Experimentations 1 | Feminist Film Experiments with Science

Los Angeles Filmforum presents Experimentations: Imag(In)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 1: Feminist Film Experiments with Science.

Screening followed by a panel with Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Charlotte Pryce, Rachel Mayeri, Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu, moderated by Jheanelle Brown. Curated by Jennifer Lynn Peterson.

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Films include: Pwdre Ser, the rot of stars (Charlotte Pryce, 2018), The Jollies (Rachel Mayeri, 2016), We Rule (Catherine Chalmers, 2014), Wolf Release (Bill Basquin, 2018), Wasteland No. 2: Hardy, Hearty (Jodie Mack, 2019), ...These Blazeing Starrs! (Deborah Stratman, 2011), the air we breathe (Christina Battle, 2023), How a Sprig of Fir Would Replace a Feather (Anna Kipervaser, 2019), in ocula oculorum (Anna Kipervaser, 2021), Wasteland No. 3: Moons, Sons (Jodie Mack, 2021)

This screening presents a sample of contemporary experimental films that explore science from feminist perspectives. To the extent that one can generalize about feminist experimental film, we might say it is known for its critique of gender, sexuality, and representations of the body. But in the past quarter-century, feminist experimental filmmaking has been transformed by new contexts, new ideas, and new points of departure. Rather than a unitary singular subject, much recent experimental film is more interested in hybrids, networks, collectivities, and blurred boundaries. Not only has the status of the personal shifted, but a new set of generational concerns has emerged such as intersectionality, trans and nonbinary gender identities, decolonization, environmentalism, and human-nonhuman entanglements, to name just a few. In many recent experimental films we can detect a skepticism about personal self-expression, replaced by an ambitious critical interrogation of the act of representation and knowledge-making itself, often deployed with strategies of convolution or play. This shift marks as a turn away from the singular, fixed, psychological self of modernity and a turn toward the manifold, fluid, material self of the Anthropocene.

Presented as part of Los Angeles Filmforum's PST ART: Art & Science Collide public screening series Experimentations: Imag(In)ing Knowledge in Film.