MAJOR! follows the life and campaigns of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a 73- year-old Black transgender woman who has been fighting for the rights of trans women of color for over 40 years. Miss Major’s personal story and activism for transgender civil rights, from mobile outreach and AIDS prevention to fighting the prison industrial complex, intersects LGBT struggles for justice and equality from the 1960s to today. She is a veteran of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion and was incarcerated at Attica months after the 1971 Uprising. Most recently, Miss Major has served as the executive director of the San Francisco-based Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP), a grassroots organization advocating for trans women of color in and outside of prison that is led by trans women of color. Miss Major’s extraordinary life and personal story is one of resilience and celebration in a community that has been historically traumatized and marginalized. While mainstream gay rights and marriage equality dominate the headlines, Miss Major’s life is a testament to the fierce survivalism and every day concerns of transgender women of color, who so often live in the margin of the already marginalized.
Author: Fara
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Periwinkle Cinema: MAJOR!
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Other Cinema: SONIC ODDITIES (INCREDIBLY STRANGE MUSIC)
An *expanded* version of the 16mm show that sold out the Roxie a couple months ago, this cult-music compilation–-in addition to that mountain of sublimely ridiculous performance—in fact doubles down on its fanboy gambit, topping it with 3 sonic circus rings of particular interest: Mid-Century Anomalies, Black Music of the ‘70s, and Experimental Turntablsm. And amongst all the sideshows, the Retro, the Camp, there’s still some hearty Avant-Garde—Sun Ra, Harry Partch, a 24-year-old Michael Tilson Thomas on prepared piano! AND Marie Osmond reciting Schwitters, George Clinton hailing the Mothership, the Dead Boys at CBGB’s!! PLUS Spike Jones, Liberace, Tiny Tim, Village People, Heino, Cpt. Beefheart, the Residents, Christian Marclay, GG Allin, Hawaiian exotica, Soundies, Scopitones, tons more…and beer for a buck! -
Matters of Practices/Actions/Doings
Light Field presents:
Fugue (2015, 8 min, 16mm, sound, b/w)
Fugue is a formal and physical experiment in order to understand the relationship between image, sound, and movement. The movements and the setting are informed by motion studies that were conducted and filmed at the beginning of the 20th century with the aim to use filmmaking for analyzing motions of manual mechanized labor as well as concepts of biomechanics that elaborate the relation between body and mind as a form of actor’s training. In the film, the movements that are recorded are also printed on the part of the film strip that is read as optical sound by the light sensitive sensor of the projector. What you hear is what you see. The image recurs as movement and the movement recurs as sound.
Matters of Practices/Actions/Doings (2016, 25 min, performance)Through an exploration of movement and sound, rhythm and physicality in the material film, I examine the relation between sound and physicality and sound and the body of film. I analyze the technical procedure of movement of film and movement of the body, and the links between those sounds and movements in order to understand both the actual and active part of movement as a component of the film material as well as the consequences the material has for social and physical bodies.
Bio:
Kerstin Schroedinger is an artist working with video, sound and text. Her historiographic practice questions the means of film production, historical continuities and ideological certainties of representation. Her films and curatorial practice are often collaborative.
Recent films include Fugue (Film, 2015), as well as Rainbow’s Gravity (Video, 2014), Red, she said (Video, 2011) both with Mareike Bernien. Her work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MIT List Visual Arts Center Boston (2016), FMAC Mediathèque Genve (2016), The School of Kyiv – 2nd Kiev Biennale 2015, Forum Expanded of Berlinale, Short ٍFilm Festival Oberhausen, International Film Festival Toronto, amongst others.
with:
The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough – Peter Rose (1981 / 33 minutes / 16mm / color / sound)“A powerfully formal, analytic inquiry into the nature of vision and cinema… painfully beautiful images of mysterious events and things that split, multiply, migrate and quiver with a hallucinatory vibrance… a rich fabric interlacing the metaphysical with the ironical.” – Sally Banes, The Village Voice
Light Field is a new artist-run film festival located in the San Francisco Bay Area showcasing experimental/avant-garde films with an international focus.