This month: Earth (1930, dir. Alexander Dovzhenko, silent, b/w) with live soundtrack by Jim Abramson and Bill Sack.
Please join us for a celluloid screening of Earth, Alexander Dovzhenko's grand film dramatizing the collectivization of Soviet farms. The film's stunning imagery will be accompanied by the equally stunning sounds of musical duo Jim Abramson and Bill Sack.
"The astonishingly beautiful Earth is unlike anything else in movies. Drafted to make a film on rural collectivization, Dovzhenko produced a myth presenting the creation of the kolkhoz (collective farm) as a natural phenomenon, part of a cosmic cycle of birth and death. Murdered by a crazed kulak (or wealthy peasant), Earth's young hero is a martyr to the fertility of harvest. Released amid the campaign to liquidate the kulaks, Earth is ultimately a pagan myth made to celebrate a tragic social experiment." - J. Hoberman, Village Voice
About Emulsified:
There is a room off the fluorescent-lit white corridors of the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo called the Bone Yard.
The Bone Yard is where pieces of equipment not yet completely trashed come to wait out their days. A limbo of sorts. A purgatory of tech souls. The objects sit on shelves holding onto the feeble hope that maybe in a few years their particular approach to rendering an image or sound—with tubes, or alternating scan lines, frame buffers and 8-bit audio, magnetized particles on tape—will come back into favor. Like a comet returning after 17 years. Or the eighties.
In the same room, sit rows of metal cans, each a bit wider than 16 millimeters. In each of those cans is a reel of film, each containing a series of thousands of emulsified images rolled up on acetate. Light struck images, but kept in the dark. These films are what remains of the university's 16mm film collection, saved (barely, and some quite literally) from the trash bin of progress.
Most of these prints haven't seen the light of day in years, possibly decades. Animation. Documentary. Industrial films. Other Sundry and Miscellaneous. Some are visionary works. Some are less profound, but speak to us nonetheless—of film, of light, of the time of times, of all time.
It is our belief that you are as curious as Carl Lee and John Massier about the bones scattered in the yard. It is also our belief that you also may be entranced by light through film.
So, we begin a monthly screening from these Media Study archives.
