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Wavelengths 5: Blue Mantle

Wavelengths 5: Blue Mantle

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The ocean has always been a mythic source of life, as much as it has a legendary call to death: A programme of paradoxical beauty and the possibility of extinction.

Films in Wavelengths 5: Blue Mantle

Atlantiques

Mati Diop

Winner of International Film Festival Rotterdam's Best Short Film Award, Atlantiques is by Mati Diop, who recently starred in Claire Denis's 35 Rhums. Atlantiques recounts the oddysey of Senegalese friends who attempt a life-threatening boat crossing. Melancholic and mysterious, the film urgently and elegantly addresses the perils of illegal migration.

One

Eve Heller

A single roll of Super 8mm to capture the mystery in the everyday, blown up to 35mm.

753 McPherson St.

Kevin Jerome Everson

Life may not go on but careful work continues at this Mansfield Ohio address.

blue mantle

Rebecca Meyers

An ode to the sea, where beauty and death often meet.

Slaveship

T. Marie

The apocalyptic sublime of J. M. W. Turner’s 1840 masterpiece The Slave Ship, with its firery conflagration and strewn debris amid wild waters, is the source for T. Marie’s time-based pixel painting-film Slaveship.

Hell Roaring Creek

Lucien Castaing-Taylor

A quiet, ravishing pastoral to restore the senses. A shepherdess guides a parade of sheep across Montana's Hell Roaring Creek; a quotidian ritual that exists out of time.

screening times

    • Sunday September 12
    • 9:15:00 PM
    • JACKMAN HALL - AGO

Note: indicates Premium Screening.

official description

Google Earth® is sort of terrifying, with its swooping, dizzying zooms allowing us to travel
across the globe in seconds as if it were but a seismic ball of blue, with intermittent mass. That blue mantle of gushing ocean has always been a mythic source of life, as much as it is a legendary call to death.

The recent devastating oil spill in the Gulf of New Mexico, with its Turneresque images of death at sea, perfectly encapsulate this paradox, as does the mysterious and melancholic Atlantiques by Mati Diop. Like a feverish dream, a young man speaking in hushed tones describes his high-seas odyssey to friends huddled around a campfire in Dakar. As he describes “the sea that never ends,” his attempts at clandestine immigration are rendered real and fictive. Faint illuminations cast through an ornate gateway to a train platform in an abandoned station create an elegiac stained-glass effect in Eve Heller’s One, the first roll of film she ever shot, recently revisited and blown-up to 35mm. Resuscitated archival footage of a tragic event is met with contemporary prophecy in Kevin Jerome Everson’s enigmatic 753 McPherson St., a temporary resting place where death is routinely encountered.

Rebecca Meyers’s Blue Mantle is an ode to the sea rife with reference and influence, from Marcel Broodthaers to Courbet’s crashing waves. Intercutting between the mesmeric sea and various representations of the deep, Meyers crafts an ambitious treatise buoyed by the breadth of its cast. The apocalyptic sublime of J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 masterpiece The Slave Ship is the source for T. Marie’s time-based pixel painting-film Slaveship. A searing abstraction with a hot palette updates the classic scene in reference to today’s skewed social hierarchy.

Hell Roaring Creek is a stream in Montana with a wild name, and also the latest film by experimental anthropologist Lucien Castaing-Taylor. A static camera records the coming of day as a shepherdess leads her flock of sheep across the titular stream in a painterly pastoral to restore the senses through a tradition of old.

Andréa Picard

director bio

Mati Diop was born in Paris and is an actor and filmmaker. She joined the Pavillon artistic laboratory of the Palais de Tokyo in 2006 and the National Studio of Contemporary Arts Fresnoy in 2007. Her short films include Last Night (04) and 1000 suns (08).

Eve Heller studied film at S.U.N.Y. Department of Media Studies at Buffalo and New York University. Her films include Last Lost (96), Astor Place (97), Her Glacial Speed (01), Behind the Soft Eclipse (04) and Ruby Skin (05).

Kevin Jerome Everson has completed numerous features and short 16mm, 35mm and digital films. His previous works includes Spicebush (05), Cinnamon (05), The Golden Age of Fish (08) and Erie (10).

Rebecca Meyers was born in New York and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Her films include how to sleep (winds) (00), night light and weeping (01), glow in the dark (january - june) (02), things we want to see (04) and lions and tigers and bears (06).

T. Marie is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has screened at M.I.T. and the Portland Art Center.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor was born in Liverpool and is an anthropologist and artist working in film, video, and photography. His films include Made in USA (90), In and Out of Africa (92), Sweetgrass (09) and The High Trail (10).

     
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