Shu Lea Cheang’s UKI and Fresh Kill
Posted by | gfung | Posted on | May 3, 2024
Shu Lea Cheang’s UKI and Fresh Kill
UKI
Wednesday, April 10, 6:00 p.m.
Shu Lea Cheang, 2023, Germany / USA, 86 minutes
In English / Format: DCP
In her latest feature, pioneering media artist Shu Lea Cheang mixes 3D animation and live action to create an exhilaratingly queer science-fiction epic of corporate surveillance, contagion, sex, and biotechnology. Residents of a city beset by a viral epidemic discover that the pharmaceutical firm GENOM has been harvesting data about their sex lives to develop a drug that will bring the population under its control. Meanwhile, one of GENOM’s humanoid data collectors, dumped into a toxic e-waste site, mutates into the virus UKI. Backed by mutants, castoffs, and the city’s infected activists, UKI sets out to sabotage the firm’s authoritarian ambitions. Drawing from her experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ‘90s, Cheang imbues UKI with the power, in her words, “to mobilize, to infiltrate, to subvert.”
Presented in partnership with Video Data Bank.
Fresh Kill
Thursday, April 11, 6:00 p.m
Shu Lea Cheang, 1994, USA, 80 minutes
In English / Format: 35mm
“Shu Lea Cheang’s audacious directorial debut is a lethal comedy swimming through a torrent of toxic multinational treachery.” —Lawrence Chua, BOMB Magazine
Renowned media artist Shu Lea Cheang presents her groundbreaking debut feature, a cyberfeminist eco-thriller, newly restored for its 30th anniversary. Partners Shareen (Sarita Choudhury) and Claire (Erin McMurtry) find themselves in the crosshairs of a nefarious multinational corporation after they discover it is poisoning citizens through toxic cat food, contaminated sushi, and nuclear waste. When their daughter disappears, they turn to a global band of hackers and activists. Cheang shifts between horror, camp, and agit-prop, structuring the film around an electric sense of destabilization and disruption. Characteristic of the activist impulse that runs through all her work, Fresh Kill’s themes of predatory capitalism and environmental catastrophe remain just as pressing today.
Presented in partnership with Video Data Bank.
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Taiwan and now based in Paris, Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker whose work aims to re-envision genders, genres, and operating structures. She began her career as a member of activist media collectives Paper Tiger TV and Deep Dish TV. Later, as a celebrated pioneer of Net Art, her work Brandon (1998–99) became the first-ever web-based artwork commissioned and collected by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Since 1994, she has produced four feature films, Fresh Kill (1994), I.K.U. (2000), Fluidø (2017), and UKI (2023), which encompass a new genre she calls “Scifi New Queer Cinema.” In 2019, she represented Taiwan at the Venice Biennale with the mixed media installation, 3x3x6. Over the years, Cheang has participated in many renowned international biennials, including Performa 19, New York; the 11th Taipei Biennial; the 50th and 58th Venice Biennale; and the 1992 and 1994 Whitney Biennials among others. Her works are included in the world’s key permanent collections for contemporary art, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and DSL collection, Paris.
Lizzie Borden: Regroup, Born in Flames, Working Girls
Posted by | gfung | Posted on | May 3, 2024
Lizzie Borden: Regroup, Born in Flames, Working Girls
Regrouping
Thursday, March 28, 6:00 p.m.
Lizzie Borden, 1976, USA, 80 minutes
In English / Format: 16mm
Lizzie Borden, Regrouping, 1976. Courtesy of Janus Films and Anthology Film Archives.
“Combative, entropic, mesmerizing.” —Melissa Anderson, 4Columns
Lizzie Borden’s daring first feature is a shapeshifting portrait of a women’s collective and the slippery relationship between a filmmaker and her subjects. When the collective breaks down, the film similarly fragments, with the introduction of fictional characters, disjunctive sounds and images, and multi-textual observations by artists outside the group, including Joan Jonas, Barbara Kruger, Nancy Holt, and Kathryn Bigelow, resulting in a rich and complicated depiction of 1970s feminism. The collective protested Borden’s final cut after Regrouping’s 1976 premiere and Borden shelved the film for many years. Now, with the participants’ permission, it is circulating once more in a restoration by Anthology Film Archives.
Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation
Presented in partnership with the Gene Siskel Film Center; the University of Illinois Chicago’s (UIC) College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts; and UIC’s Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.
Born in Flames
Thursday, March 28, 8:30 p.m.
Lizzie Borden, 1983, USA, 80 minutes
In English / Format: 35mm
Lizzie Borden, Born in Flames, 1983. Courtesy of Janus Films and Anthology Film Archives.
“By turns humorous, satirical, and deadly earnest … a still-potent artifact of political commitment.” —LA Weekly
“Deserves its legendary status and still has the power to challenge.” —Eric Monder, Film Journal International
Lizzie Borden’s legendary second feature is a thrillingly provocative tale of female rebellion set in America 10 years after a social democratic cultural revolution. When Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield), the Black radical founder of the Woman’s Army, is mysteriously killed, a diverse group of women—Black, white, queer, hetero, working class, and elite—build a coalition to topple the patriarchy once and for all. Radical in both style and politics, Borden’s film brings together documentary footage, incendiary news reports, and violent action sequences to underscore the urgency of intersectional feminism in the face of oppression. Fueled by a post-punk soundtrack and featuring performances by numerous cultural luminaries including civil rights activist Florynce Kennedy, Honey, Adele Bertei, and Kathryn Bigelow, among many others, Born in Flames continues to resonate today.
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with restoration funding from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and The Film Foundation.
Presented in partnership with the Gene Siskel Film Center; the University of Illinois Chicago’s (UIC) College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts; and UIC’s Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.
Working Girls
Friday, March 29, 6:00 p.m.
Lizzie Borden, 1986, USA, 93 minutes
In English / Format: DCP
Lizzie Borden, Working Girls, 1986. Courtesy of Janus Films.
“Working Girls is, among its serious splendors, an act of solidarity.” —So Mayer, Current
In her groundbreaking third feature, Lizzie Borden looks at gender, race, and labor relations in a Manhattan brothel. Inspired by the experiences of sex workers Borden met while making Born in Flames, Working Girls follows the rhythms of a day-in-the life of Molly (Louise Smith), an artist who turns to sex work to fund her photography practice (images provided by the artist Nan Goldin). Molly and her colleagues greet clients in the brothel’s pastel-hued reception, change sheets, answer the phone, and log their earnings in a ledger overseen by their overpaid boss, paralleling women’s labor of all kinds—from domestic to the office.
Digitally restored by The Criterion Collection and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, in conjunction with Sundance Institute. Funding provided by The Criterion Collection and Sundance Institute. Laboratory services by Criterion Post and Roundabout Entertainment, Inc.
Presented in partnership with the Gene Siskel Film Center; the University of Illinois Chicago’s (UIC) College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts; and UIC’s Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.
BIOGRAPHY
Lizzie Borden is a writer, director, editor, and script consultant. Her 1983 film Born in Flames, named one of “The 50 Most Important Independent Films” by Filmmaker Magazine, has been shown at countless festivals and theaters around the world. It has been taught and written about extensively since its 1983 premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. In 2016, when the film was restored by Anthology Film Archives, New Yorker critic Richard Brody called it “a feminist masterpiece.” Borden also wrote, directed, and produced the controversial independent fiction film Working Girls, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Directors’ Fortnight, won a US Dramatic Special Jury Recognition at the Sundance Film Festival, and was restored by the Criterion Collection in 2021. Borden’s long-unseen 1976 film Regrouping was restored by Anthology Film Archives in 2023.
Elisabeth Subrin: Maria Schneider, 1983 and Shulie
Posted by | gfung | Posted on | May 3, 2024
Elisabeth Subrin: Maria Schneider, 1983 and Shulie
Thursday, March 21, 6:00 p.m.
1997–2022, USA / France, 62 minutes
In English and French with English subtitles / Format: DCP
Elisabeth Subrin, Maria Schneider, 1983, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Manifest Pictures.
