December 1st
Site Specific: Films by Vera Brunner-Sung
Filmmaker in attendance

TuesdayDecember 1, 2015
8:00pm
@ Mass Gallery
507 Calles St, Ste 108, Austin, Texas 78702 (map)

In anticipation of the December 2 Texas premiere of her feature film Bella Vista at the Austin Film Society, Experimental Response Cinema is pleased to present a program of Vera Brunner-Sung’s short experimental works, along with works by two filmmakers who have influenced and inspired her. Vera will introduce the program and host a q&a post-screening.

Vera Brunner-Sung uses experimental, documentary, and narrative techniques to explore the connections between place and identity. “I am interested in our relationship with the places we inhabit: how they shape our experiences, and how, in turn, we intervene in them to suit our own needs. Whether on a wilderness island in Lake Superior, in the suburbs of Southern California, or the Swiss Alps, each of my projects begins as an investigation into a landscape, and from there seeks to explore the psychic or emotional dimensions of its human experience. At the foundation of my work is the idea that place derives its meaning from the accumulation of subjective experience. I want to expose these traces, to better understand who—and why—we are.” – VBS

Longshore
2004, digital video, 4 mins.
A tour of a midwestern neighborhood navigates the relationship between individual and community, privacy and intimacy.

Untitled (Perlman Pl.)
2006, 16mm film, 1 min.
In Southern California, the housing boom generated a seemingly endless repetition of pastel stucco boxes. This micro-portrait draws attention to the human side of this standardized environment, revealing the intimacy of anonymity in one suburban fortress.

The Garden City
2007, 16mm film, 13:30
To what extent can we control the lived environment, and how does this impact our lives? A consideration of growth and development that suggests all landscapes are human.

My Goats
2006, digital video, 2:30
A neighborhood herd of sheep and goats. Shot in the suburbs of Delhi, emerging from a fever dream.

Inventory
By Zelimir Zilnik
1975, film on DVD, 9 mins.
Tenants of one old building in the centre of Münich are featured in this film: most of them are foreigners who work in Germany as “guest workers” (Yugoslavs, Italians, Turks, Greeks etc.). In their mother tongue, each of them tells who he or she is, and briefly talks about their major worries, new hopes and plans for the future.

Minong, I slept
2010, 16mm film, 5 mins.
On the remote wilderness island called Minong (Isle Royale), remains of human industry are absorbed into the forest and shoreline. An inquiry into the push and pull between people and nature, land and sea, intimacy and vastness.

The Fourth Watch
By Janie Geiser
2000, 16mm film, 10 mins.
The ancient Greeks divided the night into four sections; the last section before morning was called the fourth watch. In these hours before dawn, an endless succession of rooms is inhabited by silent film figures occupying flickering space in a midcentury house made of printed tin. Their presence is at once inevitable and uncanny. A boy turns his head in dread, a woman’s eyes look askance, a sleepwalker reaches into a cabinet which dissolves with her touch, and hands write letters behind disappearing windows. The rooms reveal themselves and fill with impossible, shadowed light. It is not clear who is watching and who is trespassing in this nocturnal drama of lost souls.

Der tiefe See/The Deep Sea
2012, digital video, 22 mins.

A consideration of heimat and cultural identity through the idiosyncrasies of observation, language and memory. Clinical analyses of land and cityscape expose the tension between reality and an impossible ideal. Neutrality breaks into convulsions: a scream at midnight, the evening bells. The man in uniform has work to do.

TRT: 67:30