Experimentations 1: Feminist Film Experiments with Science

Los Angeles Filmforum presents Feminist Film Experiments with Science - the first program in their PST ART: Art & Science Collide public screening series Experimentations: Imag(In)ing Knowledge in Film.

Experimentations: Imag(In)ing Knowledge in Film is Filmforum’s expansive film series and upcoming publication that investigates the ways that experimental and scientific films produce and question the visualization of the world. Combining artist films utilizing scientific imagery, science and natural history films, and films of indigenous and traditional knowledge, the series examines how science, nature, and technology films shape our understanding of humans, nature, gender, knowledge, and progress. The multi-venue public screening series presents analog and digital time-based media incorporating diverse scientific and experimental film traditions from across the globe. The series will include eighteen screenings between September 2024 and February 2025, with films and digital works from 1874 to today from around the world, multiple guests, panels and wonderful collaborations that will reveal the possibilities and circumstances of cinema in this realm.

Experimentations Program 1

Feminist Film Experiments with Science

Curated by Jennifer Lynn Peterson.

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.

Some of the films in this screening play with the tradition of the natural history film, visualizing the life cycles of animals and plants using microscopy, time lapse, and other forms of cinema-specific manipulation. Other films explore the limits of cinema’s ability to represent natural phenomena, displaying affinities with scientific observation but diverging from science in their goals. Some of these filmmakers use “laboratory” methods, balancing the rigors of artmaking against the repetitive and sometimes wild practices of experimentation. Many of these films visualize subjects in the natural sciences such as biology, zoology, botany, or geology. Questioning scientific objectivity, deconstructing traditions of scientific visualization, and deploying an array of cinematic techniques, these feminist artists demonstrate experimental film’s ongoing, provocative engagement with science.

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)

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

4:45 – 6:00 pm
Panel: Thinking about Scientific Imagery in Experimental Films

Panelists:

Jennifer Lynn Peterson holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and is currently a Professor of Media Studies at Woodbury University in Los Angeles. A film historian whose research focuses on the relationship between media and the environment, she is the author of Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Duke University Press, 2013). Her scholarly articles have been published in Representations, JCMS, Feminist Media Histories, Camera Obscura, and in numerous edited collections. Her film, art, and book reviews have been published in Texte zur Kunst, Millennium Film Journal, Film Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Artforum.com. Previously, she was Associate Professor in the Film Studies Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her second book, on American motion pictures and nature conservation in the interwar years, is under contract for publication by Columbia University Press.

Charlotte Pryce has been making experimental films, photographs and optical objects since 1986. Born in London, Charlotte Pryce graduated with a BFA from the Slade School of Art, University College London and completed an MFA in Fine Art/ Film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She draws inspiration from the work of visionary naturalists - notably Rachel Carson and Opal Whitely, and the mysteries and sentience of the non-human world are central to her practice. She finds resonance for her ideas in early 20th century writers of eco-fiction, and in the mystical tradition of her Welsh/British heritage. These influences are present in her most recent films Pwdre Ser, Of this Beguiling Membrane, and so it came about (A Tale of Consequential Dormancy), as well as in her magic lantern show, The Tears of a Mudlark. Her practice remains anchored in the physical manipulation of substances, of chemical exploration of the material of cinema.

Her films have screened in numerous festivals including Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Toronto, San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong, Ann Arbor and London. In 2013 the Los Angeles Film Critics Association honored her with the Douglas Edwards Award for Best Experimental Cinema Achievement, and in 2014 she was the recipient of Film at Wits End Award, and in 2015 she received the Gil Omenn Art and Science Award from the Ann Arbor film Festival. In January 2019 she presented a career retrospective at the Rotterdam Film Festival and her work was performed at the Velaslavasay Panorama in Los Angeles, Bozar in Brussels and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Rachel Mayeri is a Los Angeles-based artist working at the intersection of science and
art. Her videos, installations, and writing projects explore topics ranging from the history of special effects to the human animal. Her multi-year project Primate Cinema explored the scientific and popular representations of the boundary between human and non-human primates in a series of video experiments; works in the series have been honored at Ars Electronica and screened at major film and art festivals such as Sundance, Berlinale, True/False Film Festival, Transitio Mexico Festival of ElectronicArt, Abandon Normal Devices and Edinburgh Festival of Art. Her recent work includes Orfeo Nel Canale Alimentare (Orpheus in the Alimentary Canal), an animated opera about the digestive tract. Mayeri is Guest Curator at the Museum of Jurassic Technology and Professor of Media Studies at Harvey Mudd College.

Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose work is grounded in literature and the conceptual avant-garde. Cherlyn’s creative activity often starts from a life event or curiosity concerning an anomaly in language or in the aging material world. Her working method at various times involves handcrafted material, mixed media, and experimental interchange between new and old technologies. Cherlyn’s films have been shown internationally at venues and festivals including Edinburgh International Film Festival, Helsinki Festival (Finland), Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, Image Forum Festival (Japan), Crossroads Film Festival at SFMoMA (USA), among others. She received the Jury Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival for How Old Are You? How Old Were You?.

Jheanelle Brown is the Project Director and Curator for Experimentations: Imag(In)ing Knowledge in Film, leading project management, offering scholarly and curatorial guidance to project scholars, developing several film programs, developing the overall curatorial framework of the film series, and serving as co-editor of the resulting publication. Jheanelle is a film curator/programmer, lecturer, and arts administrator based in Los Angeles whose curatorial practice creates frameworks to explore the boundlessness of Black life in experimental and non-fiction film and video. She is currently Special Faculty at California Institute of the Arts. She has co-curated Time Is Running Out of Time: Experimental Film and Video from the L.A. Rebellion and Today and the traveling film showcase Black Radical Imagination: Fugitive Trajectories from 2018 to 2019.

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.