In her acclaimed “speculative biographies,” filmmaker and SAIC alum Elisabeth Subrin (MFA 1995) explores the absences and erasures of women’s lives in the historic record. She presents two works, produced 26 years apart, that use reenactment to express the ways we continue to live with, in Subrin’s words, “the residues of the past.”
Presented in partnership with Video Data Bank.
Maria Schneider, 1983
2022, 25 minutes
Best Documentary Short Film, 2023 César Awards
“Subrin has made a provocative, unnerving document, difficult to forget.” —Tony Pipolo, Artforum
In Elisabeth Subrin’s latest film, actresses Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga, and Isabel Sandoval recreate a 1983 French television interview with the iconic Maria Schneider. When asked about Shneider’s traumatic experience filming Last Tango in Paris with Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando, the actresses not only perform Schneider’s words and gestures, but inhabit them through their own identities. Together, they conjure all who have been silenced, before and after. (Adapted from the New York Film Festival.)
Shulie
1997, 37 minutes
“Shulie is… daring and revelatory… Subrin’s ideas are beautiful, and the movie is a thing of wonder.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“A cinematic doppelganger without precedent.” —Mark MacElhatten, New York Film Festival
Subrin’s landmark film Shulie (1997) is a shot-by-shot reenactment of an unreleased 1967 documentary portrait of Shulamith Firestone, then a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, who, just a few years later, would go on to write her influential radical feminist treatise The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. Through the film’s meticulous staging and performances, Subrin reflects on the ways Firestone’s experiences of gender, race, and class continue to echo today.
BIOGRAPHY
Elisabeth Subrin is a New York–based award-winning director and artist. Her critically acclaimed films and video installations have been featured in numerous festivals and exhibitions internationally, including solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Film at Lincoln Center, New York; and the 2020 Viennale, Vienna. Subrin’s 2016 award-winning feature narrative, A Woman, a Part, premiered in competition at the International Rotterdam Film Festival and traveled to festivals throughout Europe, the United States, and Asia. It was released theatrically in 2017. Subrin’s The Listening Takes, her 2023 multi-channel video, sound, and sculptural installation, will open May 26, 2024 at Participant, INC in New York. Subrin is currently developing a feature-length biopic about Maria Schneider.
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Accessibility
The Film Center is ADA accessible. Theaters are equipped with hearing-loops. CATE events are presented with real-time captions (CART). For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or email cate@saic.edu.
Use this for ticket info (once we have links from the Film Center, we can go back in and insert):
Tickets
$13 General public
$8 Students
$6.50 Film Center members
$5 SAIC staff & faculty & AIC staff
FREE for SAIC students with a valid ID
All CATE programs are free for SAIC students. Unless otherwise noted, SAIC student tickets are released five days prior to showtime. Tickets must be picked up in person from the Gene Siskel Film Center box office. A student ID is required.
An Evening with Baloji
Posted by | gfung | Posted on | May 3, 2024
An Evening with Baloji
Thursday, February 29, 6:00 p.m.
2018–19, Belgium / Democratic Republic of the Congo, 54 minutes
In French with English subtitles / Format: DCP
Baloji, Peau de Chagrin / Bleu de Nuit, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Sudu Connexion.
Critically acclaimed Belgian-Congolese artist and musician Baloji presents a selection of his stunning short films. Operating in the realms between documentary, magical realism, and social critique, Baloji’s hybrid practice explores the transcultural identities of African diasporans and the history and future of the Congo. He often collaborates with other artists to create elaborate costumes and sets his films to his own music, itself a kaleidoscope of hip-hop, Congolese rumba, and house with lyrics that mix the personal and political.
Presented in partnership with the Gene Siskel Film Center, which premieres Baloji’s debut feature Omen on Friday, March 1, as part of the European Union Film Festival: Spotlight on Belgium.
Kaniama Show
2018, 23 minutes
Winner, Special Jury Prize, Festival International du Film Francophone de Namur
Echoing the title of his critically acclaimed 2018 album 137 Avenue Kaniama, Baloji’s short is a stinging satire of political corruption and media collusion in post-independence Democratic Republic of the Congo. Taking shape as a Sunday afternoon variety show, smiling guests sing the praises of government officials and mining interests while musical interludes suggest a different reality.
