One of world's most exciting and provocative young filmmakers, Joshua Gen Solondz has spent over a decade enacting trance-like rituals on both film and video that confront the viewer with an unsettling vision of domesticity and the human body. Picking up a mantle left by luminaries like Stan Brakhage and Luther Price, Solondz—who often appears in his work in various states of self-induced peril or subjugation—perverts his materials through a deft application of superimpositions, flicker effects, and montage editing, creating startling juxtapositions within and between frames. As physical and bracing as they are intimate, these one-of-a-kind films wrest a strangely poignant poetry from an at times unforgiving world.
Tonight's program, Solondz's first in Los Angeles, features a selection of his early video work, plus four more recent 35mm pieces, including the local premiere of his longest and most ambitious film to date, We Don't Talk Like We Used To (2023), which screened in TIFF's Wavelengths program as well as the Currents section at NYFF.
Program:
Pt 1: Videos
Videos with Mom: Breast (2007, 3 min)
BURNING STAR (2011, 4 min)
(it's not a prison if you never try the door) (2013, 7 min)
AGAINST LANDSCAPE (2014, 4 min)
Pt 2: 35mm
LUNA E SANTUR (2016, 10 min)
(tourism studies) (2019, 7 min)
NE CORRIDOR (2022, 6.5 min)
We Don't Talk Like We Used To (2023, 36 min)
TRT: 78 min
In person: Joshua Gen Solondz
"While unblinkered in its assessment of our most severe global woes, Solondz’s work suggests more than any sort of a before-and-after comparison, instead offering a liberatory space for connection and coexistence: between cultures, images, generations and individuals." —Jesse Cumming, Viennale
"[Solondz's] flicker-stutter strategy rushes the optical nerve before his images have a chance to be corralled by conscious understanding. [He] meshes textures, rarely lingering in one format long before it’s corrupted by a strobing overlay... We don’t talk like we used to, because we’re not what we used to be." —Dylan Adamson, InReviewOnline
"Solondz’s practice comprises performance, deliberately mauled found footage, kaleidoscope pulsations and variations on the flicker film. With an intense propensity towards noise and vibration, this range in form furnishes the disruptions and breakdowns central to Solondz’s unique filmic voice that provocates towards politics, race, transnationalism and the paranormal." —Tiffany Sia and Leo Goldsmith, Screen Slate
"[Solondz] alternates furiously not only between the murky depths of his celluloid material, which has the damaged surfaces and burnished colors of Phil Solomon’s film work, and the bright flatness of the digital frames, but also between different orientations of the same frame... Though its material is uniformly denotative, the effect as a whole is closer to music than rhetoric, aimed as it is at catharsis." —Phil Coldiron, Filmmaker Magazine
"We Don’t Talk Like We Used To is part travelogue and part diary film, a combination of the artist’s bizarre version of domestic bonhomie and his resistance to reducing the larger world to consumptive tourism. Setting these two elements into dialectical action, Solondz produces an aggressive, throbbing film ritual that alludes to common experiences—travel, physical affection, scenes from daily life—but thwarts the tendency to reduce them to mere spectacle." —Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope
(Available to download after screening date)