April 24–25, 2023
Tune in to e-flux Film for the repeat screenings and wrap of Looking up, an online program of films and texts put together by artist Jorge Jácome as the twelfth edition of Artist Cinemas.
The films will stream from Monday, April 24, 12am ET to Tuesday, April 25, 11:59pm ET, available here.
Looking up has featured films by films by Sandro Aguilar, Luis López Carrasco, Kevin Jerome Everson, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Jacqueline Lentzou, and Malena Szlam; and interviews and responses by Ana David, Matías Piñeiro, Alejandra Rosenberg Navarro, Francisco Valente, Daniela Delgado Viteri, and Uli Ziemons.
Thank you for watching, and for reading!
Looking up
By Jorge Jácome
Repeat screenings April 24–25
#1. Kevin Jerome Everson, Recovery (2020, 10 minutes)
In conversation with Uli Ziemons
Recovery is about an Airman training to be a pilot at the Columbus Air Force Base 14th Flying Training Wing in Columbus, Mississippi.
#2. Malena Szlam, Lunar Almanac (2013, 4 minutes)
In conversation with Matías Piñeiro
Lunar Almanac traces the observational points of the lunar cycle in a series of visual notations. Using single-frame and long-exposure photography, the unaltered, in-camera editing accumulates over 4,000 layered field views of half-moons, new moons, and full moons. These lunar inscriptions flit across the screen with a frenetic energy, illuminating nocturnal reveries that pull at the tides as much as our dreams.
#3. Pauline Curnier Jardin, Explosion Ma Baby (2016, 9 minutes)
With a response by Daniela Delgado Viteri
It’s August. Feel the suffocating heat of the sun penetrating your skin. All around you, an abundance of flesh is spinning. Thousands of men offer up the naked bodies of baby boys to the angelic icon of San Sebastian. Screams, colors, chants, and explosions. Money-garlands. Imagine no women but me. Wait, yes, behind us women are following with devotion, dressed in well-pressed clothes and their stocking feet. Now, come back here. Imagine how badly I fell in love with this. I desperately wanted to be part of it. To be there. I wanted to belong. But I know that I can’t. And so I try to capture it on film. I go there and film it every year, over and over, again and again. One day I will tell the story of a poor and sterile man who wants to replace San Sebastian. But more summers will have to pass before our hero will appear.
#4. Luis López Carrasco, Aliens (2017, 23 minutes)
In conversation with Alejandra Rosenberg Navarro
“This world has always seemed to me to be somewhat strange, somewhat alien to all of my emotions.” An alien is a foreigner, an outcast and, in popular culture, an inhabitant from another planet. Tesa Arranz, a key figure in the 1980s Madrid scene and lead singer of The Zombies, has painted over 500 portraits of outer-space creatures. Confronting the singer’s paintings with memories of her youth, her poems and diaries, Aliens depicts an emotional landscape in Spanish history where happiness, nightmarish experimentation, and alienation walked hand in hand.
#5. Sandro Aguilar, Jewels (2013, minutes)
In conversation with Francisco Valente
Hypnosis. Diapausing insects and a broken heart.
#6. Jacqueline Lentzou, Hiwa (2017, 11 minutes)
In conversation with Ana David
Jay wakes up in Manila, yet he was dreaming of Athens. He’s had a nightmare, in which he had to save his two daughters from a special surgery: Their houses are attached to their bodies, and must be removed. In his attempt to fetch his daughters, he roams the Athens cityscape, seeing things in a very different light while he narrates his dream to his wife.
Looking up suggests connections between the sky, the universe, dreams, flying, religion, aliens, possibilities, imagination, life, and death. Read Jorge Jácome’s introduction here.
Artist Cinemas is an ongoing series on e-flux Film focusing on exploring the moving image as understood by people who make film. It is informed by the vulnerability and enchantment of the artistic process—producing non-linear forms of knowledge and expertise that exist outside of academic or institutional frameworks. It also acknowledges the circles of friendship and mutual inspiration that bind the artistic community.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