Peau de Chagrin / Bleu de Nuit
2018, 10 minutes
“A dreamscape of electric hues and intriguing characters”– Daphne Milner, It’s Nice That
In the bewitching Peau de Chagrin / Bleu de Nuit, Baloji meditates on both the ardent bonds between people as well as between people and the land. Set on a former Univlier plantation in Lusanga now cultivated by the Congolese Plantation Workers Art League—an art and agricultural cooperative that has bought the territory back with profits from the sale of artworks to Western institutions—the film unfolds in a series of tableaux that interweave the story of an unstable romance with the violent history of colonial extraction. Suffused with the region’s greenery, the two stories play out on stages woven from palm leaves and Indigenous vegetation and overseen by skeleton-faced ghosts.
Never Look at the Sun
2019, 5 minutes
When he was young, Baloji often heard the expression “never look at the sun…because you’re already black enough.” In this collaboration with the acclaimed writer and designer Thandi Loewenson, he uses choreography, costume, and poetry to examine the effects of colorism and skin lightening on the psyches of Black men and women.
Zombies
2019, 15 minutes
Winner, Principal Prize Oberhausen International Short Film Festival
Set in a hallucinatory Kinshasa, Zombies explores the effects of social media and its myopic soft power. Moving through the city’s hair salons, futuristic clubs, street parades, and a river overflowing with garbage, Baloji’s subjects pose for the camera or keep their eyes on their phones. Collaborating with queer performers and street artists in striking costumes made from trash like bottle caps and e-waste, Baloji also amplifies Kinshasans’ spirit of reinvention and disruption in their efforts to redress long-entangled social, political, and environmental injustices. These men and women, he suggests, are the creative resistance to our digital “servitude volontaire.”
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and based in Belgium, Baloji is an award-winning musician, filmmaker, art director, and costume designer. The word “baloji” refers to occult and evil forces. In Swahili, it initially meant “man of science,” but in colonial times it has been interpreted as “man of occult sciences”—essentially, “sorcerer.” This nominal assignment has proved to be both a burden and a gift, driving his visionary interest in the oneiric, magical, and historical. As a filmmaker, Baloji has produced six shorts, including the award-winning Zombies and the feature Omen, which won the Prix de la nouvelle voix at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and is Belgium’s entry for the 2023 Academy Awards. Baloji Augurism, a solo exhibition related to Omen, is currently on view at the Fashion Museum Antwerp. As a musician, Baloji has released two solo EPs and two critically acclaimed albums, HotelL Impala (2007, EMI France) and 137 Avenue Kaniama (2018, Bella Union).
The Blue Description Project
Posted by | gfung | Posted on | May 3, 2024
The Blue Description Project
Thursday, February 15, 6:00 p.m.
Liza Sylvestre and Christopher Jones, 2024, United States, 82 minutes
In English with open captions and captioned audio descriptions / Format: DCP
Derek Jarman, Blue, 1993. Presented with new open captions and a captioned audio description track produced by The Blue Description Project, 2024.
In 1993, the British artist Derek Jarman released Blue, an epoch-defining account of AIDS, illness, and the experience of disability in a culture of repressive heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness. Despite being referred to as a feature film, Blue never existed exclusively in one medium. It was screened in theaters, simulcast on television and radio, released as a CD, and published as a book, creating opportunities for many different kinds of sensory abilities—visual, aural, and textual—to experience the work. The Blue Description Project, conceived by artists and writers Liza Sylvestre and Christopher Jones, builds on the multifaceted nature of Jarman’s work through newly commissioned and expansive accessibility. Reflecting Blue’s standing as a foundational work of Crip art, the project challenges ableist hierarchies in art while focusing on the generative possibilities of difference and interdependence.
Sylvestre, Jones, and scholar Sarah Hayden will join us virtually for an extended conversation about the project after the screening.
The Blue Description Project is produced by Crip*—Cripistemology and the Arts, a transdisciplinary initiative in the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in partnership with Sarah Hayden and the Voices in the Gallery research initiative at the University of Southampton.
