covalent voices: perspectives from black hole collective film lab
artists in person:
arc / Emily Chao / Anna Geyer / Matthew Hidy / Lauren Iverson /
Zack Parrinella / Nicky Tavares / Patricia Ledesma Villon
technical support for this livestream provided by
Shapeshifters Cinema
www.shapeshifterscinema.com
As mainstream cinema went increasingly digital in the first two decades of the 21st Century, commercial film-processing labs worldwide shuttered. But while capitalist nay-sayers touted this as the end of the era of photochemical filmmaking, a defiant international network of artist-run film lab collectives emerged, heroically rescuing cast-off laboratory machinery, seizing these means of photochemical creativity, ingeniously re-imagining filmmaking workflows and continuing traditions of tactility in this so-called digital age. Founded in 2014, the geographically dispersed but Bay Area-born Black Hole Collective Film Lab represents a bright node in this burgeoning and anarchic international network.
Celebrating the closure of the two-part series Commingled Containers: Echoes from the Bay, Cinematheque commences its 2021 programming with its first online artist talk, featuring members of the Black Hole Collective Film Lab (BHCFL). Opening with a slideshow documenting collective members’ activities and the underground laboratory itself, this livestreamed program will feature two films produced in collective workshops and live discussion—with BHCFL members on far ranging topics, including origins, goals, group processes and collective processes; community aesthetics and work ethic; the state of underground filmmaking in the Bay Area in light of COVID-19 and ongoing economic precarity and the BHCFL’s relationship to the worldwide network of artist-run film lab collectives.
PLEASE NOTE!
Tonight’s artist talk will be live and will not be recorded! Please join us for this special one-time-only event!
Note also that the two-program series Commingled Containers: Echoes from the Bay concludes at midnight on Sunday, January 10.
Both programs are presented free of charge!