May 14th, 2015
@ Farewell Books (map)
8:00pm
Free / Suggested Donation
“Poetry in the cinema today is a willingness to work productively on the edge of inscrutability, opacity, meaninglessness, fears which are only the products of capital’s smear campaign against the time of contemplation; an ability to arrange images such that they regain their mystery… and choose the possibility of being loved some day over selling you straight away on a feeling, a thrill, an idea; and a properly historical understanding of what an image has meant, and will mean. In short, poetry in the cinema today would give images back the fullness of their possibility. It might look like the films of Mary Helena Clark, and as I had started to say, there’s something about her poetic cinema in particular…” – Phil Coldiron, Cinema Scope Magazine
A filmmaker based in Berkeley, California, Mary Helena Clark’s films explore genre tropes, the materiality of film, and the pleasure of tromp l’oeil. Bringing together observational, appropriated, staged and abstract footage, they operate on dream logic until disrupted by moments of self-reflexivity. She has exhibited at the Wexner Center for the Arts, the National Gallery of Art (DC), Anthology Film Archives (NYC), Cleopatra’s (Brooklyn), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Brooklyn Museum of Art, and at the New York, San Francisco International, Ann Arbor, BFI London, Toronto International, and Hong Kong International Film Festivals.
Experimental Response Cinema is excited to present this intimate screening with the artist in person. Limited seating, first-come, first-serve.
Notes: Sound Lost and Found: Listening to the films of Mary Helena Clark by Federico Windhausen.
Farewell Books, founded in February 2013 and run by Travis Kent & Mikaylah Bowman, is a progressive new and used bookshop and art gallery in the city of Austin, Texas.
This project is funded and supported in part by the City of Austin through the Economic Growth & Redevelopment Services Office/Cultural Arts Division believing an investment in the Arts is an investment in Austin’s future. Visit Austin at NowPlayingAustin.com.
Program
Sound Over Water
5 min / 16mm / sound / 2009
Blue sky and blue sea meet on emulsion. (MHC)
Orpheus (outtakes)
6 min / 16mm / sound / 2014
“Using footage from Cocteau’s Orphée, Mary Helena Clark optically prints an interstitial space where the ghosts of cinema lurk beyond and within the frames.” – Andrea Picard
The Sound of Running in My Voice
5 min / digital video / sound / on-going
We ape naturalism. (MHC)
The Dragon is the Frame
14 min / 16mm / sound / 2014
An experimental detective film made in remembrance: keeping a diary, footnotes of film history, and the puzzle of depression. (MHC)
What are you thinking?
I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated. How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.
What are you thinking now?
– Jack Spicer, Psychoanalysis: An Elegy
By foot-candle light
9 min / 16mm to digital video / sound / 2011
A walk through the proscenium wings. You close your eyes and suddenly it is dark. (MHC)
“In the dream we call cinema there is no either, no or. We move from cave to forest to theater and back again, certain only that we are elsewhere, at least until the reel runs out. Here is objective truth, or “hypnosis” by another name.” – Ben Russell
Aphorisms
6 min / 16mm to digital video / sound / work-in-progress
The Plant
8 min / 16mm to digital video / sound / 2012
A spy film, built on the bad geometry of point-of-view shots. (MHC)