Presented in partnership with SAIC’s Department of Art Therapy and Counseling and Disability Culture Activism Lab (DCAL) and Bodies of Work: Network of Disability Art and Culture, a multi-institutional program comprised of DCAL; Access Living’s Art and Culture Project; the University of Illinois–Chicago’s Department of Disability and Human Development and Disability Cultural Center; and the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab.
AbilityLab receives funding from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR), part of the US Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Administration for Community Living (ACL). The contents of this program may not represent the policies of NIDILRR, ACL, or HHS, or the endorsement of the federal government. This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
BIOGRAPHIES
Liza Sylvestre is a multimedia artist and research assistant professor within the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where she has co-founded the initiative Crip*—Cripistemology and the Arts. Her work has been shown internationally, including the Plains Art Museum (Fargo), Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis), John Hansard Gallery (Southampton), ARGOS (Brussels), and Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt). Sylvestre has been the recipient of both an Artists Initiative and Arts Learning grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, a fellowship through Art(ists) on the Verge, a VSA Jerome Emerging Artist Grant, an Art Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship, and a fellowship from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. She has been artist-in-residence at the Weisman Art Museum and the Center for Applied and Translational Sensory Science. In 2019, she received a Citizens Advocate Award from the Minnesota Commission of the Deaf, DeafBlind, and Hard of Hearing. Sylvestre’s work has been written about in numerous publications and books including Art in America, Mousse Magazine, Ocula Magazine, Art Monthly, and SciArt Magazine.
Christopher Robert Jones is an artist and writer based in Illinois. Their research revolves around the “failure” or “malfunctioning” of the body and how those experiences are situated at points of intersection between Queer and Crip discourses. They are a regular contributor to Art Papers magazine and their work has recently been exhibited at the Krannert Art Museum, Gallery 400, and the Weisman Art Museum. Jones is the co-founder of Crip*—Cripistemology and the Arts, a transdisciplinary initiative that is housed within the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where they are also a research assistant professor.
Sarah Hayden is a writer and Associate Professor in Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Southampton. From 2019–2023, she led “Voices in the Gallery,” a research, writing and curatorial project on intersections of voice, text and access in contemporary art funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. In 2022, she developed slow emergency siren, ongoing: Accessing Handsworth Songs in partnership with LUX and co-led the “Art of Captioning” British Art Network Research Group with Hannah Wallis. Recent writings include essays on Charlie Prodger for The Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession, Sharon Hayes for Bricks from the Kiln, and captioning as “unvoiceover” for Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: ORIANA and GOSILA
Posted by | Amy Beste | Posted on | October 26, 2023
Thursday, October 26, 6:00 p.m.
Join San Juan–based artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz for the Chicago premiere of her new feature ORIANA.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, ORIANA, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
“The videos of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz exhibit a sensibility deeply informed by long and careful looking at the tropical landscape of her native Puerto Rico.”–Erica Dawn Lyle, Art In America
“Less a speculative vision about what might be and more a provocation of how other futures are actualized in the present.” – Walker Art Center
Program
ORIANA
2023, Puerto Rico, 78 minutes
In Spanish with English subtitles, Format: DCP
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s (MFA 1997) films explore the physical and symbolic stories of the Caribbean. In ORIANA, a band of feminist warriors takes refuge in a verdant Puerto Rican landscape. Set in the wake of Hurricane Maria and featuring performances by a group of San Juan–based artists and activists, the film takes inspiration from French writer and theorist Monique Wittig’s radical 1969 novel Les Guérillères. As Muñoz’s characters move through forests, abandoned industrial sites, and colonial ruins, ORIANA visualizes the possibilities for creating a decolonial and feminist world.
GOSILA
2018, Puerto Rico, 10 minutes
In Spanish with English subtitles, Format: DCP
A film about disorder, sense-making from the ground up, slowness, and the work in the days after a hurricane.
About the artist
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her expanded moving-image practice brings together Boalian theater, experimental ethnography, and feminist thought to focus on the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements and everyday poetic work in the Caribbean. Her artworks have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, including solo shows at Argos Centre for Audiovisual Art, Brussels; Pivô, São Paulo; CRAC Alsace, Altkirch, France; Espacio Odeón, Bogotá; Pérez Art Museum Miami; and the New Museum, New York. She received a master of fine arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997.
