Saturday, November 18, 2006

Queer City Cinema Visual Art Component

• Queering Plunder Panel Discussion
  Join artists from the Queering Plunder exhibition at Dunlop Art Gallery for an informative and insightful look at the challenges and practice of media art making. The panel discussion will be an opportunity to explore issues around the contextualization of queer media art (film/movie theatre vs. the art gallery/exhibition space) and how the positioning of queer work in film festivals or public screenings and in galleries takes on different readings and reactions from the publics that view the work in these spaces.

Queer City Cinema Artist Focus

• My Rectum is Not a Grave (To a Film Industry in Crisis)
  A screening of recent videos by Steve Reinke
  
  
  • Anthology of American Folk Song
    (Canada 2004, video, 28 min.)
    Named after Harry Smith's seminal Anthology of American Folk Music, Anthology of American Folk Song re-inscribes the optimistically paranoid mythological landscape of contemporary America. Reinke illustrates this by saying "they had been unable to believe in the existence of terrorists. After all, none of them had discovered any repressed memories of terrorist abuse. They had focused instead on the more immediate and real threat of serial killers, alien abductors and Satanic ritual abusers." Anthology Of American Folk Song is the first in a series called Final Thoughts, an archive of found and original material collected by Reinke. Anthology is permeated by a sense of menace, standing as an oblique, disparate catalogue of small humiliations, traumas and strange, absurd, occasionally beautiful images and songs that queer the mythologies of a culture in crisis.
    
    
  • Ghosts of Gay Porn
    (Canada 2005, video, 4 min.)
    Combines Vu-Master slides, a list of names generated according to statistical probability for the year 1982 in America, and Gordon Lightfoot's most profoundly homoerotic song.
    
    
  • Ask the Insects
    (Canada 2005, video, 8 min.)
    Part home-made science (before it became doctrine and law), part animated video reverie, Reinke's brief and episodic compression is an incendiary release which opens by announcing the death of the reader, of any audience capable of pulling its fragments together, or better, of dissolving into its tissues, of allowing the body to change shape, to identify, for instance, with an insect. Or a stone. It begins with the death of the reader and ends with the death of the author, and between he stops along the way to muse on rain falling up, the "useless bio-diversity" of insects (meaning life is mostly decoration), signal deconstruction and beautiful noise, and burning books. His style is abrupt and associative; he jumps and jumps again, producing these small beautiful abysses which no one can see. He has produced something invisible to treasure, an impossible movie, which refuses to adhere to memory's sound-byte continuums. It is waiting for a new body to store or restore it. And while it is waiting it speaks, like a lover on the phone.
    - Mike Hoolboom
    
    
  • Regarding the Pain of Susan Sontag (Notes on Camp)
    (Canada 2006, video, 4 min.)
    Jethro Tull helps the author revisit and extend the final scene of Ask the Insects as well as pledging some New Year's resolutions.
    
    
  • Picnic (collaboration with Dani Leventhal)
    (Canada 2006, video, 4 min.)
    Leventhal shot, Reinke edited.
    
    
  • The Mendi
    (Canada 2006, video, 9.5 min.)
    An ethnographic documentary on a Papua, New Guinean tribe shot for the CBC's Man Alive in the 1970s forms the basis for this darkly comic rumination on how to conduct one's life.
    
    
  • My Rectum is Not a Grave (To a Film Industry in Crisis)
    (Canada 2006, video, 6 min.)
    He wanted to photograph small things - buttons, spiders - but did not have the right lens.
    
    
  • Hobbit Love is the Greatest Love
    (Canada 2006, video, 3 min.)
    Because we were children, we could hide anywhere.
    
    

Reception and Queer City Cinema Kick-off Party