Woods Hole Film Festival 2008

Multichannel digital media artist Julie Talen will be one of 4 filmmakers in residence this summer. Best know for her pioneering work in multichannel format vision and sound productions, Julie will screen her powerful film PRETEND and 60 Cameras Against the War. On Wednesday, Julie will discuss the process of making a multichannel film and the process of layering both image and sound. She will demonstrate how, by stripping or adding layers, she can completely change a film that you, as the viewer might not be aware of. 1. MONDAY SCREENING: Simultaneity - images that are divided in place but connected in time - is probably the most common use of multi-frame work, from the split screen of a baseball game, to surveillance cameras on a nine-grid to popular TV shows. For filmmaker Julie Talen, the divided frame - increasingly evident in our screen-based reality - is a new visual language of its own, and in '60 cameras against the war,' Talen unearthed unexpected synchronicities among random digital videos taken in the massive but little-seen anti-war rally held in New York City on Feb 15, 2003, just days before the invasion of Iraq. The mea culpa of 'oh, who knew? We all believed the administration' is put to the lie here, all the more effectively because the use of simultaneous footage shows how thousands of people were trapped by the NYPD on nearby streets while the rally itself had room to spare. Talen will discuss how these videos were tracked down, painstakingly put on time lines and edited together to make this film, which premiered at the Whitney Museum during the RNC in 2004; and she'll give other examples of how the simultaneous camera is used in fiction and documentaries, in her own work and others. 2: WEDNESDAY SCREENING - Talen explores and explodes the divided frame well beyond simultaneity in her award-winning fiction feature, Pretend, which A.O. Scott of the New York Times called "a harrowing, dazzling film," and the Village Voice lauded as unveiling "a new graphic vocabulary." In Pretend, a simple but clear narrative thread - the story of two girls who try to terrify their parents into staying together - is the scaffolding on which to build experiments in multichannel narrative. After discussing simultaneity in Monday's screening, in Pretend, we'll look at more complex ways to connect images that are cut up on the screen: visual fugues, realtime scenes, framing, borders, layers and superimposition. What you see is very influenced by what you hear and creatively changing the soundtrack changes how you experience the film: electronic music does one thing, Prokovief another, new voice-over from the characters' something else. Talen will premiere the new audio tracks for the upcoming DVD of Pretend by Re-Voir. Few, if any, films avail themselves of the DVD's capacity for new audio tracks, other than adding audio commentary or dubbed languages. This screening will be a sneak preview of the work-in-progress of Pretend with new audio.