November 17, Thursday, 7:30PM,
2005
Emerging Women Artists Series
Suitcase Devil Baby Dress 9 min, video, 2003
Director: Nina Yuen
Dueling interpretations attempt to illuminate a series of cryptic situations.
Hurt & Save 22min, video, 2001
Director: Julia Haslett
The tragicomic story of an adjustable bed salesman in southern England. In the intimacy of people’s homes, Tom demonstrates his product’s “healing” qualities to customers who are eager to talk, if not to buy.
Julia Haslett was Born in London, England in 1968, Julia Haslett has been making films and videos for the past ten years. She has worked at WGBH-Boston, the Discovery Channel, and most recently as a Filmmaker-in-Residence at the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics. Now a resident of New York City, she is currently at work on a film about the French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil.
The Obituary Project 4 selections from the series 13min, video, 2000-2005
Director: Hope Tucker
In Person!
Bessie Cohen, Survivor of 1911 Shirtwaist Fire
3 minutes, digital video, color, sound, 2000
Lolo Ferrari
1.5 minutes, digital video, color, sound, 2001
Big Star
3 minutes, digital video, color, sound, 2003
Noel
5 minutes, digital video, color, sound, 2005
An obituary whittles one's social contribution down to its barest form,so that the last ninety years of a life can be eclipsed by an escape from a burning building. An exploited French porn star with a large but anonymous fan base might have no obituary at all, garnering only an AP wire report. Beyond the newspaper obituary page, a songwriter's
identity remains as obscure as his motives for penning a popular holiday standard.
The Obituary Project is an ongoing film and video project, with some fifteen pieces completed to date. These explore the obit as social construction and biography, fiction and non-fiction. The works I craft make no pretence to being direct translations of factual life stories. They are elegies, meditations, and memorials. Each is constructed after extensive research but explores only a particular facet of its subject. Sometimes the inspiration for a segment of The Obituary Project has been a particular person, sometimes the unacknowledged circumstances of that life, and sometimes the mystique they've left behind in death. The project rearranges the contours of biography, to reclaim or expand a neglected identity, by acknowledging the traits and attributes by which we learn to recognize and which become identifying markers of authentic life. In this way, I ask my audience to consider the fabricated nature of biography and identity through my own admittedly incomplete fabrications.
(Re)collection
20min, video, 2005
Director: Arshia Haq
(Re)collection contrasts three seemingly unrelated spaces: the laboratory of an entomologist; an antiquated movable-type press whose operator expresses nostalgia for his dying native language, Urdu; and, finally, the space occupied by other people’s photographs whose subjects are impossible for strangers to identify. Haq’s investigation bridges the empirical language of scientific research and the subjectivity of personal reflection. - Susan Oxtoby
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