September 3–30, 2025
e-flux Film is pleased to present the September 2025 edition of our monthly series Staff Picks, featuring Lawrence Weiner’s A First Quarter (1973, 85 minutes). Shot in and around New York City, A First Quarter marks Weiner’s first feature-length work and a decisive move from gallery-bound presentations toward a fully cinematic mise-en-scène. The film’s Godard-inflected structure reveals Weiner’s materialist approach to working with moving images.
“Using the structure of a feature film as its basic format, A First Quarter adopts the principles of Nouvelle Vague cinema as its role model. Simultaneous realities, altered flashbacks, plays on time and space are all components of the form and content of the film. Because it was originally shot in video and then kinescoped to 16mm film, A First Quarter has acquired a poetic, soft look. The dialogue consists entirely of the work as it is spoken and read, built, enacted, written and painted by the players. As the scenarios build, they appear as tropes, one after another.”
—Alice Weiner
This online presentation of A First Quarter is presented in collaboration with the Lawrence Weiner Estate and Electronic Arts Intermix, coinciding with a three-part program featuring Lawrence Weiner’s films and audio works at e-flux Screening Room on Sunday, September 14, in collaboration with Gladstone Gallery. Read more about the Screening Room program here.
A First Quarter will stream on e-flux Film for the month of September 2025. View the film here.
A key figure in the development of Conceptual Art, Lawrence Weiner pursued language itself as the dynamic in his art-making process. Weiner’s work posits a redefinition of the artist/viewer relationship and the very nature of artwork. Weiner has produced books, films, videos, performances, and audio works. His cartoons stake out new territories as a departure from his drawings, while melding his epigrammatic statements traveling across the screen, from stage left to stage right and vice versa. Weiner was an inveterate urban dweller; he spent his entire life working between New York City and Amsterdam until his death in 2021.
Staff Picks is a streaming series on e-flux Film of 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@e-flux.com.
