STRETCHING THE FRAME: DEATH, DYING AND THE MATERIAL BODY

Northampton Film Festival, September 2017

Run time: 82 minutes. 12 works screened on film and as digital transfers.

Curated by Sarah Bliss

Filmmakers from the AgX Film Collective approach film and time as concrete but malleable materials that can be worked by hand, elongated or cut into, and where the idea of waste begs to be turned inside out. Elasticizing and manipulating both temporal and material frames, these films address death and dying via American militarism and the cult of technology, the immigrant’s experience of displacement, the power of place and memory, the hospital-industrial complex, and the malleability of identity. Subversive, reverent, poetic, playful, and reflective, they provide insight not only into the fundamental truth of impermanence and change, but also into the fecund generative resource of close relationships fostered within and by collective communities.

Boston-based AgX is part of a growing worldwide movement of artist-run film labs and collectives focused on an appreciation of photochemical filmmaking. Members maintain and share a fully equipped darkroom and specialized film production equipment, knowledge, and camaraderie. They host regular educational workshops, produce major film events, collaborate on cross-platform projects, and hold work-in-progress screenings.

The program:

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1. ENOLAEMEVAEL. Kathryn Ramey. Double 16mm with optical sound transferred to HD digital. 2016. 7:00

An unfaithful remake of Man Ray’s 1926 "Emak Bakia" made without the use of a motion picture camera, ELONA EM EVAEL/LEAVE ME ALONE is a nonsensical response to brutality alongside a celebration of silver process. The film uses a variety unconventional image making and hand-printing strategies to achieve its hi-contrast jittery style including contact printing with a mag-light taped to a sync block and hand-processing in a bucket. No conventional motion picture processes/tools/labs were used.

Kathryn Ramey is a filmmaker and anthropologist whose work operates at the intersection of experimental film processes and ethnographic research. Her award winning and strongly personal films are characterized by manipulation of the celluloid including hand-processing, optical printing, and various direct animation techniques. Her scholarly interest is focused on the social history of the Avant-Garde film community, the anthropology of visual Her book Experimental Filmmaking: Break the Machine is a thinly veiled experimental ethnography on the contemporary experimental film scene masquerading as a textbook on experimental film techniques written in the freehand voice of a zine.

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2. Domestic Disturbance: Roombadrone. HD video. 2011. 12:22.

An examination of the blurry line between military and domestic technological innovations. A Roomba vacuum robot searches an abandoned house for an unknown target.

Nicolas Brynolfson is an artist working in film and video whose work has shown internationally. He lives and works in Boston.

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3. Restless. Robert Todd. Black and White and Color 16mm transferred to HD. December 2016. 7:10.

Changing winds, shifting moods, stirring, awaiting… At (AGX North)

Robert Todd is a lyrical filmmaker as well as a sound and visual artist, Robert Todd continually produces short works that resist categorization. His visually stunning body of work, which comes from a deeply personal place, takes a variety of poetic approaches to looking at the personal, political, and social ways in which we choose to live. His large body of short-to-medium format films have been exhibited internationally at a wide variety of venues and festivals. He teaches film production at Emerson College.

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4. Prison Island. Susan Deleo. Super 8mm transferred to video. 2015. 03:46.

Prison Island is an exploratory journey through an island previously inhabited by prisoners of war. It is a portrait of a place conceived through three rolls of super 8mm film and the impression left on the filmmaker from a day’s visit to this abandoned and fascinating site.

Susan DeLeo is a multi-media artist using experimental film/video, installation and photography to explore issues of memory, loss, the elemental/natural world and personal mythology. She has a 5th year Diploma in Studio Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and was a recipient of the Clarissa Bartlett Travelling Scholarship Award. She exhibits and screens nationally and internationally and is a member of the Boston based Agx Film Collective.

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5. Flying A (WEST #1). Kathryn Ramey. 16mm bw silent. 2011. 4:00

Flying A (WEST #1) is a found object rephotographed and hand-processed where horses run backwards, guns swallow their bullets and a man un-dies. Part of a series of films examining American expansionism and the mythology of "the WEST", Flying A is a silent, terse 4 minute deconstruction of a snippet of a typical American Western film with a shoot out, fist fight and cattle rustling. As the dramatic narrative winds up in reverse we travel from THE END of the conflict to where it begins, with two cowboys under a tree.

Kathryn Ramey is a filmmaker and anthropologist whose work operates at the intersection of experimental film processes and ethnographic research. Her award winning and strongly personal films are characterized by manipulation of the celluloid including hand-processing, optical printing, and various direct animation techniques. Her scholarly interest is focused on the social history of the Avant-Garde film community, the anthropology of visual communication and the intersection between avant-garde and ethnographic film and art practices. Her book Experimental Filmmaking: Break the Machine is a thinly veiled experimental ethnography on the contemporary experimental film scene masquerading as a textbook on experimental film techniques written in the freehand voice of a zine.

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6. Te quiero tanto. Anto Astudillo. Black and white/color super8 and 16mm. 2017. 05:48

Te quiero tanto gently explores the tensions between ethnic history and the immigrant experience. Using portable 16mm and super8 film cameras, the film moves back and forth from my childhood neighborhood in Chile to Hispanic neighborhoods in NY and Boston. Reflecting on my present displacement, I look for familiar faces and the echoes of the place where I grew up.

