The Experiment

Examining the common ground between documentary and experimental/avant-garde modes of cinema. Curated by Lorenzo Gattorna & Peter Buntaine.

American Falls

Philip Solomon, 2010, 55 min.

“American Falls is a single-channel triptych adaptation of a 55-minute, six-channel, 5.1-surround installation commissioned by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. It was inspired by a trip that I took to the capital at the invitation of the Corcoran in 1999, where I first encountered Frederick Church's great painting Niagara; took note of a multichannel video installation being projected onto the walls of the Corcoran rotunda; and went on walking tours of various monuments to the "fallen" throughout the DC area. The architecture of the rotunda in the vicinity of Niagara invited me to muse on creating an all-enveloping, manmade "falls", re-imagined as a WPA/Diego Rivera cine-mural, where the mediated images of the American Dream that I had been absorbing since childhood would flow together into the river with the roaring turbulence of America's failures to sustain the myths and ideals so deeply embedded in the received iconography.” - Philip Solomon

Hosted by Jessica Betz, former assistant of Philip Solomon who performed a great deal of the chemical, optical and installation work on American Falls.  Jessica will also be present for a Q&A following the screening.

Reviews of American Falls:

ttp://artforum.com/film/id=26500

http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/view-from-the-falls-20100713

American Falls Preview:

http://vimeo.com/15940609

The Experiment

Saturday, March 12th, 7:30pm

The Experiment

Curated by Peter Buntaine and Lorenzo Gattorna

Melting Ground

Dirs. Richard Garet and Asher Thal-Nir, 2011, 16mm on video, b&w, sound, 40 min.

"...As if Erik Satie and Albert Pinkham Ryder had taken a helicopter ride in Alaska together in order that they might locate a cipher or secret alphabet in the clouds, the mist and the glacial moraine below. Aerial adumbrations of wilderness unfolding in time like a Chinese landscape painting from the Sixteenth Century. Topography as stand-in for the unconscious. With geology and waterfall as phantasm, a panorama of lost places flickering in the eidetic harbor of dream. Of what was and never will be again, as much in metaphor, in mind, in memory as in actual place. Who am I? Where am I going? What can I become?" - David Baker on 'Melting Ground'

At Sea

Dir. Peter Hutton, 2004-07, 16mm, color, silent, 60 min.

"The momentum of more than forty thousand tons is as absolute as the darkness" (John McPhee, Looking for a Ship). Hutton's most recent film—a riveting and revelatory chronicle of the birth, life, and death of a colossal container ship—is unquestionably one of his most ambitious and profound. A haunting meditation on human progress, both physical and metaphorical, At Sea charts a three-year passage from twenty-first-century ship building in South Korea to primitive and dangerous ship breaking in Bangladesh, with an epic journey across the North Atlantic in between.

Filmmakers Peter Hutton and Richard Garet in person for a Q&A's following the screenings and a reception sponsored by Sugar Hill Ale