Accessibility
This event will have real-time captions (CART). For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or contact cate@saic.edu.
Tags: Beatriz Santiago Muñoz > Experimental > Les Guérillères > Monique Wittig > Puerto Rico
Lawrence Andrews: mythicPotentialities
Posted by | Amy Beste | Posted on | October 12, 2023
Thursday, October 12, 6:00 p.m.
Enthralling in form and vision, Lawrence Andrews’ works are kaleidoscopic explorations of Blackness through mass media and popular culture.
In the genre-defying imageless video mythicPotentialities (2019), Andrews examines the murder of Emmett Till, the trial that followed, and the ways these events have been mediated through artistic and mass media. Focusing on Till’s great uncle Moses Wright, who testified at the trial, Andrews asks what happens when we imagine Wright’s life beyond the limited events that came to define him.
2019, Lawrence Andrews, USA, 60 mins
In English, Format: Digital
Presented in partnership with SAIC’s Video Data Bank.
About the artist
Lawrence Andrews’s practice spans video, photography, and installation. Employing multi-layered strategies of appropriation, he often focuses on media and culture, suggesting that “culture is all we are as people; we speak about it, look at ourselves through it, and ultimately change because of it.” Andrews’s work has shown extensively throughout the US and internationally on television, at major film festivals, and in museums and galleries, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; and the American Film Institute, Los Angeles; among others. He has received numerous grants and fellowships, including a Rockefeller Intercultural Documentary Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowships.
Accessibility
This event will have real-time captions (CART). For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or contact cate@saic.edu.
Tags: Black Noise > Emmett Till > Experimental Essay > Lawrence Andrews > Moses Wright > sound art > Video Data Bank
Želimir Žilnik: LOGBOOK SERBISTAN
Posted by | Amy Beste | Posted on | October 7, 2023
Saturday, October 7, 1:00 p.m
Želimir Žilnik, LOGBOOK SERBISTAN, 2015. Courtesy of the artist
For more than 50 years, renowned Serbian director Želimir Žilnik has produced a body of trailblazing and politically committed films. A key member of Yugoslavia’s rebellious Black Wave film movement of the 1960s and a pioneer of docufiction, Žilnik’s perspective was shaped by atrocity at the hands of Nazis, Yugoslavia’s turbulent history and dissolution, and periods of exile. Over the years, he has used his camera to explore the experiences of outsiders of all kinds, depicting complicated social and political realities from a distinctly human perspective.
Join us for three programs that cover the range of his career, including his essential early SHORT FILMS (Thursday, October 5, 6:00 p.m.), mid-career feature MARBLE ASS (1995) (Friday, October 6, 6:00 p.m.), and recent award-winner, LOGBOOK SERBISTAN (2015).
LOGBOOK SERBISTAN
2015, Želimir Žilnik, Serbia, 94 minutes
In multiple languages with English subtitles, Format: DCP
Over the last two decades, Žilnik has produced a startlingly original body of work on the struggles of undocumented immigrants and refugees. In the award-winning LOGBOOK SERBISTAN, he casts Middle Eastern and African refugees fleeing war and poverty as versions of themselves in stories based on their experiences seeking asylum. Most hope to reach the European Union (EU), yet, as borders close, find themselves stuck in overwhelmed refugee centers in Serbia, which is itself excluded from the EU. Harrowing and humorous, Žilnik’s film is a masterful human drama and incisive portrait of border politics.
Presented in partnership with The Center for Eastern European and Russian/Eurasian Studies at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) School of Literatures, Cultural Studies, and Linguistics and UIC’s School of Art and Art History.
