Letters As Films

A scrapbook on Baillie's life and career, with stills, ephemera and writings by filmmakers across generations.

This is the first book on the West Coast avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Baillie (1931-2020), famed for the films Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964), Castro Street (1966) and All My Life (1966) and for his influence on directors such as George Lucas (one of Lucas' charitable foundations helped fund the digital transfer of Baillie's films) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Alongside stills from Baillie's films, the book fosters a dialogue between Baillie and filmmakers and writers across several generations, including experimental filmmaker Peter Hutton, filmmaker and anthropologist J.P. Sniadecki and Jonas Mekas, along with suites of images by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, British artist and experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers and Brazilian artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz, among others. Reproductions of correspondence and other ephemera are also included.

First global exploration of contemporary forms of filmmaking from political and cultural self-determination movements of Autochthonous communities and peoples.

Film X Autochthonous Struggles Today brings together for the first time filmmakers, activists, film curators, and scholars who share a common interest in filmmaking practices that emerge from and participate in the various situations of struggle that the Autochthonous/Indigenous/Native/Aboriginal/First Nations peoples and communities are involved in worldwide.

Starting with the Edison Studio's 1894 short films Buffalo Dance and Sioux Ghost Dance, representations of Autochthonous peoples have been part of cinema right from its inception. The vast majority of these representations, however, have not been produced by nor for Autochthonous peoples. In the wake of political and cultural self-determination movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and with the gradual democratization and accessibility of the tools of moving-image making, Autochthonous communities have displaced and renewed cinema's forms and means of production, increasingly reclaiming their right for self-representation by way of film and video.

Along with the vibrant forms of moving images arising from within the communities, close to their existential political concerns, filmmaking has also become a potent tool in Autochthonous struggles. This book answers the need to take a global look at the diverse ways of filmmaking that fight for land rights and against environmental injustice (Brazil, Morocco, Taiwan, USA), that resist neocolonial domination, economic and political exploitation (Japan, Philippines), that offer a counterpoint during low intensity or drawn-out armed conflicts (Colombia, Mexico), that invent strategies of counter information and representation (Australia, Canada, Russia, Samoa), and that strive for visibility.

Contributions by Myrla Baldonado, Mayaw Biho, Nadir Bouhmouch, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Carolina Canguçu, Amaranta Cesar, Karrabing Film Collective, Rupert Cox, Nicolas Défossé, Etienne De France, Sophie Gergaud, John Gianvito, David Harper, Aurélie Journée-Duez, Blackhouse Lowe, Caroline San Martin, Laura Langa Martínez, Isael Maxakali, Sueli Maxakali, Dan Taulapapa Mcmullin, Chie Mikami, Francisco Vázquez Mota, Omar Moujane, Marie Pierre-Bouthier, Perrine Poupin, Ariel Arango Prada, Beatriz Rodovalho, Roberto Romero, Jonathan Sims, Mercedes Vicente, Jamahke Welsh.

Published in collaboration with Harun Farocki Institut, this book unpacks About Narration [Erzählen], a 1975 essay film directed by Ingemo Engström and Harun Farocki.

Edited and introduced by Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert, this book focuses on About Narration [Erzählen] directed by Ingemo Engström and Harun Farocki.
It includes the film's script alongside the historical documents related to its making and Farocki's previously unpublished theoretical and programmatic essay on the film. The publication also includes a retrospective essay by Ingemo Engström on the film's political and artistic background.

Volker Pantenburg's detailed elaboration of the conditions of its making, alongside Boynik and Holert's concluding remarks, further contextualizes the film. The interview with Cathy Porter on Larisa Reisner, a heroine of About Narration, gives an overview of the life of a militant writer who inspired Engström and Farocki.

Edited and introduced by Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition For a Time Light Must Be Called Darkness. Lina Selander in collaboration with Oscar Mangione held at Argos, Centre for Art & Media, Brussels, 24.09.2017 - 17.12.2017.

