, director of the documentary Excavating Taylor Mead.