Despite the best efforts of the VSW and the Ann Arbor Film Festival to make this event impossible to find, they will be screening the 16mm Program of the 53rd Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour at the Visual Studies Workshop. This program consists of:

• A Symptom (Ben Balcom, Milwaukee, WI 2014, 7 min., 16mm): "A mirrored discourse. The object we see is that which craves articulation, but is never said quite right. We are looking at speech from both sides of the mirror, listening to that wretch who elaborates upon the grid of desire. – BB"
• The Song Remains The Same (Mark Toscano, Los Angeles, CA 2014, 5 min., 16mm): "When feelings are reduced to keywords, it's a lot easier to find just the right soundtrack. And when an emotional response can be so readily activated via musical triggers, it's a lot easier to make a moving film. – MT"
• The Dragon is the Frame (Mary Helena Clark, Berkeley, CA 2014, 14 min., 16mm): "An experimental detective film made in remembrance: keeping a diary, footnotes of film history, and the puzzle of depression. – MHC"
• Poetry for Sale (Friedl vom Gröller, Vienna, Austria 2014, 3 min., 16mm): "In Poetry for Sale, Friedl vom Gröller impressively contrasts the intimacy of the act of writing and the publicity of its presentation. The difficulty of the undertaking, selling poems in the subway, shows the difficulty of material survival for poets. The double breaking of the rules on which the film is based—both selling and filming are forbidden in the subway—exposes both poetry and filming as criminal acts, thus revealing the true status of poets and filmmakers. – Nicole Streitler"
• Peacock (Andrew Kim, Los Angeles, CA 2015, 12 min., 16mm): "A meditation on our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence… 'The peacock painted on the window will never dance or speak. It is only the peacock that lived in the forest which used to speak, dance, and walk in a sweet manner.' – AK"
• vindmøller (Margaret Rorison, Baltimore, MD 2015, 3 min., 16mm): "A study of the monolithic wind turbines along the shores of Amager, Copenhagen, Denmark. Triple exposed on one roll of color film, then finding four generations of grain. The soundtrack is a recorded live-improvisation by artist Mario de Vega using unstable media and acoustic resonators. – MR"
• Things (Ben Rivers, London, UK 2014, 21 min., 16mm): "This film was a challenge set by a friend, to make something in my home over the course of the year. Coming from a country where the seasons are very evident, I am interested in how they effect people's sense of the world, moods, and our understanding and relationship to our environment. These mood changes feed into the film – in the Winter section the film is very internal and reflective, looking at the details around the house, and back to the things I've collected. In Spring, the atmosphere brightens, there are humans, hands holding a book or drawing, an eye reading. Summer is a mix of both the joy of these things, countered with a sense of unease. Autumn then becomes a further remove of representation of the space I live in, and in an uncertain state–are the walls crumbling around me? Is this the future, partly foretold in Fable, the book read in Spring? – BR"
• Blue Loop, July (Mike Gibisser, Iowa City, IA 2014, 5 min., 16mm): "Chicago's summertime blazes, unanchored. Skywriting out of time. Part of a series of nighttime long exposures, Blue Loop, July creates an odd document of a long-standing celebratory tradition in one of Chicago's lower west side neighborhoods. By leaving the camera's shutter open for seconds at a time, the film transforms a summertime spectacle into a light-trace animation that unseats reliability of spatial and temporal direction. – MG"
• Falling (Robert Todd, Boston, MA 2015, 7 min., 16mm): "Moving through fall's end and beginning, falling. – RT"
• Color Neutral (Jennifer Reeves, New York, NY 2014, 3 min., 16mm): "Anything but gray, a color explosion sparkles, bubbles, and fractures in this hand-crafted 16mm film. Reeves utilized an array of mediums and direct-on-film techniques to create this exuberant, psychedelic morsel of cinema as material. But it speaks of the end of one era or another, a time for letting go and celebration. "
• a certain worry (Jonathan Schwartz, Brattleboro, VT 2014, 3 min., 16mm): "a certain worry enveloped in the covering of the ground, illuminated around a face, light on something ferocious, touch upon something gentle. -JS"
• 7285 (Sarah J Christman, Brooklyn, NY 2015, 6 min., 16mm): "Coda for a film stock. A cresting wave, a pregnancy in the third trimester, a tennis match in the fourth set, the cicadas' song – a stream of precarious moments of falling action, caught before their end. – SC"
• Accent Grave on Ananas (Tamara Henderson (with sound by Dan Riley), Vancouver, Canada 2013, 3 min., 16mm): "'The film's succession of events is carefully planned so it can be edited in camera, captured in single shots as if experiencing the dream. In this Surrealist tradition, everyday objects are manipulated by unseen hands and the sequenced juxtaposition of these moments creates a narrative that is at once absurd and highly familiar. These sequences allude to chain reactions, operations carried out with focused concentration to meditate on the banal and uncanny with equal attention, troubling out their esoteric truths.' – Mouse Magazine"

[source: Visual Studies Workshop website, 2016-Jan-25]