For this year’s International Women’s Day, Ultra Dogme presents 5 short pieces with expansive implications. Each writer has taken a different artist and has brought to this day and dossier multiple perspectives on the processes, epiphanies, and the traps of artistry. In several striking photographs by the visual artist LaToya Ruby Frazier, Katie Kirkland perceives a rich crosshatching of the human form, family ties and a wider political realities. Elspeth Vischer analyses a scene from Surname Viet Given Name Name (1989), a film by Trinh T. Minh-ha, and so embeds Trinh’s cross-interrogation of the limits and power dynamics of the documentary form with her own. Finding intense musicality in the insistant visual rhythms of Anna Thew’s Autumn Rush for Kurt Kren and Winter and Spring and Summer, Laia Nadal points to the film’s connections to American Transcendentalism. Forrest Cardamenis examines how the (underappreciated) work of Ann Hui asks us “to reflect on the borders—linguistic and otherwise—that still exist, even amid a global film industry and globalizing festival circuit, when we discuss ‘cinephilia.'” Yoana Pavlova conjures a playful mimesis; a stop-motion, crimson-tinged extrapolation of the work of experimental animator Jodie Mack.
Women’s Day 2022
LaToya Ruby Frazier’s ‘The Notion of Family’ (2001-2014)
by Katie Kirkland
‘Autumn Rush for Kurt Kren and Winter and Spring and Summer’ (2003) dir. Anna Thew
by Laia Nadal
Caught Between Two Worlds—A Scene Analysis of ‘Surname Viet Given Name Nam’ (Trinh T. Minh-Ha, 1989)
by Elspeth Vischer
Ann Hui
by Forrest Cardamenis
Red, a Jodie Mack tribute
by Yoana Pavlova