Refracting Lumière

Cinema’s origins have held an enduring appeal for the avant-garde. In the act of returning to cinema’s earliest productions, experimental filmmakers from different eras and regions have discovered a highly flexible and productive artistic gesture. Such returns facilitate interrogations of film history as well as efforts to renew film form or criticize modern media cultures. At their most fruitful, they question the terms of avant-garde film practice itself.

The films of the Lumière brothers have lent themselves especially well to such endeavors. As a series of screenings produced at film venues such as Cornell Cinema, Mad Stork Cinema, and MoMA PS1 have demonstrated, remakes and revisions of works by the Lumières constitute a veritable sub-genre of avant-garde film: a common form through which highly disparate practitioners have repeatedly reframed our understanding of the cinematic, positioning our filmic present in relation to films past.

“Refracting Lumière” presents a highly distinctive subset of experimental films that re-stage, re-situate, or re-purpose filmic scenarios initiated by the Lumières. The program focuses on works from the Coop's collection that were produced in the 1970s, a decade of experimental film practice characterized by sustained inquiries into cinematic specificity, as well as innovative contributions to narrative, found footage, and diaristic film forms. Works exemplifying these tendencies by Malcolm Le Grice, Chick Strand, Hollis Frampton, and Bill Brand are included on the bill.

Curated by Josh Guilford. Originally screened at Union Docs in conjunction with "Staging Encounters," an intensive workshop on film curation.