The films of Arthur Lipsett are softly apocalyptic assemblages of midcentury images and sounds—documentaries, street photographs, advertisements, interviews. In the classic Very Nice, Very Nice, hundreds of purloined moments spin past the eye at a jet-age clip: crowds march, highways sprawl, an atom bomb drops, children play, wrestlers grapple, audiences guffaw. Equally magpied, the soundtracks draw heavily on dialog from psychiatric films and religious oratory, continuously circling back to existential themes, collaged with jazz, spirituals, and ritual music.

After a decade in Greenpoint, Light Industry has moved to East Williamsburg: 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407. Our fall season begins in this new space, designed by AD-WO, with a selection of early films by Peter Tscherkassky. The works assembled here stand as some of the most vital cinematic experiments of the late 20th century, appealing, at once, to the eye through the virtuosity of their formal construction, and to the theoretical imagination through their rigorous conceptual strategies.

Light Industry is proud to present the world premiere of Circumstantial Pleasures, a new cycle of films by Lewis Klahr.

Shaped by soundtracks ranging from girl-group bops to post-punk noise, Klahr’s cut-out animations conjure narratives that are at once cryptically articulated and forcefully emotional. These collage films, scholar Tom Gunning observes, “have always mimed the processes of memory by pulling together the discards of contemporary life (images from ads, textbooks, or comic books, objects such as game pieces, menus, playing cards) into scenarios that seem like some Hollywood film dimly remembered.”

Introduced by Robert Beavers

I met Renate Sami when the filmmaker Ute Aurand invited me to show films at FilmSamstag in Berlin in the late 1990s, but it was only later that I experienced the calm directness of her own film and video work, and became acquainted with the emotion at its source. When I moved to Berlin, I learned more: how she came to film and what directions her filmmaking took