Event
Beyond Words: The Art of CommunicationPost an Event »
Oddball Films and guest curator/archivist Scotty Slade invite you to Beyond Words: The Art of Communication, a presentation of 16mm films and live poetic performances exploring the need for and the many faces of language.
Although the likes of Plato and Sitting Bull had already postulated as much, it wasn’t until the year 1964 a.d. that the wizard and media theorist Marshall McLuhan finally broke the spell the phonetic alphabet had placed on us with his famous statement, “the medium is the message.” Where we were once free-loving, non-questioning, less than consciously aware-of-its-effects-on-us users of this highly abstract form of symbolic representations of human-created phonemes, McLuhan’s words revealed that behind the curtain of written language was a strange and powerful truth. This terrifying and all too real reality, is at the heart of this program. Because let’s face it, for all we know, The Language of the Bees (1965) might stem from the same primordial linguistic root as our own. The shift from pictographic writing systems, as we see in Pictographs (1957), very well may have contributed to our ongoing and pervasive disconnection from the natural world. And really, are we still like those “blind” and less-than-aware inhabitants of Plato's Cave (1973), mistakenly taking the shadows on the wall for real creatures? Perhaps Oakland poet Mary-Louise Hansen, who will perform her epic poem, Walking in the Dreamland, as the live score to this highly bizarre portrayal of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave might help awaken us to the potential of reality! Drawn out of the depths of darkness, we shall walk in another dreamland, lugging our Baggage (1969) through the streets of San Francisco with the incredible mime Mamako Yoneyama, in this travelogue of the speaking body. And perhaps after this mix of dreamlike fantasy-land far-outedness, a dose of reality is in order, with an intimate home movie of a deaf family on summer vacation from the 1940's. Which reminds us that language of the hands and body is more universal than we may at first glance realize, and perhaps no film demonstrates this better than Hand Sig nals for Agriculture (1976), an elegant and comical dance of farmers and their machines. And perhaps no sonic score could better augment this gem than a live performance of Dada artist, Kurt Schwitters’s, Ursonate! Let us not forget, however, that no matter how conscious or unconscious we are to our speaking bodies, certain, Invisible Walls (1969), it turn out, are exactly 18 inches from and around our bodies, forming what is commonly known, as “the comfort zone” and about which we are highly expressive. To cap off our meditation on the written word, a quick lesson in High Speed Reading (1950s), and finally, to put a real period on this film screening about language, Maya Deren’s A Study in Choreography for the Camera (1945). So come, discuss, engage, and speak with all your speaking body!