alr

A Diptych by Robert Fenz

Director in Person
Screening on Film
$12 Special Event Tickets

Peripatetic filmmaker extraordinaire Robert Fenz (b. 1969) returns with two new films extending his poetic engagement with the haunting, atavistic echoes that render culture and history as among the cinema’s most distant and elusive subjects. Intensely cinematic, Correspondence and The Sole of the Foot use Fenz’s exquisite 16mm cinematography to impart a sense of haunting pastness and transience to the faces and landscapes portrayed within them. Accompanying and complementing Fenz’s diptych is Shiloh Cinquemani’s exhilarating and award-winning portrait of German locomotive efficency, Berlin Tracks 18h00-20h00. – Haden Guest

00:00 / 00:00
      A Diptych by Robert Fenz introduction and post-screening discussion with Haden Guest and Robert Fenz.

      PROGRAM

      • Correspondence

        Directed by Robert Fenz.
        US/Germany, 2011, 16mm, color and b&w, silent, 30 min.

      Correspondence is my tribute to Robert Gardner’s body of work. Retracing his steps, I filmed in the same locations in which he filmed. Dead Birds (1964) was filmed in West Papua, Rivers of Sand (1974) was filmed in Ethiopia, and Forest of Bliss (1986) was filmed in Benares, India. My goal was to craft a film in dialogue with his body of work. I found my images – one might say – to the left-and-right of his frames. I shot the majority of the film in lush black-and-white and did not record sound. I intended in this way to echo the poetic element in Gardner’s film documents. Correspondence is as much about Gardner’s documentary style as it is about filmmaking with silver gelatin material – about how we think and remember with film. So, Correspondence is my tribute to Gardner, but it is also my homage to a kind of filmmaking in which he is a master. – Robert Fenz

      • The Sole of the Foot

        Directed by Robert Fenz.
        US/Germany, 2011, 16mm, color, 34 min.

      A series of improvised variations on the concept of “place,” The Sole of the Foot explores ideas of belonging, isolation, and displacement. I filmed in France, Israel, and Cuba, among populations whose claim to belonging and identity are contested by others who assert a superior right to belong. I chose these locations because of questions I have about my own sense of belonging and of place.

      The sound in the film moves in-and-out of sync; the film itself is in color. Color, like sync sound, creates an illusion of presence. By using location sound, and moving it in or out of sync, I try alternately to enhance or mute a sense of alienation and disorientation – touched by improvisation – creating a space wherein viewers may contemplate their own train of thought as equal participants in an act of imaginative co-creation. – RF

      • Berlin Tracks 18h00-20h00

        Directed by Shiloh Cinquemani.
        Germany, 2010, 16mm, color, silent, 2 min.

      A composition of elusive moments and variations of colliding perspectives, Berlin Tracks 18h00-20h00 documents the railway tracks stretching out from under the Modersohnbrücke (Modersohn Bridge) towards Warshauer Str. S-Bahn Station in Berlin, Germany. The abstracted landscape visualizes alternative conceptions of time, experience and the ordinary.

      Current and upcoming film series

      Read more

      The Reincarnations of Delphine Seyrig

      Read more

      Ben Rivers, Back to the Land

      Read more

      Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque

      Read more

      Make Way for Tomorrow. Carson Lund’s Eephus

      Read more

      Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Collective Monologue

      Read more

      David Lynch, New Dimensions

      Read more

      Museum Hours: Mati Diop’s Dahomey

      Read more

      Albert Serra, or Cinematic Time Regained

      Read more

      Wang Bing’s Youth Trilogy