Film and Site
Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, J. J. Murphy's Print Generation, and Robbie Land's Grant Park
Film and Site
Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, J. J.
Murphy's Print Generation, and Robbie Land's Grant Park
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left: aerial view of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970); right: J. J. Murphy's Print Generation (1977) |
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Thursday, October 22, 2015
7:00 pm at
Beautiful Briny Sea, in the Grant Park neighborhood
$8
Film Love brings together two significant works of the 1970s: Robert Smithson’s
own film of his Spiral Jetty – one of the most famous art works of the
last fifty years – and Print Generation, J. J. Murphy’s visual and
sonic meditation on film and memory. As neither film has been released on
commercial video, this screening will be a rare opportunity to view them in
their entirety. They are accompanied by filmmaker Robbie Land’s 16mm study of
foliage and photosynthesis in Grant Park – projected in the neighborhood where
it was made.
Though it contains striking aerial views and fascinating
footage of the piece’s construction, Spiral Jetty the film is neither a
documentation of the artwork, nor a standard documentary about it. Instead,
Smithson – who was a prolific writer and a regular moviegoer – constructed
Spiral Jetty as a cinematic essay. Using montage and movement, voiceover
and sound design, and cutting between disparate locales – the Great Salt Lake, a
natural history museum, New Jersey, and the surface of the sun – Smithson took
full advantage of film’s ability to travel across time and space, situating the
Spiral Jetty in “the earth’s history.”
J. J. Murphy’s Print
Generation describes its own process in its title. Through contact printing
(a film technique roughly akin to photocopying), a section of film imagery is
copied and recopied, decaying with each "generation" of printing until the
imagery becomes abstract – a visually absorbing dance of chemical emulsion on
the filmstrip. However, Murphy organizes this material in a surprising way,
bringing up questions about film as an analogue for memory, and about the
mysterious point at which an image becomes recognizable as such.
These
two works are often discussed in their separate fields – Spiral Jetty
as a major document of land art, Print Generation as a key experimental
film of the 1970s. The audience for these films does not often overlap, yet
there are many connections to be made in viewing them together: while Smithson
transfers the physical site of the Great Salt Lake to film, Murphy uses the
filmstrip itself as a "site" for the re-generation of imagery. This screening,
taking place at the headquarters of artisan salt maker Beautiful Briny Sea in
the Grant Park neighborhood, will also feature Robbie Land’s sensuous film of
chemical photosynthesis among the leaves of Grant Park’s trees.
Grant Park (Robbie Land, work in progress, 7 min)
Spiral
Jetty (Robert Smithson, 1970, 30 min)
Print Generation
(J. J. Murphy, 1977, 50 min)
Beautiful Briny Sea
408 Woodward Ave SE, Atlanta, GA 30312
www.beautifulbrinysea.com
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| Robbie Land, still from Grant Park (work in progress, 2015) |
Film and Site is a Film Love event. The Film Love
series provides access to great but rarely seen films, especially important
works unavailable on consumer video. Programs are curated and introduced by Andy
Ditzler, and feature lively discussion. Through public screenings and events,
Film Love preserves the communal viewing experience, provides space for the
discussion of film as art, and explores alternative forms of moving image
projection and viewing. Film Love was voted Best Film Series in Atlanta by the
critics of Creative Loafing in 2006, and was featured in Atlanta Magazine's Best
of Atlanta 2009.