I’m programming a two-part screening series at WUHO, the Woodbury University School of Architecture space in Hollywood. Part I takes place on Tuesday 14 December — please see information below!
Structures of Experience: Interpreting the Built Environment Through Film and Video // A Screening of Experimental Documentaries Programmed by Vera Brunner-Sung
Tuesday, 14 December 2010 at 8:00 pm at WUHO, 6518 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90028
This two-part screening series of experimental documentaries take architecture and the urban landscape as a theme. Programmed by filmmaker Vera Brunner-Sung, Part I will take place at WUHO on Tuesday, 14 December 2010 at 8:00pm. (Part II is scheduled for January 2011; date TBA.)
Part I brings together work by contemporary filmmakers Alexandra Cuesta, Taylor Greeson and Seth Stewart, Taylor Lane, Rachel Reupke, Scott Stark, and Brunner-Sung. Admission is free with a suggested donation of $5.
Intimate, strange, and funny, this first screening reveals individuals navigating the architectural underpinnings of the unfamiliar. Whether exploring a labyrinthine corporate hotel, contemplating the monumental urbanism of Beijing, or witnessing a bomb blast in Lebanon, they are united in the ability to evoke a psychology of place from the materials and structures of their surroundings. Brunner-Sung brings together these works to offer compelling considerations of the political, personal and aesthetic resonance of the landscapes we traverse, as well as to enrich her own creative interests in these themes.
The Films
NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR (Rachel Reupke, digital video, 9:00, 2007). This video work reflects a fascination with science fiction and the inherent problem of visualising the future. Shot in Beijing in 2006, it is inspired by a city in the throws of a construction boom where developers’ hoardings intrude on every street, each displaying, in a pastel-soft style, an architect’s visual of what is to come: the future of the city rendered as illustrated inserts into the reality of its present.
HOTEL CARTOGRAPH (Scott Stark, 16mm, 12:00, 1983). A camera mounted on a movable cart, pointing down at the floor, passes over a seemingly endless succession of gaudy carpets and surfaces in a single shot through a major hotel. The movements across the 2-dimensional space, and in and out of elevators through 3-dimensional space, suggest a conceptual map of the visible environment, which is perhaps drawn by the camera itself.
PLACES CHANGE (Taylor Lane, digital video, 5:30, 2009). Places Change is the story of a childhood home left behind, and the unexpected changes that follow. The house is left unrecognizable by disaster before it can be given a proper farewell, and something unfamiliar is resurrected in its place.
WAYWARD PILGRIMS (Taylor Greeson and Seth Stewart, super-8 on digital video, 6:30, 2007). A young couple sets out to capture images of a mormon polygamist community, only to become waylaid by roadside attractions, ghost towns, and the meanderings of their own relationship. Shot on Super8 and hand-processed in a kitchen sink, Wayward Pilgrims embraces an unadorned immediacy and subtle eloquence to tell a touching and humorous story of uncertainty, naivete, and the compelling idiosyncracies of human relationships.
BEIRUT 2.14.05 (Alexandra Cuesta, 16mm, 8:00, 2008). During the shooting of From Beyrouth With Love (Wael Nourredine, 2005), Alexandra Cuesta captured her impressions of Beirut using a handheld camera. The images are indirect and unsettled: reflections in the rain or through display windows, a view out of a moving car. Cuesta captures and edits these images into fragments with the certainty of a dream. The menace of war resonates in her images without taking on form. Beirut 2.14.05 is both honest and masterly, a miniature at the roots of poetry; where the palpable echoes the visible. (Viennale)
THE GARDEN CITY (Vera Brunner-Sung, 16mm, 13:30, 2007). To what extent can we control the lived environment, and how does this impact our lives? A letter recounts a journey from American suburbia to a foreign city, becoming a meditation on growth and development that suggests all landscapes are human.
TRT of the Screening: 54 mins