Join us for a screening curated by AgX member Yue Hua and Ellie Koo, featuring 14 films from current and prior AgX Film Collective members filmed on 16mm and encompassing single-channel experimental films, animation, personal narratives, dual projection, and a multi-projector performance.
Poster designed by Tomas Orrego
Free admission. Those without an Emerson ID must RSVP in advance by providing a name and email address on this guest registration form by March 27 at 11:59pm.
A Q&A session will follow the program. Catering will be provided.
Where: Emerson College, SPC Theater, Little Building, 80 Boylston Street, Boston, MA, 02116 (directions)
When: Friday, March 29, 2024
Doors open at 3:30pm. Program begins at 4pm with a 30-minute talk, followed by a 90-minute screening (with a 10-minute break).
Program Details:
Kathryn Ramey, ENOLAEMEVAEL/LEAVEMEALONE, 2017, 7mins, B/W, Sound, 16mm, Dual projection
Content warning: strobing
An unfaithful remake of Man Ray’s 1926 "Emak Bakia" made without the use of a motion picture camera, ELONA EM EVAEL/LEAVE ME ALONE is a nonsensical response to brutality alongside a celebration of silver process. Whereas Man Ray alluded to death with a rending of collars (a funereal tradition in many cultures including Ray’s, Judaism), ELONA EM EVAEL/LEAVE ME ALONE chooses from a surplus of tragedies the recent Amnesty International Report “Will I be Next?” on US drone strikes in Pakistan and a list of the 101 children killed by them as of April 2015. Juxtaposed with footage of the filmmaker’s young sons (standing in for Ray’s muse and mistress Kiki of Montparnasse) the film obliquely points to the privilege inherent in the banal peacefulness of my family’s everyday life.
The film uses a variety of unconventional image making and hand-printing strategies to achieve its hi-contrast jittery style including contact printing with a mag-light taped to a sync block and hand-processing in a bucket. No conventional motion picture processes/tools/labs were used. The film is meant to be played/looped at 24fps with the soundtrack provided by the image.
Filmmaker Bio: Kathryn Ramey is a filmmaker and anthropologist whose work operates at the intersection of experimental film processes and ethnographic research. Her award winning and strongly personal films are characterized by manipulation of the celluloid including hand-processing, optical printing, and various direct animation techniques. Most recently she has been focused on creating an anti-colonial film practice with collaborators in Puerto Rico and researching environmentally friendly photochemical processes utilizing indigenous flora. She is deeply committed to sharing her knowledge of alternative analogue technologies through workshops and publications.
Sarah Bliss, Moth Print, 2023, 3mins 35s, B/W, Sound, Digital
Moth Print is a collaboration with my deceased father. It traces lines of loss and confronts failure of memory. A cameraless handmade film, it employs a laser printer to image directly onto clear film leader, creating both (optical) sound and image. Each printed sheet contains 231 frames patiently composed and assembled one by one: 9.6 seconds of projected film. It utilizes two texts: digital video I shot of a Galium Sphinx moth compulsively divebombing a light that could destroy it, and a manuscript page from my father’s unpublished memoir in which he describes visiting his own father who was dying of Alzheimer’s. My father found him imprisoned in a state hospital, brutally beaten and bruised, strapped to a gurney unable to speak.
Filmmaker Bio: I’m a filmmaker, artist, educator, and Buddhist practitioner who facilitates presence and attunement with the sensate, desiring body. I work artisanally with hand-processed celluloid film and with video to make experimental and documentary films, kinesthetic immersive installations, artist books and performances that engage personal and social history. Of particular interest is the relationship between art practice and dharma practice. My work is shared and screened internationally at museums, galleries, film festivals, microcinemas, and backyards. I’ve been recognized with fellowships from the Flaherty Seminar, the Massachusetts Cultural Council (2019 Film and Video finalist; 2013 New Media/Installation fellow), and Scotland’s Alchemy Film Festival, am an Independent Imaging Retreat alum, and a recipient of a Lightpress Grant from the Interbay Cinema Society. I received a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, teach cameraless filmmaking, and am a member of Boston’s AgX Film Collective.
Douglas Urbank, Portrait, 2017, 5mins 16s, B/W, Silent, 16mm
An imagined portrait, a handmade, stream-of-consciousness improvisation. 16 mm.
Filmmaker Bio: Douglas Urbank, based in Boston, Massachusetts, is an artist with a background in sculpture and drawing who began to experiment with filmmaking in 2008. His short films have screened in festivals and curated programs, including nationally at Revolutions Per Minute Festival, Boston, Massachusetts; Microscope Gallery and Millennium Film Workshop in New York; San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads Film Festival; Moviate Underground Film Festival, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Chicago Underground Film Festival; Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Seattle, Washington; and internationally at Mire Lab’s PRISME festival, Nantes, France; and curated programs including, Zumzeig Cinema, Barcelona; Laboratorio Experimental de Cine program, Mexico City; Artist Film Workshop, Melbourne, Australia; and others. He was a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowships Film & Video finalist in both 2017 and 2019.
Beginning in 2001 he co-hosted a radio program devoted to experimental, improvisational, and other unconventional music and sound art. He has been a member of Fort Point Theatre Channel, an independent theater company which brings together an ensemble of artists from the worlds of theater, music, and visual arts. And he is a founding member of the AgX Film Collective. He is interested in cross-pollination between art forms on the fringes of alternative culture: experimental music, film and theater.
Michelle Trujillo, Cuentos Para Niños #2, 2019, 4mins, B/W, Sound, Digital
An imagined origin story following El Coco; european colonizers' most powerful weapon. Images were created on 16mm film through alternative techniques.
Filmmaker Bio: Michelle Trujillo was born in South Florida to Colombian and Costa Rican Parents. The focus of her practice is to question and explore representations of Latinx culture, gender and identity creation. Her work stems from an intersectional feminist perspective but does not always offer solutions to the problems it engages with. Instead, she is concerned with upsetting power structures and notions of normality through disorientation. She works in Spanish, English and Spanglish as a mirroring of her lived experience. She also works in various mediums such as eco and hand-processed 16mm film, digital video, 35mm still film and cyanotypes. She is currently working and living in Boston, MA where she is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Film and Video at MassArt.
Raymond (Ray) Rea, cat's cradle, 2011, 3mins 50s, Color, Sound, Digital
cat's cradle is a short meditation on the beauty of a failed attempt.
Filmmaker Bio: Raymond Rea is a filmmaker and playwright. His short films, made under Density Over Duration, have exhibited widely and internationally in experimental venues & microcinemas, non-fiction spaces and festivals, as well as on the LGBTQ+ film festival circuit. His writing for stage has been produced at the EXIT Theatre in San Francisco (EXIT Stage Left and the EXIT Cafe) and by Theatre B (Minnesota). Ray's work often challenges assumptions, hints at theatricality, and uses a raw LoFi aesthetic to address complexities. He holds an MFA in Cinema from San Francisco State University. For more information: https://raymondrea.com
Peaches Goodrich, Something From Nothing, 2017, 2mins 32s, B/W, 16mm with Optical Sound Track
Content warning: strobing
Created with discarded 16mm film outtakes and a boxcutter, this short film is an exercise in making something from nothing. With the boxcutter, the film's emulsion is carved into animating patterns, playing with the shapes and negative space of the discarded footage. Conversely, patterns and frequencies are scratched into the film’s optical sound track, manipulating the projector's light based audio system. The result is a primitive musical arrangement of alternating beeps, boops, whirs, and whooshes.
Filmmaker Bio: An illustrator, filmmaker, animator, and musician, Peaches was raised in Atlanta and currently lives in Philadelphia. He collaborates with Sam Sharpe on the smorgasbord comics anthology Viewotron, makes experimental 16mm film animations and installations, performs with the disco-punk outfit Boston Cream, and enjoys the subtleties of the color brown.
