About this Event
A night of short films with a live cinema performance by Tristan Turner, Isaac King, and Agis Shaw, and an introduction by chemist Dr. Shelby Hatch.
“Lost in the Flood” explores the cultural and material impacts of flooding and contamination through the vulnerable medium of photochemical film. In each of the three titles in this program, the celluloid medium registers a different dimension of the destructive force of extreme weather. Late New Orleans-based filmmaker Helen Hill’s Super 8 home movies were damaged in Hurricane Katrina; blown up and preserved in 16mm, the waterlogged footage of Big Easy life speaks to both endurance and loss. Drawing on 35mm prints from the Jones Film Collection at Southern Methodist University, film artist Michael A. Morris manipulates scenes of floods and tempests from old Hollywood to dramatize the challenges of archival preservation against the deluge of time in ARK (2018, 35mm).
The program’s centerpiece is SWANNANOAN SILT (2025), a live two-channel cinema performance by filmmakers Tristan Turner and Isaac King accompanied by musician Agis Shaw. In September 2024, Turner and King set out to document the impacts of Hurricane Helene, which caused massive flooding, landslides, and environmental hazards throughout the greater Appalachian region. Working with 16mm motion picture and 35mm slide film, Turner and King captured images of devastation and community resilience, pushed to the limits of legibility by processing their images in the contaminated waters of the Swannanoa and French Broad Rivers.
The program will feature an introduction by Dr. Shelby Hatch, Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern and a scientist researching the impact of heavy metal contamination in Chicago.
Films screened:
Helen Hill Home Movie Reel
(Helen Hill, 2000-2005, 11 min, Super-8-to-16mm, print courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive)
ARK
(Michael Morris, 2018, 7 min, 35mm, print courtesy of Canyon Cinema)
Swannanoan Silt
(Isaac King, Tristan Turner, and Agis Shaw, 2025, ~18 min, two-channel 16mm motion picture and 35mm slide film)
About the guests:
Isaac King is a visual media artist and filmmaker born and raised in South Carolina. His practice centers around handmade cinema, recycled cinema, and amateur filmmaking and prominently utilizes celluloid film (super 8, 16mm, 35mm), taking full advantage of its materiality. His work and research have included and focused on matters of representation and socio-ecological metamorphosis, particularly in the United States South.
Coming from an experimental film background, Isaac examines culture through an abstract lens with hopes that this abstraction energizes and promotes a desire to learn and a will to reach across cultural differences. His approach to visual anthropology comes with an understanding of the heterogeneity of cultural contexts and that for insights to be gleaned earnestly, the singularity of the interlocutor’s perception must be taken into account. He questions documentary image use as an easy means of calling up a static past and instead opts for a filmmaking strategy that trusts the intermittence of life. Through alternative photochemical processes, direct animation, and asynchronous ethnography, he continues reexamining, recontextualizing, and re-presenting Southernness.
Isaac holds a BFA in Film and Television from the Savannah College of Art and Design. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions and features in private collections across the United States, France, and Ireland. Additionally, he has works held in the public trust through the Buncombe County Special Collections in Asheville, NC, and the Moving Image Research Collections at the University of South Carolina.
Tristan Turner is an experimental filmmaker and mixed media artist from Asheville, NC. His work aims to combine the aesthetics of the past and present to interrogate medium specificity, new limits, and personal expression. Tristan is fond of both digital and analog imagery. Often in his work, he blends the two until they merge into something both familiar and alien. Community, poetry, collaboration, diaristic narratives, mixed media, abstraction, and visual experimentation are core values in his work. Philosophically, Tristan believes that cinema is the most boundless platform of human expression. Everything is cinema.
Shelby Hatch (she/her/hers) is a scientist focused on the intersections of chemistry, sustainability, and social justice. Shelby is a Weinberg College Adviser and an Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of Chemistry. She has taught a variety of undergraduate chemistry courses - introductory lab classes, first year seminars, courses for non-scientists, and a capstone laboratory course for chemistry majors - plus firesides on the chemistry of beer & the chemistry of chocolate. Her research involves environmental justice and Youth Participatory Science, which centers and involves students in the entire research process, from creation of a hypothesis through disseminating results once data has been collected and analyzed. Since 2017, she has been a lead collaborator on a National Science Foundation grant Teachers and Students Synergistic Learning Through Youth.
Shelby studies the distribution of heavy metal contamination in Chicago in relation to where low socio-economic status and communities of color are located. She enjoys teaching undergraduate chemistry courses that incorporate sustainability and environmental justice into the curriculum. Shelby is also very passionate about teaching in the Northwestern Pr*son Education Program (NPEP). She developed a course and compiled an open educational resource textbook for her NPEP chemistry courses, has taught at Stateville Correctional Center, and looks forward to teaching at Logan Correctional Center in the fall of 2022. She received her BA from The College of Wooster and her PhD from The University of Rochester.
Science on Screen
Supported by the Sloan Foundation and the Coolidge Corner Cinema’s Science on Screen program, each of the screenings in the “Watching the Weather” series will feature extended introductions by scientists, historians, and scholars, who will shed light on the themes and histories depicted on screen.
An initiative of the COOLIDGE CORNER THEATRE, with major support from the ALFRED P. SLOAN FOUNDATION.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, United States
USD 0.00
