DIM
DIM is a monthly evening of contemporary moving-image art and cinematic experiments. DIM presents Canadian and international artists and their moving-image practices in dialogue with the cinema.
DIM is programmed by Amy Kazymerchyk through the Pacific Cinémathèque Pacifique. programming[at]dimcinema[dot]ca
DIM evenings take place on the third Monday of every month and commence at 7:30pm, unless otherwise stated.
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Monthly update on upcoming screening
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DIM Suggests
Jan
14
DIM CINEMA JAN 23 Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
January 14, 2012 - 5:20pm | Add new comment
DIM Cinema Presents
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
by Jonas Mekas
Monday January 23 2012 7:30pm Tix 10.50/9$ + 3$membership
Pacific Cinematheque 1131 Howe St. Vancouver
dimcinema.ca/ cinematheque.bc.ca
Filmmaker and curator Jonas Mekas (b.1922), one of the central figures in American avant-garde cinema, and his brother Adolfas (1925-2011), who would also become a filmmaker, fled their native Lithuania in 1944 due to the war. On route to Vienna, they were detained in a labour camp in Elmshorn, near Hamburg; eight months later they escaped and hid on a farm near the Danish border until the end of the war. They then lived in a series of displaced persons camps in Germany. In 1949, the brothers arrived in America and began their prolific film practices. For Jonas, these would be driven by a desire to hold on to fragments of his life as he passed through it and it passed through him. His film diaries flutter with single frames and short gestural sequences of gatherings, landscapes, family, and friends — what he calls little moments of paradise. He considers this yearning to be the fate of displaced persons, whose every living moment contains a past they are afraid they can never return to. Reminiscences is structured in three parts, recounting the Mekas’ early days among Lithuanian immigrants in Brooklyn (1950-1953); their homecoming, after 27 years, to the village of Semeniskiai in Lithuania (1971); and their journey to Elmshorn, where they were interned, and then to Vienna, where they spend time with close friends Peter Kubelka, Hermann Nitsch, Annette Michelson, and Ken Jacobs. Reminiscences does not picture Lithuania as it was in 1971. Rather, it was shot through the eyes of a displaced person who has returned looking for the paradise of his memory. Color, 16mm, 82mins.
Dec
8
DIM CINEMA DEC 12 L’Histoire, toutes le histoires (History and Stories: Documenting Documentaries)
December 8, 2011 - 8:20pm | Add new comment
DIM Cinema Presents
L’Histoire, toutes le histoires (History and Stories: Documenting Documentaries)
Curated by Pascale Cassagnau (in attendance)
Monday December 12 7:30pm Tix 10.50/9$ + 3$membership
Pacific Cinematheque 1131 Howe St. Vancouver
dimcinema.ca/ cinematheque.bc.ca
The works in “L’Histoire, toutes le histoires” exemplify interactions between contemporary art and documentary practices that are particularly fecund. These artists employ working processes with empirical data (documents) and marks of historicity (archives) that are both critical and ambiguous. In Les Gardiens, Florence Lazar employs the simple discursive act of transplanting a private object—a domestic rug—to a public space—a garden in the Paris suburbs. This symbolic act of “making visible” extends to the conversation between two veiled women, sitting face to face on the rug, about civic concerns. Lazar displays an astute concern for aesthetic formulas within painting and for the gaze of the viewer within pictorial and cinematic histories.
Expectations of universality and wholeness have been irrelevant in contemporary works of art and cinema for a long time. They gave way to subjective and inter-subjective appropriations of history and storytelling. Within the conditions of this new historicity, documenting could be defined as a practice of both re-claiming and dissolving the relationship of one’s own biography within micro- and meta-narratives. This re-claiming is evidenced in Anya, the second part of Bouchra Khalili’s ongoing series “Straight Stories.” Anya explores the story of an Iraqi refugee who, since 1996, has been waiting at the Straight of Istanbul—a temporary stop for migrants in transit—for a visa to Australia. By fragmenting diaristic, confessional, and surveillance strategies, Khalili makes physical and psychic geography indistinguishable.
Grand littoral | Valérie Jouve/France 2003. 35mm, 20 mins.
