Screenings and Readings presented by JOAN, Rotations & Alexis Kyle Mitchell

Films by Peter Weiss, Jacqui Duckworth, Julie Dash, Mary Helena Clark, Sarah Ballard, Yelena Gluzman, Onyeka Igwe, Margaret Raspé, and more.

Readings by Danielle Carr, Amelia Bande, and others to be announced.

Curated together by Rotations’ Corina Copp, JOAN’s Suzy Halajian, and artist Alexis Kyle Mitchell, this two-night screening and reading program commemorates the final days of Mitchell’s exhibition The Goal of Our Health, on view at JOAN through January 31. Events for a Moving Body brings together films and readings that think with the body as a site of knowledge, relation, and struggle. Spanning archival and contemporary experimental, ethnographic, and transnational queer, feminist and artist cinema practices, these works reflect on athleticism, performance, hysteria, spirit, and human–animal ecologies; extending Mitchell’s inquiry into how embodied knowledge resists the limits imposed on bodies by medical, economic, social, and ideological structures. 

Mitchell’s JOAN exhibition marks the Los Angeles premiere of her 2024 feature-length film The Treasury of Human Inheritance, which explores the idea of inheritance as a genetic, political, and spiritual set of relations; and includes newly commissioned works that unearth a history and aesthetics of fascist and eugenicist logics and practices. In dialogue, Events for a Moving Body constellates transtemporal moving images that bring into view the body in its sensorial labors—Jacqui Duckworth, Julie Dash, Peter Weiss, Margaret Raspé—with anachronistic works by artists Onyeka Igwe, Yelena Gluzman, Sarah Ballard, and Mary Helena Clark, among others, that immerse us newly. 

How have bodies historically navigated constraint through collectivity, ritual, repetition, and shared forms of attention? Invited poets and scholars Danielle Carr, Amelia Bande, and others will read in and around the film-work, together proposing the body as something not merely acted upon. Instead, histories are embodied, memory flows multidirectionally, and new forms emerge for health, care, and desire outside capitalist and imperialist frameworks.

Bringing together histories of feminized labour with ethnographic scenes of stenographers captioning for d/Deaf students in the classroom, this experimental film considers how captioners and their clients make sense of demands for invisibility, neutrality, and access. Formally, by interrupting the normative coherence of sound and image, the film reflexively undermines the fluency of its own audio track to make palpable the nuanced interpretive work that goes into transcribing across modalities.

A Prayer Before Birth confronts debilitating illness with creative vitality, simultaneously desperate and defiant.

In a text responding to the film, Nat Raha writes that in “the space that emerges between fiction, personal experience and surrealism, A Prayer enacts an avant-garde lesbian aesthetic working to come to terms with being in a disabled body, that places the emotional turbulence of this experience front and centre while confronting affects through which ableism coheres."

Study II: Hallucinations is constructed around twelve separate dimensions of time and space in succession. Opposites such as obsession and tiredness, eroticism and aversion call up inner images of human bodies at rest and in motion before the darkness of sleep.

No Dance, No Palaver is a series of three works, all of which use the first major anti-colonial uprising in Nigeria as an entry point to experiment with colonial moving images relating to West Africa during the first half of the 20th century. In the third, Specialised Technique, ​​William Sellers and the Colonial Film Unit developed a framework for colonial cinema. This included slow edits, no camera tricks and minimal camera movement. Hundreds of films were created in accordance to this rule set. In an effort to recuperate black dance from this colonial project, Specialised Technique attempts to transform this material from studied spectacle to livingness.

As early as 1971, Raspé developed the so-called ‘camera helmet’ before these were industrially available: a construction site helmet equipped with a Super 8 camera that captures the central perspective of the artist’s gaze and enabled her to film her everyday life. The resulting films show the artist performing routine tasks, including housework. The body is considered as a programmable ‘Mensch-Maschine’ (human machine) or as a ‘Frautomat’ (female robot), to which the camera helmet acts as a prosthetic extension and enables the viewer to experience the artist’s own perspective, universally mirrored. Of her work, Raspé wrote, “These films are cut-outs off the running thread of time of this spiral of life and death, growth and dissolution.”

In Four Women, one of the first experimental films by a Black woman filmmaker, dancer Linda Martina Young interprets the same-titled ballad by Nina Simone and embodies the spirits of four women — Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet Thing and Peaches — who represent common stereotypes of Black women attempting to survive in America.

Neighboring Animals is organized around the mouth – as a tool to bite and chew, as an instrument of speech, and as a site of disgust and desire. The film incorporates footage of animal dentistry, bite mark analysis, and a reliquary containing the tooth of Mary Magdalene, alongside text quoting from psychological studies on disgust, Georges Bataille, and Emily Dickinson, among others.

In 19th century Paris at the Salpêtrière Hospital, patients were hypnotized on stage to reproduce the symptoms of hysteria for public audiences. Over a century later, high school cheerleaders are fainting en masse.

Please note: seating is limited. Box Office opens thirty minutes prior to the listed showtime. Guests may add their name to the standby list upon arrival. Online ticket sales will be honored up until 15 minutes after the scheduled showtime; at that time, any unclaimed seats will be released for in-store purchase on a first-come, first-served basis. All Sales Final.