About this Event
Join us for a program that spotlights the work of Milwaukee-based filmmaker Ben Balcom whose films turn a lens to progressive social projects of the past with a playful visual language adept in analogue techniques of experimental cinema. Across these films, rural landscapes, cities, poems, and letters combine to cast the “real shape” of places and histories into possible futures.
Included in the program is Balcom’s newest film, THE PHALANX (2025), which traces the everyday lives and utopian aspirations of participants in the Ceresco community, a vibrant yet short-lived socialist settlement in mid-19th-century Wisconsin.
To accompany Balcom’s work, this program incorporates two short films that employ kindred gestures to explore time and place: Rhea Storr’s OKAY KESKIDEE! LET ME SEE INSIDE, an account of Black community spaces in the UK lost to gentrification, and a late 70s gem, VISIBLE INVENTORY SIX: MOTEL DISSOLVE by American multimedia artist and educator Janis Crystal Lipzin.
Works screened:
NEWS FROM NOWHERE (Ben Balcom, 2020, 8 min, 16mm-to-digital)
“Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not misery but refinement.” - William Morris
Two slow pans across a public park in Milwaukee. Words from Bernadette Mayer imagining the possibility of a perfect summer day. -BB
GARDEN CITY BEAUTIFUL (Ben Balcom, 2019, 12 min, 16mm-to-digital)
One sunny afternoon in the middle west, suspended in a time between, two commuters daydream about a life lived otherwise. -BB
OKAY KESKIDEE! Let Me See Inside (Rhea Storr, 2025, 19.5 min, Super 16mm-to-digital)
A personal account of Black community spaces in the UK, focusing on Caribbean diaspora. By visiting the site of the former Keskidee Centre that is now luxury apartments, the film considers the conditions which allowed this historical space to thrive. -LUX
THE PHALANX (Ben Balcom, 2025, 14 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Letters from the Ceresco community trace the fragility of harmony, the dream of life in association, the frictions that give way to fracture. Members of the phalanx drift apart, lingering in private corners, suspended in speculative time. -BB
VISIBLE INVENTORY SIX: MOTEL DISSOLVE (Janis Crystal Lipzin, 1978, 15 min, 16mm)
A space filled with moving…a series of panning shots of motel rooms in which the film-maker stayed during semi-annual transcontinental auto trips – homogenous accommodations lacking locational cues. Superimposed over the screen image are the names of the towns in which the rooms are located and the car’s odometer reading at each location. The sound track consists of two Gertrude Stein texts: “America I Came and Here I Am” and “American Food and American Houses” both from 1935.
SILENT WITNESS (Ben Balcom, 2023, 3.5 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Filmed in Jackson Park in Milwaukee during summertime, 2020. Featuring the Statue of Commerce by Gustav Haug, 1881. -BB
Total runtime: ~ 72 min
Screening followed by a conversation with the filmmaker.
Materials courtesy of Ben Balcom, LUX, Canyon Cinema
*Program title "The real shape of the earth" is quoted from UTOPIA by Bernadette Mayer, drawn from NEWS FROM NOWHERE.
Ben Balcom is a filmmaker and educator based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he is an assistant professor of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Balcom’s recent films explore the histories and afterlives of radical social ideals and communal living. Working within experimental nonfiction, his projects combine archival research, poetic narration, and observational filmmaking to reflect on the possibilities of alternative ways of living. Drawing from speculative fiction, critical theory, and utopian poetics, his work often revisits the sites of now-defunct experimental schools and intentional communities, using cinema as a space for both research and imagination. Featuring landscapes both real and imagined, these films engage collective memory while speculating on futures beyond the limits of capitalism. Earlier in his practice, Balcom worked with abstraction, introspection, and formal experimentation, exploring the tensions between perception and communication, and probing the materiality of film itself. These threads continue to inform his evolving approach to nonfiction and poetic cinema. Balcom’s films have screened internationally at venues and festivals including the Museum of the Moving Image, International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Arts Festival, IndieLisboa, Media City Film Festival, and Ann Arbor Film Festival. He has received awards from Onion City, Athens International Film + Video Festival, and Ann Arbor. In 2023, he was a research fellow at the Center for 21st Century Studies. He also co-founded Microlights Cinema, a microcinema that ran from 2013 to 2023, dedicated to bringing experimental film and video art to audiences in Milwaukee.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, United States
USD 0.00
