Cinema + Disjunction
February 09 2009
Curated by Ben Donoghue
Vancouver Premiere
Filmmakers & Curator in Person
Panel discussion to follow screening.
Night Equals Day | Canada | 2008 | Director: Adrian Blackwell | 35mm silent | 30mins
Every Building, Or Site, That a Building Permit Has Been Issued for a New Building in Toronto in 2006 | Canada | 2008 | Director: Daniel Young, Christian Giroux | 35mm silent | 13mins
This Vancouver premiere screening of Adrian Blackwell’s Night Equals Day and Daniel Young and Christian Giroux’s Every Building, Or Site, That a Building Permit Has Been Issued for a New Building in Toronto in 2006 bring two recent structural approaches to development in Toronto to the West. These two new silent 35mm architectural films form the initial parts of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT)’s “Cinema and Disjunction” commissioning and production support project for critical architectural film works. Drawing inspiration from art historical precedents and contemporary critiques of the urban form, the initial projects presented under this framework defamiliarize and interrupt Toronto’s visual narratives with new questions and alternative possibilities. To express our intent in Bernard Tschumi’s terms, these films “reinscribe the movement of bodies in space, together with the actions and events that take place within the social and political realm of architecture.”
Blackwell’s Night Equals Day employs complex camera control to record a day at a single point of Regent Park’s (Canada's oldest public housing development and now the site of significant condominium development) Sackville and Oak streets intersection, compressing a twelve-hour equinox day to thirty minutes of film time, one frame per second, and one three-hundred-and-sixty degree camera rotation per hour. In Young and Giroux’s Every Building, one experiences a comparatively accelerated city represented by one hundred and thirty odd buildings or building sites captured in short static shots. – Ben Donoghue
Followed by a panel discussion between the artists, curator, and Vancouver writer and theorist Jeff Derkson, and structuralist filmmaker, theorist and installation artist Chris Welsby.
Adrian Blackwell is an artist and urbanist whose work focuses on spaces of uneven development in the postfordist city. Daniel Young and Christian Giroux have been collaborating on sculpturally concerned projects since 2003. They are represented in Toronto by Diaz Contemporary.
CINEMA + DISJUNCTION
09 February 2009
7:30pm
Pacific Cinematheque [1131 Howe]
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Film does not equal Sculpture: Two Toronto sculpture practices experiment with film
Young, Giroux, and Blackwell will briefly introduce excerpts of their recent film projects, followed by two short talks investigating the relationship between these moving images and their ongoing investigations of physical space.
FILM DOES NOT EQUAL SCULPTURE
11 February 2009
7:00pm
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Thought on Film XIII: The Condition of Post-modernity
An excerpt from David Harvey's The Condition of Post-modernity will be presented for group reading and discussion. Harvey’s answer to Fred Jameson’s Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition is a significant influence on Young, Giroux and Blackwell’s work because of Harvey’s rigorous basis of his analysis of cultural and social change in the economic and his special emphasis on social geography and the production of space.
THOUGHT ON FILM XIII
24 February 2009
6:00pm
Cineworks [1131 Howe, back lane entrance]
Co-Sponsored by the Pacific Cinematheque, Presentation House Gallery, VIVO Media Arts Centre, Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society and Emily Carr University
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