AMIA UvA

Presentation by Will DiGravio about his work on George Kuchar which was moderated by our board members Sam Yang and Minna Li

Please join us at Eye Filmmuseum (Cinema 4) on Saturday, April 15, at 10:30am for “Come to Life: Movement on Screen,” featuring a screening of:

FX Messerschmidt (René Hazekamp, 1988)
Applied Pressure (Kelly Sears, 2018)
Bala II (Janica Draisma, 1993)
Dust Poetry (Nan Wang, 2014)
Total Body Workout (Keixin Hao, 2021)

Come to Life presents three films from the Eye collection and two videos in order to explore different approaches to conveying movement and stasis on screen. Through camera work, editing techniques, and subject matter, the films and videos consider movement as a source of agency for their subjects.

While Janica Draisma’s Bala II uses rhythmic editing to construct a kinetic choreography of aquatic street sweepers, René Hazekamp’s FX Messerschmidt deploys dramatic camera movement to animate the static objects of a museum display. Kelly Sears likewise complicates the conventions of instructional photography as she explores the somatic entanglements of trauma in Applied Pressure. In Nan Wang’s 16mm work Dust Poetry, fine particles are layered with organic material in a kind of direct animation technique. Actively engaging the audience in a series of head-to-toe movements, Kexin Hao’s Total Body Workout draws on the history of mass gymnastics and exercise routines in Asia, the Soviet Union and the United States to reconfigure the past in a totalized bodily experience.

Find more information and tickets at the link in bio.

Note: The final film in this program involves audience participation and movement.

For our friends from INA (institut national de l'audiovisuel ) we have screened two documentary by the Dutch filmmaker, Otto Schuurman. ‘Sacrifice Area’ and ‘Pacific: Paradise in Pain’ are two iconic activist films from the 1980s. After the screening, we also conducted an Q&A with Bruce Gray, who was a close collaborator Schuurman.

Special thanks to for letting us screen these two fantastic documentaries for tonight’s audience and our friends from INA.