Event Details
Date & Time:
Wed February 5, 2025
7 PM-9:30 PM
Location:
The Block Museum of Art
40 Arts Circle Drive
Evanston, IL 60208
Audience:
Open to the public
Details:
THE HUMAN SURGE (2016) with guest Eduardo Williams
Screening and discussion with guest filmmaker Eduardo “Teddy” Williams
(Eduardo Williams, 2016, 97 min, DCP)
THE HUMAN SURGE, the first feature film by Argentinian filmmaker Eduardo “Teddy” Williams, translates the queasy sensations of 24-7 computing (vague, unsatisfiable desires; a sense of physical and material displacement; low-resolution, low-bars modes of social life) into thrilling, formally audacious cinema. Williams’ film flows inexorably between Mozambique, Argentina, and the Philippines, tracking the tenuous and heavily mediated threads of human connection that pass between precariously employed young people through the wormholes of the internet. Along the way, Williams’ cameras revel in the sinuous pleasures of movement, using different image textures (from 16mm to GoPro to webcams) to access dimensions of embodied experience typically flattened in the digital netherworld. Since appearing in 2016, Williams’ first feature has already become a landmark—indeed, as Dennis Lim observed in Film Comment, “no film of the 2010s came closer to the texture of contemporary lived experience than Eduardo Williams’s THE HUMAN SURGE.”
Following the film, Williams will appear for discussion and audience Q&A with Christina Nguyen, Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Department of RTVF.
Co-presented with support from the Michael and Jane Hoffman Visiting Artist Series and the MFA in Documentary Media at Northwestern.
About the artist:
Eduardo "Teddy" Williams (born 1987) is an Argentinean film director. He first studied at Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, and then in Fresnoy, France, under the tutorship of Portuguese director Miguel Gomes. Williams works within an avant-garde/experimental tradition. In 2016, his feature debut The Human Surge won the Golden Leopard in the “Filmmakers of the Present” section at Locarno Film Festival. His continued experimentation with film has earned him the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists in 2019; the 2020-2021 Fulton Fellowship at the Harvard Film Study Center; and the CHANEL NEXT PRIZE in 2022. His latest feature, The Human Surge 3, makes brilliant use of a 360-camera to create a stunningly original vision of people and places from across the globe coming together.
Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu