This Radiant World: Recent and Retrospective Experimental Films is a four-program series of exceptional experimental films from the last few years, complemented by several newly restored and preserved retrospective works. Many of the films comment directly or indirectly on the anxieties and uncertainty of the past two years; others serve as joyful and playful counterpoints. Together, they demonstrate the continuing richness of experimental cinema, the history of which is exemplified by this selection of lesser-known works that are overdue for rediscovery and reappraisal. 

Christopher Harris’s films often examine geographic space as a locus for competing layers of representation and perception. still/here (2000) is a meditation on the vast landscape of ruins and vacant lots that constitute the north side of St. Louis, Missouri, an area populated almost exclusively by working-class and working poor African Americans. The film explores the vestiges of a once-thriving community through evocative imagery of derelict cinemas, fading billboards, and abandoned domestic spaces, asking the viewer to reflect on the causes of this decay.

The five-program series "Troubling the Image: New + Restored Experimental Cinema" features an eclectic and wide-ranging group of works that celebrate the vibrancy of experimental and almost-experimental cinema from near and far, now and then.

The five-program series "Troubling the Image: New + Restored Experimental Cinema" features an eclectic and wide-ranging group of works that celebrate the vibrancy of experimental and almost-experimental cinema from near and far, now and then.

Landscapes of Light features works about place that alternate between close observations of the everyday and more expansive and dislocated views of the world. This program is anchored by two beautiful films by Dane Komljen, Our Body (2015) and All Still Orbit (2016; co-directed by James Lattimer), that imbue place with tenuous histories, personal and political. Arash Nassiri’s Tehran-geles (2015) is a nocturnal flight around the buildings of Tehran, a disorienting view of lights, commercial structures, and signage that could double for Times Square or Las Vegas. Also showing are Peter Hutton’s Boston Fire (1979), Julie Murray’s Distance (2010) and Joana Pimenta’s An Aviation Field (2016). Onscreen preshow is Lois Patiño’s video Strata of the Image (2015).