The (non)digestibility of the camera​ – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art invites to a screening of four experimental films as part of the Party’s Over film review about connections between food and cinema. 

Breakfast (Table Top Dolly) 

directed by Michael Snow, Canada 1976, 15'

• The camera slowly advances across an overladen breakfast table, knocking objects out of shot. The film, shot in 1972, but edited four years later, is a kind of self-parody, referring back to Michael Snow's earlier film, Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have the Time.

Food

[Jídlo], directed by Jan Švankmajer, Czech Republic/Great Britain 1993, 17'

• Breakfast, lunch and dinner with a master of surreal stop motion animation. Švankmajer’s obsessions return – food, macabre, dark humour – and the film can be read as a metaphor for any devouring system, both communism and capitalism.

Cat Food 

directed by Joyce Wieland, Canada 1967, 14'

• The mechanics of a movie projector – devouring the film tape roll by roll – are compared here with the methodical mechanics of a cat eating fish after a fish.

Spring Flavor 

directed by Ken Paul Rosenthal, USA 1996, 3'

• The alchemy and texture of film is celebrated with images of sun-splintered reeds that have been re-photographed, hand-processed, buried beside a pond, and soaked in cooked wild berries.