Anya, Straight Stories Part 2 | Bouchra Khalili/France-Turkey 2008. DV, 12 mins.
Les Gardiens | Florence Lazar/France 2009. 16 mins.
X+ | Marylène Négro/France 2010. DV, 68 mins.
Total running time: 132 mins.
Pascale Cassagnau has a PhD in Art History and works as an art critic. She is in charge of audiovisual and new media content at France’s Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP), the public institution responsible for contemporary art under the French Ministry of Culture and Communications (www.cnap.fr). She is a frequent contributor to Art Press. Her research focuses on new practices in cinema, especially the ways they interact with contemporary artistic creation.
This program is generously supported by the Consulate General of France in Vancouver, Institut Français, and Centre National des Arts Plastiques — French National Centre for the Visual Arts (CNAP)
Image: Les Gardiens, Florence Lazar 2009
Nov
17
DIM CINEMA NOV 21 The Road Ended at the Beach and Other Legends: Parsing the “Escarpment School”
November 17, 2011 - 3:38pm | Add new comment
A unique but overlooked confluence in Canadian film history, the “Escarpment School” outlines a loosely knit band of Ontario-based filmmakers that came of age in the late-1970s. Its affiliates include the celebrated experimental filmmakers Philip Hoffman, Mike Hoolboom, Richard Kerr, Carl Brown, Gary Popovich and Steve Sanguedolce, who studied together at Sheridan College, under the tutelage of Rick Hancox and Jeffrey Paull. Over the past thirty years, the Escarpment School cineastes have helped to inaugurate Canada’s first-person cinema; reinvented documentary as a mode for self-expression and formal exploration; extended and deepened the rich landscape tradition in Canadian art; and inspired the next generation of filmmakers through their work and their teaching.
Although varied in tone and texture, the films in this program share numerous qualities, including an attention to geography, a drive to record reality, the filtering of documentary material through individual experience, the looming presence of America, and a process-based, formalist approach to nonfiction. These characteristics in turn reflect the twin impact of the New American Cinema and its conterminous postwar movements, especially Beat literature, as well as the Canadian social documentary tradition, which were often viewed side-by-side in the “Escarpment School” classroom.
Trains of Thought | Lorne Marin. Canada 1983. 16mm, 10 mins.
Beach Events | Richard Hancox. Canada 1984. 16mm, 8 mins.
The Road Ended at the Beach | Philip Hoffman. Canada 1983. 16mm, 30 mins.
His Romantic Movement | Richard Kerr. Canada 1984. 16mm, 15 mins.
Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion | Philip Hoffman. Canada 1983. 16mm, 6 mins.
Mexico | Mike Hoolboom and Steve Sanguedolce. Canada 1992. 16mm, 35 mins.
image: The Road Ended at the Beach by Philip Hoffman (1983)
The films in this program are distributed by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre.
This program is the first in a four screening series originally curated for the Winnipeg Cinematheque. www.brettkashmere.com/escarpment.html
Sep
11
DIM Cinema Sept 19 Nicolas Boone LIQUIDATION
September 11, 2011 - 3:07pm | Add new comment
Transbup| France 2009. Colour, DV. 50 mins.
La Transhumance Fantastique | France 2006. Colour, DV. 55 mins.
Programmed in parallel with the exhibition LIQUIDATION and the production of Nothing Happening at VIVO Media Arts Centre. Co-presented with the LIVE International Performance Art Biennale and Swarm Festival of Artist Run Culture. LIQUIDATION is presented with the generous support of the Consulat général de France à Vancouver and Institut Français.
image: La Transhumance Fantastique (2006)
May
8
DIM Cinema May 16 | Ben Russell: By the Light of the Black and White Gods
May 8, 2011 - 3:42pm | Add new comment
Ben Russell: By the Ligh of the Black and White Gods
Monday May 16 2011 7:30pm
at the Pacific Cinematheque 1131 Howe St.
