We offer a look into the expansive, creative mind of Philadelphia composer Gene Coleman (whose new work for The Crossing will be premiered June 15), through a performance of Gene’s brainchild, Ensemble N_JP, featuring Japanese musicians on traditional instruments, focused around the unique art of internationally-acclaimed Toshimaru Nakamura whose engaging soundscapes are created through a no-input mixing board. From Berlin to Tokyo to Chicago and now in Philadelphia, convention meets experiment as Ensemble N_JP explores connections between contemporary and traditional forms of art.

Gene Coleman is a composer, musician and director. Winner of the 2013 Berlin Prize for Music, he has created over 70 works for various instrumentation and media. Innovative use of sound, image, space and time allows Coleman to create work that expands our understanding of the world. Since 2001 his work has focused on the global transformation of culture and music’s relationship with other media, such as architecture, video and dance. He studied painting, music and film making at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where his principle teachers included legendary experimental film artists Stan Brakhage and Ernie Gehr, as well as Robert Snyder (music) and Barbara Rossi (painting).

Coleman formed Ensemble N_JP in 2001 as a vehicle for his on going work with musicians from Japan. Through concert programs, multimedia works and educational projects, the group explores connections between contemporary and traditional forms of art. N_JP is made up of musicians who work with Coleman on a project-by-project basis. It unites outstanding Japanese musicians from the traditional, experimental and contemporary classical music communities, along with artists from Europe and the USA. Ensemble N_JP has performed in a number of important festivals and venues since it’s inception, these include the I-House of Tokyo, Pitt Inn Shinjuku, Kidailack Art House (Tokyo), The House of World Cultures Berlin, The Dresden Society Theater, The Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Lake Forest College, The Chicago World Music Festival, The I-House Philadelphia, The Blurred Edges Festival in Hamburg, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, The Japan Society NY, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The group’s members include:
*Gene COLEMAN (composer, founder and artistic director)
*Rei HOTODA (conductor and assistant artistic director)
*Ko ISHIKAWA (sho {bamboo mouth organ})
*Naomi SATO (sho)
*Aya MOTOHASHI (hichiriki {bamboo oboe})
*Sasamoto TAKESHI (ryuteki {bamboo flute})
*Yumiko TANAKA (shamisen {Japanese banjo})
*Yoko NISHI (koto {Japanese zither})
*Toshimaru NAKAMURA (no input mixing board)
*Kazuhisa UCHIHASHI (guitar and daxophone)

Major support has been provided by:

This completely new economic policy-making team faces a plethora of economic problems/challenges:

• the 2013 budget (still to be approved) with a huge deficit which calls for sharp expenditure cuts
• the social unrest of Summer 2011 and its aftermath
• restraining the long-term increase in housing prices
• stemming the increase in poverty
• increasing labor force participation
• contending with essential improvements in education and health
• reducing Israel’s centralization of wealth and economic influence
• preserving Israel’s international credit rating and improving its position in international economic rankings
• maintaining Israel’s predominance in the global hi-tech sector

Above is a short list of the main challenges facing the new government, to which can be added in general, maintaining Israeli economic growth in a global economy still in crisis and with a high degree of uncertainty.

The 2013 I-Biz lecture tour will present these problems/challenges to our US audiences and suggest ways of dealing with them, including solutions currently being debated by the new government. The lectures are geared to members of the US business community and indeed to all persons involved and/or interested in the welfare of the Israel economy, with the aim of provoking lively discussion.
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Yaacov Fisher, trained in Economics at Cambridge and Harvard universities, is a recognized expert in the field of economic and business information on and analysis of the Israel economy.

As a Senior Economist in the Research Department of the Bank of Israel until 1990, he established economic information systems that are still operative at the central bank, and was responsible for the Bank’s published current economic analysis. From 1990 to 1995, he served as Managing Director of Praedicta Ltd., Israel’s first provider of computerized economic information systems. From 1995 to 2000, he was an independent consultant in the areas of supply, analysis and presentation of Israeli economic and business information, and acted as a consultant to several government ministries.

In 2000, he founded his company I-Biz – Israel Business Information Services Ltd. Today, I-Biz is a leading supplier of information and analysis on the Israeli economy, both at the macro-, industry/sector and regional levels: numbered among I-Biz clients are many important economic, business and financial entities both in Israel and around the world.

