Artist & Curator: Silvia Gruner in conversation with Tarek Elhaik Wednesday, February 20, 2019 5:30-7:30pm Dwinelle Annex, Room 126 Co-sponsors: Arts Research Center and UCHRI.

For decades, the Italian sound artist and composer David Monacchi has made recordings of biodiverse regions as part of his Fragments of Extinction project, with the dual purpose of saving these unique soundscapes and creating his own compositions. In Dusk Chorus, his high-tech fieldwork in the equatorial rainforests of the Amazon is documented by filmmakers Saravanja and D’Emilia. A tree emits a...

Throughout the duration of the exhibition Arthur Jafa / MATRIX 272, a series of notebooks that Jafa began assembling in the 1990s are on view in the Florence Helzel Works on Paper Study Center on the museum's lower level. Reflecting the artist’s interest in found images and affective collage, the notebooks offer unique insight into his singular approach. Viewing hours are Wednesdays 12–1,...

Black interiors are the life worlds of black peoples often denied them in normative modes of cultural circulation. Spirit is black radical energy. In Lynne Sachs’s Sermons and Sacred Pictures we are introduced to the work of Reverend L. O. Taylor, who captured the essence of the black church in a series of recordings from the 1930s and ’40s. We meet Bessie Jones in Bess Lomax Hawes’s...

Misleading Innocence (tracing what a bridge can do) explores the story of the planning and politics of a series of overpasses on Long Island, commissioned in the 1920s and 1930s by Robert Moses.

Lang’s wonderfully inventive Liliom, which has a musical lightness akin to René Clair’s films, fell into almost complete obscurity soon after its release. Made in France, the first stop on Lang’s self-imposed exile from Germany, this tragicomedy is based on Ferenc Molnar’s fantastical play about earth, heaven, and purgatory. Charles Boyer stars in one of his best roles, and Antonin Artaud appears...

In Shakespeare Wallah (wallah means “peddler”), a family of English Shakespearean actors find themselves lost in the new India, reduced to giving performances at golf clubs, schools, and the palaces of declining maharajahs. Their conflict is heightened when the daughter of the family falls in love with a young Indian playboy. The Kendal family—mother, father, and daughter—play themselves in the...

Prompted by producer Seymour Nebenzahl to do a sequel to his highly successful pair of Mabuse films of 1922, Lang took the opportunity to make what he would later call “an allegory to show Hitler’s processes of terrorism.” The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was quickly banned by Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda under the newly formed Nazi government. This thriller-melodrama exploring themes of...

James Ivory called The Guru “the most unseen and most mysterious of our movies . . . Merchant Ivory’s version of a sixties trip.” The film is centered around a sitar virtuoso (Uptal Butt) whose life is disrupted when he accepts an English pop star (Michael York) as a pupil and is simultaneously sought out by an exuberant young Englishwoman (Rita Tushingham) who decides to devote herself to him...

This here’s a screwball comedy that throws some real curves: most particularly a leggy Claudette Colbert and a shirtless Clark Gable. Cheeky Colbert plays a runaway heiress on a bus north to find her fiancé; instead she finds fellow traveler Gable, an ace reporter with everything but an assignment. The repartee (written by Robert Riskin, who won an Oscar for the screenplay) is faster than a...