Light Industry: Onishi Kenji's A Burning Star
Tuesday, July 13, 2010 , 19:30, 7$
177 Livingston Street, Brooklyn, NY, USA

- A Burning Star (Onishi Kenji, 16mm, 1995, 95 mins)

One of the most notorious yet unseen works of Japanese experimental cinema, Onishi Kenji’s A Burning Star operates with an emotional and physical intimacy reminiscent of both the confrontational style of Hara Kazuo and the radically subjective camerawork of Stan Brakhage. Made when Onishi was in his early 20s, the film documents his father’s funeral and cremation through subtle Super-8 lensing and a rigorous sense of real-time. At the funeral site, Onishi undresses and manipulates the corpse, scrutinizing it with his camera, then later records the act of cremation through the furnace’s portholes. This last sequence is the morbidly compelling heart of the film, presenting unearthly images reminiscent of an alien planet's gaseous surface, with flames licking over quasi-organic landscapes that look increasingly less like a skull, a ribcage or a hip bone.

Of A Burning Star, Onishi writes, “my inner conflicts find a cruel form." By fixing with unsettling intensity on his subject, but only briefly focusing on himself, Onishi evacuates his own emotions from the event’s depiction. Instead, he creates a film that speaks through its relentless examination of mute objects—what remains of his father—by capturing the very moments of their inexorable disappearance.

Human Emotion Project - Paris
22 & 23  July 2010, 16-20h
Galerie Younique
6 Avenue de la soeur Rosalie, 75013 Paris

Curated by Kisito Assangni &  Alison Williams

Including films & videos by German Britch (Argentina), Michael Chang (Denmark), Vienne Chan (Hong kong/Canada), Russell Chartier (USA), Glenn Church (USA), Luca Curci (Italy), Debbie Douez (Spain), Danny Germansen (Denmark), Alberto Guerreiro (Portugal), Neil Howe (Australia), Adamo Macri (Canada), Bill Millett (UK), Jerry King Musser (USA), Joas Sebastien Nebe (Germany), Leuna O’Doherty (Ireland/France), Pekka Ruuska (Finland), Icetrip Stvz (Mexico), Anders Weberg (Sweden), Alison Williams (South Africa), Masha Yozefpolsky (Israel).

Drawn together by the art that they share via internet, artists with disparate cultural and aesthetic identities approach the internal workings that exist in all humans. Emotions are inherently difficult to explicate. How does one describe fear ? We know it when we feel it but how can we share, through the paltry use of language, our experience of it ? Moving images, mostly embellished with sound, extend the expressive possibilities beyond what can be accomplished through language or even static imagery. By employing the largest palette of creative possibilities, film and video artists from around the world strive to externalize those complex driving forces that we all enjoy and endure and that bind us, as humanity, together despite our difference.

Punto de Vista’s anti-documentary documentaries
Friday, July 16th 2010, 19:30h, $8 admission
Millennium Film Workshop
66 East 4th Street, New York, USA

Discussion to follow with Josetxo Cerdán, María Adell of PRAGDA, and Spanish film critic Manu Yáñez.

A program of new Spanish experimental non-fiction at the Millennium Film Workshop, in conjunction with the festival Punto de Vista, selected by Doctruck  and Uniondocs, and co-presented with Pragda.

The Punto de Vista Documentary Film Festival is an annual festival held in Navarra dedicated to forms of cinema generically grouped under the heading of ‘documentary.’ Programmed by Artistic Director Josetxo Cerdán, films come from around the world, with an emphasis on finding rarities in form and subject. The festival seeks to reward risk-taking and non-narrative approaches, and to uncover glints in Spanish and World Cinema.