Echo Park Film Center is pleased to bring Baltimore-based filmmaker and programmer Lorenzo Gattorna to screen his films and those of subsequent influence. The selections sway between Gattorna’s speculative surveys and haunting hybrids by his contemporaries. Seeming counterparts coalesce in polyvalent montage, i.e. analog and digital technologies, intuitive responses versus structuralist tendencies, singular and superimposed selves, parallel yet particular places as well as the direction of camera movement or even stasis thereof. Sharing a devotion to both estrangement and cognition, these artists attempt to elucidate each other by examining some postulated approximations of reality. They introduce a given set of changes - imaginary or inventive - into the common background of known facts, therefore creating an environment wherein the impressions of the viewers will reveal something about the inventions, the characters or both. Seeing is a kind of knowing fraught with seductive half-truths, misdirected fantasies and the consciousness that often a closer look only reveals greater distance.

The aim of the program is to create a bridge between the “Western” and the “Eastern” contemporary avant-garde film discourse. “We picked a few of the most memorable North American avant-garde films made in the last few years and looked for Eastern European ones which somehow refer or connect to them by following a similar trend or technique.”

As the overall picture of the contemporary avant-garde film scene is extremely complex, each selection is inevitably subjective and reflects the taste and preferences of the curators.

A program of shorts by the artist couple Melissa Dullius and Gustavo Jahn with some new and rare films, some German and Berlin premiers. Distruktur – Dullius and Jahn – claim a space fluctuating somewhere between the big and small cinema. Consequently working with analogue film while shooting and mostly also developing their own material, their films seem to create a kinematic time-space that is distinct from the ordinary even though they often use film settings of daily life.