13 Lakes USA, 2004 ,135 min.,16mm
James Benning
“13 Lakes’ purpose is didactic: by replicating the artist’s own careful observation of the natural world, it seeks to assist its audience in becoming artists in their own right. Moreover, Benning offers surprising insight into the spatial nature of his medium, simply by anchoring his camera firmly in place. In short, the form of Benning’s film directly yields its content. Then again, Benning’s film is not entirely without formal precedent: Benning remains a structuralist in a time well after that movement’s cultural ebb. …Benning’s film is about thirteen lakes, which is as far removed from the Hollywood system as it is from environmental orthodoxy. Perhaps there is no better way to conclude than to be reminded of the film’s simplicity and to consider the film’s nonconformity, both in terms of its form and in its content. Whether it is its opposition to traditional narrative structures or to the environmentalist gospel, 13 Lakes remains enmeshed with a dialogue specific to its particular time. The subject of the film might be eternal, but its implications are very timely.”
Michael J. Anderson, Senses of Cinema.com

At Sea USA, 2007, 60 min.,16mm
Peter Hutton
25 words or less...”Well, it’s about a boat being built, a boat in service, and ends with a boat being taken apart in the third world. Oh yeah, it’s silent.”
“At Sea is a 60 minute silent film, silent and slow. The film is broken in to 3 sections: birth, life, death. The film opens BIG (very big) with a static shot of the top of an enormous ship strung up as if by the strings of some Daewoo puppet master. In this introductory section we not only learn the effort required to construct a ship but the effort required to view a film in which one must participate, not simply watch passively. Hutton was once a seaman – an experience which, thankfully for viewers of his film, never shook free from his imagination. While At Sea is in essence a documentary, it is unusual in that it is constructed purely of long takes without any sound at all: no environmental sound to take us away from the image in front of us, no musical cues to guide our emotions. At Sea delivers an experience distinct in the cinema, un-tethered by the constraints of conventional story telling, it looks at commerce and its consequences.”
Tim Massett, http://nfann.blogspot.com/2007/09/peter-huttons-at-sea.html

casting a glance USA, 2007, 80min., 16mm
James Benning
In his new feature, Benning studies Robert Smithson’s pioneering earthwork, Spiral Jetty (1970), one of the icons of modern art. Benning: “Between May 2005 and January 2007 I made 16 trips to the Spiral Jetty... casting a glance maps the Jetty back onto its 37-year history. From morning to night, its allusive, shifting appearance may be the result of a passing weather system, seasonal shifts, or simply the changing angle of the sun.”

The Eye of the Day 
Netherlands/Indonesia, 2001, 92 min., DVD
Shape of the Moon 
Netherlands/Indonesia, 2005, 92 min., DVD
Leonard Retel Helmrich
In The Eye of the Day, Leonard Retel Helmrich creates a cinematic feast for the eyes as he documents the tumultuous period known in Indonesia as the “Reformasi,” the years that followed the resignation of President Suharto, as it affects a family in urban Jakarta and in the Indonesian countryside. In Shape of the Moon, the second part of what will be a trilogy, Helmrich continues his chronicle of an Indonesian family dealing with the trials and tribulations of daily life in the world’s largest Islamic nation. Shape won the top documentary award at the Sundance Film Festival.

Farribique France, 1946, 85min., 16mm
Biquefarre France, 1983 90 min., 16mm
Georges Rouquier
Two documentaries about French farm life, the only existing prints in the U.S. (Cornell University collection). Farribique chronicles the passage of a year during WW II; Biquefarre chronicles that same landscape almost four decades later, transformed by the French agri-business. The separation of time between the films is sufficient to plot a “fall” from a sacred sense of the land to a profane one. The analysis of the world-view of what the historian of religion Mircea Eliade calls homo religiosus provides one way in which this fall can be described – a fall also evident in the qualitatively different structures of the two films.

Hyas and Stenorhynchus France, 1929, 13min., DVD
The Sea Horse France, 1934, 15 min., DVD
Vampire France, 1945, 35mm, 9 min., 35mm
The Love Life of the Octopus France, 1965, 13 min., DVD
Acera or the Witches Dance France, 1972, 13 min., DVD
Jean Painlevé
In 1950s America, the Walt Disney True-Life Adventures became the definition of nature films by depicting particular animals as exemplars of post-war American life and morés. French nature film pioneer Jean Painlevé was the anti-Disney: his fascinating short films tended to focus on aquatic species that confront conventional assumptions about gender and family.

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind 
USA, 2007, 58min., DVD
John Gianvito
John Gianvito’s Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind is a poignant, engaging, and inspiring meditation on men and women who have fought for social justice in the United States. Gianvito reminds us of the place of these heroic individuals in American history and shows us their resting places in American geography.

Safari USA, 2006, 7min. 7sec., Video
Catherine Chalmers
“Catherine Chalmers’ deeply Darwinian Safari, a seven-minute video, offers a ravishing experience of natural color by following the travails of some New York cockroaches, a species no longer found in the wild, after their release into an elaborate rain forest constructed in her studio. Other inhabitants include an African claw frog, for which cockroach spells dinner; red-spotted newts; a gorgeous lizard; a pair of ferociously battling beetles; and a harlequin cockroach, whose black and white stripes are ready for Fashion Week.”
Roberta Smith, New York Times

Sheep Rushes (work-in-progress), USA, DVD
Lucien Taylor
Eight sections of Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s mammoth Big Timber project: a revealing and often breath-taking look at sheep ranchers at work in Montana, during the twilight of this kind of ranching.

WE RULE USA, 2007, 4min. 45sec., HD DVD
Catherine Chalmers
Q: They are agriculturalist, live in large societies, have complex communication and wage war. In this video, they appear to use language to express their sentiments.
Sound familiar? What is the species?

A: Atta Cephalotes Common name: Leaf cutter ants.