We’re excited to partner with the UI Cinematic Arts Department’s student-run experimental documentary film festival, ICDOCS, to present a program featuring one of this year’s festival jurors, Sara Sowell.
Dada’s Daughter / Sara Sowell
Dada’s Daughter is an ongoing expanded-cinema performance with 16mm film projections and a live score using objects of illusionary optics and industrial scrap. Abstractions of light and pattern reintroduce photographic practices of early 20th century Dada films by way of darkroom techniques and improvisation. Spliced in between photograms and negative images, sections of clear film leader cue a live performance activating the remote objects photographed on celluloid through the immediacy of the film projector’s beam. When placed in front of the projector these objects create tactile optical images; impressions of form, shape and pattern that reenact the process of capturing images on celluloid.
Jews Harp or: Harpaud / Sam Taffel / United States // 2023 // 0:06:29
“If I held you any closer, I’d be on the other side of you” – Groucho Marx
An examination of identity seen through the lens of the Marx Brothers and Antonin Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty.” Appropriating sounds, images and thoughts from The Marx Brothers, Wayne Koestenbaum, Elaine May, Susan Sontag and Artaud, “Jews Harp or: Harpaud” reflects on impersonation, doppelgängers, and the nature of Vaudeville as a shared art form / cultural practice. Gesturing towards performance as a form of survival, the effect of mirroring becomes a means of finding wholeness.
Another Rapid Event / Daniel Murphy / 2023
in 1859, two telegraph operators communicate using the radiant energy from a massive solar storm as their sole power source. In 2012, radiation from a comparable solar storm narrowly misses the earth.
이것은 보이는 것과 다르다: This Isn’t What It Appears / Heehyun Choi / 2022
Among everything obscure in an image, there is always the camera. This Isn’t What It Appears reconstructs and radicalizes the ways to see and interpret archival photographs of Korean women taken in the 1950s by American soldiers stationed in South Korea. This film attempts to reveal the camera within the frame, not as an omniscient eye but as a reciprocal medium that subverts the hierarchy in an image.