The Last Days of Contrition + Field Trip
Throughout the year, we will screen a few films by experimental filmmaker, documentarian, and teacher Richard Kerr. For this first screening, we are juxtaposing two films made over twenty years apart.
In the presence of the filmmaker, Richard Kerr
"The Last Days of Contrition is an exploration of the Canadian and American landscapes, and the relationship between the two. The narrative deals with a journey through timeless, vacant American landscapes (baseball stadiums, Venice Beach, Mojave Desert, and a US Missile Base). The photographic strategy is influenced by a consciousness of light, a quintessential characteristic of American photography. I documented the American landscape in the tradition of the early formalist photographers (Walker Evans, Paul Strand, etc.) allowing there to be content in form." (Richard Kerr)
"Field Trip is a travel diary about the American social landscape. The images consist of visual research for future film projects and were accumulated during my many location scouting trips to the United States between 1980 and 1995. Over time, I have come to regard this photographic archive as a collection of works of historical and personal value. Over the years, I began to rework the photographs. The more I handled and touched them, the less I thought of them as photographs and the more I saw them as something that could be hand-sharped, altered, transformed and re-imagined." (Richard Kerr)
Richard Kerr
Richard Kerr is a Canadian visual artist and filmmaker based in Montréal, where he teaches experimental film at Concordia University. Since the late 1970’s Kerr has produced an expansive body of work in analog film and digital video which have been screened at festivals, and collected by museums and galleries around the world. Emerging as an important figure in the history of Canadian experimental cinema, Kerr has also maintained a dedicated teaching practice spanning over a period of 30 years. Within this period the nature and technological means of the moving image have profoundly changed while informing and expanding his relationship to his studio practice and pedagogical concerns. His work prompts a return to an experimental investigation of the image’s fundamental qualities, revealing film as material, chemical and translucent. Kerr’s work is both formal and tactile as he is concerned with the materiality of the image within an era of dematerialization that pushes the image towards a digital form, where images render themselves less visible yet ubiquitously opaque. In the late 1990's he began making Motion Picture Weavings, a form he continues to explore in his studio as a direct response to the changing nature of filmmaking.
Photo : Collections de la Cinémathèque québécoise
