Unseen Festival Sneak Preview! with Andy Martrich, J. Gordon Faylor, Scott Adams, films by Jean-Jacques Martinod, Friday, August 17, 2018, 7pm
Join us at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave.) for an Unseen Festival sneak preview, with films by Jean-Jacques Martinod (in person at this event) and readings/performances by Andy Martrich, J. Gordon Faylor, and Scott Adams. Friday, August 17, 2018, at 7:30 pm. Free and open to the public.
Full access passes to the Unseen Festival (Sept. 1-30) will be on sale for just $50, a 50% discount.
Andy Martrich is the author of A manifest detection of death-lot in banking games (Gauss PDF Editions), Ethical Probe on Mixed Martial Arts Enthusiasts in the USA (Counterpath), and Pitching with Demonic Sigil Grips (PRB Editions), among others. He lives in France.
J. Gordon Faylor is the author of The Puppet Wedding (Smiling Mind Documents), Registration Caspar (Ugly Duckling Presse), and The Sycophant (TROLL THREAD), among other works. He edits Gauss PDF and is the managing editor of SFMOMA’s Open Space.
Scott Ross Adams is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and visual artist. He is currently a professional brewer and lives in Emmaus, PA.
Jean-Jacques Martinod is a filmmaker and visual artist originally from Guayaquil, Ecuador. His films have screened in a variety of venues including the Museum of The Moving Image and festivals such as FIDMarseille, EDOC (Encuentros del Otro Cine), Festival Dei Popoli, Les Inattendus festival de films (très) indépendants, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, ULTRACinema Festival de Cine Experimental y Found Footage, Stuttgarter Filmwinter Festival for Expanded Media, among others, while also in a variety of galleries and DIY venues. His films oscillate between non-fiction traditions utilizing formal experiments in celluloid film, analogue tape, digital media, and archival footage. He resides in Montreal, Canada, where he is a member of both the Global Emergent Media Lab and the Centre for Expanded Poetics at Concordia University, where he is currently an MFA candidate.
Film program:
TRANSLATIONS ON THE VOYAGE, CURATED BY JEAN-JACQUES MARTINOD
Landscape as a form of memory. Memory as a form of language. Light & Vision immersed within the camaraderie of space-time. This program is meant to be a portal into the ways personal attitudes can merge with modalities of travel, within the context of our always traveling spaceship Earth. In some cases the images inhabit a time and question what it means to be a spectator of our surrounding narrative. In others these take shape through the intense interiorization of light via one’s own capacity to channel the qualities of the collective memory or commune with Nature’s own. Most times there is some of both and yet the stances are as intimate as they are political, as all the artists represented here are in the truest sense independent filmmakers with unique and committed visions. Within them we find diverse forms that dialogue with the quest for transcendence, the ultimate voyage of Light & Vision.
350 MYA – Terra Long – Morocco/Canada – 2016 – 8 min
A sheet whips before the camera, shaped by the same wind that forms the rigid, undulating lines of sand below it as the film conjures the continued presence of the now vanished Rheic Ocean in the Tafilalt region of the arid Sahara Desert.
Terra Long is an independent filmmaker and educator. She creates tapestry like works that draw on natural history, deep time, and the space between the real and the imaginary. Her works have screened at festivals and micro cinemas all over the world including the Edinburgh International Film Festival, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, CPH DOX, in the Wavelengths section at Toronto International Film Festival, and the Images Festival in her hometown of Toronto. She is also a member of the Independent Imaging Retreat Collective (Film Farm).
Grabados del Ojo Nocturno – Jean-Jacques Martinod – Morocco/Ecuador – 2016 – 7 min
A collage of collected imagery turned ritual travelogue: from the Sahara to the oceans of South America, passing through an old ancestor’s abode.
Ñores – Annalisa D. Quagliata – Mexico – 2017 – 3 min
In Mexico, if you point out corruption or impunity, they silence you. This was evidenced by the Narvarte multi-homicide, where Rubén Espinosa, Nadia Vera, Alejandra Negrete, Yesenia Quiroz and Mile Virginia lost their lives. A story that repeats itself over and over.
Annalisa D. Quagliata studied at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a double major in Film/Video and Studio for Interrelated Media. Her work has been screened internationally, and her project imago received the Princess Grace Foundation grant. She is also a grantee of FONCA’s Young Creators Program.
Fracking – Colectivo Los Ingrávidos – Mexico – 2018 – 4 min
Earth plundered howls.
