FW: Early Films by Leslie Thornton - Monday at Collective Unconscious!

From: Caroline Koebel (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Mar 24 2008 - 05:04:10 PDT


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From: "Janne Kristensen" <email suppressed>
Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 17:40:34 -0400
To: email suppressed
Subject: Early Films by Leslie Thornton - Monday at Collective Unconscious!

Please join us for this great show with films from The Film Makers-Coop:

Early Films by Leslie Thornton
At The Collective Unconscious
279 Church St, just south of White St.
Monday March 24, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Curated by Ghen Zando-Dennis

$5.00 Admission

The films of Leslie Thornton have helped to define the very nature of
contemporary avant-garde practice. Her work has been consistently in the
forefront of that tendency which takes a theoretical and critical analysis
of the cinematic image as a central concern, while conducting a
painstakingly detailed interrogation of the texture of a highly-mediated
everyday life. Thornton's films directly engage with issues in feminism,
colonialist/post-colonialist studies, semiotic theory and cultural analysis.
They demonstrate a rich and provocative attention to relations between sound
and image and the syntactical potential of the film form. Experimenting with
multi-media, specifially the relation between film, video, theater, and
still photography, Thornton explores the limits of representation and the
myriad discursive relations of spectators to images.
-Mary Ann Doane, Senses of Cinema

The Films:

Jennifer, Where are You? (1981) 16mm, color, sound, 10 min
Shows a child age ten years in one shot, a sort of sound version of the
Kuleshov experiment. -- L.T. "The film is a questioning of authority and
authorship, of the power implicit in authority, of the balance between her
fear and her will to disrupt, of the balance between her fear and his
inability to understand her (lack of an) answer ..." -- Su Friedrich,
Downtown Review, 1981.

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X-Tracts (1975) 16mm, black and white, sound, 9 min

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She Had He So He Do He To Her (1987) 16mm, color, sound, 5 min

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Adynata (1983) 16mm, color, sound, 30 min
ADYNATA offers a vulgar tour of the Other, in this case Imperial China?;
Woman?; Madness?; Japan?; Murder?; Eroticism? -- L.T. "The colors are
extremely vivid and work to amplify what at first glance appears to be an
unruly fetishism of the exotic object. There is too much for the eye - the
film seemingly capitulates to the seductive force of visual pleasure. But
this richness of the image is somewhat deceptive. It is itself a
second-order signifier of an exoticism associated with the discourse of
Orientalism which is both quoted and criticized by the film. And, for
Thornton, the discourse of Orientalism is precisely a discourse of excess,
of hyperbole, of the absurd. In ADYNATA she investigates the mise-en-scene
of Orientalism - the conglomeration of sounds and images which connote the
Orient for a Western viewer/auditor." -- Mary Ann Doane, Millenium Film
Journal, 1987.

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Oh China Oh (1983) 16mm, black and white, sound, 3 min
A post-script to ADYNATA, even more incorrect. -- L.T.

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