Wenhua Shi, Monosabishii (物寂), 2023, 4mins, Color, Silent, Double 16mm to Digital
A visual poem was composed, when no one is at home.
Filmmaker Bio: Wenhua Shi pursues a poetic approach to moving image making, and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. His work has been presented at museums, galleries, and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Hamburg, European Media Art Festival, EXIS, Athens Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Crossroads, Pacific Film Archive, West Bund 2013: a Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary art, Shanghai, Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism, and the Arsenale of Venice in Italy.
Yue Hua - Blue Bird (multi-projector performance), 2024, 18mins, Color, Sound, 16mm
Content warning: strobing, nudity
Blue Bird is a multi 16mm projector performance of the journey of a bird’s soul to find its body, also a journey into self. The work reflects my personal journey to find myself as well as my meditations on the relationship between spirit and body and the struggle to accept and love myself. Through the continuous changing of the 16mm film loops on the projectors, choreography their movement, and creation of visual effects with prisms, I aspire to create a liminal space that engulfs the viewer in an unrecognizable mental experience. We embark on this voyage with the bird through screens, memory and present, dream and reality and ultimately reach the sea of memory to rediscover her “body”. Using spoken word and poem elements to engage the viewer in a thought-provoking dialogue, inspiring them to seek their own sense of “wholeness.”
Filmmaker Bio: Yue Hua/华越 is an award-winning filmmaker and multimedia artist, born and raised in Wuhu, China, currently based in Boston, MA. Her work delves into film, expanded cinema, and digital media, including projection, performance, installation, and production design. Yue’s art explores themes like spirit-body relationships, searching for belonging, and the female perspective.
Kyle Joseph Petty, monolithic tenderness, 2024, 7mins 8s, Color, Sound, Digital
Content warning: strobing
Among towering facades, empty chatter, crumbled by the flicker of heartbeats
Tension between natural forms and tessellating commercial structures give way to a celebration of paternal love.
Filmmaker Bio: Kyle J. Petty is a visual artist working in photography, film, video, and collage. His practice is informed by a fascination with American image culture and a deep concern with our collective detachment from the earth. His film work has screened internationally at Visions du Réel, Barents Ecology Film Festival, and Antimatter Media + Art. Kyle grew up in the Merrimack Valley of New Hampshire, earned a BA from Chester College of New England, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He is a member of AgX Film Collective, teaches film/video at Montserrat College of Art and Tufts University, and lives in Medford, Massachusetts.
Ethan WL, Way Beyond The Blue, 2023, 8mins, Color, Sound, Digital
Content warning: flashing images
Memories of old and new.
Filmmaker Bio: Ethan WL is a filmmaker and musician from Gloucester, Massachusetts. His works often explore the idea of place and its connection to one's personal history. In both film and music he favors long, contemplative pieces.
Brittany Gravely & Ken Linehan, Tarot Portrait: Faith, 2023, 8mins, Color, 16mm with Optical Soundtrack
FAITH is part of a set of cinematic tarot cards in which we collaborate with the subjects to create layered vignettes infused with personal symbolism. By choosing costumes, objects, actions and locations that represent their own visions, the stars of these films bring forth what they want to manifest mythically and physically within their lives. Inspired by their particular choices and personalities, we collaborate throughout the shoot, double-exposing each roll of film as a toss of the alchemical I ching while adding a spectral layer. Sealed into the receptive emulsion, these layered iconographies are then awakened with the projection of light and witnessed by those who may recognize parts of their own dreams.
Filmmaker Bios: With a focus on sound and audio media, Ken Linehan's creative work explores intermedia space through works including field recordings, 16mm motion picture films, silkscreened images, works of cut paper as well as a variety of music projects. Most recently, Ken has been engaged in a series of psychic/cinematic collaborations in Magical Approach with Brittany Gravely. Having graduated in 2001 with an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Kenneth has taught courses on sound art and film sound at MassArt and RISD. Over the past decade his work has been exhibited at arts spaces, live music and cinematic venues such as the RISD Museum, the Boston Center for the Arts, Apex Art, AS220 and the Brattle Theatre, including events programed by Mono No Aware, Magic Lantern Cinema, Millennium Film Workshop & Balagan Films.
