Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Recent Experimental Documentaries

1/15/08 to 2/26/08

An earthwork emerges from underwater; a man sails out to sea and disappears. The history of a glass of milk is chronicled, and the myths of the mainstream media smashed. Speculative, observant, or interrogative, these documentaries manifest the urge to deal with the world-its people, its injustices, its beauty-in diverse strategies and to surprising effect.

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  • Here Is Always Somewhere Else, February 12

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • casting a glance

    • Tuesday, February 26 7:30 pm

    James Benning casts his keenly observant eye for landscape over Robert Smithson's great artistic intervention in the landscape, the Spiral Jetty.

  • Paper Tiger Reads Paper Tiger Television

    • Tuesday, February 19 7:30 pm

    Maria Juliana Byck in Person. It's 7:30 p.m. Do you know where your brains are? The latest communiqué from the pioneering radical media collective Paper Tiger TV mines the organization's archive of bold, sassy DIY activism. With classic Paper Tiger shorts.

  • Here Is Always Somewhere Else

    • Tuesday, February 12 7:30 pm

    Rene Daalder in Person. Daalder seeks the inexplicable in his portrait of Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, who disappeared at sea when he was thirty-three, and whose work has inspired a new generation of artists. With shorts by Ader.

  • F Is for Phony

    • Tuesday, February 5 7:30 pm

    Booksigning and Presentation by Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner. Juhasz and Lerner present films that work the boundary between fact and fiction, from Spanish-American War newsreels through Buñuel's Land Without Bread to works by Mitchell Block and Elisabeth Subrin.

  • we will live to see these things, or, five pictures of what may come to pass

    • Tuesday, January 29 7:30 pm

    Julia Meltzer in Person. The Speculative Archive (Julia Meltzer and David Thorne) provide a perspective on Syria at a time of tension and uncertainty, using an array of disparate approaches to envision the future. With short not a matter of if but when.

  • Milk in the Land: Ballad of an American Drink

    • Tuesday, January 22 7:30 pm

    Milk, long a staple of the American diet, gets a cool, refreshing examination in a film by Ariana Gerstein and Monteith McCollum. Interviews with farmers, activists, and historians, together with a rich array of collaged and animated materials, reveal a contested, unexpected history. With Gerstein's short Alice Sees the Light.

  • Best in the West

    • Tuesday, January 15 7:30 pm

    Maryam Kashani in Person. Kashani catches up with a group of men who left Iran in the 1960s and '70s and made lives for themselves in San Francisco. Interweaving industrial and archival footage with intimate interviews and family portraits, Kashani skillfully negotiates between the personal and the global, individual lives and Iran/U.S. relations.