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (2011) emerges from the necessity to dismantle the audiovisual grammar that the aesthetic of the television and cinematic corporatism used effectively to ensure the dissemination of audiovisual ideology through which it achieves social and perceptual control over the population. The works of the Collective has participated in Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, The Flaherty Film Seminar, Images Festival-Toronto, CROSSROADS 2018 San Francisco Cinematheque, SF Museum of Modern Art, FILMADRID, Ambulante Cine Documental, FicValdivia, DocsDF, IBAFF, CCCB – Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona. Dos veces ganadores del 2 Premio Norberto Griffa a la Creación Audiovisual Latinoamericana en Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento de Argentina, The Marian McMahon Akimbo Award en Images Festival – Toronto, Experimenta India, Bangalore 2017, Experimental film festival Process 2018 Riga, Latvia, Punto de Vista Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Navarra, One Flaming Arrow: Inter-Tribal, Art, Music, & Film Festival – Portland Festival internacional de Cine Lima Independiente, La maudite, Paris Mex-Parismental, VISIONS Montreal, Canada, DOBRA Festival Internacional de cine Experimental – Brasil, MARFICI, Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente de Mar del Plata, Tabor Film Festival, Croacia.
The Handeye (Bone Ghosts) – OJOBOCA – Germany – 2012 – 8 min
In early 20th century Vienna Robert Musil invited Sigmund Freud to partake in, what he called, “a very special séance”. Seated at the table Musil revealed that they were going to summon the ghost of Franz Anton Mesmer, discoverer of animal magnetism and forefather of hypnosis. Musil told Freud about a series of dreams he had which involved a talking flea. Musil, who had secretly become a follower of the imaginationist school of animal magnetism wanted to question Mesmer as to the meaning of these dreams, in which said flea foretold of impending catastrophes all over Europe. It is said that Mesmer obligingly appeared and spoke in a repetitive and oblique manner. Mesmer’s words were transcribed by Freud in several scraps of paper and hidden separately in a series of objects that, owing to the vicissitudes of history, would end up in the collections of three Viennese museums. Legend has it that he who could piece together the text would find instructions for the assembly of a film.
Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy are filmmakers based in Berlin. Since 2010 they have worked together under the moniker OJOBOCA. Together they practice Horrorism, a simulated method of inner and outer transformation. Since 2010 they are members of the artist-run film lab LaborBerlin.
El Diezmo – Jean-Jacques Martinod – Ecuador – 2018 – 13 min
In an image void a tongueless voice speaks. Composed entirely of found footage re-manipulated through tape deterioration, a journey into the realms of an ambiguous demon via the portal of the screen.
Samadhi – Jordan Belson – USA – 1967 – 6 min – 16mm
“The experiences which led up to the production of this film, and the experiences of making it, totally convinced me that the soul is an actual physical entity, not a vague abstraction or symbol. (…) Natural forces have that intensity: not dreamy but hard, ferocious. After it was finished I felt I should have died. I was rather amazed when I didn’t” – JB
Filmmaker and artist Jordan Belson creates abstract films richly woven with cosmological imagery, exploring consciousness, transcendence, and the nature of light itself. Born in Chicago in 1926, Belson studied painting at the California School of Fine Art (now San Francisco Art Institute), and received his B.A., Fine Arts (1946) from The University of California, Berkeley. He saw films by Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren and Hans Richter at the historic Art in Cinema screening series in San Francisco in the late 1940s, and later, films by John and James Whitney. Belson was inspired to make films with scroll paintings and traditional animation techniques, calling his first films “cinematic paintings.” Curator Hilla Rebay at The Museum of Non-Objective Painting exhibited his paintings, and upon Fischinger’s recommendation awarded Belson several grants. From 1957-1959, Belson was Visual Director for The Vortex Concerts at San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium, a series of electronic music concerts accompanied by visual projections. Composer Henry Jacobs curated the music while Belson created visual illusions with multiple projection devices, combining planetarium effects with patterns and abstract film footage. His Vortex work inspired his abandoning traditional animation methods to work with projected light. He completed Allures (1961), Re-entry (1964), Phenomena (1965), Samadhi (1967), and continued with a series of abstract films. His varied influences include yoga, Eastern philosophies and mysticism, astronomy, Romantic classical music, alchemy, Jung, non-objective art, mandalas and many more. Belson has produced an extraordinary body of over 30 abstract films, sometimes called “cosmic cinema,” also considered to be Visual Music. He produced ethereal special effects for the film The Right Stuff (1983), and continues making fine art and films today, completing Epilogue in 2005.