The Dynamic Arts: Documentaries by Jim Davis
The American filmmaker Jim Davis is best known for his dynamic, abstract filmmaking, which built on aesthetics he developed first in his hanging sculptures, mobiles of coloured plastic that channeled and shaped light. Davis’s interests in modern aesthetics would lead him to hail the promise that cinema could become “the only dynamic art,” yet the dynamic possibilities across the arts had long informed his approach, from his early years as a painter to his mature work working directly with light. In addition to his abstract films, Davis made a modest body of documentaries focused on the life and work of artists he admired, the cubist painter John Marin and the Prairie School architect Frank Lloyd Wright, both of them artists whose sense of dynamics resonated with Davis’s own creative ambitions. Davis’s films on Marin and Wright are presented in this program, beginning with the portrait, John Marin; following this is Pertaining to Marin, a shorter portrait made from the earlier film’s outtakes. Closing the program are the paired architectural studies, Taliesin East and Taliesin West, on Frank Lloyd Wright’s home studios, the first in Springfield Wisconsin, the second in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Program:
- John Marin (1950, 16mm, 23m, colour, sound)
- Pertaining to Marin (1953, 16mm, 10m, colour, sound)
- Taliesin East (1950, 16mm, 10m, colour, sound)
- Taliesin West (1950, digital file, 10m, colour, sound)
TRT: ~53 minutes
16mm film prints provided by the Black Zero Media Collection.
AD HOC aims to rethink what an experience of cinema can be. We seek to reposition historical landmarks and buried treasures within the on-going tradition of experimental and other non- commercial modes of filmmaking, drawing on work from Toronto, throughout Canada, and internationally. Within these parameters, we aspire to diversity in programming, as well as to multimedia and interdisciplinary screening events that bring together varied communities.
AD HOC = Stephen Broomer, Madi Piller, Jim Shedden, Bart Testa.
AD HOC would like to thank Alberto Zambenedetti, Denise Ing, Charlie Keil, Eyan Logan, Sean Rogers, Thom Chan, Jarret Sorger, and the staff of Innis College and the Cinema Studies Institute.