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Cinema and Disjunction
Curated by Ben Donoghue
Night Equals Day
Canada 2008. Director: Adrian Blackwell. 35mm silent/30 mins.
Every Building, Or Site, That a Building Permit Has Been Issued for a New Building in Toronto in 2006
Canada 2008. Directors: Daniel Young, Christian Giroux. 35mm silent/13 mins.
VANCOUVER PREMIERES │ Filmmakers and Curator in Attendance
These two new silent 35mm architectural films form the initial parts of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT)’s “Cinema and Disjunction” commissioning and production support project for critical architectural film works. Drawing inspiration from art historical precedents and contemporary critiques of the urban form, the initial projects presented under this framework defamiliarize and interrupt Toronto’s visual narratives with new questions and alternative possibilities. To express our intent in Bernard Tschumi’s terms, these films “reinscribe the movement of bodies in space, together with the actions and events that take place within the social and political realm of architecture.” Blackwell’s Night Equals Day employs complex camera control to record a day at a single point of Regent Park’s (Canada’s oldest public housing development and now the site of significant condominium development) Sackville and Oak streets intersection, compressing a twelve-hour equinox day to thirty minutes of film time, one frame per second, and one three-hundred-and-sixty degree camera rotation per hour. In Young and Giroux’s Every Building, one experiences a comparatively accelerated city represented by one hundred and thirty odd buildings or building sites captured in short static shots.
– Ben Donoghue
These two new silent 35mm architectural films form the initial parts of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT)’s “Cinema and Disjunction” commissioning and production support project for critical architectural film works. Drawing inspiration from art historical precedents and contemporary critiques of the urban form, the initial projects presented under this framework defamiliarize and interrupt Toronto’s visual narratives with new questions and alternative possibilities. To express our intent in Bernard Tschumi’s terms, these films “reinscribe the movement of bodies in space, together with the actions and events that take place within the social and political realm of architecture.” Blackwell’s Night Equals Day employs complex camera control to record a day at a single point of Regent Park’s (Canada’s oldest public housing development and now the site of significant condominium development) Sackville and Oak streets intersection, compressing a twelve-hour equinox day to thirty minutes of film time, one frame per second, and one three-hundred-and-sixty degree camera rotation per hour. In Young and Giroux’s Every Building, one experiences a comparatively accelerated city represented by one hundred and thirty odd buildings or building sites captured in short static shots.
– Ben Donoghue
The screenings will be followed by a panel discussion featuring the following:
Adrian Blackwell, director of Night Equals Day, is an artist and urbanist whose work focuses on spaces of uneven development in the post-Fordist city.
Daniel Young and Christian Giroux, directors of Every Building…, have been collaborating on sculpturally concerned projects since 2003 and are represented in Toronto by Diaz Contemporary.
Ben Donoghue is executive director of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT).
Jeff Derkson is a Vancouver writer and theorist.
Chris Welsby is a Vancouver structuralist filmmaker, theorist and installation artist.
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RELATED EVENTS
11 FEB 09 | Emily Carr University | 7pm | Free | ecuad.ca
Film does not equal Sculpture:
Two Toronto sculpture practices experiment with film.
Young, Giroux, and Blackwell will briefly introduce excerpts of their recent film projects, followed by two short talks investigating the relationship between these moving images and their ongoing investigations of physical space.
24 FEB 09 | Cineworks | Thought on Film | 6pm | Free | cineworks.ca
The Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society will present an excerpt from David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity for group reading and discussion at its Thoughts on Film Series on February 24. Harvey’s seminal book, and its analysis of cultural and social change, economics, social geography and the production of space, is an important influence on the works of artists Young, Giroux and Blackwell. The event is free and open to the public.
- SHOWTIMES - click for screening and ticket options
- Monday, February 9, 2009 - 7:30pm