www.dimcinema.ca | www.cinematheque.ca
In 2005, Chicago media artist Ben Russell initiated an inquiry into the alchemy of cinema, trance, travel and psychedelic ethnography. This inquiry has since conjured seven films, collectively known as the Trypps series. The first gestures in Trypps Number One were cameraless and focused on manipulating the essential elements of cinema: light and dark. By Trypps Number Three, Russell was directing the cinematographic apparatus on the collective transcendence of a concert by Rhode Island noise band Lighting Bolt. Immersed in the deep chiaroscuro and soft focus of the throbbing spotlit audience, Russell draws out the deeply corporeal and metaphysical embodiment of this contemporary youth ritual. The adaptation of trance ritual within hybrid culture lead to Trypps #6 (Malobi). Structures of ethnographic spectatorship are negotiated, and the body of the filmmaker folds into the cinematographic process. Trypps #7 (Badlands) fully indulges the semiotics of the moving image. The perception of a woman’s LSD trip in Badlands National Park is suspended between the gullies and horizons of the desert landscape. “Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell’s unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence” (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago).
Ben Russell: www.dimeshow.com
Black and White Trypps Number One
USA 2005. B&W, 16mm, silent. 6 mins.
Black and White Trypps Number Two
USA 2006. B&W, 16mm, silent. 9 mins.
Black and White Trypps Number Three
USA 2007. Colour, 35mm, sound. 12 mins.
Black and White Trypps Number Four
USA 2008. B&W, 16mm, sound. 11 mins.
Trypps #5 (Dubai)
USA-Dubai 2008. Colour, 16mm, silent. 3 mins.
Trypps #6 (Malobi)
USA-Suriname 2009. Colour, 16mm, sound. 12 mins.
Trypps #7 (Badlands)
USA 2010. Colour, Super 16mm on HD, sound. 10 mins.
Black and White Gods
USA 2008. B&W, dual 16mm live performance with sound. 20 mins.
+
Apr
11
DIM CINEMA APRIL 18 | Suspicious Futures: Select Video Works of Susan Britton
April 11, 2011 - 8:26pm | Add new comment
DIM Cinema Presents
Suspicious Futures: Select Video Works of Susan Britton
Monday April 18 7:30pm
at the Pacific Cinematheque 1131 Howe St.
www.dimcinema.ca | www.cinematheque.ca
Curated by Allison Collins
A communiqué from the past, performed as sex, love, loss, mystery, and technology. The work of Susan Britton, one of the original artists and founders of Toronto-based Vtape (a leading Canadian distributor of independent, artist-driven video art), has been out of distribution — and thus out of the public eye - for almost 15 years. Recently restored, this body of work reveals an important early voice from the past life of video art in Canada. Campy sci-fi concerns mixed with synth beats accompany her inquests into the future. Offering sceptical inquiry into ideology and the feminine subject, her short works act as vignettes, bringing us subject positions and rhetoric from our recent past. Britton’s longer narratives play with their own formal nature, with deft use of apparatus and technology to help the story along and then pull it apart. This screening experiments with loose ends, as befits Britton’s proto-punk personae. Offering a sample of work from her sprawling, ambitious body of video art, it is accompanied by a catalogue—fully illustrated, with a full videography.
Why I Hate Communism No.1 | 1976. Video, 3 mins.
Freeze Frame |1983. Video, 2 mins.
1984 | 1983. Video, 4 mins. — Previously unreleased
Casting Call | 1979. Video, 36 mins.
Up Down Strange | 1981. Video, 55 mins.
This programme originated at Vtape January 2011 as part of their Curatorial Incubator program. www.vtape.org
____
DIM Cinema is a A monthly evening of contemporary short-form moving images and cinematic collaborations. DIM is focused on expanding the visibility of Canadian and international experimental artists and their practices in the cinema; and illuminating underground moving-image culture in Vancouver. DIM is programmed by Amy Lynn Kazymerchyk
Apr
11
DIM CINEMA APRIL 17 | Suspicious Futures: Select Video Works of Susan Britton
April 11, 2011 - 8:15pm | Add new comment
DIM Cinema Presents
Suspicious Futures: Select Video Works of Susan Britton
Monday April 17 7:30pm
at the Pacific Cinematheque 1131 Howe St.
