Cellular Cinema
By Kevin Obsatz
Cellular CinemaJul 30, 2020
CCC12 - Mike Gibisser
In this Conversation, we discuss Mike's films Travel Stop (2017), Slow Volumes (2019), and The World of Facts (2018).
Mike Gibisser is a filmmaker and artist interested in navigating the indefinite lines between essay, narrative, experimental, and documentary work. Over the past decade, he has completed two narrative features (Finally, Lillian and Dan and World of Facts), a feature film essay (The Day of Two Noons), as well as several experimental and non-fiction shorts. He has presented work at numerous cinemas and festivals around the world, including the Toronto International Film Festival, the International Oberhausen Film Festival, the Harvard Film Archive, the AFI Film Festival, the Images Film Festival, the European Media Arts Festival, and the New York Film Festival. His work has been featured in Artforum, Variety, and Cinemascope, amongst other publications.
CCC11 - Scott Fitzpatrick
A discussion of competition and conflict in the experimental community, power dynamics and class struggle in the film festival landscape, celluloid purists (pro and con), and much more!
Scott Fitzpatrick is a visual artist (Libra) from Winnipeg whose film and video work has screened at underground festivals and marginalized venues worldwide. He obtained his bachelor's degree in Film Studies at the University of Manitoba and began conducting lo-fi moving image experiments in 2010.
https://vimeo.com/artbarbarian
CCC10 - Carl Elsaesser
Experimental filmmaker Carl Elsaesser, currently based in Maine and Minnesota, discusses his recent work, including Itinerary of Surfaces, The Misbehaving Image, and Exercises in Resistance.
http://carlelsaesser.com/
CCC9 - Hannah Piper Burns
You can find examples of Hannah's work here: https://vimeo.com/hpb
Adroitly choreographed and cleverly edited, Hannah Piper Burns’ videos are brainy but for the body. Reflecting and refracting the spells and charms of popular culture, her work is seductive and unrelenting. Fluent in the languages of pop music, dance and reality television, the works are crisp and communicative, political in their poetics and personal in their polemics. Their tautness and rhythm uphold what music videos promise and all too rarely deliver: a multisensory re-envisioning of the bodily and intellectual experience of music.
Writing by HPB: https://www.hannahpiperburns.com/copy-and-content
More about Cellular Cinema: http://www.cellularcinema.org
CCC8 - Kelly Sears
In this conversation, we discuss The Drift, Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise, and Pattern for Survival.
Kelly Sears uses experimental animation techniques to create hybrid works that draw on fiction and documentary storytelling, recasting American archetypes and institutions to reimagine our own social and political legacies.
She transforms an extensive trove of source materials, such as first aid handbooks, chronicles of space exploration, presidential and military newsreels, 35 millimeter photography manuals, aerobic and yoga guides, archival films, high school yearbooks, and disaster survival guidebooks, into new instructional and advisory texts that may lead the viewer astray and disoriented. Through these animations, we glean bits of history that are recognizable but unsteady.
CCC7 - Lori Felker
In this conversation, we discuss Lori's films "Spontaneous," "Not You," and "Future Language: The Dimensions of VON LMO."
Lori Felker is a filmmaker/artist, teacher, programmer, and performer. Her moving image work focuses on the ways in which we process, share and disseminate information, via screens, dreams, gestures, games, and dialogue. By employing and pushing these structures, she attempts to study the ineloquent, oppositional, delusional, frustrating, and chaotic qualities of human interaction.
CCC6 - John Akre
John Akre is an animator, experimental filmmaker and documentarian who has been an integral part of the community art community of Minneapolis for decades. We discuss his films "Charlotte's Photographs," the "Hats of the New American Cinema Series: Scor3pio Rising" and his ongoing Art-A-Whirl and Open Streets projects.
CCC5 - Sabine Gruffat
During this discussion, we talk about the short, experimental documentary "Take it Down" and the feature-length 16mm documentary "I Have Always Been a Dreamer."
Sabine Gruffat is a French-American artist who was born in Bangkok, Thailand. After living many years in Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong, She immigrated to the United States.
Sabine Gruffat is an artist who works with experimental video and animation, media-enhanced performance, participatory public art, and immersive installation. In this work, machines, interfaces, and systems constitute the language by which she codes the world. The creation of new ideas means inventing new tools, crossing analog and digital signals, or repurposing old machines to patch into new ones. By actively disrupting both current and outmoded technology, Gruffat questions standardized ways of understanding the world around us.
CCC4 - Roger Beebe
During this conversation, we discuss Beebe's films "Amazonia," "Strip Mall Trilogy," and "Lineage (for Norman McLaren)."
Roger Beebe is a filmmaker whose work since 2006 consists primarily of multiple projector performances that explore the world of found images and the "found" landscapes of late capitalism. He has screened his films around the globe at such unlikely venues as the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square and McMurdo Station in Antarctica as well as more likely ones including Sundance and the Museum of Modern Art with solo shows at Anthology Film Archives, The Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City, and Los Angeles Filmforum among many other venues.
Beebe is also a film programmer: he ran Flicker, a festival of small-gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000 and was the founder and Artistic Director of FLEX, the Florida Experimental Film Festival from 2004-2014. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Art at the Ohio State University where he helped launch the new Moving-Image Production major in Autumn 2017.
CCC3 - Kevin B. Lee
Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker, media artist, and critic. He has produced over 360 video essays exploring film and media.
His award-winning Transformers: The Premake introduced the “desktop documentary” format, was named one of the best documentaries of 2014 by Sight & Sound and screened in many festivals including Berlin Critics Week, Rotterdam International Film Festival and Viennale International Film Festival.
Through Bottled Songs, his collaborative project with Chloé Galibert-Laîné, he was awarded the 2018 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Grant, the 2018 European Media Artist Platform Residency, and the 2019 Eurimages Lab Project Award at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
He was 2017 Artist in Residence of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. In 2019 he produced “Learning Farocki”, a series of video essays on Harun Farocki, commissioned by the Goethe Institut. In 2020 he is co-curating the Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist with Will DiGravio and Cydnii Wilde Harris.
He was Founding Editor and Chief Video Essayist at Fandor from 2011-2016, supervising producer at Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies, and has written for The New York Times, Sight & Sound, Slate and Indiewire. He is Professor of Crossmedia Publishing at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart.
CCC2 - Kym McDaniel
In this episode we discuss Kym's recent short experimental video series entitled "Exit Strategies."
Kym McDaniel is an experimental filmmaker, media collaborator, choreographer, and performer. Her films have shown at Slamdance, Antimatter, Chicago Underground Film Festival, ADF’s Movies by Movers, and selected exhibitions at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University, and the London Bow Arts Gallery, among others.
Her practice is rooted in somatic-based inquiry and energetic movement rituals. She has a BFA in Contemporary Performance & Choreography, and a BA in Psychology. Her training in the Alexander Technique has largely influenced my process both as an artist and educator. She studied Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she graduated with my MFA in 2018. She currently teaches in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University.
CCC1 - Travis Wilkerson
A conversation with Travis Wilkerson about his films Machine Gun or Typewriter, Did You Ever Wonder Who Fired The Gun and An Injury to One. Recorded on March 26, 2020.
Travis Wilkerson is an American independent film director, screenwriter, producer and performance artist. Named the "political conscience of 21st century American independent cinema," by Sight & Sound Magazine, Wilkerson is heavily influenced by the Third Cinema movement, and known for films that combine "maximalist aesthetics and radical politics." This is owed, in part, to his meeting Cuban filmmaker Santiago Álvarez.