This program brings together films that explore sensuality, the body and romantic love, and their expression through the haptic medium of 16mm film. With a note of nostalgia, this screening aims to depict the ineffable and mythic possibilities of desire, sex and a sensuous relationship with the natural world.

Programmed by Anna Higgins.

16mm prints and films from FILMFORM and LUX.

Joseph Plateau, who invented the phenakistoscope, the first device capable of producing the illusion of a moving image from a sequence of still images, provided a definition of the persistence of vision in 1829. In his research into visual physiology, he described the effects of light stimuli and colors on the retina, determining their duration to equal one tenth of a second. Yet this value is not constant: it increases as the eye adapts to darkness, hence the sensation of movement which is characteristic of a film projection. Plateau thought that the eye sees at a rate of ten images per second and that, when they are superimposed, the brain links them into a single, continuous, moving image.