CONTENT WARNING: These films contain flashing lights which may not be suitable for those with photosensitive epilepsy, as well as explicit images of violence.
Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco has built an impressive body of work over the last two decades. Her frenetic and direct cinematic practice melds an interest in formal experimentation with political intervention. Her feature debut, the audacious and refreshingly unusual ¡Aoquic iez in Mexico! (2024), will have its own Spectacle screening, but her earlier shorts constitute their own powerful block of cinematic assaults on the traditions of the medium, Mexican society, and the passive spectator. Quagliata Blanco will present her entire filmography, from work she developed at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design under the tutelage of experimental film luminaries like Saul Levine, to her more recent pieces which anticipate the political fury of her feature.
THURSDAY, APRIL 3 – 7:30 PM
LA OTRA PIEL
2015-2017, 9 min, 16mm
A collection of seven handmade shorts from the beginning of Quagliata Blanco’s career. Demonstrating an emphasis on texture, these films reflect her incipient interest in film as material, and in material as an inherently expressive matter.
CALYPSO
2016, 5 min
Inspired by The Odyssey, Quagliata Blanco crafts a cinematic portrait of the nymph Calypso. Not beholden to the specifics of mythology, she offers a sensuous and surprising queer reinterpretation of the classic.
SE BUSCA (UN MAR DE AUSENCIA)
(Searching for (a sea of absence))
2016, 2 min
Se busca roughly translates to “wanted” in English, but “searching for” is perhaps more fitting within the context of Quagliata Blanco’s film and the ongoing crisis of missing women in Mexico. This short compiles 50 images of missing women, whose “Se Busca” posters are circulated in efforts to find them.
FIN ES UNA PELÍCULA MEXICANO
(The End – A Mexican Movie)
2016. 3 min
Juan Bustillo Oro’s Dos Monjes (1934), a classic of Mexican cinema, is an expressionist work about fraternal hate and masculine violence. This short focuses explicitly on the murdered female protagonist at the heart of Dos Monjes. It’s both a work of criticism and a revelation of Mexico’s age-old violence against women.
CRISÁLIDA
(Chrysalis)
2017, 3 min
A handmade film about metamorphosis. Typical of Quagliata Blanco, the content is as shapeshifting as its form.
A NUESTRO TIEMPO
(Closer to Our Time)
2018, 6 min
Quagliata Blanco turns to the archive once more. Here she samples images from Leobardo López Arretche’s landmark 1968 protest documentary El Grito to stress the unresolved promises of the 1968 cultural revolution in Mexico.
MY CELL PHONE
2018, 2 min
A fun (and troubling) investigation into people’s attachment to their phones.
Special thanks to Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco.