TRIBUTE OR TRIBUTARY

A collection of the myriad itineraries and circular wanderings into and about our animals, our loves and our origins, this is a reverent program of aural and visual landscapes by wandering souls revisiting spaces previously created for or consecrated by others.

Films:
Ours Be The Tossing by Mary Billyou
Super 8 and Digital Video, 2005
Running Time 07:00 minutes
“Why sing when nobody hears?” No response is made to the letters read in this film of lonely island landscapes. Meetings are imagined, but are never realized. Intimate yearnings and unknown bliss intermix over flickering home movies.

Rundown 1969, a film by Bob Fiori
16mm, color, with voice-over by Nancy Holt
Running Time 13:00 minutes
A film that documents images of Smithson's entropic site
specific pours, Asphalt Rundown, Rome, Italy, 1969; Concrete Pour, Chicago, November 1969; Glue Pour, Vancouver, January 1969, through the use of
"stills" and filmed footage. This film was completed in 1993.

Asphalt Rundown, Rome, 1969, was Smithson's first "flow", situated in an abandoned and mundane section of a gravel and dirt quarry in Rome. A large dumptruck released a load of asphalt down a gutted and gullied cliff already marked by time. Smithson's flow works, in Nancy Holt's words are "entropy made visible". Aside from Smithson's interest in working outside of the gallery walls, he also had a strong interest in Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionist works. It has been noted by Robert Hobbs that Smithson takes the drip away from the canvas and monumentalizes it in a slow ooze. Pollock, who moved the canvas off the easel and onto the floor understood the monumental gesture in his "action paintings". Smithson, in Hobbs words, realized his own action painting outdoors. The flows were in some sense an homage to and walk away from the expressionist mark.

Landscape Annihilates Consciousness by Sterling Ruby
Digital Video, 2002
Running Time 11:40 minutes
A celebrated landscape painter hypnotizes through brush stroke and voice.

To The South Was 72 by Sabine Gruffat
Super 8 and CGI transferred to Digital Video, 2005
Running Time 11:00 minutes
“A personal guided tour of the largest prehistoric city in the New World.” Observations at Gettysburg by Brian Frye
16mm film, 2002.
Running Time 10:00 minutes
"Man is full of sin and nature, and all he does don't bear looking at, and a heap of what he says is a shame and a mawkery. But cant no witness hurt him. Some day something might beat him, but it wont be Satan." -- William Faulkner in "A Fable".
The annual Civil War re-enactment at Gettysburg is one of the largest and best attended in the country. Why Gettysburg? Partly because -- rightly or not -- we take it as the moment at which the outcome of the struggle for America was most in doubt. But truly because the words Lincoln spoke there made of it that moment, framing the struggle in its starkest terms. And so these people who believe in America come to perform its redemption. It is a passion-play, really, a dramatic evocation of the cataclysm in which a young nation expiated its sins in blood, and was reborn.

Things I Forget to Tell Myself by Shelly Silver
Video, b&w and color, sound, 1989.
Running Time 02:00 min. color/sound
A fragmented view of a city provides this poetic examination of disclosing and withholding, what is and isn't seen, and once it is seen, how is it read?

Aspect by Emily Richardson
16mm film. 2004.
Running Time 09:00 min. color/sound
Aspect is filmed in a forest over the period of a year. Using photographic techniques, such as time-lapse and long exposures on single film frames the forest year is condensed into a few minutes. Light, colour and shadow travel across its surface and the film shifts between seeing the trees as trees and seeing the movement of light and shadow abstracting the real environment. Your eye is taken all over the screen with this perpetual movement and change of light and colour. There is no one focal point, - it is continuously changing. As with Redshift and Nocturne, light becomes the main protagonist. In Aspect fragments of unconscious forest sounds, ants in their anthill, the wind across the forest floor, the crack of a twig are reconfigured into an audio piece which articulates the film (and the forest) in an illusive and ambiguous way. Sound: Benedict Drew

Perfidia by Cordelia Swann
Betacam. 2002.
Running Time 13:00 min. color/sound
"A contemporary fable, set in the streets, parks, edifices and firmaments of Paddington and West London, about the day to day life of a woman named Perfidia and her neighbours. Featuring jet trails, a canary, a student, an archbishop, Marlene Dietrich, and the London Fire Brigade." -C.S.
"'Perfidia'...is also the name of a woman with no particular faith or allegiance. As the soundtrack reminds us she is, like Marlene Dietrich in the film 'Morocco', a 'suicide', a 'one way ticket' who has stepped off the ship never to be seen again. In Swann's film, she becomes an 'itinerant and a tourist', immersing herself in a kaleidoscope of London sights and sounds which manage to allude to a multitude of experiences and beliefs but adhere to none in particular. The film is loosely wrapped around a narrative centred on the consequences of a fire at the protagonist's home, but that is just a ruse. She relishes as much the prospect of revisiting those life-saving firemen as ruminating on the angels occupying the different firmaments. For Perfidia, grounded in her immediate environment but always urging her mind to roam beyond, reality is a trigger for metaphor and the imagination." - Sotiris Kyriacou
Narration Suzanne Parke
Camera Cordelia Swann
Additional Camera Marek Budzynski/David Pearce
Sound Recording Rick Balian/David Pearce
Producer/Edit Cordelia Swann/Marek Budzynski

Screening Time: 76:40 minutes
Organized by Sabine Gruffat and Mary Billyou