About the artist
Želimir Žilnik is an artist-filmmaker from Novi Sad, Serbia. He has made more than 50 feature and short films which have been exhibited internationally. Žilnik has been the subject of major career film retrospectives at Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2019; Cinemateca Argentina, 2018; Mar del Plata International Film Festival, 2017; Anthology Film Archive, New York, and Harvard Film Archive, 2017; Ankara International Film Festival, 2016; Doclisboa, 2015; Arsenal, Berlin, 2015; CINUSP, São Paulo, 2014; Thessaloniki International Film Festival, 2014; and more. His work has also been featured at Documenta, Kassel; Venice Biennale; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien; Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg’ Lentos Art Museum, Linz; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Deutsches Historisches Museum and Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome; among others.
Related Events
SHORT FILMS (Thursday, October 5, 6:00 p.m.)
MARBLE ASS (Friday, October 6, 6:00 p.m.)
Accessibility
This event will have real-time captions (CART). For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or contact cate@saic.edu.
Želimir Žilnik: MARBLE ASS
Posted by | Amy Beste | Posted on | October 6, 2023
Friday, October 6, 6:00 p.m.
Želimir Žilnik, MARBLE ASS, 1995. Courtesy of the artist.
For more than 50 years, renowned Serbian director Želimir Žilnik has produced a body of trailblazing and politically committed films. A key member of Yugoslavia’s rebellious Black Wave film movement of the 1960s and a pioneer of docufiction, Žilnik’s perspective was shaped by atrocity at the hands of Nazis, Yugoslavia’s turbulent history and dissolution, and periods of exile. Over the years, he has used his camera to explore the experiences of outsiders of all kinds, depicting complicated social and political realities from a distinctly human perspective.
Join us for three programs that cover the range of his career, including his essential early SHORT FILMS (Thursday, October 5, 6:00 p.m.), mid-career feature MARBLE ASS (1995), and recent award-winner, LOGBOOK SERBISTAN (2015) (Saturday, October 7, 1:00 p.m.).
MARBLE ASS
1995, Želimir Žilnik, FR Yugoslavia, 87 minutes
In Serbian with English subtitles, Format: Beta video transferred to Digital video
Winner of the Teddy for best feature at the 1995 Berlin Film Festival, MARBLE ASS is Žilnik’s breakthrough celebration of queer life in former Yugoslavia, shot during the Balkans War. Staring the late Merlinka as a version of herself, the film follows the lives of Merlin and Sanela—two trans women who turn to sex work as a means of financial security and an act of political resistance against the militant machismo of wartime culture. Their routine is shattered when Johnny, Marlin’s ex-lover, is decommissioned from the army and arrives at her house full of barely repressed rage. Referencing Paul Morrisy’s FLESH (1968) and Billy Wilder’s SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959), MARBLE ASS is a radically exhilarating mix of political allegory, screwball humor, empathy, and Belgrade’s ’90s underground.
Presented in partnership with The Center for Eastern European and Russian/Eurasian Studies at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) School of Literatures, Cultural Studies, and Linguistics and UIC’s School of Art and Art History.
About the artist
Želimir Žilnik is an artist-filmmaker from Novi Sad, Serbia. He has made more than 50 feature and short films which have been exhibited internationally. Žilnik has been the subject of major career film retrospectives at Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2019; Cinemateca Argentina, 2018; Mar del Plata International Film Festival, 2017; Anthology Film Archive, New York, and Harvard Film Archive, 2017; Ankara International Film Festival, 2016; Doclisboa, 2015; Arsenal, Berlin, 2015; CINUSP, São Paulo, 2014; Thessaloniki International Film Festival, 2014; and more. His work has also been featured at Documenta, Kassel; Venice Biennale; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien; Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg’ Lentos Art Museum, Linz; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Deutsches Historisches Museum and Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome; among others.
Related Events
ŽELIMIR ŽILNIK: SHORT FILMS (Thursday, October 5, 6:00 p.m.)
LOGBOOK SERBISTAN (Saturday, October 7, 1:00 p.m.)
Accessibility
This event will have real-time captions (CART). For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or contact cate@saic.edu.
Tags: Balkans War > Docudrama > Docufiction > Experimental Narrative > FR Yugoslavia > Merlinka > Queer > Želimir Žilnik
Želimir Žilnik: Short Films
Posted by | Amy Beste | Posted on | October 5, 2023
Thursday, October 5, 6:00 p.m.
