Liminal Ethereal Space:
Foster/ Dixon/ Domonkos
Experimental Films
May 9

Wednesday, May 9.
8PM
The Museum of Human Achievement, 3600 Lyons Rd (map)
Tickets: $7 general/ $5 students

Experimental Response Cinema is honored to welcome filmmaker Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Bill Domonkos and Wheeler Winston Dixon in person to present Liminal Ethereal Space.

The experimental films of Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Bill Domonkos and Wheeler Winston Dixon evoke a dream space between film and video, analog and digital, ritual and occult, real and fabulist; a cinematic space that is both dead and alive, perhaps best described as liminal ethereal. Foster, Domonkos, and Dixon employ a regenerative phoenix approach to détournement; all three use “found footage” and archival material in bringing dead things to life and vice versa. As Domonkos writes, “I am interested in the poetics of time and space—to renew and transform materials, experiences and ideas. The extraordinary thing about cinema is its ability to suggest the ineffable—it is this elusive, dreamlike quality that informs my work.”

Dixon’s video art conjures “a phantom zone, a world that doesn’t exist – a world that is for the eye and ear alone.” As Dixon sees it, “There are already enough images in the world. I prefer to use existing imagery, but in the process of playing with it to the point of abstraction, to create an other-worldly experience.” Similarly, Foster prefers to work in a liminal aesthetic, with chance as her collaborator. “I am interested in spaces ‘in between.’ I often use “chance editing” (surrealist automatism). I prefer limitations: restrictions are liberating.” Like the Surrealists, these three filmmakers allow ideas to slowly arise from found images and sounds, summoning liminal realities and ethereal spaces.

PROGRAM:

Film for Storm de Hirsch 
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (3min)
“I don’t want to put any labels on my films… I never impose on you; you need to find what you have to find.” ― Storm de Hirsch

Superluminal Time Travel
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (5min)
Like our subconscious dreams, the cinema allows us to freely time travel…‘Superluminal Time Travel’ is a surrealistic shaman ritual film that evokes both nostalgia and potential for annihilation of the past, wherein toxic history and images are consumed by paradoxically cleansing smokestacks. It is a cleansing film.

Sleeping with the Fishes
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (2.5min)
Surrealist collage in honor of Luis Buñuel, André Breton, and bisexual dadaist poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

Say / Nothing
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (8min)
‘Say / Nothing’ is a film about things about which we are routinely expected to ‘say nothing.’ It is a personal film on family loss and trauma, but also, far more importantly, a wider statement against a patriarchal culture of war and the military industrial complex, and the dangers of forced consensus and unquestioned obedience.

cul-de-sac
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (3min)
This enigmatic abstract perhaps represents a variety of types of cul-de-sacs or quandaries; seemingly irresolvable political conflicts, for example. There is only one way out of a cul-de-sac- one must carefully back out.

A Film for Chantal Akerman
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (3min)
A film for Chantal Akerman (1968–2015); feminist pioneer of avant-garde cinema, video artist, muse and friend.

Meantime 
Bill Domonkos (4.5min)
A short film by Bill Domonkos featuring the music of Paul Mercer. A combination of manipulated archive film footage, special effects and animation.

Lu deux fois 
Bill Domonkos (3min)
This film combines layers of archival medical/scientific animation, video and digital animation.

Nocturne
Bill Domonkos (5min)
Inspired by the music of Tchaikovsky and the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Evoking a sense of time and nostalgia, the film uses archive film footage which is manipulated, reconstructed and combined with newly created digital animation and special effects.

Logos
Bill Domonkos (3min)

Orgone Beat
Bill Domonkos (6.5min)

Endless North
Bill Domonkos (3min)

Look
Wheeler Winston Dixon (3.5min)
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” – Henry David Thoreau

Double Wedding
Wheeler Winston Dixon (1min)
“The chains of wedlock are so heavy that it takes two to carry them; sometimes three.” – Alexandre Dumas

The Big Idea
Wheeler Winston Dixon (4.5min)
“There are two problems for our species’ survival – nuclear war and environmental catastrophe – and we’re hurtling towards them. Knowingly.” – Noam Chomsky

Ulysses on the Shore
Wheeler Winston Dixon (5min)
“When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn’t interested any longer. That’s very astonishing.” – Raymond Queneau

Efficiency
Wheeler Winston Dixon (1.5min)
“Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.”
– Jacques Ellul

Electric City
Wheeler Winston Dixon (2min)
For Robert Heide and John Gilman
“I often think that the city at night is more alive and more richly colored than it is during the day.” – Anonymous

Borders
Wheeler Winston Dixon (1.5min)
“Cinema is universal, beyond flags and borders and passports.” – Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Downhill
Wheeler Winston Dixon (2min)

—–

Wheeler Winston Dixon has been making experimental films and videos since the 1960s in the underground film movement in New York City, where he spent time working at Andy Warhol’s factory. His work has been screened in venues such as The Whitney Museum of Art, The San Francisco Cinématheque, The New Arts Lab, The Collective for Living Cinema, The Kitchen Center for Experimental Art, Anthology Film Archives, and The Museum of Modern Art. See wheelerwinstondixon.com.

Bill Domonkos is an internationally acclaimed experimental filmmaker, GIF artist and stereoscopist. His artwork combines 2D and 3D computer animation, special effects, photography and manipulated archive film footage. His work has been shown internationally in cinemas, film festivals, galleries and museums. His uncanny, disturbingly surreal GIFS are screened internationally from Hong Kong to Italy. See www.bdom.com.

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is a film and video artist whose work has been screened in such venues as Outfest, Nederlands Filmmuseum, Collective for Living Cinema, Swedish Cinemateket, SLA 307 Art Space, NY, Studio 44 Stockholm, Museum of the Future Berlin BWA Contemporary Art Museum, Poland, Filmhuis Cavia in Amsterdam, and other venues around the world. See gwendolynaudreyfoster.com

(Descriptions of the films are excerpts quoted from the filmmakers’ vimeo pages.)

 

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