August 1–31, 2023
e-flux Film is very pleased to present the August 2023 edition of our monthly series Staff Picks, featuring four works by filmmaker Chris Kennedy.
“Often combining a careful concern with the apparatus and a high degree of formal rigour with thoughtful attention to social reality and history, Kennedy’s films examine the interpenetration of a kind of phenomenology—how the things of the world appear to consciousness—with the material possibilities of film (multiple exposures, hand processing, found footage, multi-frame presentations).”—Scott Birdwise, Canadian Film Institute
“[U]nlike so many others who stake out a particular plot of ground and till it for all it’s worth, [Chris Kennedy] is a bit of a conceptual vagabond. A lot of his films are quite different from one another in their surface effects, but at their core they share certain basic questions, in particular the relationship between organized vision and the chaos of the sensory world. That is, how do schemas and patterns determine what we are able to see?”—Michael Sicinski
lay claim to an island (2009, 13 minutes)
Texts from the 1969 American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz and letters from supporters propel an exploration of political yearning, emancipatory architecture, and failed utopias. What does it mean to claim land that has more value as a symbol than as a potential home? And how does that symbol function beyond the boundaries of its geographic limits?
349 (for Sol LeWitt) (2011, 1 minute)
“A digitally animated version of Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #349, which was commissioned by Toronto’s Mercer Union gallery in 1981. Recreating LeWitt’s geometric vocabulary and primary colour palette, 349 careens through emblazoned emblems, lifted from walls and transported into dialogue with LeWitt’s exploration of spatial systems and human emotion..”—Andréa Picard, Toronto International Film Festival
Towards a Vanishing Point (2012, 8 minutes)
Footage shot in Coba, Mexico and the Siwa Oasis in Egypt and a found film from California serve as inspiration for a series of sketches on the notion of the vanishing point. Commissioned for LIFT’s 30th Anniversary Celebration.
The Initiation Well (2020, 3 minutes)
The Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra, Portugal is a huge estate that has two wells for performing initiation ceremonies built into the ground. This film takes us into one of them. Sound design by Samuel La France.
Watch the films here.
About the artist
Chris Kennedy (b. 1977 Easton, Maryland; raised Cambridge, Maryland) is an independent filmmaker, film programmer, and writer based in Toronto. He is the Executive Director of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. He programmed for the Images Festival from 2003-2006, for Pleasure Dome from 2000-2006, and for TIFF Cinematheque’s The Free Screen/Wavelengths from 2012-2019. He co-founded and co-programmed Early Monthly Segments from 2009 to 2018. His short experimental films have screened at over one hundred film festivals worldwide and have been featured in solo shows at the Canadian Film Institute, Los Angeles Film Forum, Nam June Paik Art Center, the La Plata Semana del Film Experimental, and the Pacific Film Archive. His film Watching the Detectives won the Ken Burns Award for the Best of the Festival at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2018. He has presented the work of others in Belgium, Egypt, Germany, the US, and Canada. He holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was co-founder and host of a weekly film salon. His work as an artist and programmer operates in dialogue with the history of film as art, exploring the medium’s materiality in a contemporary context.
About the series
Staff Picks is a monthly streaming series on e-flux Film of staff picks and recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.