Black Zero - summer release day
Hi all,
Our home video label Black Zero has released three new blu-ray discs of essential Canadian experimental films, as of this morning — Christine Lucy Latimer: Fragile Systems, Richard Kerr: Crisis Collision Resolve, and Larry Kardish’s underground feature Slow Run (1968). As always, these discs feature new video essays in the same voice and style as the Art & Trash series. Each disc is available for $35 CAD, and is packed dense with contextualizing bonus features. We produce these discs in an edition of 1000, so get them while you can!
The films and videos of Christine Lucy Latimer defy their containers: they reveal the fragile systems underlying media, press the boundaries of image-making machines, and embrace the faults and frailties of vision. Almost all of Latimer’s work is silent, but nothing is truly silent: Latimer’s images recall the hums, tweets and mechanical moans of the technology with which she made them. Her work began long after most of the formats she employs had become obsolete. Refusing the universal nostalgia of the antique camera and the antique image, Latimer’s works are undeniably present-facing and playfully disobedient, ethereal, and abstract. Supremely self-conscious yet mystical, they are seances that draw out the ghosts in the machine.
This disc collects 17 of Latimer's projects, spanning 2002 to 2021.
Mosaic (2002)
Ghostmeat (2003)
The Bridge View (2003)
Over {Past:Future} Sight (2006-07)
(Just Beyond the Screen) The Universe - As We Know It - is Ending (2008)
Focus (2009)
Fruit Flies (2010)
The Pool (2011)
The Magik Iffektor (2011)
Nationtime (2013)
Lines Postfixal (2013)
Jane's Birthday (2013)
Physics and Metaphysics in Modern Photography (2014)
C2013 (2014)
Still Feeling Blue about Colour Separation (2015)
House Pieces (2017)
Tender (2021)
SPECIAL FEATURES
Digital masters approved by artist Christine Lucy Latimer
Dreaming in Abstraction, a new interview with Christine Lucy Latimer
14 additional project-specific interviews, throughout the disc
Fragile Systems, a video essay by Stephen Broomer
Select audio commentaries with the artist and her family
Liner notes by artist and curator Meganelizabeth Diamond
Through the course of the 1980s, Canadian artist-filmmaker Richard Kerr had gradually moved towards an ‘accelerated cinema,’ an imagistic cinema of movement, montage and aggressive sound design. Kerr’s work in this ‘accelerated cinema’ became increasingly total at the same time that he became invested in the model of the ‘teacher-practitioner,’ collaborating directly with his students and working with simple, accessible tools.
This collection gathers thirteen of Kerr’s films made between 1991 and 2017, chronicling an important phase in his creative evolution. Crisis Collision Resolve serves as a portrait of an artist pushing the limits of the moving image, while pitching a dynamic dialogue between pedagogy, collective action, and personal vision.
plein air etude (1991)
plein air (1991)
the machine in the garden (1991)
i was a strong man until i left home (2000)
pictures of sound (2000)
collage d'hollywood (2003)
hollywood décollage (2003)
a universe of broken parts (2007)
action : study (2009)
de mouvement (2009)
house arrest (2012)
morning ... came a day early (2014)
wholly holy (2017)
SPECIAL FEATURES
Newly restored digital masters approved by director Richard Kerr
Machines of Cinema, a new interview with Richard Kerr
The Dissolving Carousel, a video essay on Kerr's demi-monde by Canadian filmmaker Stephen Broomer
Liner notes by film scholar Bart Testa
Slow Run is a raw, lyrical portrait of New York City as seen through the eyes of a young Canadian exile. The filmmaker, Larry Kardish, at 23 years old, had made his first and only film as a candid love letter to the city, a litany of fascinations and complaints. Kardish blends dreamlike street photography, intimate portraiture, and a rhapsodic monologue performed by the filmmaker's fictional surrogate, a young Canadian ex-pat (Saul Rubinek in his first film role). The narration accounts the lives and relationships of a group of young Bohemians, and unfolds in parallel to the imagery rather than in dialogue with it, creating a tension between voice and vision, presence and distance.
When Slow Run was released, Jonas Mekas asked, "is Larry Kardish a lyrical realist?" It is a film of such contraditions: romantic and disenchanted, spontaneous and composed. Slow Run captures a fleeting moment in time—New York in its grand beauty, as seen by an alien.
SPECIAL FEATURES
A new digital restoration approved by filmmaker Larry Kardish
From Sandy Hill to Ottawa, a new interview with Larry Kardish
Blind Alleys: Slow Run and the Tropic of Manhattan, a video essay by Stephen Broomer
Liner notes by poet and filmmaker David Spittle
English subtitles
On Canada Day, July 1, we will be doing a free online release of Rob Fothergill’s Countdown Canada (1970), a speculative docudrama about Canadian sovereignty in decline. In addition to a new 2K scan of the filmmaker’s personal 16mm print (in admittedly rough shape), we will be releasing a video introduction by the filmmaker (recorded in 2017) and a new video essay. That video essay, “The Invasion Will Be Televised,” is also a preview of a new monthly video essay series, Northern Light, which will be coming this fall as part of a new partnership. More information coming on that soon.
In order to support what we do here at Art & Trash, and at Black Zero, consider pledging support to our Patreon!
Till next time!
Stephen Broomer // Art & Trash