Since 1995, the Périphérie association organizes the Rencontres du cinéma documentaire (Meetings of Documentary Cinema), and since 2005 presents each October a one-week long non-competitive festival at the cinema Le Méliès of Montreuil. Open to diverse audiences, the festival brings together heritage films and recent works around a cinematic theme.

"Barbara Hammer paints a colorful portrait of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, from her childhood to her death in 1979. Bishop described herself as “timorously kicking around the coastlines of the world,” and the film is loosely organized around her stays in Nova Scotia, Key West, Brazil, and Cambridge—the homes she made for herself and the lovers she took. Never “out” as a lesbian—the concept would have been foreign to the writer who graduated from Vassar in the thirties—Bishop nonetheless actively pursued women, from her first summer-camp crush to her last affair. Hammer examines Bishop from all angles, interviewing everyone from literary luminaries like Marie-Claire Blais and Edmund White to Lota’s aged former maid. Hammer pulls the viewer into Bishop’s world, blending present day footage of each location with archival photos, and recreating moments in the writer’s life." Adapted from text by Monica Nolan (Frameline)

December 11, 2015 – January 10, 2016
With Lary 7, Bradley Eros, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Rose Kallal, Andrew Lampert, Bruce McClure, Joel Schlemowitz

Microscope is extremely pleased to present “Never Twice”, an exhibition of live moving image performance in the context of what is usually referred to as expanded cinema: works free from the constraints or presenting alternatives to the traditional theatrical screening setting – single projection on a screen before an audience. The title of the exhibit, a reference to the quote from Heraclitus “one cannot step into the same river twice”, emphasizes the ephemeral character of this art form, one always intrinsically connected to a “here” and “now”, a multi-sensorial experience that although it may be performed again, it cannot ever be replicated.