Being in a Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait

Drawing on a wealth of unseen archival material and unpublished notebooks, the film weaves a complex and personal portrait of Margaret’s life, from the perspective of a fellow artist sensitive to the potential Margaret envisaged for film as a poetic medium.

Making the Nature Scene

Long before Kim Gordon was a cooler-than-thou multimedia artist in Body/Head, she was a cooler-than-thou multimedia artist in Sonic Youth. In the ’80s, Gordon and her bandmates were fixtures of New York’s downtown art and music scene; one regular haunt of theirs was legendary nightclub Danceteria, which served as the setting for a short film Gordon made sometime around 1985. Now, as Dangerous Minds points out, said video has surfaced online thanks to filmmaker/designer Chris Habib (a.k.a. Visitor Design). “Excellent video I found in my Sonic Youth archive,” Habib writes on the clip’s Vimeo page. “I digitized it for Kim during her [early 2000s] CLUB IN THE SHADOWS exhibition at Kenny Schachter’s old space in the West Village.”

Is It A Plaisir

'Is it a plaisir' is an experimental short film that explores femininity and the body as a sharp territory, crossed by the tension between desire and imposition. Through symbolic, sound and visual saturation, the film acts from pleasure (plaisir), revealing a liberation that emerges in the midst of excess, where intensity and lightness, dark and light, intertwine, collide and converge.

l'eau tonne à minuit

The Clock's Cruel Necessity

Sometimes it seems that the past is more present than the present itself. The film unfolds the story of a couple forced to break apart, mixing video and still images. Will the hero put the past behind him or cling to the unreachable past?

Orka

STEINA: “My background is in music. For me, it is the sound that leads me into the image. Every image has its own sound and in it I attempt to capture something flowing and living. I apply the same principle to art as to playing the violin: with the same attitude of continuous practice, the same concept of composition.

Late Anthropocene

Hand processed expired Kodak 7291, Camera: Beaulieu R16, Lens: Angenieux 12-120mm with +3 Diopter, Polarising filter for the clouds. Hand processed in C-41 chem using a Lomo UPB-1A tank. Still haven't mastered removal of the rem-jet anti-halation layer (thats all the white 'static' on the film). The film expired about 40 years ago.

Folia

Folia is a double bass solo piece written in 1995 by Finnish composer Kaija Saarihao. The film tries to render an account of a personnal vision of the piece through the interpretation of a double bass player and the view of the two filmmakers. 16mm print with optical sound.

A Field of Sheep

A field full of sheep is observed through the camera, preserving that moment in time forever.

Tea Time

On a quiet afternoon an elderly woman prepares some afternoon tea for her and her husband. This short film was made on a single Super-8 cartridge, edited in camera, shot in sequence with only one take per shot. This was originally made for an Los Angeles film event called: "Attack of the 50 Foot Reels".

Lala

Childhoods from different people and places collide through art.

Representation

A meditation on representation through images.

Before Noon

An unfinished short student film about dreaming

Jeff

A phone sex operator loses her grip on reality, caught in a hypnotic relationship with a caller making disturbing confessions.

O Novo Corpo

On an isolated farm, a woman finds an injured and frightened woman in her old chicken coop. Moved by an inexplicable instinct, she decides to help her, without imagining that this silent encounter will awaken buried secrets. When tension finally gives way to trust, something dark approaches, bringing a truth that no one could have foreseen.

Hasta el cementerio de Flores

As a teenager, I used to take a bus, whose ticket had the inscription "To the Flores Cemetery" as the end of its route. At that time, whenever I saw the ticket, I thought of Charles Baudelaire's "The Flowers of Evil" and of imaginary walks the bus would take me on until I reached the Flores Cemetery. Thirty years later, I found one of those tickets in a box, and it makes me think of finitude and the transient. Film made with Floripondio flowers, Hollyhock and Santa Rita petals, blood, cobwebs, insects found after a storm, mushrooms, onions, and hair on 16mm film.

The Trouble With Forgetting

To forget about the end of a relationship, a woman fantasizes about an ideal one. Fantasy and reality begin to melt into one another, but the past finds a way to rear its head again. Films used: Notorious (1946) Gaslight (1944)

Rembrandt, Etc., and Jane

The following films were all made in 1976. I do not wish to describe them. —SB "Two portrait sketches and two nondescript."

Lacuna

A prisoner belonging to a void known as “Lacuna,” longs to escape their entrapment. As they search for a way out, they confront the unchecked mental illness that plagued their former life.