Details:

Tone Glow Presents: Departures - Films of Place by Allen Ross, Peter Bundy, and Robert Fulton

RSVP 


(Various Filmmakers, 1974-1981, approx. 84 min, 16mm and digital)

From southern Alabama to Bowling Green, Kentucky by way of Tibet, this collaborative program between Tone Glow and Block Cinema gathers together three underrecognized experimental filmmakers whose eccentric paths each explored vastly different terrains, while gravitating around shared concerns for the cinematic evocation of place and spirit.

ALABAMA DEPARTURE (1978), co-directed by Peter Bundy & Bryan Elsom, is a beautiful tapestry of small towns in southern Alabama: Coffeeville, Banks, and Dauphin Island. Through gentle portraits of these landscapes, the film encourages a mode of viewing and listening that draws connections between humans, the natural world, the music they both create, and the environments that bind them. Insects buzz, fish leap out of the Gulf of Mexico, and an organist plays a ditty: all of life as song and dance.

In THE GRANDFATHER TRILOGY (1979-1981), the trio of short films that came to define his legacy, late Chicago filmmaker Allen Ross crystallized an austere but unmistakably personal cinema rooted in time, place, and family. As plain as dirt and as rich as soil, PAPA (32 min) is built up from stark black-and-white 16mm compositions that frame the filmmaker’s land-working grandfather at peculiar angles, often casting a glance pensively to the beckoning earth. As a portrait film, the film captures what Ross called his grandfather’s “divinely shadowed presence” with bracing intimacy. The mundane family conversations and afternoon naps captured in THANKSGIVING, 1979 linger in the incandescent light of unhurried time — even as a background TV broadcast delivers unsettling reports on the unfolding hostage crisis in Iran. Ross pivots to reflect on the ephemerality of life and the finality of death in the last of the three shorts, BURIELS. Cast in an aching blue hue, the film attends to the banal conventions of grief with pure reverence, crafting one of cinema’s most tender and understated depictions of death as a ritual, as a passage, and as a transubstantiation. 

At once materialist and spiritual, THE GRANDFATHER TRILOGY reflects the influence of avant-garde filmmaker Robert Fulton, with whom Ross studied while attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Fulton was an independently wealthy cinematographer, world traveler, and seeker who, like Ross, had a habit of turning the world upside down through his camera; for PATH OF CESSATION (1974), Fulton traveled to Tibet, gathering impressions in the form of both meditative long takes and swirling superimpositions and inversions. 

Films Screened:

ALABAMA DEPARTURE (Peter Bundy & Bryan Elsom, 1978, 9 min, 16mm from the Walker Arts Center)

PATH OF CESSATION (Robert Fulton, 1974, 15 min, 16mm from Canyon Cinema]

THE GRANDFATHER TRILOGY (Allen Ross, 1981, 60 mins, 16mm from Chicago Filmmakers]

Image credit: ALABAMA DEPARTURE (1978) by Peter Bundy & Bryan Elsom

About the guest curator:

Joshua Minsoo Kim is a music and film critic, film programmer, and educator based in Chicago. He is the editor-in-chief of Tone Glow, a publication dedicated to experimental music and film.

Tone Glow Film Festival:

Tone Glow Film Festival (TGFF) is a Chicago-based international film festival committed to showcasing the best in experimental film. Eschewing traditional submission-based programming, TGFF instead hand-selects works that highlight the ingenuity, originality, and radical possibilities of independent and avant-garde filmmaking. Its mission is to provide local audiences with the chance to see masterworks both new and old, inviting contemplation on the cinematic form’s history and future. TGFF is co-presented by Chicago Filmmakers.

Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu