Videoteca

location_onCambridge, MassachusettspublicUS

De Humani Corporis Fabrica 2023 star_border 7.3
An extraordinary adventure through the interior of the human body; or the discovery of an alien landscape of unprecedented beauty.

Expedition Content 2022
Constructed from the audio archive of the 1961 Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea: In the encounter with the Hubula people, this work reflects a parallaxing image of the histories of field recording, ethnographic film, and colonialism.

Composite 2017
An experimental documentary that takes as its starting point the police composite sketch, playing with the sketching process in order to investigate the connections between language, visuality, and memory in our most intimate relationships.

La Libertad 2017 star_border 5.3
Produced out of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, Laura Huertas Millán's quietly masterful La Libertad follows a group of matriarchal weavers in Mexico, formally mimicking the examination of an object through subtle shifts in scale and space.

Caniba 2017 star_border 5.6
Caniba is a fresco about flesh and desire. It reflects on the discomfiting significance of cannibalism in human existence through the prism of one Japanese man, Issei Sagawa, and his mysterious relationship with his brother, Jun Sagawa.

Somniloquies 2017 star_border 7.6
Works with sound recordings of Dion McGregor, who became famous for talking in his sleep.

Ho Chi Minh Kim Chi 2016 star_border 5.5
The sights and sounds of a kimchi factory in Vietnam.

An Aviation Field 2016 star_border 7.5
Moving and mysterious, Joana Pimenta’s An Aviation Field juxtaposes the natural and the manmade as it links the great utopian modernist project of Brasilia to the volcanic crater in Fogo, Cape Verde, and offers speculative futures for a troubling past.

Ah Humanity! 2015
“Ah humanity! reflects on the fragility and folly of humanity in the age of the Anthropocene. Taking the 3/11/11 disaster of Fukushima as its point of departure, it evokes an apocalyptic vision of modernity, and our predilection for historical amnesia and futuristic flights of fancy. Shot on a telephone through a handheld telescope, at once close to and far from its subject, the audio composition combines excerpts from Japanese genbaku film soundtracks, audio recordings from scientific seismic laboratories, and location sound.”—Ernst Karel, Verena Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor

Single Stream 2014 star_border 5
Single Stream explores a recycling facility in the Boston area, where hundreds of tons of refuse are sorted daily. Blurring the line between observation and abstraction, Single Stream plunges the viewer into the steady flow of the plant and the waste it treats, examining the material consequences of our society's culture of excess.

Manakamana 2013 star_border 7.5
A documentary about a group of pilgrims who travel to Nepal to worship at the legendary Manakamana temple.

Yumen 2013 star_border 7
Set in a quasi-ghost town that once thrived with oil in China's arid northwest, Yumen is a haunting, fragmented tale of hungry souls, restless youth, a wandering artist and a lonely woman, all searching for human connection among the town's crumbling landscape. One part "ruin porn", one part "ghost story”, and entirely shot on 16mm, the film brings together performance art, narrative gesture, and social realism not only to play with convention and defy genre, but also to pay homage to a disappearing life-world and a fading medium.

Leviathan 2012 star_border 6.6
An experimental portrait of the North American commercial fishing industry through the lens of GoPro cameras placed on a fishing vessel off the coast of New England.

Hell Roaring Creek 2010
A static camera records the coming of day as a flock of sheep cross the titular stream in a painterly pastoral to restore the senses through a tradition of old.

Sweetgrass 2009 star_border 6.8
An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern-day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana's breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture, revealing a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.

Terrace of the Sea 2009
Filmed in an unofficial Palestinian Bedouin camp established in 1948 on a stretch of beach north of Tyre, in South Lebanon, Terrace of the Sea uses a collection of family photographs taken over three generations as a prism through which to reflect on memory, loss and history. An anthropologist, author (her most recent book is "Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile) and filmmaker, Diana Allan documents the experiences of the Ibrahim family, who have been making a living as fishermen for generations. The film looks at their relationship to work and to the physical environment and how they've persevered in this ‘temporary' home. Produced at Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, Terrace of the Sea is a haunting work, a meditation on the process of memory and on the distances between photography and film, land and sea and - between seeing and being seen.

chronotope 1 2009
Created as a looping gallery piece, chronotope 1 comments on time, space, context and contingency and asks the viewer to consider a cow standing amidst the rushing traffic of a Kathmandu street.

Demolition 2008 star_border 9
"If the old doesn't go, the new never comes" recites a teenager hanging out near a demolition site in the center of Chengdu, the Sichuan capital in western China. In Demolition, filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki deconstructs the transforming cityscape by befriending the migrant laborers on the site and documenting the honest, often unobserved, human interactions, yielding a wonderfully patient and revealing portrait of work and life in the shadow of progress and economic development.

Still Life 2007
"The Arab governments pushed us out of our homes... I was twelve years old… I've been here for 60 years." A beautiful, poignant documentary, Still Life examines the effect a collection of personal photos showing life in Palestine before the 1948 displacement have on an elderly Palestinian fisherman living in exile in Lebanon. The importance of place and memory in preserving a people's history are crucial to Diana Allan's illuminating documentary. In, Said Ismael Otruk, a Palestinian man born in Acre in the 1930s, recalls his childhood and the halcyon days of his youth. His memories, not always accurate, so he relies on the photographs he managed to take with him. They are images of young boys, of the port, of fishing boats and the sea. On one, he reads a note he wrote many years ago: "Acre and Said in the Golden Age."

Songhua 2007
In northeastern China the Songhua River flows west from the border of Russia to the city of Harbin, where four million people depend on it as a source of water. Songhua is a portrait of the varying people that gather where the river meets the city, and an ethnographic study of the intimate ways in which they play and work.