Image Courtesy Criterion Collection and Janus Films.
Artist’s Choice: Movie Nights is a three-week film series that highlights the continued importance of cinema and the moving image for artists working across media. Programmed by Ana Benaroya, Awol Erizku, and Cynthia Daignault, the series will bring together an eclectic mix of films offering reflections on each artist’s respective practice or cinematic interests, allowing audience members to consider how visual histories interact and cross-pollinate with one another.
Screening schedule:
Wednesday, July 30: Selections by Awol Erizku
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), dir. Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid (Run time: 14 minutes)
Maya Deren conceived, directed and played the central role in Meshes of the Afternoon, her first film and a work that helped chart the course for American experimental cinema. Shot without dialogue or sound and with a run time of only 14 minutes, within this relatively spare format unfolds an unsettling, fully realized narrative which blurs the barrier between the projections of the mind and the external, waking world.
La Jetée (1962), dir. Chris Marker (Run time: 27 minutes)
Chris Marker's La Jetée remains one of the most influential, radical science-fiction films ever made, a tale of time travel told in still images. After World War III, Paris lay in ruins and a scientist researching time travel hopes to send subjects to various time periods. He finds a suitable subject in a prisoner with a vivid pre-war childhood memory. The prisoner travels in time and comes to understand an incident he witnessed as a child.
Black Girl (1966), dir. Ousmane Sembène (Run time: 59 minutes)
Ousmane Sembène made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl. Sembène transforms a deceptively simple plot—about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white family and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a prison, both figuratively and literally—into a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by M’Bissine Thérèse Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement—and one of the essential films of the 1960s.