Crude Cinema/Expanded Exhibitionism: Painting on the Wind
Saturday/Sunday November 7/8 - 9AM-11PM
Light Industry
220 36th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11232
Red Channels has contributed two film programs on view at Light Industry this weekend, as part of a 5-day event co-presented by Triple Canopy. The center-piece of the event is the East Coast and theatrical premiere of Wang Bing's 14-hour film installation Crude Oil (2008). Wang's film will screen 5 times in its entirety, from 9AM to 11PM, beginning Wednesday November 4th and concluding Sunday November 8th. Our programs are part of a collectively-curated DVD library on view on 3 monitors within the screening room.
The event raises many questions about packaging and presenting reality (["re"]), etc; "ethnography for ethnography's sake"; industry as an aesthetic object [subject]; disengaged observation and presentation; and, perhaps most simple of all, China and industrialization, and their appearance on film (the themes of our programs).
DVD1
--A Fire - Ebrahim Golestan, 1961, 21 minutes
--Chung Kuo - Cina [Part 3: Shanghai] - Michelangelo Antonioni, 1972, 58 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 78 minutes
DVD2
--This is Shell - Geoffrey Jones, 1970, 7 minutes
--Night Over China - Aleksandr Medvedkin, 1971, 53 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 60 minutes
One trait the artist shares with the curator is the need for control: creating works and situations where specific ideas and themes are presented to an audience -- within a certain context, within a certain time. Wang's 14-hour epic film/installation, in its very expansiveness and unmanageability, does its best to defy curatorial control, challenging the limits of any distribution and exhibition apparatus.
Light Industry and Triple Canopy have succeeded in meeting the challenge, screening the mammoth work not once but five times; pairing Wang Bing's epic cinema against, in effect, itself -- turning the screening of this film into a retrospective of his work, where his other films screen simultaneously, competing with each other for the interest and attention of the audience; presenting other works to be seen in the very room of the installation, allowing a dialectical juxtaposition to frame and influence the spectator, giving them a way out (or a way in).
This flood of produced and carefully arranged images effectively becomes a festival; and like any festival the key issue becomes how to synthesize everything you've seen into a unified experience. Joris Ivens' white whale was to make a film about the wind, a film he attempted many times -- including in his final work, A Tale of the Wind (1988), made in China when he was 90 years old. Great friend of the country and its people, and director of his own 12-hour documentary on the the subject, How Yukong Moved the Mountains (1976), perhaps only he could understand what we're trying to do.
Wang Bing's Coal Money (2008, 52 minutes) will also have its US premiere at the event, Saturday at 4; and his debut film, West of the Tracks (2003, 554 minutes), will screen Sunday at 12. The event also featured, earlier in the week, Lucy Raven's China Town (2009, 52 minutes), and recent work by the Center for Land Use Interpretation.
More info: http://lightindustry.org/crudeoil
Co-sponsored by Triple Canopy
(The Golestan film was released on DVD as part of the publication (2004) of Revue Cinéma #7. The Antonioni film was released on DVD in Italy (2007) by Feltrinelli, and in France (2009) by Carlotta. The Jones film is available on a career-spanning 2DVD, "The Rhythm of Film," released by the BFI (2005). The Medvedkin film can be purchased on an English-dubbed DVD from International Historic Films.)