Film
Intimate Archaeologies
- 7PM
For women filmmakers, exercises in challenging and reconceptualizing dominant visual forms have functioned to claim authority over the act of seeing itself. This constellation of films approaches life writing through both autobiographical and secondhand accounts, layering reflections on the filmmakers’ position as artists, intimate family histories, and technologized forms of looking. Treating the personal as always political, these filmmakers reconfigure cinematic language to subvert the conventions of self-narration to gently excavate what is hidden and challenge what seems apparent, touching on money, motherhood, memory, and the process of making.
Dir. Alile Sharon Larkin, 50min
An art student sets out to reclaim her body and self-worth from Western patriarchal norms.
Dir. Rea Tajiri, 32min
Groundbreaking and haunting, this film is a poetic composition of recorded history and non-recorded memory. Tajiri’s family was among the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans interned in camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor, an experience that has often been wrapped in silence and forgetting. Ruminating on the difficult nature of representing the past—especially one that exists outside of traditional historical accounts—Tajiri blends footage of interviews, memorabilia, and a pilgrimage to the camp where her mother was interned She also tells the story of her father being drafted before Pearl Harbor and returning home to find his family’s house razed.
Dir. Chantal Akerman, 9min
In French with English subtitles
In this collage-like self-portrait, created with a light touch on commission by the French television program Cinéma, cinémas, Akerman demonstrates with surreal humor the essential elements of making a film.
Dir. Mary Filippo, 15min
This experimental, autobiographical documentary reflects on being both the daughter of a working-class mother, and someone who has become middle-class and a mother herself. Situating the filmmaker in the web of economic and social injustices of her culture, the film also acts as an incrimination.
Go to the movies just once a month and a BAM membership pays for itself.
Despite their corporate-sponsored origins, these two films—by Albert Maysles and William Greaves—offer surprisingly telling portraits of companies and the lives of their workers.
Three teenage girls grapple with friendship and desi re over the course of a summer. Shot in Sciamma’s hometown, the film draws on her own experience of sexual awakening at a friend’s synchronized swimming show.
In 1960, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin interviewed Parisians, establishing the foundation for cinéma vérité. Three decades later, Gregg Bordowitz, inspired by their film, interviewed people living with HIV.