Anto Astudillo's background in psychophysical theater has led her to interweave her exploration in experimental narrative and documentary filmmaking with performance. Born in Santiago, Chile, Anto became a producer for the Santiago a Mil Festival where she worked with German choreographer Pina Bausch. Anto co-directed the New England Graduate Media Symposium for three consecutive years programing the work of young artists as well as internationally renowned artists and has programmed screenings of experimental work to promote film and alternative practices. She is a founding member of the Boston Film Collective AgX. Anto obtained an MFA in Film and Media Arts at Emerson College where she is currently teaching film production.

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7. Journal de Nantes. Ethan Berry. Hand-processed 16mm and Super-8 transferred to video. 2016. 8:12.

This film is from a series of Journals I have made about cities I have visited. The images are a mix of hand-processed 16mm and Super-8 film. The audio was recorded as I moved through the city and experienced the events connected to the film conference I was attending. I limit myself to images and sounds recorded on site. My intention is to represent the ambience and the experience of the place through the mix of sound and images. For me, the sound comes first and establishes the associations that trigger the images that I choose.

One of the co-founders of AgX, Ethan Berry is an artist educator and filmmaker who has been active in the film community for more than twenty years. He has an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art. He is Professor and Coordinator of the Senior Capstone Seminar at Montserrat College of Art. He is the former president of the board of the Boston Film/Video Foundation and since 2008 he has been director of the ANYEYE, a film lab located in Beverly Massachusetts.

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8. Something From Nothing. Peaches Goodrich. 16mm transferred to video. 2017. 02:32.

Handmade animation in which both image and sound are created by scratching into 16mm film with a boxcutter. The original film content is laid waste, playing heavily and playfully with negative visual and auditory space.


David "PEACHES" Goodrich was born and raised in the city of Atlanta, Georgia sometime in the last century. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design and graduated with a BFA in Film/Animation/Video in 2006. Working across many mediums and disciplines, he has an affinity for 16mm film, brown inks, analog printing processes, and experimentation. His film, animation, video, paintings, drawings, installations, and music have been seen throughout New England and the continental United States.He currently lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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9. Portrait. Douglas Urbank. 16mm, silent. 2017. 5:00.

An imagined portrait, handmade by adhering images to measured lengths of 16mm blank film leader. Improvised, stream of consciousness, evolved from the physical process of making the film.

Douglas Urbank, based in Boston, Massachusetts, is an artist with a background in sculpture and drawing who began to experiment with film in 2008. He is a founding member of the AgX filmmakers collective, established in 2015. He is also a member of Fort Point Theatre Channel, an independent theater company bringing together an ensemble of artists from the worlds of theater, music, and visual arts. Between 2001 and 2013 he was host of a radio program devoted to experimental, improvisational, and other unconventional music and sound art. He works to promote cross-pollination between art forms on the fringes of alternative culture: experimental music, film and theater.

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10. How it Ends. Mike Piso. HD video. 2015. 09:38.

Ten minutes of the three weeks my great aunt spent dying in a shared room in a skilled nursing facility in the Boston area. A meditation on the end of life, dementia, and institutionalized end-of-life care, it is not easy to view. In this case the philosophy of hospice care is largely absent from how it is being practiced.

Mike Piso is a Boston-based artist and educator whose been making experimental films for nearly two decades. Mike has been active with numerous collectives – Boston Indymedia (2000-05), Esprit Des Corps (2002-05), and most recently, AgX (2015-present). From 2007-16 he worked as an educator and manager at Outside The Lines Studio in Medford, promoting outsider art made by individuals with intellectual disability.

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11. Matters of Life and Death. Robert Todd. Black and White 16mm, silent. July 2017. 12:45.

Entering the envelope of life and floating within its many layers.

Robert Todd is a lyrical filmmaker as well as a sound and visual artist, Robert Todd continually produces short works that resist categorization. His visually stunning body of work, which comes from a deeply personal place, takes a variety of poetic approaches to looking at the personal, political, and social ways in which we choose to live. His large body of short-to-medium format films have been exhibited internationally at a wide variety of venues and festivals. He teaches film production at Emerson College.

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12. Brought into Light. Stefan Grabowski and Mariya Nikiforova. 16mm transferred to video. 2014. 02:52

A music video for the song "Brought into Light" by Matti Bye, off his album Bethanien. Working from found 16mm footage of underwater lava flows, Stefan Grabowski and Mariya Nikiforova rephotographed and then layered the original material with a secondary in-camera exposure. Further chemical manipulation was then added in an attempt to create a visual analogue of the sonic tonality.

Stefan Grabowski is an artist and filmmaker based in Boston. Since 2011, he has curated the Balagan Film Series, dedicated to avant-garde, experimental, and otherwise marginalized film and video. He is also a founding member of the AgX Film Collective, an open group that formed to share equipment, resources, knowledge, and camaraderie with a focus on photochemical filmmaking.

Mariya Nikiforova was born in 1986 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. She received a BFA in Visual & Media Arts from the Honors Program at Emerson College in 2009 and and a MA in Cinema Studies from the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III) in 2016. From 2011 to 2015, she worked as co-curator of the Balagan Film Series. She continues to work on 16mm films as a member of the independent film labs L'Etna and L'Abominable.