House of Sound
Saturday, June 5th, 20:00h, free entrance
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
4454 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, USA
MOCAD and Toronto's Images Festival are thrilled to be collaborating on an evening of short experimental films culled from recent festival presentations, alongside classic avant-garde shorts. This salon-style screening will highlight experimental short works by film and video artists from around the world who are pushing the boundaries of the medium in form and/or content.
Whether the instigator of a melodramatic moment, a vessel of history or the materialist marker of time, the presence of recorded music throughout the films and videos presented in House of Sound are all united by the role of sound as harbinger of change.
The musical selections found in these contemporary and historical works by Keren Cytter, Maya Deren, Nelson Henricks, Laida Lertxundi, Vanessa Renwick and Nikolai Ursin merge the popular and the perplexing: the songs playing back into each house mark control gained, control lost.
Program:
- Portrait #3: House of Sound (Vanessa Renwick, 2010, 35mm on video, 12 minutes, USA)
Scanning the now empty intersection where a legendary Portland record store once stood among a strip of black jazz clubs, Portrait #3: House of Sound is a testimonial to a community space recently demolished.
- Behind Every Good Man (Nikolai Ursin, 1965, 16mm, 8 minutes, USA)
This remarkable 1965 student film is a brief encounter with a transsexual black man who shares his experiences as a woman through snagging a "good man."
- Four Seasons (Keren Cytter, 2009, video, 14 minutes, Germany/Israel)
A series of deadpan , forlorn exchanges between characters begins with a brief detour into Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire and culminates in a fireworks show of spontaneously combusting household objects: a record player, a Christman tree and a plate of cake.
- My Tears Are Dry (Laida Lertxundi, 2009, 16mm, 4 minutes, USA)
A Hoagy Land 45, two women, a bed, an armchair and the beautiful outside.
- Failure (Nelson Henricks, 2007, video, 7 minutes, Canada)
Images of beauty rituals both masculine and feminine focus on the removal of body hair. Scenes of adolescent embarrassment are played out in adult life. Gender confusion lurks behind the curtain. Impoverished aesthetics. Popular music.
- Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943, 16mm, 15 minutes, USA)
In 1990, Meshes of the Afternoon was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", going into the registry in just the second year of voting.