https://ariduongnguyen.cargo.site ari-duong nguyen Thu, 12 Dec 2024 03:50:29 +0000 https://ariduongnguyen.cargo.site en https://ariduongnguyen.cargo.site/rest-repeat-film-from-sleep Wed, 29 Nov 2023 02:43:42 +0000 ari-duong nguyen https://ariduongnguyen.cargo.site/rest-repeat-film-from-sleep [rest; repeat]: film from sleep <img width="6480" height="6480" width_o="6480" height_o="6480" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e2fe52d6886f972be963fe20b7d88c1e45a120b686702204103c92cfd1579380/open-call-sleep.png" data-mid="199362327" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e2fe52d6886f972be963fe20b7d88c1e45a120b686702204103c92cfd1579380/open-call-sleep.png" /> <img width="6480" height="6480" width_o="6480" height_o="6480" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dc52275936c782a2a00504be5bbab7bdb768d5df777d79aab0fb61108f28301f/sleep-film-program.png" data-mid="198958615" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/dc52275936c782a2a00504be5bbab7bdb768d5df777d79aab0fb61108f28301f/sleep-film-program.png" /> Saturday, September 30, 2023Millennium FIlm WorkshopFull list of works can be found here.The program emerged out of an open call for films on sleep and rest; possible meandering included similar activities that flow slowly inwards, like ‘staying idle, reminiscing, daydreaming, absences’. The program also emerged out of a personal need to apologize for seeking rest, as I found myself mirrored in the vacant stare of Chantal Akerman as she scooped out sugar from the paper bag in Je Tu Il Elle. -- I found programming to be humbling, more a task of education than anything else. Almost a plea for the wiser to divulge to me how one is to live, in this case, with your legs dug to the ground amidst the roaring stream.[The selection was made based on topic relevancy - only at this point did I realize themes emerging, ranging on films of sleeplessness, films that felt sleepy in its imagery and pacing, films that document sleep, films that inspire sleep. After notifying artists with personal comments and making graphics, I attempted to weave aforementioned themes into coherency. The films follow one another in both an affirming and exploratory way, crashing and rolling onto one another like waves.] The program moved through nighttime routines, insomniac texts, the taste of home in your dreams, the slackful gait of natural life, the choreographic proximity of sleep to mortality, bedtime tales, and more.&nbsp; -- The screening lasted around two hours (excluding introduction). We greeted people with a make-your-own-tea-table and a busy boiling kettle. After a 15-minute intermission, a live performance took place where Lucy lied down and dreamed - and everyone involved got to dream with her. Some of us secured special ground seats as an area was cleared out for people to lie down or lounge with pillows from a dear MFW friend, yXEN. Audience members were encouraged to take a nap or ‘rest their eyes’ if needed. https://ariduongnguyen.cargo.site/No-images-on-camera-B-The-Personal-Cinema-of-Gloria-Chung Thu, 12 Dec 2024 03:50:29 +0000 ari-duong nguyen https://ariduongnguyen.cargo.site/No-images-on-camera-B-The-Personal-Cinema-of-Gloria-Chung No images on camera B: The Personal Cinema of Gloria Chung <img width="1080" height="1350" width_o="1080" height_o="1350" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/981b230e323f124f2c7f8328fba52960065c421887c36093d41bc82fd6f38c1d/Snapinsta.app_464943804_3750230945239877_6286767743824970247_n_1080.jpg" data-mid="223243487" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/981b230e323f124f2c7f8328fba52960065c421887c36093d41bc82fd6f38c1d/Snapinsta.app_464943804_3750230945239877_6286767743824970247_n_1080.jpg" /> No image from camera B: The Personal Cinema of Gloria Chungcurated by Joe Wakeman and Ari-Duong Nguyen&nbsp;The screening is accompanied by an exhibition of live-broadcasted camera feeds on display in the Millennium Gallery. These feeds from satellite cameras form an important aspect of Gloria’s work - these are images made for knowledge of the existent world, environmental documents - records of the earth in its moment of flux, passively witnessed from above. FILMS:The Photoplay Obeys the Laws of the Mind Gloria Chung 2020 8 minTrue Places Gloria Chung 2022 7 minMEMORY IX Utopos/Dystopos Gloria Chung 2019 8 minRiver Moon Black Birds Gloria Chung 2015 7 minKrakatau Gloria Chung 2023 11 minMake Sure the Sea Is Still There Gloria Chung 2021 7.5 min Filmic travelogs as cautionary tales, told through images of sublime nature - Gloria Chung reflects on the human experience in the time of unfolding climate crisis. Found footage from traffic webcams and news reports accompany diaristic snippets captured in transit, the camera gaze slipping out of human operation. In Gloria Chung’s honest exploration of this world that entrances her, nostalgia and anxiety for a disintegrating futurity is palpable, like a veil that wraps us in. Yet, Gloria’s films are infectiously calm, the sensorial drama of awe-inspiring nature unfolds like poetry… https://ariduongnguyen.cargo.site/some-place-home Wed, 29 Nov 2023 02:43:42 +0000 ari-duong nguyen https://ariduongnguyen.cargo.site/some-place-home SOME PLACE HOME <img width="842" height="1191" width_o="842" height_o="1191" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/df8d32008661f6352739628004ceb02eaa36aab379d6d4f689ad9f2aa06b6a3e/some-place-home-draft-3.png" data-mid="198958892" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/842/i/df8d32008661f6352739628004ceb02eaa36aab379d6d4f689ad9f2aa06b6a3e/some-place-home-draft-3.png" /> <img width="2397" height="1600" width_o="2397" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/96447f456d824ca5cd894da58399594fea993f51f402534595e47ea511ce73cb/00078_---.jpg" data-mid="199367687" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/96447f456d824ca5cd894da58399594fea993f51f402534595e47ea511ce73cb/00078_---.jpg" /> <img width="2397" height="1600" width_o="2397" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/65f77997dfd4bfa3812cacf65752fdbc13e7a445a57ca6563a5556aa4a3d5bc4/00074_---.jpg" data-mid="199367686" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/65f77997dfd4bfa3812cacf65752fdbc13e7a445a57ca6563a5556aa4a3d5bc4/00074_---.jpg" /> <img width="2397" height="1600" width_o="2397" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a96bf8607fd4fbaaf819fe855a3978e21fe2c484b9e8879924f876ce6fc7c952/00070_---.jpg" data-mid="199367685" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a96bf8607fd4fbaaf819fe855a3978e21fe2c484b9e8879924f876ce6fc7c952/00070_---.jpg" /> &nbsp; Saturday, October 1, 2022Millennium FIlm WorkshopFull list of works can be found here The intention to put together this program came as circumstantial as my casual stumble on a programming meeting at MFW. I reveled in the prospect of getting friends into a new, fascinating cinema space to see other friends’ work. A screening for ‘friends and family’, only in-becoming, lend each other an ear an eye.&nbsp; The play between stranger audience and familial film characters in most of these ‘home’ films, the sharedness of having a home and our complicated feelings towards it; the familial image is never individual, there is no helping one sees their own as they watch others. -- Together we filled the Millennium space with films about grandmothers, rituals, waning neighborhoods, and missed goodbyes. We screened 10 films in total, with those under 10 minutes also looped on a CRT monitor installed with a couch and some decors in the gallery space, a cinema-side living room. The works were sourced from my memory of previous screenings around the city - underground and festival, supplemented by a private call among friends. https://ariduongnguyen.cargo.site/ecocinematic-desires Wed, 29 Nov 2023 02:43:43 +0000 ari-duong nguyen https://ariduongnguyen.cargo.site/ecocinematic-desires ecocinematic desire <img width="2460" height="1631" width_o="2460" height_o="1631" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bee7baff6edcac8e754a3670cf98577008c151f397afd8b70826b4747018143c/000002420009.jpg" data-mid="198958897" border="0" data-scale="82" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bee7baff6edcac8e754a3670cf98577008c151f397afd8b70826b4747018143c/000002420009.jpg" /> written 05/2023 for Lana Lin’s class Decolonizing Documentary Full essay here. Cover photo by ari-duong nguyen This essay surveys the implication of desires within three works of ecocinema: Latipa’s Perpetual Peace, Miko Revereza &amp; Caroina Fusilier’s The Still Side and Laura Huertas Millán’s El Laberito. Departing from Scott Macdonald’s definition of ecocinema as evoking “the experience of being immersed in the natural world”, this essay examines the construction of the human as a desiring agent within ecological networks. This is done in particular through investigating how the films portray quotidian labor work, anecdotal memories, and manufactured fantasies.Looming in the background of these depictions of desires is the persistence of imperialism and neoliberal capitalism, in the way people are entangled in the global economy, as well as an omnipresent network of ecologies as resources, as hosts, as companion characters. Methodologically, this critique is placed in conjunction with one of Nitasha Dhillon’s “principles for decolonial film”: decolonial film does not aim for representation but, instead, the facilitation of “spaces and enunciation as an event” or even “rupture into the field of the sensible”.&nbsp; .&nbsp; Therefore, this essay posits that within these eco-films, human desires are strategically non-representational, but an animating force in its spaces. These desires were not directly represented, but shaped the meanings of beautiful images and sounds, while simultaneously resist against complacent objectification under imperialism. On a formal level, this lack of representation is also concretized through different techniques of (in)visibility, challenging the dominant complexes of visuality: while Latipa focused on objects participating in and driving human migration alongside with scenes of life and labor, Millán alluded to her characters mainly through verbal narration and substitute other-bodies from TV, and Revereza &amp; Fusilier channeled human presence in decay and ruins, in fictional accounts of all-too-real idealism and escapism. In surveying these three films by its commonalities and differences, an alternative landscape for imagining human presence within ecological sites emerges.&nbsp; https://ariduongnguyen.cargo.site/Zen-For-Film-time-as-metaphor Tue, 19 Dec 2023 21:22:49 +0000 ari-duong nguyen https://ariduongnguyen.cargo.site/Zen-For-Film-time-as-metaphor zen for film: time as metaphor <img width="2397" height="1600" width_o="2397" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/405c4a6a9f10dd7c339e09251ed7b9ab4e653923c628719128b8c23170703def/01440_25A.jpg" data-mid="199779848" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/405c4a6a9f10dd7c339e09251ed7b9ab4e653923c628719128b8c23170703def/01440_25A.jpg" /> written 12/2022 for Ann Stoler’s class Grammars of Time Full essay here. Cover photo by ari-duong nguyen &nbsp;This essay uses Nam June Paik’s Zen For Film to argue not only for that time is an essential political concept, malleable, absorbent, inevitable, and that time exercises its power through being a metaphor. Conflicts are metaphorized by time, and time is also metaphorized by our investigation of it, either purposely or coincidentally, like in Nam June Paik’s scratch-and-dust blank film. Methodologically, this omnipresence is demonstrated through firstly, a multifaceted analysis of the experience that is Zen For Film, from the curatorial demands - and liberties attached to the work, to its place in the museum as well as art history, to the nature of the art object at the center of the work. This is part 1, “Zen for film: temporal blankness?“. .&nbsp; In part 2 “the metaphor of time” the work is set aside, yet the universality of the time metaphor remains. I surveyed three among many cases where the temporality functions at the core of inequality, namely logistical capitalism (Paul Virilio), queer utopia (José Esteban Muñoz) and carcerality (Dominique Moran). Part 3 “transparent film, transparent time” synthesizes the metaphor of time and the actuality of temporal inequalities. I argued for time to be an step towards an equalizing variable, a prism that reveals connections between systems of oppression.&nbsp;“In the experiment that we are instantly reminded of the existence of time to be equal in the confrontation of near-nothingness, it is not that time is stripped bare in the artwork, but that in the barest form we experience our existence through time.“ https://ariduongnguyen.cargo.site/Crater-Magazine Sat, 09 Dec 2023 04:10:46 +0000 ari-duong nguyen https://ariduongnguyen.cargo.site/Crater-Magazine millennium film workshop x crater magazine CRATER Magazine was officially launched with its Issue Zero in September 2023. Its main aim is to archive filmmaking and programming beyond and opposite to establishments (non-profit, academic, commercial) full MFW interview here.&nbsp;We chatted with Joe Wakeman, the present Executive Director of Millennium Film Workshop about its institutional history, its revival in the new Bushwick physical space in correspondence with the underground cinema ‘renaissance’ post-quarantine. We also talked about what MFW has to offer now: open screenings, streaming of programs as archive, spontaneous interaction btwn generations of experimental filmmakers, the avant-garde manifest through access. <img width="1276" height="2048" width_o="1276" height_o="2048" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6f034d18c9eed0a3d0f24e5124286275d6e8c7b6e3d3a55c48e301b716d049e2/WhatsApp-Image-2023-11-28-at-21.26.17_2120df3b.jpg" data-mid="199071467" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6f034d18c9eed0a3d0f24e5124286275d6e8c7b6e3d3a55c48e301b716d049e2/WhatsApp-Image-2023-11-28-at-21.26.17_2120df3b.jpg" /> <img