Exploring water as both a sublime and immersive geography and as a troubled and contaminated resource, this program presents a mesmerizing sequence of experimental shorts caught between imagination and matter. The seven films, which include a rapturous seaside montage, an environmental portrait of life around an artificial lake north of Los Angeles, and a delightful trick film send-up of nature’s commodification, chart a lively course through different formal possibilities and expose the simultaneously reflective, unstable, and abstracting properties of both water and experimental filmmaking. Taken together, the films conjugate new perspectives on the perennial relay between water and cinema and offer an expanded visual language for the complicated beauty of nature. Guest curated by Kylie Walters.
PROGRAM INCLUDES:
MOODS OF THE SEA (Slavko Vorkapich & John Hoffman, 1940-1942, 10 min, b&W, sound, 35mm)
LA PLAGE (Patrick Bokanowski, 1991, 13 min, color, sound, 16mm)
POND AND WATERFALL (Barbara Hammer, 1982, 15 min, color, silent, 16mm)
SALT OF THE SEA (Saul Levine, 1965, 4 min, color, silent, 16mm)
QUARRY MOVIE (Greta Snider, 1999, 10 min, color, sound, 16mm)
CASTAIC LAKE (Brigid McCaffrey, 2010, 29 min, color, sound, 16mm)
SKY BLUE WATER LIGHT SIGN (J.J. Murphy, 1972, 8 min, color, sound, 16mm)
35mm print of MOODS OF THE SEA courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive; all 16mm prints courtesy of Canyon Cinema.
Total run time: ~89 min
The screening will be followed by a conversation with filmmaker Greta Snider and PhD candidate in Screen Cultures, Kylie Walters.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Kylie Walters is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Screen Cultures writing a dissertation on Mobil, media, and design in the postwar era. She is a Franke Graduate Fellow for 2024-2025.
Greta Snider has made films since discovering the art form at Antioch College in Ohio, and promptly moved to San Francisco to join a thriving low-budget experimental film scene, where she continues to make, screen, and teach about cinema. In her work, Snider utilizes a combination of original and archival material to create nonfiction art cinema of a personal nature. Her single screen films on 16mm lean heavily on the creative use of montage, interweaving the personal and historical in a number of short essay films. Her stereoscopic performances and installations take the materiality of film and family photos, to reshape themes of memory, loss, and personal histories in a more intimate, affective experience. She has screened in museums throughout the world, and also in bars, alleyways, and once, at an all-night international rave party in a penthouse in the Shibuya. Snider teaches experimental filmmaking at San Francisco State University, where she is faculty advisor to The Archive Project.
Presented by the Block Museum of Art with support from the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.
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