Curator : Karine Boulanger / Vidéographe

As part of the Rick Prelinger sessions: archives, popular documentary et NYC  initiate by the labdoc (Le laboratoire de recherche sur les pratiques audiovisuelles documentaires) which will take place during the 21th RIDM, Vidéographe presents an special video program of works from its collection.

Travel destination (Vitale), artists’ perspectives (Chouinard, Reinke), source material (Gaucher, Kantor):
in this video program drawn from the Vidéographe collection, New York is seen through the prism of personal experience. Each piece is like a moment stolen from the legendarily frenetic city and time itself, capturing traces of artistic dialogue and artists’ comings and goings between New York and Canada.

VIDEO PROGRAMME
Frank Vitale, Hitch-Hiking: Hitchhike 3 – New-York State Police, 17 min, 1972
Luc Courchesne et Marie Chouinard, Marie à New York, 4 min, 1982
Eric Gaucher, Circa. 1967, 9 min, 2016
Istvan Kantor, Anti-credo, 29 min, 1987
Steve Reinke, New York Loves Me, 1 min, 1995

PRELINGER’S FORUM
The Rick Prelinger sessions: archives, popular documentary, NYC
This short series of discussions with California-based researcher, collector and filmmaker Richard (Rick) Prelinger will explore an important and fascinating slice of the film world and its documentary expressions. The montage film – from Nicole Vedrès to Chris Marker, from video mash-ups to Christian Marclay – has a long history in parallel to motion pictures. In Prelinger’s projects, documented perspectives on audio/visual fragments are an important aspect of research, cataloguing and circulation (Prelinger Archives: archive.org). Those perspectives are also crucial to an artistic approach built on anonymous, mundane, utilitarian images, as seen in Prelinger’s filmic encyclopedia (Our Secret Century) and feature works.

Presented in collaboration with UQAM’s labdoc, these sessions will shed light on the approach of a practicing archivist and DIY filmmaker who unearths and displays America as it appears in amateur, corporate and propaganda images spanning nearly a century. A master class with Prelinger will be held at UQAM’s labdoc, as well as three screenings at the Cinémathèque québécoise.