Once again International House (I House) is the best venue in Philadelphia for films about art or by artists as well as early film classics. The upcoming season includes :
Thursday, Sept. 23 films by the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès. The beginnings of French cinema that established many of its conventions. Méliès particularly loved special effects.
Wednesday, Sept. 29 Michael Snow’s Corpus Callosum (2002); the artist will be present. Snow is one of the most influential of experimental filmmakers who has also worked in painting, sculpture, photography, sound and music. Earlier in the evening the Slought Foundation is opening an exhibition of recent work by Snow and John Oswald. Oswald is a fellow Torontonian who is best known within music and dance worlds; the duo will perform together at I House on Thursday, Sept. 30.
Saturday, Oct. 9 Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance (1988) and Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men (2009) This last of three nights of films by women directors from North Africa and the Middle East features work by Hatoum, better known as a sculptor and installation artist, and the first feature-length film by Neshat, whose previous short films were usually shown as multi-screen, gallery installations. The Hatoum film is based on letters between the artist, living in Britian, and her mother in Beirut. Not only her first feature but also the first to follow a clear narrative, Neshat’s film is based on the banned novel by Shahmush Parsipur, set in Iran in 1953; I saw a short version of the film at the Cisneros Collection in Miami last year, and am very much looking forward to the full-length version.
Friday, Oct. 22 Teinosuke Kinugasa’s silent A Page of Madness (1926), with a live score for string quartet and koto, bass clarinet and shakuhachi played by Ensemble N_JP. I House describes this as one of the most acclaimed, but least seen, films in history. The music , commissioned by I House, was written by Gene Coleman and Akikazu Nakamura.
Thursday, Nov. 18 Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927). One of several notable urban film portraits from the 20s which include Sheeler and Strand’s Manhatta and Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera.