www.dimcinema.ca | www.cinematheque.ca
Curated by Allison Collins
A communiqué from the past, performed as sex, love, loss, mystery, and technology. The work of Susan Britton, one of the original artists and founders of Toronto-based Vtape (a leading Canadian distributor of independent, artist-driven video art), has been out of distribution — and thus out of the public eye - for almost 15 years. Recently restored, this body of work reveals an important early voice from the past life of video art in Canada. Campy sci-fi concerns mixed with synth beats accompany her inquests into the future. Offering sceptical inquiry into ideology and the feminine subject, her short works act as vignettes, bringing us subject positions and rhetoric from our recent past. Britton’s longer narratives play with their own formal nature, with deft use of apparatus and technology to help the story along and then pull it apart. This screening experiments with loose ends, as befits Britton’s proto-punk personae. Offering a sample of work from her sprawling, ambitious body of video art, it is accompanied by a catalogue—fully illustrated, with a full videography.
Why I Hate Communism No.1 | 1976. Video, 3 mins.
Freeze Frame |1983. Video, 2 mins.
1984 | 1983. Video, 4 mins. — Previously unreleased
Casting Call | 1979. Video, 36 mins.
Up Down Strange | 1981. Video, 55 mins.
This programme originated at Vtape January 2011 as part of their Curatorial Incubator program. www.vtape.org
____
DIM Cinema is a A monthly evening of contemporary short-form moving images and cinematic collaborations. DIM is focused on expanding the visibility of Canadian and international experimental artists and their practices in the cinema; and illuminating underground moving-image culture in Vancouver. DIM is programmed by Amy Lynn Kazymerchyk
Mar
14
DIM CINEMA | MAR 21 | THE PERMANENT LONGING FOR ELSEWHERE
March 14, 2011 - 7:40am | Add new comment
According to the International Organization for Migration, the total number of international migrants has increased from an estimated 150 million people in 2000 to 214 million people today. As the number of migrants has grown, so have their destinations diversified, broadening the prevalence of both journey (on the part of the immigrant or refugee) and reception (on the part of the host community). People have always wandered, but the recent proliferation of migration and mobility in our globalized world shifts the reference point of migrant and fixed resident alike: everyone is a fellow traveler. While nation-states have long provided a foundation for understanding alliances between large groups of people, today’s cultural flows spill across national borders. Migrants are one element among many that constitute global circulations of culture, politics and economy, and the contemporary denizen must continually negotiate acculturations between the many communities that compose their lives. “The Permanent Longing for Elsewhere” features works that hone in on a sense of frustration that often accompanies experiences of migration, exploring how national identification is breaking down as a suitable frame of reference in a globalized world. By stimulating the political imagination, these films prompt a consideration of what is to be both done and undone in light of contemporary, itinerant realities.
I Hate Karl Marx | Rainer Ganahl/USA-Austria 2010. Video, 6 mins.
Mapping Journey #3 | Bouchra Khalili/Morocco-France 2009. Video, 4 mins.
Flag Mountain | John Smith/Great Britain 2010. Video, 8 mins.
Messages from Paradise #1, Egypt: Austria - About the Permanent Longing for Elsewhere | Daniela Swarowsky/Austria-Netherlands-Germany 2009. Video, 44 mins.
+
Feb
20
DIM CINEMA FEB 28 | CHICK STRAND: THE LIBERATION OF CINEMA
February 20, 2011 - 3:04pm | Add new comment
Chick Strand (1931-2009) courted her films as a nurturer and lover. She worked intuitively, trusting her attraction to the sensuality of people, landscapes, and gestures. Influenced by west coast experimental filmmakers of the 1960s and 70s and her own education in anthropology and ethnography, Strand immersed her filmmaking in the joy of being with people. For 30 years, she made films about the people and landscapes of California and Mexico. “To leave out the spirit of the people presents a thin tapestry of the culture, easy to rent, lacking in strength and depth. I want to know really what it is like to be a breathing, talking, moving, emotional, relating individual in the society.” Strand also strove for intimacy with her camera, keeping it close to her body and trusting her own weight and motion to persuade its gaze. Her physical intimacy with her subjects is evidenced in the dominance of close-ups. The resulting shallow depth of field creates kinetic compositions of horizons flattened against sun-stroked faces and cropped bodies in motion. Her appreciation of synchronicity, intuition and romance is also evident in her found-footage collages. “If poetry is the art of making evocative connections between otherwise dissimilar phenomena, then Chick Strand is a great poet, for these films transcend their material to create a surreal and sublime universe beyond reason” (Gene Youngblood).
