program

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left forum film festival

SETTING IN MOTION
curated by Susan Jahoda and Jesal Kapadia

FRIDAY MARCH 9, 2007, 12:00 to 5:00 PM
New York University
721 Broadway, Btw. Waverly Pl. and Washington Pl.
Room 006
Admission is Free

Participating artists:

Speculative Archive - (Julia Meltzer and David Thorne)
Talking oneself out of a corner out of the corner of one’s mouth: May you choke on a peanut
Video, 3 minutes and 50 seconds, 2006
Rami Farah, a young Syrian performer, employs various modes of address (promise, threat, curse, joke, prediction, oath, lament, praise, recollection, premonition, declaration, harangue, conciliation, and so on) in order to speak to, with, or about those who govern, about being governed, and about the governing situation. The result is a small catalogue of the different ways one can speak and act as a citizen of a state in the face of international pressures and internal stasis.

Susan Jahoda - . . . of a worm in a pomegranate
Video, 15 minutes, 2006
Subjects organize their sense of being through time and space. Time and space are a complex weave of public impositions, socially instituted affects and representations, and an imaginary, shaped by its own unconscious rhythms.  ...of a worm in a pomegranate explores the ways in which subjects internalize, cohabitate with, and creatively experience institutional time and space in an attempt to negotiate agency. In one continuous video capture, light at dusk passes from one interior wall to another. This image provides the visual component of a non-sequential narrative that calls upon topics ranging from phantom limb phenomena to global warming.

Emily Roysdon - POW
Video, 1 minute 30 second loop, 2006
‘‘Do what?’’ speaks the collapsed subject. Rise again, midway through a tangible loop. Respond again to the textual transformation. Untitled/POW is a body forward meditation on repetitive movements and recurring powers. It draws a relationship between the ‘act of writing’ and the ‘out-of-frame’ forces that are given voice, as well as the ambiguous violence this tension enacts on the affected subject. Beginning in a cloud of palimpsest, the video enters a performative space that bears the remainder of inscription and erasure. Is the text effecting the collapse? Substituting for a body of control? Or, in fact, is it a revelation?

Ulrike Muller - LOVE/TORTURE
Video, 6 minutes, 2005
LOVE/TORTURE performs a text about pain and pleasure*/sexualized but not necessarily shared pleasure. It investigates emotional relationships and the contemporary subjectivities of media consumers. Confronted with both the bleakly simple (people are torturing and killing, people are being tortured and killed) and the utterly confusing (people are torturing and killing, people are being tortured and killed), this video proposes that viewers shift their attention to identify with the role of the perpetrator rather than with the victim.

Stephen Andrews - The Quick and the Dead
Looping animation, 1 minute 14 seconds, 2004
The Quick and the Dead is an animation based on the parable of Cain and Abel. It reinscribes the story using imagery from the current Iraq war.

Jesal Kapadia - This is not a . . .
Video, 2 minutes 30 seconds, 2003
Probing the legacy of surrealism, particularly to Rene Magritte’s famous painting ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe,’ This is not a . . . attempts to unravel the European avant-garde in the context of global diasporic circulations. The short video performs an ambivalent homage to three ordinary objects used commonly in an Indian household: a coconut grater, a tongue cleaner, and the idli-mold. These everyday instruments also border on the uncanny, displaced from their familiar context of use into a sparse white environment. The soundtrack consists of three musical pieces, which are devotional love songs that have no connection with the everyday character of the ‘not objects’.

Jenny Perlin - Possible Models
16mm, b/w, silent, 10 minutes 45 seconds, 2004
The 16mm b/w hand-drawn film, Possible Models, begins by outlining a news story about John Ashcroft’s announcement in June 2004 that a Somali immigrant to Columbus, Ohio (my home state), was charged with plotting to blow up a mall. The Somali, Nuradin Abdi, was arrested in November 2003, and held for more than six months before being formally charged. Ashcroft’s announcement of this case came on 14 June 2004, a day before U.S. presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry, was scheduled to speak in Columbus. The film continues with three parts.

