Tales of Sound and Vision

The five-program series "Troubling the Image: New + Restored Experimental Cinema" features an eclectic and wide-ranging group of works that celebrate the vibrancy of experimental and almost-experimental cinema from near and far, now and then.

Directly and obliquely, narratives are enacted, told, sung, and implied. Keewatin Dewdney’s Wildwood Flower (1971) is a simple, lovely imagining of the Carter Family’s eponymous song. Lois Patiño’s ghost-like smugglers haunt a phantasmagorical Portuguese mountain region in the cryptic Night without Distance (2015). Robert Flaherty’s long-lost film A Night of Storytelling (1935) captures the essence of Irish oral folklore. French-based Iranian filmmaker Arash Nassiri visualizes a conspiracy-driven monologue with a hallucinatory trip through the Paris catacombs in Darwin Darwah (2016). In Edward R. Feil’s The Inner World of Aphasia (1968) medical instructional film becomes a psychological horror film when a nurse becomes the patient.

(75 min., 16mm and 35mm prints courtesy of Harvard Film Archives, the Academy Film Archive, and the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archives)

Curated by Julia Gibbs and Patrick Friel.

Program (75 min.) includes:

Wildwood Flower (Keewatin Dewdney, Canada, 1971, 4 min., 16mm courtesy of Academy Film Archive)
Night Without Distance (Lois Patiño, Spain/Portugal, 2015, 23 min., digital video)
A Night of Storytelling (Robert Flaherty, Ireland, 1935, 12 min., 35mm courtesy of Harvard Film Archive)
Darwin Darwah (Arash Nassiri, France, 2016, 12 min., digital video)
The Inner World of Aphasia (Edward R. Feil, USA, 1968, 24 min., 16mm courtesy of Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive)