Thomas Edison Media Arts Consortium: Selections from the 2020 Film Festival

Streamed from August 26 through September 1

Featured are 12 titles from this year’s festival, an international celebration of the short film. Founded in New Jersey in 1981 and open to all, the festival was named for Thomas Edison’s West Orange film studio, the first-ever production facility for motion pictures. "I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear." Special thanks go to the consortium’s executive director, Jane Steuerwald.

A Month of Single Frames

Filmmaker Lynne Sachs crafted footage from Barbara Hammer’s Cape Cod artist residency into a sort of spiritual communion with the late artist. “I was really trying to figure out a way to talk to the experience of solitude that Barbara had had, how to be there with her somehow through the time that we would all share together watching her, and the film” (Lynne Sachs). (2019, 14 minutes)

The Divine Way

This disquieting take on Dante’s The Divine Comedy follows a woman as she descends endless labyrinthine flights of stairs, going ever deeper into a perilous landscape. (Ilaria Di Carlo, 2019, 15 minutes)

DONT KNOW WHAT

Reciting the simple assertion “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Thomas Renoldner used single frame editing to build a madcap rhythmic structure in this surreal self-portrait. “One strict principle was to always edit image and sound simultaneously, so every sound you hear comes exactly from the very moment when the image was recorded.” (2019, 8 minutes)

Circus Movements

Circus kids from Ethiopia perform, freely and gracefully, surrounded by the magnificent backdrop of their country’s landscape. (Lukas Berger and Mário Gajo de Carvalho, 2019, 15 minutes)

Movement in Structure

A dynamic and lyric routine explores the relationship between the dancer and the performance space. Choreography by John Lam. (Shaun Clarke, 2019, 4 minutes)

The Rain Will Follow

Though confined to a rest home, 90-year-old Melvin Wisdahl enjoys an interior life filled with images of battles once fought, his now-forsaken home, the struggles of his North Dakota ancestors, and his love for the ever-changing landscape. (Eugene Richards, 2019, 15 minutes)

Freeze Frame

In this whimsical stop-motion film, identical figures perform the hopeless task of preserving big blocks of ice. Their repetitive movements reanimate the animals frozen inside. (Soetkin Verstegen, 2019, 5 minutes)

Cold Storage

A lonely fisherman on a desolate shore finds a prehistoric man frozen in the Arctic ice. Thawing the fellow out, he then finds a new soul mate. The doleful comedy of Cold Storage pays homage to classic silent films. (Thomas Freundlich, 2019, 9 minutes)

Box of Memories

Charting a short but intimate dialogue between two characters who once were close friends, Box of Memories focuses on the ways in which shared memories affect people in different ways. (Felicitas Yang, 2019, 4 minutes)

They Say I’m Your Teacher

Created from the 16mm archive of the groundbreaking You Got to Move (a 1985 film about educating activists in the civil rights and labor movements at the legendary Highlander Center), They Say I’m Your Teacher focuses on another agent of change, Bernice Robinson. This hairdresser from South Carolina sought to extend voter registration by teaching at Citizenship Education Schools. (Catherine Murphy, 2019, 9 minutes)

Return to Calais

Nearly 80 years after her mother, Paulette, survived as a teenaged refugee fleeing the Nazi invasion of Belgium, the filmmaker Edith Goldenhar made a pilgrimage back to Calais to honor the stranger who had harbored the young woman during the bombing of the city. There, Goldenhar discovered that the same humanitarian spirit persists. (2019, 15 minutes)

How Do You Raise a Black Child?

This impressionistic adaptation of Cortney Lamar Charleston’s poem “How Do You Raise a Black Child?” portrays the everyday life of a young black man growing up in America and the issues thrust upon his parents. (Seyi Peter-Thomas, 2017, 4 minutes)