Želimir Žilnik, INVENTORY, 1975. Courtesy of the artist.
For more than 50 years, renowned Serbian director Želimir Žilnik has produced a body of trailblazing and politically committed films. A key member of Yugoslavia’s rebellious Black Wave film movement of the 1960s and a pioneer of docufiction, Žilnik’s perspective was shaped by atrocity at the hands of Nazis, Yugoslavia’s turbulent history and dissolution, and periods of exile. Over the years, he has used his camera to explore the experiences of outsiders of all kinds, depicting complicated social and political realities from a distinctly human perspective.
Join us for three programs that cover the range of his career, including his essential early SHORT FILMS, mid-career feature MARBLE ASS (1995) (Friday, October 6, 6:00 p.m.), and recent award-winner, LOGBOOK SERBISTAN (2015) (Saturday, October 7, 1:00 p.m.) Žilnik will be in attendance at the Friday and Saturday screenings.
This program brings together four of Žilnik’s most powerful and innovative short films. Shot in Yugoslavia and West Germany, each captures the experiences of people living on the outskirts of society through reenactment, improvisation, repetition, and dark humor.
1971–1977, Želimir Žilnik, Yugoslavia/West Germany, 71 minutes
Multiple languages with English subtitles, Format: Digital Video
Presented in partnership with The Center for Eastern European and Russian/Eurasian Studies at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) School of Literatures, Cultural Studies, and Linguistics and UIC’s School of Art and Art History.
Program
BLACK FILM
1971, Yugoslavia, 14 minutes
In Serbian with English subtitles
BLACK FILM is an early example of Žilnik’s political engagement, expressed through his decision to provide shelter to a group of unhoused men in his family’s small apartment. While his guests enjoy themselves, the filmmaker presses social workers, government officials, police, and even ordinary citizens for a more permanent solution. When his camera captures their indifference, his film becomes an indictment against the powers that be.
UPRISING IN JAZAK
1973, Yugoslavia, 18 minutes
In Serbian with English subtitles
Residents of Jazak, a small village in eastern Yugoslavia, reenact the ways they resisted Nazi forces during WWII—hiding guns, cutting telegraph wires, sabotaging food, and caring for Partisan soldiers. Žilnik’s camera captures stories of atrocity and grief alongside those of solidarity and mutual aid.
INVENTORY
1975, West Germany, 9 minutes
In multiple languages with English subtitles
A short structural documentary experiment that takes stock of West Germany’s “guest workers”—Yugoslavs, Italians, Turks, and Greeks—living in an old building in the center of Munich.
MARKET PEOPLE
1977, Yugoslavia, 30 minutes
Serbian with English subtitles
Žilnik takes his camera to Šabac Fair, one of the largest flea markets and festivals in the Balkans, to meet with the people who run it. Cutting between tradespeople, performers, musicians, and fair employees, Žilnik highlights its chaotic and cooperative community.
About the artist
Želimir Žilnik is an artist-filmmaker from Novi Sad, Serbia. He has made more than 50 feature and short films which have been exhibited internationally. Žilnik has been the subject of major career film retrospectives at Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2019; Cinemateca Argentina, 2018; Mar del Plata International Film Festival, 2017; Anthology Film Archive, New York, and Harvard Film Archive, 2017; Ankara International Film Festival, 2016; Doclisboa, 2015; Arsenal, Berlin, 2015; CINUSP, São Paulo, 2014; Thessaloniki International Film Festival, 2014; and more. His work has also been featured at Documenta, Kassel; Venice Biennale; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien; Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg’ Lentos Art Museum, Linz; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Deutsches Historisches Museum and Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome; among others.
Related Events
MARBLE ASS (Friday, October 6, 6:00 p.m.)
LOGBOOK SERBISTAN (Saturday, October 7, 1:00 p.m.)
Accessibility
This event will have real-time captions (CART). For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or contact cate@saic.edu.
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Conversations at the Edge is a weekly series of screenings, performances, and talks by groundbreaking media artists.
CATE is organized by SAIC's Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and SAIC's Video Data Bank.
Programs take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State / Chicago, IL / 312.846.2600), unless otherwise noted.
