A Good Night’s Sleep Screening
July 29th at 8:00pm
Studio 4: 25 Main Street, 4th floor, Northampton.
A Good Night’s Sleep is a monthly screening series featuring film and video by artists connected to Western Massachusetts. Our series connects a wide variety of non commercial forms and perspectives through collaboratively and deliberately curated programs. While most works fall into the broad categories of “experimental” and “documentary,” our priority is in building thought provoking and subversive programs regardless of genre.
Our regular programs happen on the last Saturday of every month. For locations and times, check our website or contact us.
Featured Artists:
Ben Balcom was born in Massachusetts and raised in Illinois. He received his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and his bachelor’s degree in Film-Video Production from Hampshire College. Ben currently teaches film production at UWM and is the technical director for the Milwaukee Film Festival. He is also a co-founder and programmer of Microlights Cinema. Since 2013, Microlights has hosted nearly 30 film and video artists from around the world. By invoking familiar forms of speech and the everyday failures of communication, Balcom’s work embraces the essential messiness of subjectivity. The films explore the material image in various forms. Although materiality doesn’t produce simple analogies, it evokes the many textures of real experience. Using visual and linguistic abstractions that point towards the slippages and incoherencies fundamental to our perceptual lives, I work through the complexity of ordinary affects. Cinema channels affect. It helps us to know ourselves by encouraging us to leave our bodies behind and then drawing us back through sensual immersions. In the curious relay of the theater we think through our bodies at a remove. My films attempt to expose the abstractions that structure our internal, virtual worlds.
Caitlin Driscoll is a future resident of Hadley MA, and a co-founder of First Born Productions, an organization committed to helping local artists, musicians, and writers turn their work into film, along with Camille Fantasia.
Lucas C. Ospina makes hypothetical films and several other types. He made films for a while at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. He was born in California.
Josh Weissbach is an experimental filammaker. He lives in a house next to an abandoned village in Moodus, Connecticut with his wife, two daughters, and three cats. His 16mm films and digital videos have been shown worldwide in such venues as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Mono No Aware, 25 FPS Festival, and Berlin International Directors Lounge. He has won jury prizes at ICDOCS, $100 Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, and Haverhill Experimental Film Festival. He is the recipient of the 2008 Cary Grant Film Award from the Princess Grace Foundation-USA, a 2013 Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for Emerging Artists from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, and a 2015 LEF Fellowship from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.
Sally Cruikshank is a cartoonist and animator and a graduate of Smith College. “Sally Cruikshank’s animations push beyond standard notions of how cartoons should look, move, and sound, unleashing a flock of bizarro creatures and their bold accoutrements. With her award-winning 1975 film Quasi at the Quackadero, Cruikshank created a surrealist gem of unearthly landscapes and outrageous characters. The film earned her international attention, an entry into the National Film Registry, features in books with the word “Greatest” in their title, and spots in major museum exhibits.” – Sally Cruikshank: A Career Retrospective (Lola Landekic)
Willie Gussin is a Putney, VT based experimental musician and arts organizer. He is a member of The Future Collective, an organization dedicated to supporting under-represented arts in and around Brattleboro, VT, and a board member of The Brick House, a teen center, family support organization, and community/show space in Turners Falls, MA. During the day, he works at a non-profit organization helping families with young children access local resources. He plays in a variety of noisy and improvisational ensembles based in Southeastern Vermont and Western Mass.
More Info:
The reliability of our monthly events has helped establish a community invested in learning through one another’s films and supporting the creation of new work. Frequent communication between film makers and curators has brought about natural collaboration and risk taking; artists will finish a film to show at GNS based on ideas we talk about forming in a program, and our curatorial ideas can be influenced by a film that is still in the process of being made. Works in progress have been shown many times, and we feel honored to be fostering a space for productive viewing. These types of generative practices are central to the mission of our collective. We see our series as a platform for experiments in collaborative film making and curation, and we hope to share some of these practices and ideas here.
Thanks to support from the Northampton Arts Council
