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The Silents of Sound: Three Films

Screening on Film

Over one hundred years have passed since the birth of cinema, yet the silent era continues to inspire contemporary filmmakers. This program presents three films which draw on the formal devices of groundbreaking artists such as Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers, whose pioneering efforts inform these innovative works.

PROGRAM

  • Berlin Horse

    Directed by Malcolm Le Grice.
    UK, 1970, 16mm, color, 8 min.

Reworking his own 8mm footage and an early newsreel, Le Grice’s two-part experimental short considers the temporal relationship between the process of production and the act of exhibition.

  • Workers Leaving the Factory

    Directed by Harun Farocki.
    Germany, 1995, digital video, color and b&w, 36 min.

Drawing inspiration from the Lumière’s famed short, German artist and filmmaker Harun Farocki reexamines the first film exhibited to the public through a fascinating essayistic lens. Interweaving footage from the original Workers Leaving the Factory (1895) with such films as Lang’s Metropolis, Pudovkin’s Deserter, and Antonioni’s Red Desert, Farocki poses a stimulating series of questions on the nature of observation and realism in cinema.

  • Cowards Bend the Knee

    Directed by Guy Maddin.
    With Darcy Fehr, Melissa Dionisio, Amy Stewart.
    Canada, 2003, digital video, black & white, 60 min.

Situated primarily in a hockey arena and a beauty salon/abortion clinic, Maddin’s serialized film (comprised of ten short chapters) details a Winnipeg hockey star’s encounters with an oversexed Chinese woman named Meta and her hairdresser/abortionist mother. The player’s name is Guy, and Maddin has conceded that the film is partially autobiographical: “A lovingly self-loathing peek at myself but only as I would have enough courage to look—through a cracked glass made foggy by hairspray.” Initially shown as a peephole installation, the film offers a complex exploration of voyeurism through both form and content.

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