Ashley Hunt - I WON’T DROWN ON THAT LEVEE AND YOU AIN’T GONNA’ BREAK MY BACK
Video, 31 minutes, 2006
(The Corrections Documentary Project) With Xochitl Bervera of Friends and Family of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children; Corinne Curry of Human Rights Watch; Althea Francois of the Southern Center for Human Rights; Tamika Middleton of Critical Resistance; Malik Rahim of Common Ground Collective
I WON’T DROWN began with an invitation to travel to New Orleans as part of a delegation to investigate what happened at the Orleans Parish Prison during and after Hurricane Katrina. What came up was not only a botched and deadly evacuation of the prison, but a broader climate of racial tension and brutality throughout the state response to the disaster, as what had broken down were not only the city’s infrastructure and services, but also the historical partitions that structure and ensure its racial and economic hierarchies, keeping people ‘‘in their place.’’ This video chronicles how these hierarchies were maintained nonetheless through the rhetoric of law enforcement and imprisonment.

Speculative Archive - Talking oneself out of a corner out of the corner of one’s mouth, Excerpts from Syria Kubra
Video, 7 minutes and 30 seconds, 2006
Rami Farah, a young Syrian performer, employs various modes of address (promise, threat, curse, joke, prediction, oath, lament, praise, recollection, premonition, declaration, harangue, conciliation, and so on) in order to speak to, with, or about those who govern, about being governed, and about the governing situation. The result is a small catalogue of the different ways one can speak and act as a citizen of a state in the face of international pressures and internal stasis.

Jason Simon - Vera
Video, 25 minutes, 2006
Vera is an assisted self-portrait of consumption. The subject is a woman whose passions and compulsions are of spending and loss, taste and subjectivity. The video consists entirely of an interview in which Simon’s questions are first audible, then excised, and Vera herself never leaves the screen. Along with Production Notes: Fast Food for Thought (1987) and Paul Schrader’s Bag (1994_/2004), Simon’s work investigates relationships between consumption and our shared formations of the self.

Lin + Lam - Departure
Video, 48 minutes, 2006
Departure is a video essay that looks at the impact of modernization and foreign intervention through different modes of transportation. Shot from the exploratory perspective of a moving car, cycle, and trains, the video travels through three former colonial Asian cities: Taipei, Shanghai, and Hanoi. The transformation of a road, a bridge, and railways, shows an evolution of different powers marked by the promise of progress made by former occupiers and current builders. In recognition of language hierarchies and the politics of translation, five women narrate the interrelated histories of these transforming urban environments in their native languages: Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, English, Shanghainese, and Vietnamese.

Ayreen Anastas - Pasolini Pa* Palestine
Video, 51 minutes, 2005
Pasolini Pa* Palestine is an attempt to repeat Pasolini’s trip to Palestine in his film, Seeking Locations in Palestine for ‘‘The Gospel According to Matthew’’ (1963). It adapts his script into a route map superimposed on the current landscape, creating contradictions and breaks between the visual and the audible, the expected and the real. The video explores the question of repetition. For Heidegger Wiederholung ‘repetition, retrieval’ is one of the terms he uses for the appropriate attitude toward the past. ‘‘By the repetition of a basic problem we understand the disclosure of its original, so far hidden possibilities.’’ The project ventures a conversation and a dialogue with Pasolini, especially his Poem for the Third World. Discutere ‘to smash to pieces’ is the Latin source of dialogue, discussion. The piece does not criticize Pasolini, but reveals unnoticed possibilities in his thought and works back to the ‘experiences’ that inspired it.

James Pei-Mun Tsang - Hospitality
Video, 15 minutes, single channel, color, 2006
Hospitality is an experimental narrative about the so-called origins of a political subject. It is scripted by a series of conversations that occurred in Milan, Italy, during the summer of 2005. In form this video refers to a basic scenario of identity and representation: Who is speaking, and for whom? Our claims throw into relief a turning point, which designates a ‘before’ and ‘after’ to the story.

Tami Gold and Gerardo Renique – Land Rain and Fire: Report from Oaxaca
Video, 28 minutes, color, 2006
What began as a teachers’ strike on May 22, 2006 for better wages and more resources for students has erupted into a massive movement for profound social change in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. This film tells the story of the police attack on the morning of July 14th when more than fifty thousand teachers were camped out with their children. Dozens were hospitalized. But the attack backfired as public anger transformed the strike into an unprecedented democratic insurgency, demanding the resignation of the Governor and the creation of a new constitution. Hundreds of unions, indigenous and women’s organizations, neighborhood groups, students and professional associations came together and created APP0 – The Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca and a massive campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience has brought the state government to the a standstill.