very abstract
.and a little bit harsh
curated by Lily Jue Sheng & Steff Huì Cí Ling
Saturday, June 7 | 7:00 PM
16mm films by Lily Jue Sheng, with Stom Sogo
very abstract and a little bit harsh traces the political consciousness of Lily Jue Sheng’s practice through a decade of their experience around unstable cinema economies. The making of Sheng’s Force Majeure coincided with a period of optical printing and their occupation as a small-gauge technician cataloguing late filmmaker and projectionist Stom Sogo’s life work. His untimely passing in 2012 tasked Sheng with handling Sogo’s queer and seminal diary films, which heavily influenced their early artistic process. For the first time, Sheng’s work is screening alongside Sogo’s Slow Death, in a timely combination that speaks to the psychic effects of technology, youth, and capitalist violence. Heritage Architecture marks Sheng’s shift to landscape cinema following a period of labour organizing.
The program will be accompanied by a reading from their upcoming chapbook Wage Theft, a mix of poetic and agitprop thinking that draws from class struggles across various fronts and fissures, followed by a Q&A.
“My films have strong animist sensibilities, but I want to talk about it like a historical materialist.”
–Lily Jue Sheng (read the full conversation with Steff Huì Cí Ling in BlackFlash Magazine)
“[A] movie’s reality should be as nasty and fucked up as possible, so we want to get the fuck out of the theatre and hope for something better in life.”
–Stom Sogo
*This program is rated PG, and contains rapid movement and flashing light. Total runtime ~55 minutes
Force Majeure
2015-2017 | United States | 5 | 16mm
Mercurial Matter
2014-2017 | United States | 6 | 16mm
Early animistic animations using traveling mattes and analog optical printing to layersingle-frame captured images into graphic collages.
Change 变
2016-2017 | United States | 6 | 2 x 16mm
Change is an incantation that begins and ends with the character
变 biàn. It draws attention to simultaneous logics unfolding in time, chance, estrangement, and labor. The temporality of the film moves from the agrarian feudal era to the Cold War and beyond in a chronology of Chinese characters, symbols, and images.
Heritage Architecture
2024 | China / Taiwan / United States | 9 | 16mm
Heritage Architecture is a landscape film that plays over three 100' rolls of 16mm, loosely interweaving street scenes from Chinese and Taiwanese port cities through the interstitial space-time of alleyway homes, street markets, and festivals. In the city of Shanghai, heritage architecture is encapsulated within the petite bourgeois memory of longtangs; in Taiwan, this materializes through the spiritual economy of traditional temples. In the end, the hauntologies of these places are preserved in their heritage character which reveal simultaneously national, local, and personal histories that twist and turn alongside changing political powers and rapid urban development.
Slow Death, dir. Stom Sogo
2000 | Japan / United States | 15 | 16mm on video
“[A] movie’s reality should be as nasty and fucked up as possible, so
we want to get fuck out of the theater and hope for something better in life.... I try not to have a message or even word in my movie. But I usually have some sick stories behind each of the movies. Those are just mental eye candy that it taste sweet first, seizure second.”
–Stom Sogo
Lily Jue Sheng is an artist filmmaker, organizer, and cinema worker operating inside and outside of the theater. They are from Shanghai and NJ/NYC (Lenapehoking). Their films have recently screened at Anthology Film Archives, the Emily Harvey Foundation, in the parking lot of a hosiery warehouse, Light Field Film Festival, and Mono No Aware. They have received awards from Creatives Rebuild NY, the Jerome Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and Queens Council on the Arts.