Form Fitting—New Asian American Experimental Film & Video, 2013-2014

Image credit: From Shambhavi Kaul’s Mount Song.

A guided tour through some of the most adventurous, formally innovative and unusual films and videos to emerge in the last year. Defying easy classification, these short, non-fictive works play at the intersection of forms–experimental, documentary, animation–to produce inquiries into how ideas can be structured and the material properties of what we look at and hear. Personal and popular archives, found artifacts, and light itself are our departure points.

Followed by a post-screening conversation featuring Hey-Yeun Jang, Shambhavi Kaul, and Nina Yuen.

Curated by Chi-hui Yang.

Running time: 69 minutes.

A+

Canada, 2012, 6 mins, Video, Color

DIRECTOR: Nobu Adilman

Cinema finds its accounts in an uncommon ledger, whose lines and tabulations conceal the greatest love of all.

MOUNT SONG

USA, 2013, 9 mins, Video, Color

DIRECTOR: Shambhavi Kaul

Oriental pagodas, mysterious wisps of smoke, garishly colored sunsets and dramatic thundercracks: Kaul repurposes sets and effects from 1970′s Hong Kong genre films to bring the background to the fore and evoke an uncanny vision of a movie-mythologized East.

IT’S NOT A PRISON IF YOU NEVER TRY THE DOOR

USA, 2013, 7mins, Video, B&W

DIRECTOR: Josh Gen Solondz

Multi-hyphenate Solondz creates a remediated, glitch-filled revision of a monster classic. As pixels melt, stick and stutter, Godzilla arises and the world decays, a startling vision of mutation and destruction.

CLOUDS, RAIN

USA, 2012, 6mins, Video, Color

DIRECTOR: Libbie D. Cohn

In this sensory encounter with the elements and urban space, Cohn plays with the acts of looking and hearing, and turns an unfamiliar place and the everyday into an abstracted pleasure.

NIGHT FALLS ON GLASS

USA, 2012, 11 mins, Video, Color

DIRECTOR: Norbert Shieh

A shimmering city symphony refracted through Vancouver’s vertical skyline. Highrise windows are reframed as geometric patterns and merge with urban din to reveal a gleaming city of glass.

ORCHARD.5

USA, 2013, 8mins, 16mm, Color, Silent

DIRECTOR: Hey-Yeun Jang

Orchard.5 might have started from the random flashing headlights that slip through my bedroom window blinds and fleetingly lick the walls and ceiling. The title originates from the name of the street that I have lived for the last five years and fifteen days.

None of the above says much about the film.

ANDOE

USA, 2013, 6mins, Video, Color

DIRECTOR: Nina Yuen

Through a play of performance, collage and projection, Yuen’s interpretive portrait of painter Joe Andoe is channeled through her body and the slogans of a Nike ad, producing an inquiry into the limits of ambition and the creative process.

ITEM NUMBER

Canada/India, 2012, 16mins, Video, Color

DIRECTOR: Oliver Husain

In this lavish production, Husain mines Indian musical dramas of the 40s and 50s to explore the liminal spaces of the dressing room and a tired actress’ inner thoughts, where the space behind the stage becomes the stage, and the veneer of performance is exposed.