Made as its auteur approached her 80th birthday, Agnès Varda's The Beaches of Agnès is a playful, elegiac autobiography in cinema by the “grandmother” of the French New Wave. Varda has created a living, moving collage in which clips from her earlier films are juxtaposed with images from her travels, projects, and relationships, and documentary realism gives way to dreamy montages and surrealist set pieces. Supporting players include Harrison Ford and fellow filmmaker Chris Marker, appearing in the guise of an orange cartoon cat. The result is a luminous meditation on Varda's life in film and on the art of film itself. Winner of a César (France's equivalent of the Oscar) for best documentary, the event will take place one year after EMPAC screened Varda's The Gleaners and I.

Keiko Courdy worked on initial design concepts for HALO v-2, an interactive video installation for public space in which viewers would physically generate the electricity needed to run the installation by riding human-powered generators such as a stationary bike, before entering. In the installation, viewers would lie in a dome and experience a kind of space travel, immersed in interactive visualizations of real-time earth data from a satellite. By insisting on making the production of energy visible, HALO v-2 reflects on how humans have the capacity to adapt and invent new patterns of behavior in response to impacts on the environment due to climate change. Other versions of Halo were designed for deployment in the ocean.

Courdy is a French multimedia artist and director who creates installations, performances, and interactive and immersive works that push the limits of perception. Collaborators on this project included Jacques Parnell, a French illustrator and painter who works on representations of utopian architecture, and art director and photographer Frederic Sofiyana.

Graham Parker shot 100 hours of footage (working with cinematographer Ben Tiven) while in residence at EMPAC during January 2010 for two projects, The Flitter and The giST n. Both works were included in Parker’s solo show at EMPAC, The Confidence Man. The giST n is a partial recreation of a “making of” documentary entitled The Art of The Sting (which accompanied the DVD of the 1973 film The Sting). Initially in a familiar documentary form, the piece quickly becomes unreliable: performance styles vary; microphones intrude; takes extend for too long or are cut short; line rehearsals make it to the final cut. At times it is not clear what is being described (a film? a con?) and every witness, in front of and behind the camera, becomes suspect. In The Flitter, writer and performer Carl Hancock Rux delivers a monologue based on text (including spam emails and a short essay on the phenomenon of spam fed through indexing software and alphabetized by the first letter of each line so that the essay and surrounding texts are “dissolved” together) derived from Parker’s 2009 book Fair Use (notes from spam).

Unfiction is a series of documentary films that turn truth into something other than fact, using poetry and imagination, rather than transparency and objectivity. These filmmakers question the very notion of authenticity, and disobey the typical documentary filmmaking practices; instead they stage their own realities on location, employing techniques such as reenactment, personal voice-overs and special effects.

A study of the sublime and the absurd at the southernmost point of the planet, Encouters at the End of the World is Werner Herzog’s most recent documentary, commissioned by the National Science Foundation. From the outset Herzog proclaims that it is “not a film about fluffy penguins”; instead the film examines the psychology of the scientists and technicians who have chosen to live and work in this formidable landscape.

Werner Herzog (real name Werner H. Stipetic) was born in Munich on September 5, 1942. He grew up in a remote mountain village in Bavaria and never saw any films, television, or telephones as a child. Since the age of 19 he has produced, written, and directed more than 40 films, published more than a dozen books of prose, and directed as many operas.

Associated with the German New Wave Movement, Herzog's films blur the distinctions between documentary and narrative practice through Herzog’s direct intervention into the context he is filming in order to extract what he has called the "ecstatic truth" of a situation. Please see Herzog's "Minnesota Declaration" reproduced here which was published on the occasion of his 1999 retrospective at the Walker Art Center.

Unfiction is a series of documentary films that turn truth into something other than fact, using poetry and imagination, rather than transparency and objectivity. These filmmakers question the very notion of authenticity, and disobey the typical documentary filmmaking practices; instead they stage their own realities on location, employing techniques such as reenactment, personal voice-overs and special effects. Examined Life pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms, and puts it back on the streets... In Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today’s most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas. Peter Singer’s thoughts on the ethics of consumption are amplified against the backdrop of Fifth Avenue’s posh boutiques. Slavoj Zizek questions current beliefs about the environment while sifting through a garbage dump. Michael Hardt ponders the nature of revolution while surrounded by symbols of wealth and leisure. Judith Butler and a friend stroll through San Francisco’s Mission District questioning our culture’s fixation on individualism. And while driving through Manhattan, Cornel West—perhaps America’s best-known public intellectual—compares philosophy to jazz and blues, reminding us how intense and invigorating a life of the mind can be. Offering privileged moments with great thinkers from fields ranging from moral philosophy to cultural theory, Examined Life reveals philosophy’s power to transform the way we see the world around us and imagine our place in it. Featuring Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwarne Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor.

The official premiere of four new projects created through the DANCE MOViES Commission, the only major program in the U.S. to support new works that fuse dance with the technologies of the moving image. These projects represent the second round of this commission and encompass a single-channel video installation made from animated 3D scans of a dancer and three dance films spanning the gamut from Depression-era musical, to love story, to dancing full throttle through city streets. The screening is followed by a presentation and open discussion with the artists and filmmakers. Afterwards, all are invited to a reception in EMPAC’s café.

