MILLENIUM FILM WORKSHOP presents THE SPECTRAL CINEMA

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MILLENNIUM FILM WORKSHOP presents THE SPECTRAL CINEMA
Sunday, October 17 – 7:30pm

A collection of short works connected by the ghostly stains on our souls left by the cinematic image. This program opens with the first volume of filmmaker Jawni Han’s ongoing, Walter Benjamin-inspired video essay The New Arcades Project, Part 1: Angelica’s Riddle. Using the ghostly narrative of Manoel de Oliviera’s The Strange Case of Angelica as a jumping-off point, Han constructs a video dissection of the illusory aspect of the cinema that breathes life into dead, still images, making the past present and hauntingly visible. From there we diverge and offer a series of works to be considered in light of its observations. In these films, the spirits of dead stars possess our souls, empty houses are haunted by past lives captured on home video, the faces of star-crossed lovers are frozen for eternity, dark details of an empty opera are revealed to us in grainy still images, and in the end, Everybody Dies.

THE NEW ARCADES PROJECT, PART 1: ANGELICA’S RIDDLE
Dir. Jawni Han, 2020
USA, 18 min

The New Arcades Project has its origins in two cultural objects: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and a lyrical fragment from Pavement song Gold Soundz. It is well known that Benjamin intended the Arcades Project to be more or less a collection of quotations pulled out of context from their original sources, then assembled together in a way that they generate new meanings via Benjamin’s collage technique. Putting his theory of weak messianism into practice, he sought to redeem these fragments of the past by building a sanctuary where they can stay and form new constellations of histoire(s). Benjamin’s quotation-collage technique and philosophy of history find their unlikely epigraph in Pavement’s Gold Soundz, in which Stephen Malkmus sings “you can never quarantine the past.”

In Angelica’s Riddle, we start with the irreconcilable tension between photography and cinema in terms of how time and duration are dealt with in each respective medium. Manoel de Oliviera’s haunting love story about a photographer obsessed with moving image The Strange Case of Angelica is our jumping off point. The illusion of 24 frames per second (Zeno’s paradox) takes us everywhere from Deleuze’s meditation on motion via Bergson, Derrida sketching out the early foundation of hauntology on camera, Kafka through Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, and finally, last but not least, to a mash-up of Kiarstami’s Shirin and Godard’s Breathless.

Jawni Han was born in Seoul and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. She received her BA in philosophy and makes films to explore and communicate her philosophical interests. Her films deal with various forms of specters from history that live among us, the destabilization of identity, and the possibility of non-linear experience of time through cinema. Jawni’s formal approach, which combines experimental and narrative traditions, is one way she makes sense of her queer identity and works through the contradictions she encounters in her experience as a transfem.
MISS EVE
Dir. Elizaveta Allyson, 2021
USA, 17 min
A woman haunted by her crippling obsession with a dead Hollywood actress confides in how it has overtaken her life and very being. We follow this woman, Eve, through her days and compulsive ritualistic routines. With intermittent interviews, talk sessions even, time and reality are obscured. It is left to wonder if what is shown takes place in her life or are in fact delusions replaying in her mind.
Elizaveta A. Rubin is a Brooklyn based underground filmmaker, actor and artist. A graduate of the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute and student of NYU Tisch, Elizaveta has trained in acting extensively and is a self taught filmmaker and screenwriter. Inspired by Surrealism, Tanztheater, ancient art, mystical mythologies, and the Russian avant-garde, she infuses her work with her personal research and seeks to find the nexus between her various artistic and intellectual interests and narrative storytelling. Elizaveta has recently been creating sculptural jewelry through the lost wax casting technique and has several films in the works.
SILENT LOVERS 
Dir. Julie Orlick, 2017
USA, 11 min

Obedient to the sovereign ruler of his silent universe, a hopeless mime plays lap dog to a covetous queen in their silky echo chamber of imprisonment. As revelations befall upon the crestfallen clown, he realizes his dis-enthrallment through a shattering escape with the hand of a pirouetting harlequin, while Her Majesty’s empire and identity spiral into vibrant agony.

Presented on 16mm.
Julie Orlick (b. 1990; Los Angeles, California) is an American underground experimental filmmaker, analog photographer, poet & artist. Her visual landscape is evocative of the nascent stages of the artform in tandem with cult-cinema of mid-century American experimental filmmaking. Using a Bolex h16 Rex-5, her signature style employs in-camera bolex tricks, multiple exposures, slow motion, fast motion & superimpositions, to effect a pastiche of 20th century pop-culture, an epoch intimately bound to, and defined by, film.

MOVE OUTS
Dir. Justin Clifford Rhody, 2020
USA, 18 min
A drifting malaise searches the domestic American interior for signs of life. Composed from found footage discovered on a VHS tape in a Midwestern alleyway. Original soundtrack by Carlos Gonazalez.

Justin Clifford Rhody is a photographer, filmmaker and sound artist living in New Mexico. He operates the media imprint PHYSICAL and organizes the No Name Cinema film series. More info available at: www.justincliffordrhody.com


DEI NOTTURNI SPLENDORI
Dir. Anderson Matthew, 2020
Germany, 10 min

The sound of a distant whistle and theorbo calls a sleeping singer through the empty streets of Stuttgart in a midnight journey to the opera house.

Commissioned by the Staatsoper Stuttgart early into Germany’s pandemic lockdown, Anderson Matthew captures the singer Helene Schneiderman in ecstatic 35mm photo roman, singing a madrigal by Tarquinio Merula from 1638.
“And, ‘twixt the shadows and frights / of nocturnal splendors, / My beloved will secretly be hiding. / Say what you will, say what you may.”

EVERYBODY DIES
Dir. Anderson Matthew, 2020
USA, 8 min
In Super 8mm, time, space and the body fold in on themselves. It’s a poetic journey into the desert — a reflection on the nature of death as something not to be feared but embraced as part of an intimate and universal human experience. Film by Anderson Matthew. Starring and scored by DNZ.
Anderson Matthew is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His work centers on film experimentation and queer perspectives. More info available at: www.andersonmatthew.com / @and.matthew

THE SPECTRAL CINEMA is part of MEANS OF PRODUCTION: NEW ARTISTS’ CINEMA presented by MILLENNIUM FILM WORKSHOP
This series will be devoted to showcasing works from overlooked and unknown American and International contemporary artists working in film and video, and pushing bounds beyond the limitations implied in those forms. Whether presenting intimate-scale epic by heretical artists re-interpreting the world as they see it on a no-string budget, or artists expanding vision via new tools of expression in the present and future age, Means of Production is about looking forward to a 21st century where economic and technological barriers are broken down, ushering in a new era of highly original cinematic handiwork.
The Millennium Film Workshop was founded in 1967 by a group of filmmakers with a vision to expand accessibility to the tools, ideas, and networks of filmmaking beyond the confines of institutions and corporate studios. Millennium has put on countless educational workshops, artist-hosted screenings, printed our renowned publication The Millennium Film Journal, served as a production hub kickstarting the careers of many prominent filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Todd Haynes, Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneeman, Michael Snow, Bruce Connor, Nick Zedd, Andy Warhol and Bruce Connor  and has played a large role in dismantling the monetary and educational barriers separating the art and craft of filmmaking from the general public.