by Su FRIEDRICH
2020 / Video / color / silent / 1S / 2' 00 |
A two-minute film made for a commission by the Wexner Center. A portrait of the block on which I live, filmed on a sunny late afternoon in May.
“In 1968, a group of French filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker crafted short, quickly made cinematic responses to the political and social upheaval that shook Paris in May of that year. Inspired in part by this project, called CINÉTRACTS, the Wexner Center commissioned 20 short films by filmmakers from around the world.
Wexner Center Film/Video curators David Filipi, Jennifer Lange, and Chris Stults invited artists to capture “the zeitgeist in your own backyard,” in hopes a global portrait would emerge from this index of diverse locales. The project called upon both established and emerging filmmakers to participate.
In line with the Cinétracts ‘68 manifesto, artists were given a set of guidelines with which to work: Films should be two minutes in length, shot in one day, all sound must be native to the footage, and the completed work should indicate the date and location of the production. The COVID-19 pandemic and months of protest in response to police violence against the Black community led many filmmakers to reconsider their original concepts.”
— The Wexner Center