DANCE MOViES COMMISSIONS 2008-2009:

Body/Traces (USA) Created and co-directed by Sophie Kahn and Lisa Parra, choreography by Lisa Parra, music by Sawako Kato, performance by Lisa Parra and Tina Vasquez, 3D scanning/animation by Sophie Kahn. (USA) Using a DIY 3D laser scanner and stop-motion 3D digital animation to track a dancer's movement through space and time, Body/Traces is a single-channel video projected at life-size. Illuminating the physical presence and disappearance of the body, this work addresses the questions: What happens to the body in motion when it becomes a still image? And what becomes of that image when it is returned to the moving body whence it came? (7 minute looping video installation) Body/Traces was supported by a three-week creative residency at EMPAC in January 2009.

Eyes Nose Mouth (USA) Choreographed and conceived by Noémie Lafrance, directed in collaboration with Patrick Daughters with music by Brooks Williams. (USA) Inspired by our physical, emotional and psychological relationships to spaces that are public versus private, “Eye Nose Mouth” follows single characters navigating through a series of changing landscapes. The site-specific choreography reacts to the urban and natural environments creating a narrative thread that evokes the characters' transforming emotional states. (10 minutes)

Looking Forward—Man and Woman (Brazil/The Netherlands) Directed by Roberta Marques, choreographed and performed by Michael Schumacher and Liat Waysbort (Brazil/Netherlands). This film is a love letter from a man to his wife at the end of their long lives, and simultaneously a portrait of a younger couple at the beach, where both the waves and time run backwards in opposition to the drift of fate. The second film in a trilogy that plays with the reversal of movement and time in video and dance to create mind-binding illusions. With excerpts from the poignant Lettre à D. by the social philosopher and writer André Gorz. (10 minutes)

Sunscreen Serenade (USA) Directed and choreographed by Kriota Willberg. Sound by Carmen Borgia. Illustration and design by R. Sikoryak. (USA) In homage to Busby Berkeley’s flamboyant kaleidoscopic style of the 1930s, scantily-clad finger puppets tackle the contemporary issue of ozone depletion. Cheerfully dancing in formation, the diminutive dancers deliver a gentle reminder that environmental and political trends come and go, much like the drift of our culture through movie fads. (5 minutes)

They Watch is an immersive art installation with virtual characters literally watching visitors. Several duplicates of the virtual characters – one man, one woman, and both portraits of the artists – surround and interact with visitors, who are tracked as they move about the physical space, and even projected into the virtual space. Years of research and development with game-technology have resulted in a 360° audio-visual environment, exploiting a 15-meter-wide panoramic screen and a 32-channel sound system. The subtle collaboration of the real and virtual agents and environments conflate to engender a hybrid space where the observer becomes the observed. Figuratively wearing a virtual camera causes the on-screen characters to approach and to retreat, analogously altering the soundtrack; characters that, as visitors will come to discover, are aware of their presence. They watch. Visitors’ movements activate visual cues and affect the characters’ spontaneous, unscripted behaviors, so that the installation’s visual and sonic compositions are uniquely influenced by the visit. The piece becomes a composition in movement whereby non-linear blends of real and virtual force visitors to consider perspective, agency, and the distinction between authentic and imagined as They Watch. Open Monday – Saturday from 12 PM to 6 PM (longer if public events are happening in the building) On Tuesday, November 17 @ 7:00 PM, EMPAC will host Full Immersion: an exceptional panel of international artists, engineers, and producers representing the evolving field of works created for the 360° panoramic screen

EMPAC will present a screening of Systems, the fourth episode from Art21’s 5th season. Artists invent new processes to convey the attitudes of today’s supercharged, information-based society, examining why we find comfort in some systems while rebelling against others. Systems features artists who realize complex projects through acts of appropriation or accumulation. In some instances, they create projects vast in scope, which almost elude comprehension.

Nuria Fragoso is a Mexican artist, dancer, and performer whose work explores the phenomenon of space as a social reality and as shaper of human relationships. A recipient of a DANCE MOViES Commission, Fragoso came to EMPAC first to research, and then to complete post-production on Anatomy of Melancholy. Shot in Mexico in contrasting environments including stark black-and-white interiors and a parched desert environment, the film uses visual metaphors about space and emotion to portray the quality of melancholy in social groups, catalyzed by the inadequacy of communication between individuals. Choreographed collectively by the performers, the film was edited in residence by Fragoso and Martha Uc; also working in residence, Antonio Russek created the film’s original sound.

Unfiction is a series of documentary films that turn truth into something other than fact, using poetry and imagination, rather than transparency and objectivity. These filmmakers question the very notion of authenticity, and disobey the typical documentary filmmaking practices; instead they stage their own realities on location, employing techniques such as reenactment, personal voice-overs and special effects. White Sky refers to the cloud of white dust that arrives to the Russian town of Monchegorsk every morning from the local nickle mine, obscuring the sky. Focusing on the day-to-day lives of a family who live and work in the town, White Sky presents a view of human relationships and adaptability rather than of ecological disaster. The film combines long takes of the town's scorched earth interspersed with intimate scenes of the family's domestic life, many of which were re-enacted for the film. The screening will be followed by a talk by filmmaker and film theorist Susanna Helke.