MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!!
guest curator: Amy Ruhl
For my final MALL MADNESS themed post, an unlikely film by Chantal Akerman during her post-1970s foray into popular cinema: Golden Eighties (1986).
It’s a musical. It’s set entirely in a mall. It’s by Chantal Akerman. Need I say more?
MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!!
guest curator: Amy Ruhl
The theme of this month is MALL MADNESS: four moving image works that highlight the architectural space of shopping centers—whether as narrative backdrop, or character in itself. Complicated feelings about consumption abound!
To begin, George Romero’s 1978 film Dawn of the Dead. Written in collaboration with Dario Argento
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czo24cU4dfA
What better place to hide from the flesh eating undead then a suburban shopping mall?
#marvelousmoviemondays
Happy first of November!! New month means time to introduce a new film/video artist who will take us on a month-long cinematic journey on a theme of their choice in our weekly online-only screening series, MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!! Please join us in welcoming…
AMY RUHL!!
Amy Ruhl is a filmmaker and visual artist working across fields of performance, video, and installation. She has exhibited at galleries and venues such as Lubov, Essex Flowers, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Anthology Film Archives (New York), Vitrine Gallery (London), Public Fiction (Los Angeles), and Antimatter Film Festival (Vancouver, BC). She has performed at NYU Skirball Center, Roulette Intermedium and Irondale Theater (Brooklyn, NY), The Broad Museum and REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA) and the Live Arts Biennial at Bard Fisher Center (Red Hook, NY). Ruhl has attended residencies at Yaddo, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Harvestworks Digital Media. She completed her MFA at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2016 within the Film/Video Department.
You can watch Amy’s video Hysterical Reenactments: WITCH here: https://vimeo.com/141975865
Description from Amy: Multiple forms of reenactment combine with interview footage to create a video portrait of the short-lived feminist activist group, WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell). Having reenacted WITCH’s hex of Wall Street on Halloween of 1968, I communicated with original member, Peggy Dobbins, to compare our experiences from 1968 and 2014. Re-performing text from Dobbins’ interview in my home and inter-cutting with fragments of our conversation and documentation of the recent hex, layers of historical reenactment come together to form something between documentary and lived archive. With hex poems by M.C. Elberg.
MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!!
guest curator: Kiki Loveday
April showers bring QUEER REPRODUCTION.
A significant body of contemporary feminist work explores questions of adaptation, reiteration, and change through formal, temporal, and aesthetic means. Queer and feminist makers are re-writing the historical narrative while pushing the boundaries of multiple mediums. From Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon, Cecelia Condit’s Oh, Rapunzel, and Midi Onodera’s Ten Cents a Dance, to Elisabeth Subrin’s Shulie, Jennifer Montgomery’s Deliver, Amy Ruhl’s How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body, and Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz’s Salomania, to Ja’tovia Gary’s An Ecstatic Experience, Christina Corfield’s Petticoat Nation, Kate Lain’s friskies paté (for joyce wieland) and Irene Lusztig’s Yours in Sisterhood— these makers masterfully reiterate, reinscribe, and reimagine the past in order to transform the present. Every Monday this month I will post a video exploring this growing body of work that queerly questions the possibilities of re-production in the digital age.
Since her award-winning debut with How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body in 2011, Amy Ruhl has been developing an important body of work that returns persistently to feminist sites/cites in past popular cultures. Ruhl uses the phrase “radical reproduction” to describe this element of her oeuvre which includes a playful research-based practice and deep engagement with feminist film theory. Her ongoing multidisciplinary performance project, Between Tin Men, includes her trademark tropes of authorial self-inscription, mesmerizing visual effects, and feminist camp.
Enjoy!