[Frameworks] Magic Lantern Cinema Presents: INTERIORS (Providence, Sept. 12, 2012)

[Watter, Seth]

Magic Lantern Cinema Presents

INTERIORS


Curated by Seth Watter


As early as Maya Deren’s *Meshes of the Afternoon* (1943), the
architectural interior has been a powerful trope and a structuring figure
in experimental film and video work. *Interiors* brings together nine
pieces from the last four decades of moving image culture that expand upon
and intensify Deren’s foundational gesture, and they do so from a variety
of perspectives: whether it be the formalist imperative of Vincent
Grenier’s *Interieur Interiors*, the feminist provocation of Coleen
Fitzgibbon’s *Restoring Appearances to Order*, the poetic reverie of Janie
Geiser’s *Fourth Watch*, or the playful reflexivity of Matthias
M*ü*ller’s *Home
Stories*. Each of these works meditates in some way on what Gaston
Bachelard called “the poetics of space,” or the saturation of our domestic
and private worlds with psychological qualities. Whether implicitly or
explicitly, a line is drawn between the architectural interior, the
interior of the cinematic apparatus, and the interiority of mind; each
figure mirrors and protects the others like a series of nested boxes.
Toggling between classic structuralist films and the contemporary works
that reconsider structuralism’s legacy, *Interiors* presents an indoor
universe simultaneously joyous and riddled with anxiety—both comforting and
fraught with peril. But these questions of psychic cathexis and affective
engagement with an enveloping space are inseparable from a reconsideration
of the medium itself, for it has often been suggested that the invention of
cinema brought with it a transformation in the perception of everyday life.
Slow and fast motion, freeze frames, temporal reversibility, magnification,
anamorphosis, pans, tilts and tracking shots—all of these techniques offer
a new experience of the homes and apartments that would have otherwise kept
us trapped in their four-walled regularity. And in an age when
spectatorship has become increasingly private, and the exhibition space of
cinema collapsed into the space of the living room, these nine works are a
potent reminder of the ways in which visual media influence our psychic and
physical relation to the spaces of modernity we inhabit.



“Interieur Interiors (To A. K.),” Vincent Grenier, 1978, 16mm, b&w, silent,
15 min.

“Dust Studies,” Michael Gitlin, 2010, DVD, color, sound, 9 min.

“Endurance/Remembrance/Metamorphosis,” Barry Gerson, 1970-79, 16mm
transferred to DVD, color, silent, 12 min.

“Running Outburst,” Charlemagne Palestine, 1975, DVD, b&w, sound, 6 min.

“Restoring Appearances to Order in 12 Minutes,” Coleen Fitzgibbon, 1975,
16mm transferred to DVD, color, sound, 12 min.

“Whispering Pines 2,” Shana Moulton, 2003, DVD, color, sound, 4 min.

“Corridor,” Standish Lawder, 1970, 16mm, b&w/color, sound, 22 min.

“Home Stories,” Matthias M*ü*ller, 1991, 16mm, color, sound, 6 min.

“The Fourth Watch,” Janie Geiser, 2000, 16mm, color, sound, 10 min.


TRT: 95 min.


September 12, 2012

Cable Car Cinema, 204 S. Main St., Providence, RI
9:30 PM, $5

Graciously funded by the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media
Studies at Brown University.
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