porTraiT #3: house of sound

Vanessa Renwick

2009, USA, video, B&W, sound, 11 min.

Circling the empty corner where a historic Portland record store once stood among a strip of black jazz clubs, Portrait #3: House of Sound is a testimonial to a community and cultural space recently demolished. The beautiful black and white 35mm footage, subtly tinged with loneliness, both juxtaposes and compliments the rich, vibrant voices sampled from a radio broadcast tribute to the record shop. The film moves between laughter, fond memories, melancholy and finally, conviction that despite physical destruction, the House of Sound will never die.

long for The ciTy

Jem Cohen

2008, USA, video, B&W, sound, 10 min

Humbly walking the streets of lower Manhattan she has known for thirty years, Patti Smith poetically reflects on the city’s consistencies and transformations—its past lives sometimes still tangible, some things gone with “progress.” Patti Smith’s weathered voice adds perfect texture to the patient Super-8 cinematography.

new aTlanTis

Leigh (Jen) Fisher

2008, Canada, video, color, sound, 5 min.

In a Burger King parking lot, amid towering construction cranes and monstrous half-built condos, a human attempts communication with the natural world. Carefully laying out hamburgers and writing signals on the car windshield attracts a flock of creatures, but glass and steel remain a barrier between alienated species. Against a supernatural soundtrack of lightbulb filament recordings, the imagery of New Atlantis visualizes an anxious longing for connection with the pre-developed environment.

IS somewhere beTween here
and There

Liss Platt

2008, Canada/USA, video, color & B&W, sound, 11 min.

Melting together radio transmissions, city sounds and found dialogue sound bites, Platt weaves through the two cities she has claimed as home — Hamilton, Ontario and Brooklyn, New York. A dreamlike portrayal of transience, homesickness and nomadic wandering, the film contemplates what we try to hold on to in a slippery grip of places that cannot hold us still. Platt plays with speed and stillness, mixes color and monochrome, and explores a wide array of textures in this ethereal piece.

welcome To africVille

Dana C. Inkster

1999, Canada, video, color, sound, 15 min.

In 1969, a black suburb of Halifax established in the 1800s by African families was ordered destroyed, and its residents were evicted in advance of the opening of a suspension bridge. Commercial industrial takeover spread through the neighborhood. The first fiction film set in this historic site, Welcome to Africville is an experimental narrative from the perspectives of four residents interviewed on the eve of relocation. A sincere portrait of the community and its inner life, Welcome to Africville delves into the emotional depths of its characters, giving voice to their desires, loves and losses.

haunT no. 1-3

Niklas Goldbach

2007, Germany, video, color, sound, 3 min.

Ghost-like figures hang limp and tremble in the overgrown and graffitied lots of a now-gentrified, formerly working-class Berlin neighborhood. Teasing camerawork makes the strange figures ever-elusive as if to suggest the untenable nature of both histories lost and new influxes of culture.

berlin/ny

Jack Waters

1984, USA, 16mm (blown up from Super-8mm), color and B&W, sound, 20 min.

Showing similarities of two landscapes from 1984-86. Ruined buildings, the remains of post-war Berlin, are juxtaposed with similar settings in New York’s pre-gentrified mid 1980s Lower East Side. Much of the urban rubble shown in the New York footage is now the site of expensive residential and commercial space. While the Berlin footage shows the scars of war, the New York devastation is a result of the late 70s fiscal default when land owners torched and scavenged their properties as a way of draining the last possible profit from real estate, after years of deliberate neglect in the impoverished communities that contained them.

The film documents such a torching shot during a gallery opening that shocked observers, even though such landlord-initiated arson was a common sight. The location was eventually appropriated by the city of New York, which acquired, then warehoused abandoned real estate after a specified period of tax delinquency. It later became a community garden under the auspices of Operation Greenthumb, a community program engendered to make aesthetic, social, and organic use of these lots that became neglected eyesores and centers for drug dealing and violence. This garden contained several casitas artfully constructed by the Latino residents who, despite much duress, still inhabit the area. In 1998 it was bulldozed by the City of New York. Like the Greenthumb gardens, similarly abandoned sites were resurrected by homesteaders and squatters, who are routinely evicted from these—their homes—after years of ardent labor and expense. In the film, the inclusion of the Berlin Wall’s Checkpoint Charlie takes past and present transgressions of political force from the civic into a global context. The juxtaposition of the two locations posits that the cycle of abuse that results in decrepit land sites is the result of a malignant principle in capitalism. It also underscores the power of the erasure of memory: the images of these barren landscapes’ prevalence, so commonplace in these major international cities less than 15 years ago.

asTroland

Samara Halperin

2009, USA, video, color, sound, 3 min.

Color-saturated Super-8 and a Casio soundtrack pair perfectly in this timeless portrait of Coney Island. A playful ode to the one-of-a-kind Brooklyn theme park, Coney Island is memorialized in its colorful glory, oblivious to any threat of corporate takeover.