This collection of films investigates the formal principles of abstract cinema while maturing an interest in found materials, evolving modes of production, forms of labor, and the role of decoration in daily life. Prodding at hierarchies of aesthetic value and the tension between high and low, these works question the role of abstract animation in a post-psychedelic climate. Merch tables meet museum gift stores. The sublime meets Sublime the band. Rippling head shop tie dyes and dollar store gift bags form ebullient spectacles from resurrected dead capital and banal everyday objects. These stroboscopic eulogies – celebrating the spectrum of abstraction from transcendent visual experiences to science kit optical fascinations – force a proscenium collision of the arena rock show, the planetarium light performance, and the cinema.

New Fancy Foils
12.5 min, 16mm, color, silent
Paper sample books discarded and dumpstered by long-gone businesses undergo a series of sequential experiments in pattern, rhythm, color, and text(ure). A call and response of flickering and lingering, this catalog of catalogs remembers a tactile economy.

Undertone Overture
10.5 min, 16mm, color, sound
A study of tie dye swims out to the cosmos and back again.

Dusty Stacks of Mom: the Poster Project
41 min, 16mm, color, sound- LIVE PERFORMANCE
Interweaving the forms of personal filmmaking, abstract animation, and the rock opera, this animated musical documentary examines the rise and fall of a nearly-defunct poster and postcard wholesale business; the changing role of physical objects and virtual data in commerce; and the division (or lack of) between abstraction in fine art and psychedelic kitsch. Using alternate lyrics as voice over narration, the piece adopts the form of a popular rock album reinterpreted as a cine-performance.

Glistening Thrills
8 min, 16mm, color, sound
A shiny otherworld of holographic reverie pairs dollar store gift bags and haunting resound, unfolding an effervescent melancholy in three parts. Featuring compositions for bowed vibraphone by Elliot Cole.

Let Your Light Shine
3 min, 16mm, color and b/w, sound- REQUIRES GLASSES
The ultimate photo-kinetic stroboscopic spectacle for spectacles. (Requires prismatic glasses.)

About JM:
Jodie Mack (born 1983; London, UK)
Jodie Mack is an experimental animator who received her MFA in film, video, and new media from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 and currently teaches animation at Dartmouth College. Combining the formal techniques and structures of abstract/absolute animation with those of cinematic genres, her handmade films use collage to explore the relationship between graphic cinema and storytelling, the tension between form and meaning. Musical documentary or stroboscopic archive: her films study domestic and recycled materials to illuminate the elements shared between fine-art abstraction and mass-produced graphic design. Questioning the role of decoration in daily life, the works unleash the kinetic energy of overlooked and wasted objects.
Mack's 16mm films have screened at a variety of venues including the Images Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, and Views From the Avant Garde at the New York Film Festival. She has presented solo programs of her work at venues such as the Anthology Film Archives, Los Angeles Filmforum, REDCAT, and the BFI London Film Festival. She has also worked as a curator and administrator with Dartmouth's EYEWASH: Experimental Films and Videos, Florida Experimental Film and Video Festival, Portland Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, Eye and Ear Clinic, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and The Nightingale. She was a featured artist at the 2011 Flaherty Seminar, and she’s the 2013 recipient of the Marion McMahan Award at the Images Festival.

12/6/17 ABIGAIL CHILD'S "ACTS AND INTERMISSIONS"

A new experimental documentary feature utilizing the life of Emma Goldman to explore the resurgence of protest in the 21st century. The work is hybrid and prismatic, including contemporary footage, archive and re-enactment to expose the continuing conflicts between labor and property, revolutionary purity and personal freedom.

The film performs a time travel, intercutting moments from Emma’s life with her prescient speeches, weaving industrial era factory labor with computer data centers with Emma’s intimate diaries—to explore human vulnerabilities, compromises and choices. Known as the “most dangerous woman alive,” Emma was also passionate and sexual; beauty/art/humor part of the freedoms for which she was fighting. The film creates a dialogue on individual liberties and anarchism: how we risk and how we are compromised? Questions that have become only more relevant in our current political climate.

Director's Statement:
"The film is the second in my Trilogy of Women and Ideology. Each part asks: How Ideologies fail women? What do we give up in our struggle to be more than 'merely female? The first in the trilogy, UNBOUND, retells the story of Mary Shelley, examining 19th century Romanticism through “imaginary home movies” shot in Rome. This second film explores Emma Goldman and Anarchism, shot in New York City, in a series of non-hierarchical fragmented ‘memory’ chapters. The work’s structure is influenced by films as diverse as 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould and Hollis Frampton’s Surface Tension. The third part of the Trilogy will explore Science in the 21st century, focusing on virtual women and androids." -Abigail Child, January 2017