MILLENNIUM FILM WORKSHOP presents THE SPECTRAL CINEMA
Sunday, October 17 – 7:30pm
A collection of short works connected by the ghostly stains on our souls left by the cinematic image. This program opens with the first volume of filmmaker Jawni Han’s ongoing, Walter Benjamin-inspired video essay The New Arcades Project, Part 1: Angelica’s Riddle. Using the ghostly narrative of Manoel de Oliviera’s The Strange Case of Angelica as a jumping-off point, Han constructs a video dissection of the illusory aspect of the cinema that breathes life into dead, still images, making the past present and hauntingly visible. From there we diverge and offer a series of works to be considered in light of its observations. In these films, the spirits of dead stars possess our souls, empty houses are haunted by past lives captured on home video, the faces of star-crossed lovers are frozen for eternity, dark details of an empty opera are revealed to us in grainy still images, and in the end, Everybody Dies.