SUITCASE OF LOVE AND SHAME by Jane Gillooly
JANE GILLOOLY is a non-fiction and narrative film/video maker whose work is inspired and informed by a century of non-fiction filmmaking, silent and vintage cinema, and activism. Gillooly consistently surprises as she crosses new boundaries and confronts new subjects with a distinctive vision. Her current work, Suitcase of Love and Shame, repurposes historical material for use in time-based media collage and is indicative of an evolving filmography. Gillooly uniquely balances a commitment to emotional authenticity with a sensorial, textural style driven by striking images, sounds, and a musical approach to editing. Gillooly has an enormous capacity for capturing the complexities of real characters on film. As in her previous works, Today the Hawk Takes One Chick, (2008) and Leona’s Sister Gerri, (1995), Gillooly demonstrates a compassion for and instinctive understanding of the nuances of human emotion.
Preceded by FROM ALEX TO ALEX by Alison SM Kobayashi
ALISON S.M. KOBAYASHI is an artist working in video, performance, installation and drawing. She was born in Mississauga, Canada where she received a BA from the University of Toronto. She now lives in Brooklyn where she is the Director of Special Projects at UnionDocs, a Center for Documentary Art. In her work, Kobayashi performs a variety of characters that are both studiously and playfully rendered. These personas are inspired by Kobayashi’s extensive collection of lost, discarded and donated objects; ranging from answering machine tapes purchased at a secondhand shop to a love letter left on a sidewalk. Through repeated interaction with the objects (listening, transcribing, re-enactment, play) narratives and imagery begin to manifest and inspire performances, videos, installations and drawings. The results are humorous, low-fi artifacts of an artist embodying the lives of others. Kobayashi’s short videos have been exhibited and screened widely in Canada, the United States and overseas. She was a guest artist at the 2008 Flaherty Film Seminar and her body of work was a Spotlight Presentation at Video Out, Jakarta International Film Festival, Indonesia. In 2012, she was commissioned by Les Subsistances in Lyon, France to produce her first live performance, Defense Mechanism. She is currently developing her second live performance. Johanna Linsley is writing on Kobayashi’s work in relation to eavesdropping in the soon to be published Voice(s): Critical Approaches to Process, Performance and Experience (Routledge).
PROGRAM DETAILS // 77 min // $8 advance or $10 at the door
FROM ALEX TO ALEX
(6 min, 11 sec / 2006 / VIDEO)
In the fall of 2003 I found a letter on the Winston Churchill Blvd QEW overpass.
It was labeled From: Alex To: Alex.
This is a film based on the contents of that letter.
SUITCASE OF LOVE AND SHAME
(70 min / 2013 / VIDEO)
Tender, erotic, and pathetic, this reconstructed narrative examines the obsession to chronicle the details of an adulterous affair. Suitcase of Love and Shame is a mesmerizing collage woven from 60 hours of reel-to-reel audiotape discovered in a suitcase purchased on eBay. Recorded in the 1960’s, a Midwestern woman and her lover become reliant on recording devices to document and memorialize their affair. The film aims at a cross-generational consciousness about exhibitionism, privacy and voyeurism. Focusing on the aural and experiential nature of the audio the imagery in the film is restrained – abstract, evocative and expectant, so that the audience will see with their ears. The listener/viewer is variously located within and outside of the events – complicit and voyeuristic. The “eavesdropping viewer” is compelled, despite feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable with the knowledge and access they have been given into the transgressions they imagine they see. Selected to screen as part of the distinguished Art of The Real series at the Film Society at Lincoln Center 2014, the film has screened internationally winning Best International Film at Images Festival in Toronto.
Programmed by Beckie Stocchetti and Christy LeMaster