Film series: Experimental Lens

image from Cry When It Happens // Llora Cuando Te Pase showing as part of Emotional Cartographies: The Films of Laida Lertxundi

Cornell Cinema has been proudly presenting artist films and experimental cinema since its inception, often with filmmakers visiting to discuss their work.

In Thomas Heise’s monumental essay film, Heimat is a Space in Time, the filmmaker manages to distill all of Germany’s past 100 years of history into a personal one, told through the copious letters and remembrances of several generations of Heise’s family. From World War I and the complexities of the Weimar Republic, to the Holocaust, and on to a divided Cold War Germany and its reunification, Heise reads from his personal archive and weaves together a remarkable epic of history.

Spanish filmmaker Luis Macias will perform a live projector performance, Your Eyes are Spectral Machines, on March 20, incorporating both live manipulation of multiple 16mm projectors, as well as 35mm slide projectors. Luis Macias is a self-stylized image recycler, and is a co-founder of Crater Lab, an independent film laboratory in Barcelona.

Emotional Cartographies, a program of work by Spanish filmmaker Laida Lertxundi, features the landscapes of the Basque Country and California: the two places Lertxundi has equally called home for more than a decade. The screening will feature an introduction by Patricia Keller (Romance Studies), and is cosponsored by the Dept of Romance Studies.

Finally, Cornell Cinema welcomes curator Irina Leimbacher, who will present the program Appearances and Disappearances, dedicated to the late filmmaker Jonathan Schwartz. The program features seven of his poetic films, combining cutout collage, lyrical camerawork, and elliptical editing, contemplating fatherhood, nature, and culture.

The latter three programs are cosponsored with the Cornell Council for the Arts.