Experimental Firm Programming

On March 17, 1930, a crowd assembled outside Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary hoping to witness Al Capone’s release from prison. (In fact, he had already been released the night before.) Filmmaker Bill Morrison and composer Vijay Iyer turn a single panning shot of that scene and its accompanying audio track into a split-screen surround sound panoramic film that continually doubles back on itself, creating a 13-minute trance on the nature of spectacle and spectatorship.

The title draws on a passage from the Rosh Hashana service that deals with the fate of the coming year: “Who shall live, and who shall die; who in his time, and who before his time. Who by water, and who by fire…” The title references that which has been pre-ordained – a future history that will unfold before us in time. « Who By Water » draws on archival footage in which ship passengers are depicted staring wordlessly into the camera’s lens, through a veil of deteriorating emulsion. We examine these anonymous faces: rich, poor, young, old, celebrated or incidental.

In 1929, a bank manager in Dawson City, Yukon Territory buried hundreds of silent film reels in a defunct swimming pool, an effort to dispose of them safely. Forty-nine years later, in 1978, the reels were uncovered by a construction team, and the collection of silent films became known as the Dawson Film Find. Among the 533 reels that were ultimately restored, there were 114 newsreels, each reel containing 5 or 6 individual news stories, each one about a minute in length.

Four of these news stories, produced between 1917 and 1920, have been included here in « Buried News ». Seen together, they reveal how race has historically been used as a tool in the USA to divide people for the commercial or political gain of those in power.

Archival footage captures the aftermath of race riots in East St. Louis, Illinois, 1917, and in Omaha, Nebraska, 1919, as well as extremely rare, and what was thought to be lost footage of the siege of a Lexington, Kentucky, courthouse in 1920.

Through a montage of surveillance and police body-camera footage, a reconstruction of a deadly shooting by a Chicago police officer becomes an investigation into how a narrative begins to take shape in the aftermath.