15th Oct 2015 7:30pm
Sallis Benney Theatre
Film screening
Screening
Open Colour
A new series of international experimental film, independent cinema and rarely seen classics.
The Iron Ministry
JP Sniadecki, 2014, USA / China, 83 mins.
'In motion, in thought, ears and eyes wide open!' (Film Comment). Somewhere in China, crammed into a train of unknown destination, men, women and children talk, kill time, eat, sleep. Snippets of overheard conversation reveal popular opinion, fleeting relationships, insights, while outside - hurtling at breakneck speed - vast panoramas and cityscapes flicker into momentary existence.
A one man crew, American filmmaker Sniadecki filmed The Iron Ministry over a period of three years while riding across China’s sprawling railway network, editing the footage into one fluid journey. An affiliate of Harvard’s ‘Sensory Ethnography Lab’, Sniadecki’s camera is rarely still and, aided by the remarkable sound design of Ernst Karel, immerses the viewer headlong into the heightened visual and sonic abstractions of the train’s material environment —the squeals of locomotion, a power cable slicing across the sky—all the while maintaining an intimate sense of its human scale.
Raw, impressionistic, chaotic and unforgettable, Sniadecki's experimental documentary uses a China in motion to craft a unique metaphor for modern society.
'Absorbing... The Iron Ministry turns the chaos of modern China into dense, frantic poetry" Indiewire
'Vivid and mysterious and full of life. NY Times / Critics Choice
+ From the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, two early films from the directors of Leviathan (2012) + Field recordings from sound artist Ernst Karel
The High Trail
Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2010, USA, 7 mins.
In the monumental American West, we are acoustic eavesdroppers on a man petting his herding dog, while we are visual witnesses to the progress of their charges. Part of a series of short films tracking shepherds through Montana as they take their flocks on the long trek to the Beartooth Mountains, it captures the stark beauty and danger of the Western landscape.
7 Queens
Véréna Paravel, 2009, USA, 22 min.
Recorded during an unmapped, extended (anti) ethnographic walk beneath the elevated tracks of the #7 subway line in NYC, Paravel's first film documents spontaneous interactions along the route.
Tickets on door only
