Endless Reveries: Water in Experimental Film

with 16mm and 35mm prints!

Exploring water as both a sublime and immersive geography and as a troubled and contaminated resource, this program presents a mesmerizing sequence of experimental shorts caught between imagination and matter. The seven films, which include a rapturous seaside montage, an environmental portrait of life around an artificial lake north of Los Angeles, and a delightful trick film send-up of nature’s commodification, chart a lively course through different formal possibilities and expose the simultaneously reflective, unstable, and abstracting properties of both water and experimental filmmaking. Taken together, the films conjugate new perspectives on the perennial relay between water and cinema and offer an expanded visual language for the complicated beauty of nature. Guest curated by Kylie Walters.

MOODS OF THE SEA (Slavko Vorkapich, John Hoffman, 1940-1942, 10 min, b&W, sound, 35mm) Courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive

LA PLAGE (Patrick Bokanowski, 1991, 13 min, color, sound, 16mm)

POND AND WATERFALL (Barbara Hammer, 1982, 15 min, color, sound, 16mm)

SALT OF THE SEA (Saul Levine, 1965, 4 min, color, sound, 16mm)

QUARRY MOVIE (Greta Snider, 1999, 10 min, color, sound, 16mm)

CASTAIC LAKE (Brigid McCaffrey, 2010, 29 min, color, sound, 16mm)

SKY BLUE WATER LIGHT SIGN (J.J. Murphy, 1972, 8 min, color, sound, 16mm)

All 16mm prints courtesy of Canyon Cinema.

Total run time: ~89 min

Kylie Walters is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Screen Cultures writing a dissertation on Mobil, media, and design in the postwar era. She is a Franke Graduate Fellow for 2024-2025.

Presented by the Block Museum of Art with support from the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, United States