Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown

[Filmmakers present | En présence des cinéastes | TRT: 80 minutes (digital media)]

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In this collection of recent work by North Carolina-based media artists Sabine Gruffat and Bill Brown, celluloid film serves as both a material register and critical resource for interrogating the documentary image. Whether using discontinuous montage, handmade techniques for creating and processing images, or dramatic reenactors, these films aim to extend the formal possibilities of non-fiction filmmaking.

Excerpt, Take It Down : https://vimeo.com/306205522

Take It Down
Gruffat | 2018 | sound | colour | 12:30 mins
Employing solarized color positive 35mm film and animation of old postcard images of Confederate monuments in North Carolina, Take It Down documents how Southern identity continues to be bound up in the legacy of the Civil War and the Jim Crow Era. The film considers how these old memorials continue to be sites of conflicting politics and historical narratives.

XCTRY
Brown | 2018 | sound | colour | 6:18 mins
Brown re-works 16mm footage that he shot years ago during a cross-country road trip from Chicago to Las Vegas. The spatial discontinuities of the road trip are rendered as visual continuities across three frames as Brown goes in search of the next town to fall in and out of love with.

Life On The Mississippi
Brown | 2018 | sound | colour | 28:13 mins
A short essay film about a river and the limits of knowing it. Using Mark Twain’s Life On The Mississippi as a road map, Brown travels from Memphis, Tennessee to New Orleans and considers ways that river pilots, paddlers, historical reenactors, and civil engineers attempt to know the river through modeling, measurement, and simulation.

Framelines
Gruffat | 2017 | sound | colour | 10:14 mins
An abstract scratch film made by laser etching preset patterns onto the film emulsion of negative and positive 35mm film. The strips of film were then re-photographed on top of each other as photograms. The soundtrack is created by filtering and layering the noise made by the laser etched 35mm optical track.

Amarillo Ramp
Brown + Gruffat | 2017 | sound | colour | 24:10 mins
A portrait of sculptor Robert Smithson’s final earthwork. Employing filmmaking strategies that are both responsive to the artwork’s environmental context and informed by Smithson’s own art-making strategies, the filmmakers encounter the Ramp as an observatory where human scales of space and time are set against geological and cosmic scales.

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Sabine Gruffat is a digital media artist and filmmaker with a special interest in the social and political implications of media and technology. Her experimental and essay films explore how technology, globalization, urbanism, and capitalism affect human beings and the environment. Sabine‘s films have screened at festivals worldwide including the Viennale, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, and CPH:DOX. Sabine lives and works in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Bill Brown is a media artist interested in ways landscape is interpreted, appropriated, and reconfigured according to human desires, memories, and dreams. His research interests include haunted houses, UFO’s, memorial architecture, and outsider archaeology. Bill‘s films have screened at venues around the world, including the Rotterdam Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and Lincoln Center. A retrospective of his films was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Bill lives and works in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.