Programme Curated by Dominic Angerame and Canyon Cinema
Angel Blue Sweet Wings | 1966. 16mm, 3 mins.
Artificial Paradise | 1986. 16mm, 13 mins.
By the Lake | 1986. 16mm, 10 mins.
Cartoon Le Mousse | 1979. 16mm, 15 mins.
Coming Up For Air | 1986. 16mm, 27mins.
Kristallnacht | 1979. 16mm, 7 mins.
Mujer De Milfuegos | 1976. 16mm, 15 mins.
Total running time: approx. 90 mins.
* These films only exist on 16mm. There is no other way to see them then in the cinema. I couldn't even curate it myself because there is no way to see the work and very little documentation or writing about it.
Jan
10
DIM CINEMA | JAN 17 + 24 | Mike Hoolboom: Portraits
January 10, 2011 - 7:29pm | Add new comment
Mike Hoolboom: Portraits
Monday January 17th + Monday January 24th 2011 7:30pm + 9:00pm (two double bills- see below for details)
DIM Cinema at the Pacific Cinematheque 1131 Howe St. Vancouver BC
TIX $10.50/$9.00 + $3membership
www.cinematheque.bc.ca www.dimcinema.ca
“The finest experimental filmmaker — or in his words, ‘fringe filmmaker’ — of his generation.” Canadian Film Encyclopedia
When Roland Barthes discovered a photo of his mother as a child in a winter garden, he dreamt about enlarging it ad infinitum in order to reach her very being in the finest grain and know her truth. However, enlarging distorts and ruptures an image; rather than revealing truth or essence, the apparition of a loved one scatters. Only the factuality of the photograph’s technology and materials remains. In Mike Hoolboom’s portraits, the essence of his friends and family is protected from this scrutiny. Rather, Hoolboom enlarges, through extraction, montage, collage and repetition, the image-likenesses of our collective past, present and future — our meta selves. Through this macro gleaning of our shared cultural image bank (home movies, photo albums, music videos, commercials, medical imaging, scientific analysis, Hollywood films), he regards the entwinement of his subjects in the mediums of representation, in the vast weave of truths and likenesses, in the complexity of being and not being in a world of reproductions and facsimiles.
Mike Hoolboom is a Toronto-based artist working in film and video. Widely considered one of Canada’s pre-eminent experimental filmmakers, he is a prolific creator whose works have screened in more than four hundred festivals, garnering some thirty awards. He was the 2009 recipient of the Bell Award in Video Art, given annually to a Canadian artist who has made an exceptional contribution to the art form. Hoolboom has published a pair of interview books with Canadian media artists, Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Media Artists (Coach House Press, 2008) and Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada (Coach House Press, 2001). In 1998 he authored Plague Years (YYZ Books) a tongue-in-chic autobiography. www.mikehoolboom.com
MONDAY JANUARY 17th
7:30pm: Mark | 2009. Video, 70 mins.
A sidelong biography of Hoolboom’s friend and long time editor Mark Karbusicky, animal rights activist, political vegan, punk maestro, and life-partner of performance artist and transsexual force-of-nature Mirha-Soleil Ross.
9:00pm: Imitations of Life | 2003. Video, 70 mins.
Imitations strains childhood through a history of reproduction, culling images from the Lumière brothers up to the present day in order to find the future in our past.
MONDAY JANUARY 24th
7:30pm: Public Lighting | 2004. Video, 76 mins.
How do we tell the story of a life? What cruel reduction of an image will stand for the years between a grave and a difficult birth? Public Lighting examines the current media obsession with biography, offering up “the six different kinds of personality” as case studies, miniatures, possible examples.
9:00pm: Tom | 2002-2009. Video, 53 mins. World Premiere of Newly Re-edited Version!
A portrait of Tom Chomont, a key member of the New York underground, notorious video artist, AIDS sufferer, and raconteur. Excerpts from hundreds of films — archival documents and Hollywood moments — stream past in a hypnotic rush, offering a subject whose skin is cinema, whose flesh-and-blood has been re-made into the picture plane.