In 2006, I-Biz was appointed as the Israeli correspondent to the European Union (EU) Trendchart project on innovation policy, and in 2007 – as Israel’s consultant to the EU Medibtikar project on establishing innovation-based industrial partnerships between Mediterranean basin countries. In 2008, the EU appointed I-Biz as the Israeli correspondent to the ERAWatch project, which analyses national R&D systems, and is currently a member of the official ERAWatch Network..

As of 2006, Yaacov Fisher was invited to join the Board of Directors of Psagot, Israel’s largest investment house, which was purchased in that year by York Capital of New York: he served on the Board until 2010, when York Capital sold Psagot. In 2008, he was appointed as a member of Israel’s Public Advisory Council for Statistics.

Starting in May 2006, Fisher has done 3 major annual lecture tours on the Israeli economy in the US and Canada, speaking to business audiences in more than 20 cities.

“La voce della luna is one of Federico Fellini’s most fascinating and poetic adventures, based on smiles and jokes, and a disillusioned, heartbreaking and worrying vision of the world we live in. Through legends, fairy tales and oddities, Fellini presents his endless universe of symbols, memories, inventions; without ever repeating himself, he hints at all his films. In this last masterpiece, however, Fellini filters every stylistic element, and proposes other original elements, thus unveiling his amazing imagination. We find a a kaleidoscope of characters in a story that is made up of bitter, sweet and merciless traits, humor and melancholy, exuberance and elegance, psychological dreams and a great variety of themes. La voce della luna is a magic, hilarious, surreal and grotesque fairytale. It describes today’s myths and rites (television, fast-food, discos…). It hints at yesterday’s dreams (‘Bassa Padana’ or lower Po river area, the friendly attitude of Emilia-Romagna region’s inhabitants, country fairs, the Gnocchi Day, Miss Flour, jokes … ). If you consider Amarcord as the village of memory, than you can say that La voce della luna gives us a shelter in our contemporary world.” – Vittorio Spiga “La Nazione”, 1 February 1990

IHP would like to extend special thanks to Florence Almozini of BAM and John Ewing of the Cleveland Cinematheque for making this screening possible

The posters are selections on loan from a collection of more than 3800 owned by Stephen Lewis, a long-time activist in the labor movement and a former Treasurer of his union.

Sit under the stars on ICA’s terrace for a special evening of films about artists. Filmmaker James Scott joins us in person to present his films Love’s Presentation (1966) (with David Hockney), Richard Hamilton (1969), and The Great Ice Cream Robbery (1971) (with Claes Oldenburg). Refreshments will be available.

For more information, contact the ICA at 215-898-7108

Sponsored by the Hilarie and Mitchell Morgan Endowment Fund.

Image: Frances Stark, installation view, The Inchoate Incarnate: After a Drawing, Toward an Opera, but Before a Libretto Even Exists, 2009, Wearable fabric costume (astrachan cloth). Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York. Photo by Aaron Igler/Greenhouse Media.

An epic portrait of the eloquent, award-winning Black, lesbian, poet, mother, teacher and activist, Audre Lorde, whose writings – spanning five decades – articulated some of the most important social and political visions of the century. From Lorde’s childhood roots in NYC’s Harlem to her battle with breast cancer, this moving film explores a life and a body of work that embodied the connections between the Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, and the struggle for lesbian and gay rights. At the heart of this documentary is Lorde’s own challenge to “envision what has not been and work with every fiber of who we are to make the reality and pursuit of that vision irresistible.”

Please join us after the screening for a reception for director Michelle Parkerson

Producers’ Forums are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts

So all I am left with are questions. The second that I think I have located some motivation internal to the films themselves– the second that I believe that I have discovered an authorial point of view or perspective, the “key” to understanding his films, which is also always an act of owning, of killing art, it slips away again, leaving me vulnerable, my outstretched hand hanging dead in mid-air.

Open to air strikes, perhaps.

Jacques Rancière: “It is the political relationship that allows one to think the possibility of a political subject(ivity) [le sujet politique], not the other way around.” With this political relationship in mind, I asked Périot via email if I could share with him some of my questions. We corresponded over a two week period. We discussed his films, as well as the relationship between “work” and art, being a coward, and the bourgeois position of filmmaking.

