TAM Cinema is a moving image series exploring the interrelation of photography and cinema, each in turn operating as an apparatus of memory and index of experience. Works in this series, Still/Life, form a conceptual reflection on the space opened up between photography and performance iterated in Charles Peterson’s Nirvana. Still / Life explores a certain tension across the related mediums’ claims to real and imaginary realms, to empirical and subjective states, from historic to ecstatic truths. Image-making is presented in varying, and often seemingly opposing, forms: as both inference and reference, instance and eternity.
Curated by David Dinnell and Jay Kuehner , this instance of TAM cinema will feature photographer Charles Peterson in conversation.
TAM Cinema is a free event, but donations are welcome.
PROGRAM ONE
Black and White Trypps Number Three
Ben Russell
2007/ US/ 12 minutes / Color / 35mm to video
“The third part in a series of films dealing with naturally-derived psychedelia. Shot during a performance by Rhode Island noise band Lightning Bolt, this film documents the transformation of a rock audience’s collective freak-out into a trance ritual of the highest spiritual order.” – Ben Russsell
Human Radio
Miranda Pennell
2002 / UK / 9 minutes / Super 16mm to video
People dance in private moments of personal abandon across London in the summer of 2001. The film is the result of the director’s work with the first ten respondents to a local newspaper advertisement that she placed seeking ‘living-room dancers’ – people who love to dance behind closed doors.
Skála nearby Humpolec
Jan Ságl
1971 / Czech Republic / 7 min /Super 8mm to digital
In this recording of a July concert by the Plastic People in the village of Skála near Humpolec, Ságl captures the almost apocalyptic dimension of the Plastics’ performances. He shoots expressive close-ups of the dancers using a hand-held spotlight, complemented by calmer footage of the musicians immersed in playing their instruments – all of it “edited” directly in the camera.
Skinningrove
Michael Almereyda
2012 / US / 15 min / HD digital file
The fishing village of Skinningrove in North Yorkshire, England, is known, if at all, thanks to photographs by Chris Killip. They show teenagers loafing about, children on the beach and fishermen in their boats. American director Michael Almeyreda visited Killip, who looks at his black-and-white photographs on a laptop thirty years later, a globe glowing red next to him. And through the photographer’s words the people in the pictures suddenly get a new, different story.
Landscape Series #1
Nguyễn Trinh Thi
2012 / Vietnam / 5mins / 35mm slides to digital
Nguyen Trinh Thi’s Landscape Series no. 1 presents landscape as a “quiet witness of history.” It began with searches of online archives of Vietnamese news media for images of figures in landscapes “pointing, to indicate a past event, the location of something gone, something lost or missing.” The uniformity is striking, but the sequence is subtly structured: the typology hints at narrative progression, though of an uninformative narrative, lacking details.
Spirit
Jem Cohen
2007 / US / 8 mins / B&W / Super 8mm to digital
“Patti Smith asked if I would do a short film to accompany the release of her version of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. As neither of us are fans of the music video format or industry, we approached the project as a short film, with no lip sync, that would simply try to get at the heart of her version of the song. I shot in Super 8 film and pulled a few things from my archive.
The film is a domestic portrait of Patti and her son, Jackson. William Blake was invited in the form of a plaster cast of his death mask. Kurt Cobain, (conflicted, fierce, gentle, and another mother’s son) was invited as an admirer of Leadbelly. Cats were invited as household saints. The film invokes New York and rural America. It is about picking up guitars and doing dirty dishes.”
–Jem Cohen
It makes me wanna
Paige Taul
2017 / US /3 mins / B&W / 16mm to digital
“An exploration of the expression one makes when the music is just that good. Meant to capture the intense emotion of the performers as they listen and dance to music while simultaneously addressing the universality of Black expression and whether or not such a feeling is a common experience.” – Paige Taul