DIM Cinema

Ongoing Series DIM Cinema

Moving-image art in dialogue with cinema. Curated by Michèle Smith DIM Cinema is a monthly series that presents Canadian and international moving-image art in dialogue with cinema. The series was initiated in 2008 by local curator Amy Kazymerchyk to draw attention to artists and experimental filmmakers whose practices engage with cinema as a medium, social context, formal structure, or architectural space. The name of the series is inspired by the diffused Vancouver sky, the darkness of the cinema, and a quote from James Broughton’s Making Light of It (1992): “Movie images are dim reflections of the beauty and ferocity in mankind.” DIM Cinema has been curated by Michèle Smith since 2014.

November 9 (Wednesday) 7:00 pm December 7 (Wednesday) 7:00 pm

Folding Time

Running time: 86 minutes Time flutters, spins, tumbles, and folds in a cycle of films on the ever-fresh theme of laundry. Dóra Maurer transforms an ordinary cloth, the dimensions of the 16mm frame when held between outstretched arms, into a device for measuring cinematic time. Variations in the execution of repeated foldings and incamera techniques enliven and refresh the geometric rigour of a mundane domestic act. Along with the washing, Roberta Cantow pulls a gamut of mixed emotions along the clotheslines of New York City. From the entanglements of public airing to the private rituals that turn chaos into order, women speak out about the role of laundry in their lives. Tossing a load of systemic race, gender, and class inequities in with the dirty laundry, Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker turn their lens to the overlooked working lives of laundromat employees, entrusted to handle people’s most intimate belongings.

Timing

(Időmérés) Hungary 1973-80 Dóra Maurer 10 min. Silent. DCP

Clotheslines

USA 1981 Roberta Cantow 32 min. DVD

The Washing Society

USA 2018 Lynne Sachs, Lizzie Olesker 44 min. DCP

The Colour of Pomegranates

aka Sayat Nova Նռան գույնը USSR 1968 Sergei Parajanov 77 min. DCP

“In the temple of cinema there are images, light, and reality. Sergei Parajanov was the master of that temple.”

Jean-Luc Godard

Staged in medieval monasteries and churches, inspired by Armenian miniatures, icons, and manuscripts, and influenced by early film, Soviet cinema, and American queer avant-garde, Sergei Parajanov’s biography of the 18th-century troubadour-poetmonk Sayat-Nova (“King of Songs,” one of many translations) has been described as “an exotic pageant … As much ritual as movie” (J. Hoberman, New York Times). Shooting with a static camera, Parajanov depicts Sayat-Nova’s life in a series of tableaux vivants based on his poetry, replaying each significant moment “with slight variations to account for shifts in feeling and perspective” (Rahul Hamid, Senses of Cinema). Later overdubbed with sound effects, chant, and song, but almost no dialogue or voice-overs, the film contains only snatches of Sayat-Nova’s verse. Instead its imagery is in the mise-en-scène, the weight of metaphor made material through colour, pattern, texture and form. In Armenian and Georgian with English subtitles.