politics

VANESSA RENWICK : NSEW FILM TOUR!!!

Exploded View is super excited to host the fantastic Vanessa Renwick in Tucson !!

Vanessa Renwick has been a singular voice in the experimental cinema for over 20 years. Eschewing an allegiance to any one medium or form, Renwick builds authentic moving image works revealing an insatiable curiosity and unflinching engagement with the world around her. Often focusing her lens on themes of westward expansion and the locales of her adopted home, the Pacific Northwest, Renwick uses avant-garde formal elements to explore radical politics and environmental issues.

A selection of 13 shorts. These short, personal constructions demonstrate a wide range of formal approaches and subjects that include wildness, hitchhiking, death, nuclear power, gentrification and migration. Renwick’s films share a restless spirit, an interest in outlaw art-making, and an unflagging sense of wanderlust. Without fail, the work is intense, hard to pin down and even harder to forget.

“Vanessa Renwick’s films reveal the hidden stories and secret lives that define our great national weirdness, imbued with the radical curiosity and vision of a true pioneer.” –Todd Haynes

Filed Under: Tagged With: 16mm projection, artist-in-person, ecology, experimental film, politics, video art, Works by Women

WED 3/8
The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996)

(GIRL CRUSH SERIES is co-presented with The U of A’s School of Theatre, Film and Television; Women’s Resource Center; Student Affairs; Institute for LGBT Studies; Gender & Women Studies; Hanson Film Institute)

Start Women’s History Month off right by joining us for Cheryl Dunye’s brilliant and self-reflexive speculative documentary about her quest to find queer black women’s film history – it’s also, amazingly, the first Black-woman-directed film ever to receive a wide theatrical release.

WED 12/7
FASCINATING FASCISM: Propaganda Films of the 1930’s

An evening dedicated to the fascinating and propagandistic film, performances, and parades of 1930s United States and Germany. The program features selections from American and German musical films, including favorites from the king of spectacle, Busby Berkeley and Nationalist Socialist chorus line The Hiller Girls, propaganda films by Leni Riefenstahl, footage from World’s Fair synchronized swimming display Billy Rose’s Aquacade, and European Mass Gymnastics. Influential conceptual painter, Olivier Mosset, and performance studies scholar, Yasmine Jahanmir, will cap off the night with a discussion of how geometric abstraction and athletic embodiment converge in art and culture during this politically tumultuous time.

DESERT REMAINS AND RITUALS: Eric Saks + Verbo•bala

(Artists in Person)

Celebrated California video artist Eric Saks visits Exploded View to present videos that investigate outsider mysteries and fractured narratives that wind through the Mojave Desert. Saks’ media practice has focused on phone phreaking, media jamming, gun control, hazardous waste, underground youth lifestyle, and spirituality. Saks will screen Creosote, You Talk/I Buy and the premiere of Eidolon (featuring EV fave Bill Daniel!) and more. Local artists duo Verbo•bala (Adam Cooper-Terán & Logan Phillips) employ poetry and video in their piece Sonoran Strange: Cemamagĭ Doʼag, a work that explores the duality of indigenous knowledge versus colonial science in a ritualistic study of Tucson’s sacred Tumamoc Hill.

Filed Under: Tagged With: artist-in-person, experimental film, film essay, poetry, politics, Sonoran Desert, video performance

POWER & PROTEST: Brian Mock’s RNC/DNC Slap Down + Deep State

(Brian Mock in person) NOTE DATE CHANGE

Pre-election provocateur, educator & outsider ethnologist Brian Mock presents a startling selection of narrated behind-the-scenes video from both the RNC and DNC! The second part of this evening features the post-Occupy sci-fi essay Deep State by UK artists Karen Mirza and Brad Butler The film takes its title from the Turkish term ‘Derin Devlet’, meaning ‘state within the state’. This shadowy nexus of special interests and covert relationships is the place where real power is said to reside, and where fundamental decisions are made – decisions that often run counter to the outward impression of democracy.

Filed Under: Tagged With: artist-in-person, documentary, experimental film, Occupy, politics, Sci-Fi

Tuesday 10/18
POWER & PROTEST: Brian Mock’s RNC/DNC Slap Down + Deep State

NOTE NEW DATE – day before the last Presidential debate!!

(Brian Mock in person)

LEFTIST REVOLUTIONS: Chris Marker’s Grin Without a Cat

From young anti-war protesters in America to the death of Che Guevara and the rise of leaders like Fidel Castro and Mao Tse-Tung, this remarkably fluid 3 hour documentary examines the rise and fall of the leftist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Rejecting textbook history, the first segment delves into the beginnings of this liberal faction, focusing on 1967, when anti-Vietnam fervor swept the USA and invigorated the political debate. In part two, the disintegration of the movement, dubbed the “new left,” is laid out. Rather than authoritative or sociological. Marker’s technique is essayistic, digressive, fleet-footed and conjunctural.

Filed Under: Tagged With: documentary, film essay, New Left, politics

WED 9/14
LEFTIST REVOLUTIONS: Chris Marker’s
Grin Without a Cat

From young anti-war protesters in America to the death of Che Guevara and the rise of leaders like Fidel Castro and Mao Tse-Tung, this remarkably fluid 3 hour documentary examines the rise and fall of the leftist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Rejecting textbook history, the first segment delves into the beginnings of this liberal faction, focusing on 1967, when anti-Vietnam fervor swept the USA and invigorated the political debate. In part two, the disintegration of the movement, dubbed the “new left,” is laid out. Rather than authoritative or sociological. Marker’s technique is essayistic, digressive, fleet-footed, sublime and conjunctural.

BASMA ALSHARIF : Home Away from Home

(Filmmaker, Basma Alsharif in person)

In advance of her UA VASE presentation on Thursday 3/3/16, Basma Alsharif is presenting a special program of her single-channel works at EV! Basma is an Artist/Filmmaker of Palestinian origin born in Kuwait, raised between France and the US. She developed her practice nomadically between Cairo, Beirut, Sharjah, Amman, and the Gaza Strip. Basma’s work centers on the human condition in relation to shifting geopolitical landscapes, natural environments and history. Home Away from Home presents a selection of Alsharif’s work that delves into that abyss of the idea of home. Obliterating any domestic idea of such a place, the program moves between the soporific, apathetic and psychedelic.

Filed Under: Tagged With: artist-in-person, politics, video art, Works by Women

Hanky Code: The Movie

(Filmmaker Gentry McShane in person)

Before Internet dating and hookup apps, The Handkerchief code was largely used by gay men in the 1970’s to distinguish sexual preferences and fetishes in gay clubs and on the streets of places like San Francisco and New York. In Hanky Code: The Movie, Periwinkle Cinema, San Francisco’s queer experimental film collective brings Queer and Trans filmmakers across a spectrum of genres, styles, genders, and locations to dissect the code in this epic anthology feature comprised of 25 short films! Each filmmaker or filmmaking team tells a story of a different color/fetish of the code. Films range from narrative to experimental to erotic and animated, with many films redefining the traditional code with colors, patterns, and fetishes up to creative interpretation of the artist.

Filed Under: Tagged With: artist-in-person, experimental film, politics, queer