Millennium Film Journal No. 82 Launch Screening

Celebrating the release of MFJ 82, this programme curated by Grahame Weinbren, Vince Warne, and Jonathan Ellis, consists of works discussed in the issue – attempts to document and account for an increasingly convoluted world, in which images are not just a reflection of reality, but part of its very substance.

Programme:

Little Stabs at Happiness
Ken Jacobs, 1963, 15 min

“Material was cut in as it came out of the camera, embarrassing moments intact. 100′ rolls timed well with music on old 78s. I was interested in immediacy, a sense of ease, and an art where suffering was acknowledged but not trivialized with dramatics. Whimsy was our achievement, as well as breaking out of step.” – Ken Jacobs

Adieu Ugarit
Samy Benammar, 2024, 15 min

“Shadows of the past pervade the film, a tone evoked by a dissonance between the dark emotions of the subject and the calming qualities of the Laurantian Waters… ” – Grahame Weinbren (MFJ 82)

Memory Theater 2 
Claudia Hart, 2022-25, 5 min

“Hart’s uncanny figures and their environments are wholly expressive. They drift, warp, and decay, seemingly under the spell of unknown pressures, whether internal or environmental…” – Corinna Kirsch (MFJ 82)

Rain
Mike Hoolboom, 2025, 3 min
White Harlem
Mike Hoolboom, 2024, 10 min

“I think the doorway that we walk through to find each other at an artist’s movie screening always begins the same way. By asking too much. By making preposterous statements. What do you call this place anyway: utopia? It literally means: No place.” – Mike Hoolboom (MFJ 82)

Sound of Million Insects, Light of a Thousand Stars
Tomonari Nishikawa, 2014, 2 min

“The two-minute film’s images look like cameraless film experiments—a rush of blue colour and light leaks, scratched frames jumping with flickering energy, and a hushed soundtrack of noise and pops. Beautiful, strange, and abstract—you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a hand-painted work…” – Vince Warne (MFJ 82)

Selected Works
Undertime Slopper, 2025, 5 min

“The animations hover in an aesthetic limbo, not quite amateurish, not quite refined… shaped by algorithmic leftovers: low-poly scans, warped perspective, and uncanny ‘deepfake’ digital mouths. But beyond the noise, he’s built an absurdist ecosystem, half-myth, half-meme...” – Ari Temkin (MFJ 82)

Repeat After Me (Part 1)
Open Group, 2024, 38 min - audience participation

Open Group is a well-known Ukrainian artist collective founded in Lviv in 2012. The current permanent members are Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach and Anton Varga

“Men, women, old, middle aged, young. One by one they stare into the camera, identify themselves, and shout, yowl, grunt, hiss, roar the sounds of war.                                            UUUUhHHhhTDDURRShHTTZHHTTZHT.
Machine gun. Explosion. Siren. Drone. Helicopter. Bomber. Plane.
WZWFFFBUBUUHH!WZWFFFBUBUUHH!
After producing the extended sound of war weapons or warning sirens, the performer issues the command
‘Повторюй за мною’ – ‘Repeat afte rme.’“
– Grahame Weinbren (MFJ 82)

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The Millennium Film Workshop gratefully acknowledges support for the Millennium Film Journal by the following individuals and organizations: Deborah and Dan Duane; Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation; C. Noll Brinckmann, anonymous donors; and New York State Council on the Arts. Special thanks to Magda Savon for introducing us to the Open Group.