Crop is an astounding video piece about a state-owned newspaper building in the center of Kairo. Filmed in 2012 shortly after the Arabic revolution in Egypt, the video represents an interesting, historic moment in time, and it is at the same time a reflection on image making and image representation in times of political changes regardless of local bounds or temporality.

Set at the press house of Al Ahram (the Pyramids), a conservative newspaper that has been the national official press organ since President Nasser, the viewer is guided to explore the rooms of the house from the top down, following its hierarchy of places, literally from the representative offices down to the cellars with printing machines and packaging of newspaper bundles. While the camera unfolds step by step the complexities of a building, a photo-journalist talks about the beginnings of photo reportage in Egypt. He tells us he missed the revolution staying at the hospital. He speaks about the restrictions photo journalism has had to face from its beginning both from a conservative islamic society, and a regime controlling every publication. At first the journalist seem to be one person, but that is a fiction. His narration actually is a composition of 19 statements of different interviewed journalists, whose opinions differ in complex ways. The sound track of the film is comprised of two separate layers: the ambient sound that goes along with the passage of places that we follow inside the building, and on the other side the voice-over of the interviewed journalist. This voice-over creates a real contrapuntal montage in the sense of Eisenstein's statement on sound film, whereas the ambient sound creates a poetic flow of images, a narrative of space.

Helen Hill’s vibrant, humorous, handcrafted works use diverse techniques including puppets, cel and stop-motion animation, live action, painting and drawing. Her filmmaking combines a playful sense of participation and community with a clear-eyed recognition of the somber rhythms of death and rebirth. Film prints (courtesy of Harvard Film Archive) include Mouseholes (1999), Madame Winger Makes a Film (2001) and The Florestine Collection (2011) – completed posthumously by her husband, Paul Gailiunas.

Join Experimental Response Cinema and the Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz for this very special evening, curated by Jason Cortlund & Julia Halperin (Now, Forager)!

Entanglements is a multiple projection performance by Luís Recoder and Sandra Gibson that invites sound artists to process the optical film tracks from up to four 16mm projectors. The scratched opaque footage is not what interests us per se but the effect it has in dispersing or scattering the projected audio-visual event itself.

- Entanglements for (up to) Four Projectors (2009 – 2014)
Multiple 16mm projectors, black & white film loops, mixed media, live optical sound processed by Claudio Rocchetti, 60 minutes

The following day, Saturday May 10, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder will install a special version of Threadbare.

- Threadbare (16mm projector, film, reels)
“Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder look back at the history of film technology. Their richly imaginative installations and sculptures treat celluloid and the projector in ways that are surprising and evocative. Their artworks are poetic and beautiful, offering profound insights into the nature of the medium. Threadbare (2013) is a film projector wrapped in 16mm film footage whose silhouette calls to mind Mickey Mouse.” - John G. Hanhardt, Senior Curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Writing of Joseph Cornell, Jonas Mekas remarked that his films “deal with things very close to us, every day and everywhere. Small things, not the big things…His works have the quality—be they boxes, collages, or movies—of being located in some suspended area of time.” One finds a similar sensibility in the films of Brian Frye, particularly so in a cluster of 16mm works completed around the turn of the 21st century, just as the end of small-gauge cinema seemed all too immanent. At once literal actualities and sphinx-like artifacts, Frye’s films might at first seem like outtakes from lost projects, or damaged archival isolates, bearing grainy images that beg for exegesis: Kennedy-era actors awkwardly intone lines from a portentous melodrama; a woman’s face flits in and out of legibility beneath a storm of visual debris; a old man points to a weathered gravesite, his lips mouthing silent words; Civil War soldiers maneuver at the edge of a forest. These moments play like misplaced bits of someone else’s memories, physical records of our world mysteriously unmoored from their origins.