No photography please

Rather than represent the world merely by photographic means, handmade moving-image artists seek to create new ways of seeing by staging a variety of interventions into the material makeup of celluloid. Handmade artists tattoo film’s skin not only with scratches and paint, but also with blood, dirt, paper, candy, sand, nail polish remover, and seawater. Seeking media not normally found in a filmmaker or artist’s studio, they mine their own bodies and backyards for things to make into moving images.<br /><br />This program highlights rarely-seen works of artisanal film production from the Coop’s collection. Some of the works are wonderfully constructive, building up the visual surface of the film by combining found footage with painterly abstraction. Others are destructive, subjecting film to a variety of elemental and material stresses. Taken together, these films not only exhibit the diversity of handmade practices and concerns, they also provide a framework for rethinking how cinema can be made through its unmaking.<br /><br />In other words, handmade cinema—in concept, material, and execution—is counter-cinema.