Hampshire Film Professors and Alums Screen Works on Place and Placemaking
Professor of Film and Photography Abraham Ravett and Five College Professor Emerita of Film and Video Baba Hillman join alums Emily Drummer 09F and Josh Weissbach 04F for “Up and Down the River,” an event taking place at the Montague Common Hall on Saturday, October 15.
The program will include 11 short films by local filmmakers living along the Connecticut River, most of which will be work shot and screened on celluloid. Thematically, the artists were asked to think about place and placemaking. A Q&A with filmmakers will follow the screening.
Abraham Ravett’s Łódź:22592 (HD. 22:06. 2019) focuses on a recently published book by Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario profiling the resurrected photographs made clandestinely by Henryk Ross (1910–91) in Poland's Lodz ghetto, which inspired the filmmaker to wonder once again how his father survived the turbulent WW II years in Poland. Filmed in the U.S. and Poland.
Baba Hillman’s Decroux’s Garden (16mm, color, silent. 4:00. 2012) tells the story of a return after many years to the home of a beloved teacher. Hillman says, “I’m interested in how moves between memory and return are lived on the body, how return to a place that was once beloved changes the shape that the tongue takes, the rhythm of the gait, the rhythm of the breath, how falling into memory is like entering another body.”
Emily Drummer’s Histories of Simulated Intimacy (16mm transferred to HD. 11:00. 2017) is a sensory essay film that investigates the gaps in time and space produced by the technological mediation of human love and desire. The film explores polarities such as public and private, nature and culture, near and far, bios and techne, producing a space in which technologies of intimacy, separated by historical measurements of time, can coalesce in perpetuity.
Josh Weissbach’s To all Those (Super 8 on 16mm. 6:48. 2020) shows a city symphony in miniature, dedicated to anyone who has gotten lost in thought while stuck on the midwinter train, to all that unfolds in those private reveries.
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