Last day repeat screenings
August 29–30, 2022
Tune in to e-flux Video & Film on Monday, August 29 for the repeat screenings and wrap of Screaming from the Inside, an online program of films and texts put together by artist Camille Henrot as the eleventh edition of Artist Cinemas.
The films will stream through Tuesday, August 30, 11:59pm EDT, available here.
Screaming from the Inside has featured films by Ilana Harris-Babou, Monster Chetwynd, Mindy Faber, Alexa Karolinski and Ingo Niermann, Caroline Leaf, Peter Wächtler; and texts by Ilana Harris-Babou and Camille Henrot, Jacob Bromberg, Orit Gat, Mathilde Henrot, Estelle Hoy, Jean-Luc Nivaggioni.
Thank you for watching, and for reading!
Program
Ilana Harris-Babou, Decision Fatigue
2020, 8 minutes
Text: Camille Henrot in conversation with Ilana Harris-Babou
In Decision Fatigue Ilana Harris-Babou confronts the absurdities of the wellness industry: a space where structural inequalities are often framed as personal choices. The artist’s mother, Sheila Harris, stages an intimate, playful, and sometimes painful beauty tutorial. In a decidedly “unclean” morning ritual, she traces the choices she has made in her life, both large and small, to hold on to youth and remain well.
Mindy Faber, Suburban Queen
1985, 3 minutes
Text: Mathilde Henrot
This classic feminist tape deviates from David Byrne’s and Jonathan Demme’s popular 1980s versions of suburban life, True Stories. Rather than poking sarcastic fun at the woman locked in the split-level, Suburban Queenpoignantly evokes a daughter’s longings. Portraying the relationship of a mother and daughter inextricably bound yet puzzled by each other’s lives, Faber recounts her frustration with her mother’s depression and passivity, and her fantasy of how her mother might transcend these conditions.
Alexa Karolinski and Ingo Niermann, Army of Love
2016, 40 minutes
Text: Jean-Luc Nivaggioni
Romantic love is saturated with commoditization. The socialistic premise behind “free love” crumbles when desiring competition gets in the way, and in the age of hook-up apps, the possibility of free sex represents the liberalization, not the liberation, of love. Alexa Karolinski and Ingo Niermann engage these issues with Army of Love (2016), a video campaign introducing a propositional regiment of soldiers diverse in age and appearance and tasked with solving the persistent social malaise of dire loneliness. The docu-fictional video is in part a utopian proposal framed by conversations questioning the basic premises of love and justice.
Peter Wächtler, Untitled (Crutches)
2013, 8 minutes
Text: Estelle Hoy
The silent video re-runs 12 seconds of animation, while in the subtitles a ranting monologue on harm and hurt unfolds. With every step the stop-motion animated wire figure on crutches engages deeper in an intimate soliloquy that keeps confusing past and present, cause and effect. Different scales of injury, from imagined war wounds, the public whipping of traitors, and hurtful discussions about open relationships at the Speaking Food Café all get mashed up by the relentless blurring of anxiety and isolation. The phrase “I’ve been in deeper shit before” works as a chorus line structuring the text in passages of violent hubris and fearful prostration. Yet, despite the threads, the fury and all the enemies, lovers, and buddies the figure moves on in an abstract landscape of slushy wax in solitude and silence. Unable to enter any learning curve with his manly mantra of “deeper shit” he loops away in frailty to a “place I cannot imagine,” where the plants “laugh at all the cutting shit things in this world.”
Caroline Leaf, Two Sisters
1991, 10 minutes
Text: Orit Gat
This animated short, etched directly onto tinted 70 mm film, depicts the story of two sisters: Viola, who writes novels in a dark room, and Marie, her only companion. Disfigured, Viola counts on her sister to take care of her and shelter her from the outside world. But when an unexpected stranger turns up on their front door, the sisters’ quiet lives are disrupted and their routine turns to chaos.
Monster Chetwynd, The Call of the Wild
2007, 6 minutes
Text: Jacob Bromberg
Spartacus (one of the previous names for Monster Chetwynd) spent September 2006 living in Edinburgh, where she worked with different women she met, including students on a pattern-cutting course, a knitting demonstrator, and a costumier. Together they devised a trip to the Isle of Lewis in the Western Isles to make the short film The Call of the Wild. The film twins events on Lewis with the women’s lives in urban Edinburgh. The finished film draws on cinematic influences such as Walkabout (dir. Nicolas Roeg, 1971), Picnic at Hanging Rock (dir. Peter Weir, 1975), and the anthropological film Les maîtres fous (1955) by Jean Rouch.
About Screaming from the Inside
“The more the digital world claims its own existence, the heavier it feels to inhabit a physical body. During the pandemic our personal lives were physically limited and for some time, many of us subscribed to the mirage that our digital existence could expand the spaces in which we felt restricted. Ultimately, we’ve discovered that the in-person sensations of the flesh and the mind—even the active choice to disengage and do nothing—is what truly makes us feel alive. But we have also discovered that home is not a safe space, that neither online nor in the flesh is our privacy fully protected, and that there is no intimacy without drama, intensity, and the desire to escape. Screaming from the Inside took as its starting point the feeling of claustrophobia, isolation, and inescapability (both inside the home, and inside our own bodies) induced by the pandemic and sustained by digital experience. It was through a meditation on the desire to recoil and regress, and the unspoken emotions associated with this return, that I made an intuitive selection of films to feature in this program.” (Read Camille Henrot’s full text here.)
About Artist Cinemas
Artist Cinemas is an online series of film programs curated by artists. Started in 2020, past programs have included selections by Christian Nyampheta, Oleksiy Radynski, Jumana Manna, Laure Prouvost, Cao Fei, Koki Tanaka, Charles Mudede, Adelita Husni Bey, Dmitry Vilensky, and Iman Issa.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