Artistically Brittany Gravely has focused on 16mm film for the past several years, but also creates works in many other media. Currently, she creates expanded and non-expanded cinema projects of a more mystical nature in Magical Approach with Ken Linehan. Recently, their films screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, Artifact, Fracto, Crossroads, Chicago Underground and Antimatter, among others. She also works as the publicist and designer for the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, MA and is a founding member of the artist-run film lab AgX.
Alison Folland, Keeping Together in Time, 2023, 8mins 50s, Color, Sound, Digital
This film is an attempt to define a word, “teleomeric". It is an imaginary word, taught to me by my husband. He taught me lots of words because he is Greek, and regards language at its root. Then he had a stroke and lost his language, and I am left with the memory of a word which I cannot find in the dictionary.
As I hunt for this word I am also hunting for the man he used to be. The closest word I can find to “teleomeric” is “telomeric", meaning belonging to the telomeres, or the ends of the chromosome, which protect their information, and prevent them from sticking together. In this sense, the film is actually about the search for those rare moments of consolidation, which that keep us afloat.
Filmmaker Bio: Alison Folland is a filmmaker and performer based in Somerville, MA. Her short hybrid films engage questions of affect and truth-value and are directly informed by her work as an actor in the commercial film industry. Alison studied physical theater at the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU/Tisch and film/video art at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her films have been screened at festivals such as Athens International Film and Video Festival (Ohio), Athens International Film Festival (Greece), Antimatter (Victoria, BC), and Winnipeg Underground Film Festival. As a performer, Alison has worked with directors such as Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes, Barbet Schroeder, and David O. Russell. She is a member of Agx Film Collective and teaches 16mm filmmaking at Emerson College.
Marie Li, A Murder Song in the Woods, 2024, 3mins, Color, Sound, Digital
Content warning: flashing images
Examining the interplay between flesh and nature reveals a mutual dependence, where each element influences the other. Every interaction between them gives rise to both beauty and potential harm. The film incorporate scanned found footages and hand processed films, both black & white and color. Captured the dancing flesh and the tranquil nature, working together to write this murder song.
Filmmaker Bio: Marie Li is a film director, producer, production designer, and video artist with works that are associated with a deep fascination with experimental and surreal storytelling. Artist Website: marieliyarumarie.com
David Bendiksen, The Optimyst, 2023, 5mins, Color, Sound, Digital
"The Optimyst" -- shot in August 2023 for former members of the band "Big Wreck" for a single released December 8th. Shot in a field and a butterfly sanctuary in Western MA.
The band gave total creative license which was nice. I didn't have the track yet when shooting, so they provided a "mood" description instead.
"I like the idea of masses adopting a new trend. They're all outside and happy and figuring it out. They are not paying attention to the jets overhead or the world on fire. The song has a bounce, and so the footage has its own dance/movement to compliment the song's rhythm and feel. The essence of friendship and warmth on a summer day."
Filmmaker Bio: David Bendiksen is a filmmaker and teacher who believes in the expressive use of equipment, ideas, materials, and processes and in the rich chemical, optical, and mechanical aspects of analog filmmaking. David has taught a dozen different film-related courses across Film Studies, Comparative Literature, and French at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Mount Holyoke, and Emerson College.
This event is organized as part of a year-long celebration of the 100th birthday of 16mm film, organized by Malic Amalya, Assistant Professor of Experimental Media and 16mm Film Production at Emerson College. This program is sponsored by GSO, a graduate student organization for film and media art at Emerson College, led by President Claire Maske.
Special thanks to Kathryn Ramey, Shaun Clarke, and the Visual and Media Arts Department at Emerson College.