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Tuesday, Nov 9, 1999
Lacerated Histories: Recent Experimental Films
Abraham Ravett's most recent film, The March, is composed of a series of informal conversations with his mother over a thirteen-year period. They center around one topic, her recollections of the 1945 Death March from Auschwitz. His desire to know is met with her urge to please him. Yet her hesitations and the often raw sound quality also serve to suggest the pain and cost of remembering. Bill Brown's hometown, Lubbock, Texas, was also the home of Buddy Holly. In Hub City, Brown's homespun theories regarding crash sites, accident trajectories, and the traces left by mysterious events are linked with a contemplative examination of his town. Luis Recoder's projection performances involve multiple strands of the same film threaded through a projector. In the enigmatic Magenta, an educational film on bandaging wounds becomes a soothing moment in which multiple, anonymous hands reach out to comfort one. A piece of footage found on the street was the impetus for okay bye bye, Rebecca Baron's personal meditation on the Cambodian genocide of the late 1970s. It is both about her attempts to understand her own experience (personal history in the making) and about the difficulty of grasping the incomprehensible horror of genocide (history that is still being written).-Kathy Geritz
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