The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Visual Arts at Princeton University presents Seeing the Big Picture: An Experimental Film Series organized by Professor Christopher Harris and featuring 16mm analog films by internationally celebrated experimental filmmakers working at the forefront of artists’ films. The series of nine screenings is free and open to the public on select Mondays, February 3 through April 14, at 8 p.m. in the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau Street on the Princeton campus. No tickets are required. The Film Theater is an accessible venue. Guests in need of other access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at least one week in advance at lewiscenter@princeton.edu.
A still from filmmaker Jodie Mack’s 2013 film Glistening Thrills. Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist
The experimental films to be presented in the series include a variety of idiosyncratic forms, using handmade methods, and unconventional materials. Each screening of a film will be followed by an in-person conversation with the visiting guest filmmaker. The line-up of filmmakers includes: experimental animator Jodie Mack on February 3, artist and filmmaker Mary Helena Clark on February 10, media artist Melissa Friedling and artist and filmmaker Lana Lin on February 17, filmmaker and anthropologist Kathryn Ramey on February 24, writer and artist Stephanie Barber on March 3, avant-garde/experimental filmmaker Jennifer Reeves on March 17, artist Rhayne Vermette on March 31, and artist and experimental filmmaker Sara Sowell on April 7. The series will conclude on April 14 with Learning to Be Human, a special program showcasing rare 16mm educational films from the late ’60s and early ’70s on loan from the Harvard Film Archive presented by Archive publicist and designer Brittany Gravely, who is also a filmmaker.
“The projection of artists’ films on 16mm celluloid at the proper size, scale and brightness in a cinema theater has become increasingly rare,” said Harris, “so I hope audiences take advantage of this opportunity to view them as the artists intend. Streaming digital scans of films like these on a laptop is like flipping through a coffee table book compared to visiting the Louvre; the tiny digital reproductions completely lack the size, color, and vibrant richness of real thing. You don’t want to miss it!”
The series is presented in conjunction with Harris’ spring semester Film Seminar course. Students in the course will moderate the post-screening conversations on stage with the filmmakers.
Harris joined the Princeton faculty in the fall. He makes films and video installations that read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. Often drawing on archival sounds and images, his work features staged re-enactments, hand-cranked cameras, rear-projection, close-focus cinematography, re-photography, photochemical manipulations, and screen captured video, among other strategies. Like his production techniques, his influences—among them Black literature, various strains of North American avant-garde film, and most significantly, all forms of Black music—are eclectic. His current project is a series of optically printed 16mm experimental films in conversation with canonical works of African American literature. His films have appeared widely at festivals, museums and cinematheques throughout the U.S. and internationally.
This film series is supported through the Lewis Center’s John Sacret Young ’69 Lecture Series fund. The late John Sacret Young was a 1969 graduate of Princeton and an author, producer, director, and screenwriter. He was nominated for seven Emmy Awards and seven Writers Guild of America (WGA) Awards, winning two WGA Awards. He is perhaps best known for co-creating, along with William F. Broyles Jr., China Beach, the critically acclaimed ABC-TV drama series about medics and nurses during the Vietnam War, and for his work on the television drama The West Wing. Young also received a Golden Globe and a Peabody Award, and his original mini-series about the Gulf War, Thanks of a Grateful Nation, was honored with his fifth Humanitas Prize nomination. He was the author of Remains: Non-Viewable, a Los Angeles Times best seller. Young had written extensively about American art, which led to his memoir, Pieces of Glass – An Artoir, about the effect art had on his writing, his screen work, and his life.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Program in Visual Arts, which includes film studies and production, and the more than 100 performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts and lectures offered each year at the Lewis Center, most of them free.
