Film
Library-in-Residence

Library Transmission: An Evening with Light Industry

Ed Halter, Thomas Beard, and The Otolith Collective

Edward Owens, still from *Remembrance: A Portrait Study (*1967).

Date and Time:: Wednesday 1 July, 6–8pm
Location:: Minassa

Light Industry presents two films from the margins of New American Cinema, both essential to understanding its legacy but, until recently, largely overlooked. Edward Owens was a pioneering queer Black experimental filmmaker who made a series of extraordinary short films in his youth under the mentorship of Gregory Markopoulos. Remembrance: A Portrait Study (1967) is a portrait of Owens’s family in Chicago. In accordance with the filmmaker's preference, it will be shown twice: once with sound, once without. Remembrance will be followed by Alain Montesse’s USS (1970), a rare point of convergence between the French Situationists and American underground film. Montesse’s film blends the small-gauge aesthetics of Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol with the political philosophy of Guy Debord, yielding a singular film-diary-as-dérive.

This screening will be followed by a discussion between The Otolith Collective’s Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, and Light Industry’s Ed Halter and Thomas Beard.

Doors open at 5.30pm; event starts at 6pm and ends at 8pm.

The Otolith Collective are supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Brooklyn's Light Industry is a venue for cinema in all its forms, overseen and developed by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter since its founding in 2008. The space has presented hundreds of events – screenings, lectures, discussions, performances – bringing together the worlds of avant-garde film, contemporary art, and documentary, to name but a few. Over the past decade they have also published books on cinema, including works by Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Peggy Ahwesh and the COUSIN Collective.

The Otolith Collective is a long-standing artist led organisation supporting intergenerational and intragenerational art practices, research-led projects, writing and process-based forms of development. They create environments that nourish discourse and discussion, co-commission artists, and curate exhibitions and programmes with a wide range of collaborators, organisations and institutions here and elsewhere. Theirs is an international project based on transnational and translocal vision who are committed to maintaining and animating an experimental and worldmaking approach. Performing across disciplines such as visual art, performance, new music, film and video, new technology and critical writing, we draw a diverse range of audiences. The OC has curated seminal exhibitions and platforms on the work of figures such as Black Audio Film Collective, Mark Fisher, Harun Farocki, Bahar Noorizadeh, The Chimurenga Library, Chris Marker, to name but a few.