ANYTHING CAN BE A CLOCK
Sunday, June 2 | 7:00 PM | Dave Barber Cinematheque | PG
There’s a boy-coded fad diet that endorses eating like a caveman to correct our gut microbiome, and Grimes claims she's had experimental eye surgery to block blue light to cure her SAD. Neither are supported by facts but obsession with hacking the past to unlock optimized futures is real. A collection of films that bind together disparate epochs and ways of marking time to quantify the relationship between vision and perception, history and place. A program that reaches into the deep history embedded in our DNA and the statute of limitations on muscle memory.
Please note that this program features rapid movement and flashing light. This program is rated PG. Total runtime 64.5 minutes.
Its Unbroken Marvelous Curve, dir. Auden Lincoln-Vogel
2023 | USA | 3.5 | 16mm on video | World premiere
A film about skateboarding after ten years of not skateboarding.
Spoils, dir. Luciana Decker Orozco
2023 | USA/Bolivia | 7 | 16mm on video | Manitoban premiere
"Here between us, I want you to know the truth. There is in my loneliness a desire to scream, run away, and ask what has happened to your life tuturururu." Bouquets of wildflowers and spoils of war—hunting trophies, fake eyes. Waste of food and fossils. Frame by frame I portray our experience here for the first time.
Bleu silico, dirs. Julia Borderie & Eloïse Le Gallo
2022 | France | 16 | video | Manitoban premiere
Researchers are trying to inject DNA from photosensitive algae to heal our retinas. From ocean blue to the computers blue screen, the vision is hybridized. Bleu Silico is a poetic-scientific meander guided through glass sculptures, recounting ancestral relationships between algae and human retinal cells.
Memory Foam, dir. Jack Jelfs
2022 | UK | 16 | video | Canadian premiere
Memory Foam originates in the neolithic burial chambers, stone circles and megaliths that are scattered across the area of southwest England in which I grew up. These structures, built around 2000 BCE, have endured long after their meaning or purpose has been lost. By contrast, contemporary experience arises from the non-physical – our TVs and phones deliver a flood of novelty and distraction in which nothing is memorable or permanent except a vague sense of boredom. Starting from these ideas, the film presents an anachronistic and absurd imagining of life at an unspecified moment in prehistory. A caveman struggles to do “caveman stuff”, whilst an audiobook narrator recalls a life of hunger, violence, lust and existential malaise; but her descriptions filtered through the distractedness and inability to concentrate that are perhaps unique to the present moment.
Something to Do With Brook Water, dir. Todd Fraser
2022 | Canada | 12.5 | super 8mm on video | Manitoban premiere
A super-8 letter for Henry.
Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke, dir. Tomonari Nishikawa
2023 | USA/Japan | 6 | 16mm | Manitoban premiere
The visual shows the alternation of the shots of fireworks filmed at a summer festival in Japan, producing a distinctive yet organic rhythm, as well as a gap in time between the visual and sound, both of which are produced by the photographic images on the 16mm filmstrip.
Images from: Auden Lincoln-Vogel's Its Unbroken Marvelous Curve, Luciana Decker Orozco's Spoils and Julia Borderie & Eloïse Le Gallo's Bleu silico (top) and Jack Jelfs' Memory Foam, Todd Fraser's Something to Do With Brook Water and Tomonari Nishikawa's Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke (bottom)