Join us at the November screening for Mills Folly Microcinema, the monthly showcase of experimental film and video presented by Arts + Literature Laboratory.
Mills Folly Microcinema will present "Take it Down: Recent Experimental Shorts," on Thursday, November 21 at 7:30 p.m. Admission is $5, or free for Arts + Literature Laboratory members. Seating is limited, and doors open at 7:15 p.m. Please note: tonight's screening contains explicit content not appropriate for all audiences.
Take it Down | Sabine Gruffat | 2018 | 12:36 minutes
A last stand for the silent guardians of the old order. Take It Down is a filmic day of reckoning for the Old Confederate South. What is up must come down, like the Confederate soldier monuments standing in court house squares across the South. At long last, a grand inversion! Solarized film makes positives bleed into negatives. The South is renewed.
This film looks to North Carolina to describe the cultural fissure that runs through the South, a legacy of the Civil War. In the context of the divisive Trump presidency and the increasing visibility of white supremacist activism, these Confederate memorials have become sites of conflicting politics and historical narratives.
Historians agree that a majority of Confederate statues were erected as propaganda tools legitimizing racism in the era of Jim Crow laws. For example, “Silent Sam”, a statue depicted in the film, was erected on the quad of the University of North Carolina campus. In an act of civil disobedience in Fall 2018, students and protestors tore down the statue in a statement against white supremacist oppression.
Vague Images at the Beginning and the End of the Day | Carl Elsaesser | 2015 | 8:00 minutes
A hug/punch eulogy for all things impossible now. A sketch book of images and sounds from the year wrapped around a trip out to Loomis, South Dakota to find the abandoned farm where my grandfather grew up. At the same time the film is a travelogue of my frustrations and understandings of gay sexuality. The two are connected. Awarded the Barbara Aronofsky Latham Award for Emerging Experimental Video Artist at the Ann Arbor Film Festival.
Normal Appearances | Penny Lane | 2018 | 4:51 minutes
An unsettling supercut of the women of #BachelorNation watching themselves being watched. A sort of ambivalent fan vid?
We Were Hardly More than Children | Cecelia Condit | 8:23 minutes
An epic tale of an illegal abortion, as lived by two women on a perilous journey through a world that has little concern for their survival. Best Experimental award at the 2019 Chicago Feminist Film Festival.
The Eddies | A. Madsen Minax | 2018 | 16:08
From below ground, a man named Eddie describes flood lines, levees and trivial histories of the crumbling infrastructure of Memphis, TN. In this same city, the filmmaker, a recent transsexual transplant, watches war films and contemplates masculine connectivity as he attempts to integrate into the American South. He posts a Craigslist ad asking men to masturbate on-camera with their firearms. He receives a single response from a man whose name is also Eddie.
The Eddies is a film about above and below, interior and exterior, coincidence, and loose association, revealing an inherent desire to belong and to search for physical and psychic fulfillment. Winner, The Curt McDowell Award at the Chicago Underground Film Festival.
ABOUT MILLS FOLLY MICROCINEMA
Mills Folly Microcinema showcases nationally recognized experimental film and video art work from the festival and microcinema circuit. We network with regional filmmakers and organizations to bring filmmakers and guest programmers to Madison for screenings. And we incubate local experimental filmmaking by providing screen time at at Project Projection events.
Mills Folly Microcinema is funded in part by grants from Dane Arts and the Madison Arts Commission, with additional funds from the Wisconsin Arts Board.