About the exhibition:
For a Time Light Must Be Called Darkness features six video installations, most of them made in collaboration with Oscar Mangione. These works take us to Bredäng (a suburb in south-west Stockholm), Berlin, the West Bank, Pripyat and Chernobyl. All of these places are the occasion and the starting point for broader reflections about our present in relation to historical facts. Selander visits these sites and like an archaeologist digs in their past, their monuments, museums and archives. She looks for visual documents, focuses on details and analytically sketches new hypothesis. In this way, she tries to retrace hidden links between distant imageries, correspondences and analogies, in order to create new narratives. In her essayistic approach, Selander combines her own texts and footage along with still images, quotes and archive material. In this way a constant tension springs within these multiple-layered audiovisual works and reminds us that seeing is never an innocent act.

In this anthology of contemporary eco-literature, the editors have gathered an ensemble of a hundred emerging, mid-career, and established Indigenous writers from Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and the global Pacific diaspora. This book itself is an ecological form with rhizomatic roots and blossoming branches. Within these pages, the reader will encounter a wild garden of genres, including poetry, chant, short fiction, novel excerpts, creative nonfiction, visual texts, and even a dramatic play—all written in multilingual offerings of English, Pacific languages, pidgin, and translation.

Seven main themes emerge: "Creation Stories and Genealogies," "Ocean and Waterscapes," "Land and Islands," "Flowers, Plants, and Trees," "Animals and More-than-Human Species," "Climate Change," and "Environmental Justice." This aesthetic diversity embodies the beautiful bio-diversity of the Pacific itself.

A journey through the archive of BAFTA award-winning curator and film programmer, June Givanni. This private collection made public contains thousands of films from across Africa, the Caribbean and the diaspora amassed in a career spanning more than forty years. Using oral history interviews and ephemera from four film festivals as her touchstones, author Onyeka Igwe offers a way to encounter Pan-African film through the archive. 

The book starts with Third Eye, the film festival that propelled June into a career in Pan-African cinema. Through connections she made there, she travelled to FESPACO in 1985. Participating in the festival while Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso was under the leadership of revolutionary Thomas Sankara was a formative experience. In Ouagadougou she connected with film programmers Suzy Landau and Claire Andrade Watkins, who would take steps to organise Images Caraïbes, Fort de France, Martinique, 1988, and Celebration of Black Cinema, Boston, US. 

Using original oral history research with June and other key figures in Pan-African and Black British cinema, Onyeka uncovers the important role that women festival organisers, programmers and cultural workers have played in Pan-African cinema history. She conceptualises June Givanni’s Pan-African Cinema Archive (JGPACA) as a feminist counter archive that foregrounds marginalised histories and proposes a radical approach to archiving itself. In tracing and naming the cinematic legacies that ground political filmmaking practices today, she preserves June’s work, knowledge and fervour for Pan African cinema for future generations.

This DVD contains:
Light Reading, 1978, 20 min.
Pictures on Pink Paper, 1982, 35 min.
Cold Draft, 1988, 28 min.

Lis Rhodes has been at the forefront of British experimental filmmaking since the early 1970s. She studied at the North East London Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. A strong formal aesthetic has been developed in her films, reflecting her involvement with the debates and practice which emerged from the London Filmmakers' Co-operative, where she was Cinema Curator 1975-6. Early 'expanded' works such as Light Music (1975) fused performance and multi-screen projection with an exploration of the visual qualities of sound. Her analysis of broader political and social questions can be traced to her later films, which combine formal rigour with a passionate critique of issues from nuclear power to domestic violence. As an active campaigner for women's rights, Rhodes was a founder member of Circles, the first women's artist film and video (1979) and was an Arts Advisor to the Greater London Council between 1982 and 1985. She lives and works in London and teaches at Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London.

Set in various Uzbek landscapes spanning time and place, Ismailova's films weave a storied tapestry of ancestral folklore, traditional craft and colonial resistance. By Saodat Ismailova, with Roberta Tenconi, Erika Balsom, Marcella Lista, Dilda Ramazan and Rolando Vázquez.

Uzbek artist Saodat Ismailova (born 1981) is part of the first generation of Central Asian filmmakers following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her films emphasize long shots that evoke the aesthetics of slow cinema, often combined with archival footage and installed within textile sculptural elements drawn from vernacular traditions, as in the exhibition at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan, which this volume refers to. Exploring the collective memories of her home region, Ismailova interweaves myths with personal dreams to address social issues such as women's emancipation, identity and the colonial past.