~ Aria Alamalhodaei, artsintern@ihphilly.org

*

Aria Alamalhodaei: Although some of your films are made using digital video, the majority of them are created via compiling and editing numerous, sometimes hundreds or thousands, images together. What about this labor-intensive process appeals to you?

Jean- Gabriel Périot: For sure, the process of work is important in the way I make most of my films. There are many different reasons.

The first reason is that I probably felt guilty to be a filmmaker, an artist, and a privileged person who doesn’t have to really work, as a worker in a factory for example. I felt guilty to not work as people in my family or around me did. So, I started to integrate some onerous rules in my filmmaking, some rules that could be compared to real work. For example, to make a film with 10,000 pictures is real work! To find them, retouch them, classify them, etc. could take one year of everyday work, everyday boring work. I know now that I don’t have to felt guilty to not work but I did feel that way.

The second reason is that there are many films, books, and art pieces that I simply find lazy, and that regularly upset me. I find that some artists or intellectuals don’t work enough. And as I was feeling, and I probably still feel, that as a filmmaker, an artist, I didn’t want, and still don’t want to make lazy stuff. Moreover I make films about politics, history, violence, etc, so it is for me a duty to really think about what I’m doing, to do intensive research, to maximally try to not make historical mistakes or false interpretations.

The last reason, probably the only good one answering to your question, is that to go through labor-intensive processes is necessary to really go deeper in the knowledge of the materials I use, particularly in my archival works. To spend ages watching and questioning the archives I use is the only way to go deeper in the material, to really (or try to) see everything in the pictures or in the footage. The editing also needs a lot of time. There is no one solution, there are many, but only one is the good one. I always think that for editing archives the filmmaker has to respect them, to not constrain them, but to go with them, to follow them. Such an editing process takes a lot of time.

AA: What do you see as the relationship between history and current-day revolutionary struggles, particularly in relation to your use of archival footage?

JGP: I don’t really know. I just know why I needed to make those films about history (or perhaps, and more precisely, about the lack of memories about some historical events).

I remember when at some point in my own political questioning, I felt that I lacked knowledge about history. I was reading books but I wasn’t able to really understand them because I didn’t share the same backgrounds as their authors. So I started to learn about our history. And it really helped me understand a lot of things happening today.

Moreover, the winners always write history. The “official” history. There is no history telling us the stories of the people who fought for liberty. For sure, it is possible to find books or films about progressive/leftist history, but it is not collectively shared, we don’t learn it at school. It is too subversive! It teaches us that there is always someone that can react against destruction. And even if most of us are resigned, if just one resists, humanity could be saved.

So in my work, I just give back what I learned during my research. As any teacher could positively do…

AA: Violence is a consistent theme in your work, one that you continually revisit. Many writers, such as Elaine Scarry, have discussed the incommunicability of pain; others, such as feminist writer Andrea Smith, have described the ways that it is foundational to global capitalism’s power. What is it about violence that makes it a seemingly unanswerable problem, or one that you feel that you must return to?

JGP: For sure violence, violence in general, is for me one of the most complicated question. I don’t know the writings of Andrea Smith, but violence is more than the roots of capitalism, it is at the beginning of humanity. I will never say that man naturally born violent. But every human society is violent. Since ages ago.

I have in my films two different ways to question the topic of violence. I work on the type of violence that we can’t accept the existence of. Violence created by negative ideological powers (racism, imperialism, war etc.) and violence coming from negative human feelings (revenge, jealousy etc.) That kind of violence really makes me uncomfortable because all the people who commit such negative acts are humans. They are not monsters or madmen. So if they did it, we all could do. It is for that reason that I try in my film to not judge the people who commit violence but to question the possibility that they did it.

The second way to question violence is to deal with political violence, revolutionary violence. No one ever changes the world without the forces of power, without attack their enemy. I am for a deep political change of our societies, and I know that this change can’t be peaceful. But if I can’t excuse violence used by my enemies, how could I excuse the violence of my fellows? This contradiction is a node that pops up some of my films.

AA: In the midst of all of this violence, what propels you to make film?

