Category: Archive

The Indian Boundary Line, 2010, 16mm/8mm/super-8mm on digital betacam, color. 41 mins.

From 2001-2010, Chicago musician and filmmaker Thomas Comerford made a series of quietly-observed films that contemplate the entwined social, political, and environmental histories of Chicago (Figures in the Landscape, 2002; Land Marked/Marquette, 2005). The Indian Boundary Line (2010) follows a road in Chicago, Rogers Avenue, that traces the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis boundary between the United States and “Indian Territory.” In doing so, it examines the collision between the vernacular landscape, with its storefronts, short-cut footpaths and picnic tables, and the symbolic one, replete with historical markers, statues, and fences. Through its observations and audio-visual juxtapositions, The Indian Boundary Line meditates on a span of land in Chicago about 12 miles long, but suggests how this land and its history are an index for the shifting inhabitants, relationships, boundaries and ideas of landscape — as well as the consequences — which have accompanied the transformation of the “New World.”

thomascomerford.net

Airing Thursdays and Fridays Mar 5 – 13th, 7 pm CST

The Soup Exchange is a blank/black video with subtitles. This video is approximately two hours of conversations between women in Iran and in the US. This conversation highlights the issues of race, gender and sexuality specifically in Iran and in the US. How the West sees the East and how the East sees the West is the production of media and this project’s aim is to challenge this media production in two countries that are in conflicts with one another.

Soup Exchange was a Skype session between ten women in Iran, Esfahan and ten women in the U.S., Chicago. Aush* was a center of this gathering and conversations accrued around it. In this gathering that took place in a private home in Iran, and in the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in the U.S., all women from both groups talked about Feminism in different aspects of their lives. They also talked about misconceptions about women in the east and the west.

*Aush is the most popular traditional Iranian soup that is almost always made by women in women-only-gatherings.

soheilaazadi.com/soup-exchange
soheilaazadi.com

Airing Thursday and Friday Feb 19 & 20th, 7:10 pm CST

and

Airing Thursday Feb 26th, 7 pm CST

The Society of the Spectacle (2013, 75 min.) takes infamous Situationist Guy Debord’s film of the same name as a starting point and skeleton for a new video project. Through intensive research and détournement the film is part recreation, part criticism, and part inquiry.

Spectacle can be thought of as a piece of research by way of re-making or re-stating; a research project which makes use of Debord’s work not as a quotation but as an appropriation of a collective inheritance in the cultural commons. My film reflects a complexity in both theory and practice by overlaying emotional, aesthetic, historical, political, and theoretical discourses in a matrix that forces the viewer to engage on multiple registers simultaneously. As much as it is an experiment in video, it was also an experiential act of research that sought to glean lessons from Debord’s film while leveling critiques of its shortcomings; it was an act of translation in an effort to make these lessons and criticisms legible in a contemporary American context.

heathschultz.com

Airing Thursdays and Fridays Feb 5 – 13th, 7:10 pm CST