Holly Willis

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Lover Other

Holly Willis
“I was born in 1894, a scorpion turned over in the belly of its mother,” wrote Claude Cahun, the striking Surrealist artist known for her self-portraits, which are gender-bending metaphors of identity in flux. The sentence is read in voice-over in Barbara Hammer’s self-described “expanded documentary,” a collage portrait of......
The Puddle Video

Silver Lake Film Festival: MP4-Fest

Holly Willis
Among its diverse programs this year, the Silver Lake Film Festival includes MP4-Fest, which tackles issues around technology in four related events. In “Machinima!,” curators Philip DeBevoise and Paul Marino present an overview of video projects whose creators use the engines from various video games to create new stories, or......
Britton

Follow Me to Certain Death: An Evening with Vanessa Renwick

Holly Willis
In a program of six short films and videos, Portland-based filmmaker and curator Vanessa Renwick invites us to contemplate death, and to do so with a proper mix of wrenching horror and ecstatic wonder. In Britton, South Dakota (2003), Renwick pairs 1930s archival footage of children in a small Midwestern......
From Lewis Klahrs Two Minutes to Zero

L.A. for New York

Holly Willis
Lewis Klahr lifts the heavy, creaking door behind his Los Feliz house, flooding a cluttered garage with afternoon light. “It’s like It Happened One Night,” he says. “Janie works over there, where it’s neater, and I work over here.” He gestures toward an old Steenbeck flatbed editing table, and beyond......
Photo by Ryan Trecartin

Ryan Trecartin

Holly Willis
Dazzling color, feverish pacing, superimpositions that boast a sense of the ethereal and dialogue that could have been pieced together from IM fragments all make Ryan Trecartin’s 40-minute video, A Family Finds Entertainment, a testament to the possibilities of a next-gen digital aesthetic. It’s psychedelic and ecstatic and delirious, a......
From No Animals Were Hurt

Peter Brinson's Math Media

Holly Willis
At the very moment I write this, Peter Brinson’s online biopic of inventor Alan Turing is 33 percent its proper length. That’s because since early January, when the site with the video was launched, there have been 17,044 viewers, each one unlocking and revealing a single frame in the video’s......

Signal to Noise: Fikret Atay

Holly Willis
The three videos at the Hammer Museum by Fikret Atay, who was born in 1976 in a small Kurdish city near the border of Iraq, focus on boys who refashion the world around them to their own ends. In the seven-and-a-half-minute Tinica (2004), a young man arranges a semicircle of......
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in This Short Life: Britta Sjögren in Person

Holly Willis
The stippled feathers of a dead blackbird nestled in a bed of leaves and the long, white fingers of a piano player in close-up are just two of the many evocative visual details in Britta Sjögren’s graceful second feature, In This Short Life. Shot in black-and-white 16 mm, with languid......

Defining the Undefinable

Holly Willis
Each year as the Sundance Film Festival ends, it’s subjected to scrutiny — too many people, not enough tickets, too much glamour, not enough soul. Repeat attendees wistfully recall the early days, and everybody, both in Park City and beyond, has something to say about whether or not the festival......
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Atomic Billboards

Holly Willis
In the early 1950s in Yucca Flats, Nevada, the Federal Civil Defense Administration built a small neighborhood of standard colonial houses, peopled them with mannequins and then blew them up with atomic bombs. Pictures of the houses midblast show them bending, folding inward and collapsing in a blur of wind......