JGP: I make these films because they are the only ones I can make… When I started to make my own films, it was not to obey to some strong desire to be artist or filmmaker. For sure I’ve wanted to make films since I was teenager, but life is full of surprises and opportunities. I could do something else besides being a filmmaker. I didn’t have a desire to be an “artist” just for the sake of being one, or to be “famous” or whatever the reasons. I simply wanted to tell stories… But when I was 25, I didn’t find in films or in art what I was looking for. I needed to see films about politics, films with a strong statement about our world. There were some contemporary films, but so few. It was not at all the same energy than was present during the 70’s for example, when cinema was really involved in the protests. So, when as an audience I didn’t find what I was looking for, I started to make the types of films I wanted to see. Sometimes, it’s time to stop complaining and just act.

If I continue to make them, today, in our world, it is because our world is not a perfect one. We still need to question the way we live, the way we act, to react against disaster and violence. Film is the place for me to do it. And probably it is the place I chose because I am too cowardly to really act.

AA: Your films are not exactly documentaries, but they do often tell a story, as in “Even if She Had Been a Criminal…” Can you speak more to the advantages of the narrative form?

JGP: For sure! They are and they are not documentaries, or experimental, or fiction… But for sure all of them are constructed around something close to a regular narrative structure. With introductions, breaks, chapters etc. They’re going from a beginning to an end.

For me, making film is not about answers, or to give knowledge to an audience. Making film is a way for me to try to ask a question. I always make films the about events or ideas I couldn’t understand. And to make them is a way to be, or try to be, more precise about what disturbs me about those events. To ask a good question is for sure already a way to go to the answers.

When I said that making film is a way to ask a question, I could also think about this statement in terms of grammar. How does one construct a simple sentence with words that don’t naturally match together? For me the grammatical construction of a question is closed to the way I try to construct “stories” in my film. One element after the other that, in the end, composes a complete sentence.

Moreover, my films are often closed to the experimental, they are constructed with really fast editing, there is no voice over… To keep a “classical” structure, of some kind, is a way to keep the audience within the film, even if the form of it first appears quite abstract.

AA: What is the relationship between your films and politics – or, more generally, art and politics today? Do you view your films as “political” in the sense that they are performing politics?

JGP: I am not sure that a film could be defined as political because it performs politics. Some political films are really abstract or poetic, and some films dealing with political topics are not political themselves.

For sure, I could define my own films as political. They are all questioning the world we live in, they are some kind of reaction about what happens, even when their topics seems more historical. But they are also political because the forms I use are not classical, or tele-visual. I always think that being a political filmmaker means finding ways to question our world that are different than the ways commercial cinema or the tv do. To do it with a strong cinematographic point of view and to be able to share with the audience a different experience of watching the world.

But to be a political filmmaker is, for the majority of us, a bourgeois position. If we really believe that we have to change the world, we have to act and not to make films. I don’t believe in the power of cinema to change the world. It could be useful in that we still need to share common experiences and that to be all together in a screening room allows us to create a ephemeral community. But that’s all. No one will make a revolution after watching a film! Perhaps we will have real change if one day all the TVs of the world are turned off, but not after a screening in a cinema.

*

Jean-Gabriel Périot will be visiting Ibrahim Theater on Wednesday, April 10 at 7PM for a screening of a program of his short works titled, “We Are Winning, Don’t Forget.” He will give a short introduction, followed by a Q&A. This is his first visit to the United States.

Please RSVP to let us know you plan to attend.

For additional details on full schedule of screenings including festival updates and ticket purchase information please visit: www.flaff.org

dir. Luke Fowler, UK, 2011, HD, color & b/w, 90 min.

The social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s were spearheaded by the charismatic, guru-like figure of Glasgow born Psychiatrist R.D. Laing. In his now classic text “The Politics of Experience” (1967) Laing argued that normality entailed adjusting ourselves to the mystification of an alienating and depersonalizing world. Thus, those whom society labels as ‘mentally ill’ are in fact ‘hyper-sane’ travelers, conducting an inner voyage through aeonic time. The film concentrates on archival representations of Laing and his colleagues as they struggled to acknowledge the importance of considering social environment and disturbed interaction in institutions as significant factors in the etiology of human distress and suffering. All Divided Selves reprises the vacillating responses to these radical views and the less forgiving responses to Laing’s latter career shift; from eminent psychiatrist to enterprising celebrity. A dense, engaging, and lyrical collage—Fowler weaves archival material with his own filmic observations—marrying a dynamic soundtrack of field recordings with recorded music by Éric La Casa, Jean-Luc Guionnet, and Alasdair Roberts.