Threshold to Threshold:
Charlotte Clermont and Tzuan Wu
Saturday April 29, 2023 at 7:30pm
AUTOMATA presents:
Threshold to Threshold: Charlotte Clermont and Tzuan Wu
Join us on Saturday, April 29 for films by Charlotte Clermont and Tzuan Wu.
About the program:
Threshold to threshold, pasts to presents, language colliding with language, one crossroad and the next. The Threshold to Threshold film series embraces these precarious states. The films that interest us address landscapes, people, and histories that are constantly being displaced or forgotten. The challenges presented by the works are various, but because there are thousands of thresholds we can go thousands of places.
On April 29, 2023 Threshold to Threshold will present work by two contemporary experimental filmmakers, Charlotte Clermont and Tzuan Wu. Clermont’s films traverse experimental space-time, non-place, and confusing poetry. Wu's film revolves around a family's past, unfolding a cross-generational thinking about wandering and settling. Through a variety of media, their work captures the fragility of images and materiality, and the memories of a family diaspora.
The first part of the program consists of three short films by Clermont: where i don't meet you, Lucina Annulata, and We Are The Way We Are Because Nature Will Allow It. The second part features This Shore: A Family Story 此岸：一個家族故事 by Tzuan Wu.
The program is curated by Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu.
Runtime: 77 mins.
Tickets
$10 students, members, underemployed
$12 general admission
Seating is extremely limited, advance reservations strongly encouraged
Note: Masks are required for all events at Automata.
Films:
where i don't meet you by Charlotte Clermont
(2019, 4 mins, Super 8mm > Digital)
Shot on Super 8, where i don't meet you is based on its own physicality by the means of a DIY hand processing technique, where the film's materiality is treated not only as a medium but also as a subject. Its narrative structure reflects a work on film deconstruction, which joins an unpredictable and experimental universe. Showing a series of figurative shots accompanied by a textual sequence, formal and psychological associations are developed between each of the images. Through a confusing poetry, a filmic atmosphere unfolds in a “non-place”, which recalls a moment lost between two time-spaces.
Lucina Annulata by Charlotte Clermont
(2021, 4 mins, Super 8mm > Digital)
Sunny. Semantic sequences guide the gaze, a gaze that is sometimes raised, propelled downwards, then too high, or motionless in front of an unrecognizable and yet so familiar vision. The images, linked by echoes of chromatic palettes and linear layers, scroll to the rhythm of a voice, reminiscent of an incantation. Sacred.
We Are The Way We Are Because Nature Will Allow It by Charlotte Clermont
(2016, 7 mins, VHS, MiniDV > Digital)
Shot on VHS and MiniDV, the exploration of manipulated and glitched images reveals an ambiguity between intimacy and daily-life, where mystery, seduction and confusion all coexist. The project is a collaboration with experimental musician Alain Lefebvre.
This Shore: A Family Story 此岸：一個家族故事 by Tzuan Wu
(2020, 62 mins, 16mm, Super 8mm, VHS > Digital)
Stories had been told repeatedly, their shapes changed by the narrators. Memories revisited each time in different forms like the waves beat on the shore, then vanish. THIS SHORE is an experimental documentary that opens with a family anecdote: When coming across my grandmother’s painting in a random Chinese restaurant in the States, my aunt burst into tears. The film wanders through Cold War constructions, Taiwan–United States relations, generations of diaspora, family romances, and ghost stories. While the personal and collective memories are transformed into another tale of "the Flying Dutchman", doomed to sail the oceans forevermore.
About the Artists:
Charlotte Clermont
With a background in experimental film, Charlotte Clermont creates a dialogue between video and audio explorations to examine our perceptions of the real. The performative aspect of her practice, moved by a desire to transpose the illusiveness of lived moments, is embodied in her singular way of working with analogue recording devices. Using materials from her immediate environment, she works upon the chemical sensitivity of film through various alterations, while leaving a large place to chance. Her works testify to an intimate relationship with the materiality of the medium. Imbued with a sensuality and eroticism, they reveal a dissension among polarities by inscribing themselves in the interval between the accessible and inaccessible. These tensions arouse fantastical projections of the imminent, deployed on the porous boundary of the real, the proposed fragmentary combinations serving as points of entry into a precise spacetime that allows one to observe the fragility of ephemeral sensations. Woven of autofictional fragments, they draw on an intimate memory, mingling dreams and memories and de/sanctifying reminiscences. Clermont’s approach also borrows from musical codes, using rhythmical structures and leitmotifs to assemble textures and chromatic bursts that create a narrativity and semiology of the image. Her work generally develops an inherent, autonomous, and symbolically encoded metalanguage.
Charlotte Clermont is pursuing a master's degree in Time and Space Art at University of the Arts Helsinki in Finland. Her work has been presented internationally in the framework of festivals and exhibitions, including Fracto (Germany), IFF Rotterdam (Netherlands), CROSSROADS (United States), and the Edinburgh International Film Festival (Scotland).
Text by Myriam Le Ber Assiani / translation by Ron Ross.
Tzu-An Wu 吳梓安
Tzu-An Wu works between experimental film and its expansions. He makes collages with analogue films, through mixing heterogeneous images, audio, and texts in an attempt to inquire about the constructs of (cinematic) narratives and the selves.
He holds an MA in Media Studies from The New School, New York, and a BA in Gender and Cultural Studies from NTHU, Taiwan. His works have been shown internationally, including BFI Flare (London), IFFR (Netherland), CROSSROADS (San Francisco), Golden Horse Film Festival (Taiwan), TIDF(Taiwan). Exhibitions include Taipei Art Awards, Taiwan Biennial, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, and Taipei Artist Village, etc. He also does programming of experimental cinema.
About the Curator:
Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, writer, and curator whose work is grounded in literature and the conceptual avant-garde. Cherlyn’s creative activity starts from a life event, an anomaly in language or in the material world. It continues by employing methods drawn from both Eastern and Western practices and philosophies. Her working method at various times involves handcrafted material, mixed media, and experimental interchange between new and old technologies.
She is a lecturer at CalArts, teaching experimental film. She is co-curator of Move Screen, Process Cinema, the founder of Experimentalist Media Collective, the editor of B-Journal, and serves as a programmer for the Experimental session of Slamdance Film Festival.