For movement, against reproduction. 

Times and rhythms of avant-garde cinema.

Since the very beginning of cinema, the medium divided itself between two main forms of narrative: the documentary tradition, devoted to capture a “real” view of the world, and the fictional story-telling derived from the stage and the written word. By the 1920s a sort of third position arose with the upcoming of the avant-garde filmmakers, interested in embracing a non-naturalistic, intensely fabricated imagery but maintaining a non-fictional, first-person approach to their themes and visual motifs. Believers in the concept of bringing art closer to daily life, these films insisted on a subjective vision capable of subverting the commercial modes of production and techniques.

Taking time and rhythm (aka montage) as a key problem in the aesthetic development of a new kind of moving image, this online six-week class aims to trace the evolution of a new way to achieve new temporal realities outside the traditional conventions, from the early 20th Century to our times. Most of the classes will be joined by renowned artists working in the field of experimental cinema, who will share with us not only their work but their creative processes, technical insights and reflections on how to rethink the possibilities of image-making today.

Students of all levels are welcome.

  • Modality of the class: Online via Zoom

 
from $372.00

About the Instructor:

Pablo Marín is a filmmaker, translator and writer. As an independent researcher and curator, he has presented programs on Argentinean cinema in the United States, Canada, Spain, Austria, Finland and Switzerland. He has translated books by Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage and John Waters, among others, and his volume on Argentine experimental cinema, Una luz revelada. El cine experimental argentino, was published in 2022.

Marín teaches at LAV (Madrid), Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastian), Chavón (Santo Domingo) and as a guest professor he has given seminars and workshops at Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film (Vienna), Labor Berlin, LIFT (Toronto), Zumzeig (Barcelona) and the Universidad del cine (Buenos Aires).

Among his films, Resistfilm (2014) won the best Avant-Garde Film at Filmadrid, while Trampa de luz (2021) was awarded the Principal Online Prize of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. His latest work, Materia Vibrante (2024) had its US premiere at the 2024 New York Film Festival.

Still frames: Materia Vibrante
© Pablo Marín

About the guest artists:

Still frame: House and Universe
© Antoinette Zwirchmayr

Antoinette Zwirchmayr was born in Salzburg and lives and works in Vienna. She graduated in Visual Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, in Romance Philology from the University of Vienna and in Artistic Photography and Independent Film from the Friedl Kubelka School. Her more than twenty films have been presented at numerous festivals such as Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, FID Marseille, Viennale, Media City Film Festival, FICUNAM and have been granted with several awards and fellowships. Her work has also been shown in group exhibitions at Belvedere Vienna, Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz, Cercle Cité, Luxembourg, Salone degli Incanti, Trieste, MUMOK Vienna, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris and McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco.

Still frame: Observando el cielo
© Jeanne Liotta

Jeanne Liotta was born in New York City. She makes films and other cultural ephemera such as music videos, photographs, live projection performances, works on paper and an occasional object at an Emersonian intersection of art, science, and natural philosophy. Her film Observando El Cielo was voted one of the top films of the decade by The Film Society of Lincoln Center, was Artforum's Best Films of the Year and won the Tiger Award for Short Films at Rotterdam. She participated in the Whitney Biennial in 2006 and has taught at The New School, the San Francisco Art Institute, The Museum School Boston, Bard College and is Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her work is collected by The Museum of Modern Art, The Austrian Film Museum, The European Media Arts Collection, The New York Public Library, Harvard, and Duke Universities.


Still frame: earthearthearth
© Daïchi Saïto

Daïchi Saïto is a Japanese-born film artist who divides his time between Ithaca, New York, and Montréal, where he co-founded the artist film collective Double Negative. His work explores the relationship between the corporeal phenomena of vision and the materiality of film, fusing formal investigations of frame and juxtaposition with sensual, poetic expressions. His films have been presented in museums, galleries, cinematheques, and major international festivals worldwide and are held in the permanent collections of the Academy Film Archive, the Austrian Film Museum, the Slovenian Cinematheque, and the University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center. He taught film at Binghamton, Concordia, San Antonio de los Baños and currently at Ithaca College. He is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Film-Video.

Still frame: Projector obscura
© Peter Miller

Peter Miller was born in Burlington, Vermont. He is an artist specializing in film and photography based in Essen, Germany and Paris, France. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and apprenticed to be a silversmith. His film and photographic works are preoccupied with magic and generally investigate the phenomena of the cinema and its constituent, irreducible elements: lens, light, flicker, audience, projection, etc. His works are in numerous private collections as well as public collections such as the Centre Pompidou and SFMOMA, and have been screened at festivals including the Berlinale, Viennale and the Toronto, London and Rotterdam International film festivals. Since 2018 is Professor for photography and time-based media at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany.

If your desired tuition option is unavailable, please email info@penumbrafoundation.org and we will do our best to accommodate you. If the entire class is sold out, we can add you to the waitlist.

In most cases, our registration deadline is 24 hrs prior to the start time of a workshop/class. If there is a workshop/class you would like to register for but it is not listed or if you have questions, please contact griffin@penumbrafoundation.org.

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