width="1307" height="2048" width_o="1307" height_o="2048" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9656531cda179bdf72b6e1dbb6f0b70040f330f6681633bdf9b1ce17b6c95235/WhatsApp-Image-2023-11-28-at-21.26.17_ce3ebea0.jpg" data-mid="199071468" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9656531cda179bdf72b6e1dbb6f0b70040f330f6681633bdf9b1ce17b6c95235/WhatsApp-Image-2023-11-28-at-21.26.17_ce3ebea0.jpg" /> <img width="1334" height="2048" width_o="1334" height_o="2048" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/244f5e5f06110f031578865d7402bd70fe486ef24e21d4b3b712ae0f306b8afe/WhatsApp-Image-2023-11-28-at-21.26.17_ae615593.jpg" data-mid="199071470" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/244f5e5f06110f031578865d7402bd70fe486ef24e21d4b3b712ae0f306b8afe/WhatsApp-Image-2023-11-28-at-21.26.17_ae615593.jpg" /> <img width="1343" height="2048" width_o="1343" height_o="2048" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7289266c1faf8934328481fd99020b76ce3fc4e12359bd7e1f07d9510a50d461/WhatsApp-Image-2023-11-28-at-21.26.18_97f87797.jpg" data-mid="199071469" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7289266c1faf8934328481fd99020b76ce3fc4e12359bd7e1f07d9510a50d461/WhatsApp-Image-2023-11-28-at-21.26.18_97f87797.jpg" /> https://ariduongnguyen.cargo.site/Millennium-Film-Book-Club Sat, 09 Dec 2023 20:28:59 +0000 ari-duong nguyen https://ariduongnguyen.cargo.site/Millennium-Film-Book-Club cinema book club @ mfw <img width="7289" height="7289" width_o="7289" height_o="7289" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ad78f8d4ad11c13218ac0391912a8ba319aae5b1e39923ba6856bc51498de112/book-club-pink.png" data-mid="199071883" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ad78f8d4ad11c13218ac0391912a8ba319aae5b1e39923ba6856bc51498de112/book-club-pink.png" /> <img width="7289" height="7289" width_o="7289" height_o="7289" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9c06ecc3fa300f6e2dd9dab5284b7e1c6bf301f28c8b0f9c5a2f317b80367898/book-club2.png" data-mid="199071882" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9c06ecc3fa300f6e2dd9dab5284b7e1c6bf301f28c8b0f9c5a2f317b80367898/book-club2.png" /> <img width="7289" height="7289" width_o="7289" height_o="7289" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/744cf5afb294c377bcbb84e7e78f7f93680a87d3c7a7793cca5812dd3b8e2431/book-club-3.png" data-mid="199071887" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/744cf5afb294c377bcbb84e7e78f7f93680a87d3c7a7793cca5812dd3b8e2431/book-club-3.png" /> Since 2023. live close-reading + sharing of resource (scripts and resources&nbsp;here) Regularly attended by a circulating group of around 10 film-makers, writers and enthusiasts, cinema book club aims to highlight film-writing as an art form and seek connectivity between the audio-visual and the textual. The curation of excerpts aims for accessibility: little time commitment, collective understanding, and a range of thinkers and references not confined to academia or high art sphere.&nbsp; The 1st edition discussed ‘cinema of the Everyday’, paying homage to Millnnium Film Workshop’s history. We asked critical questions about The New American Avant-garde, and mapping the quotidian’s resistance against being co-opted into oppressive structure.&nbsp; The 2nd edition discussed the relationship between nature and film, questioning the political possibility (or lack thereof) of the sublime. We also discussed the image of nature in documentaries as a tool of othering from the colonial gaze - and its potential for reclamation.&nbsp; The 3rd edition&nbsp; was co-hosted by Sebas Alarcon and Charles De Agustin and featured De Agustin’s short Mission Drift. Drawing from this work, we reflected on the position of art and film spaces in systems of oppression, guised under philanthropy and political virtue-signalling. Is art really a public service? We also discussed how the potential for violence sewn into the making of certain art spaces. &nbsp; https://ariduongnguyen.cargo.site/Main-page Wed, 29 Nov 2023 02:43:44 +0000 ari-duong nguyen https://ariduongnguyen.cargo.site/Main-page INTERVIEW Ultra Dogme To Be Exhaustive in our Honesty: A Conversation with Trương Minh Quý on Viet &amp; Nam FAR-NEAR Artistic Labor, Active Workspaces: Lunch Hour Collective on “Means of Production” METROGRAPH JOURNAL Double Exposure: Phạm Thiên Ân &amp; Kimi Takesue BOMB MAGAZINE Cathy Linh Che by ari-duong nguyen CRATER MAGAZINEMillennium Film Workshop PROGRAM [rest; repeat] some place home cinema book club @ millennium film workshop No images from camera B: The Personal Cinema of Gloria Chung crafts on film ESSAYS Screenslate“Appocalips” Saigon ExperimentalA response essay to ETA (Estimated Time Arrival) Vietcetera InternationalBeer, Sunflower Seeds &amp; Golden Star Balm: Four Vietnamese Experimental Performances In New York OTHER PROJECTS creek sdlfksadjflasd