Home Cinema: [Day 2] 3 Experimental Shorts + Poetry Reading + The Lacey Rituals

Running order:

7pm - Introduction to shorts programme
7:10pm - Living Inside, Underscan and Window Work
7:35pm - Break
7:50pm - Poetry reading by Bidhya Limbu
8:10pm - Introduction to The Lacey Rituals
8:15pm - The Lacey Rituals
9:30pm - Programme close

Like Coming Home - Understanding Home As Routine

Living Inside dir. Sadie Benning (USA, 1989, 5 mins)
A “video diary” shot by a teenaged Sadie Benning when they spent three weeks in their bedroom in self-imposed exile. Grainy images are interlaced in abstract montage as Benning muses life, their mother, their dog, and mimes. Funny and acerbic, this is one for anybody who was a teenager out of step with the world.

Underscan dir. Nancy Holt (USA, 1973-43, 9 mins)
“A series of photographs of my aunt’s home in New Bedford, Mass. have been videotaped, and re-videotaped from the underscaning monitor screen, which is framed within the final tape making a visual distance at 3 removes.” - Nancy Holt, “Notes on Video ‘Distancing,’” Art-Rite, no.7 (Autumn 1974)
How do we understand our lives? How do we package this understanding? In this short, Holt ties family to location, and images of location. Hypnotic auditory rhythms play with the visuals, creating a pattern that turns the mundane extraordinary, and the extraordinary rote. Glitches, emotional and otherwise, invent a solitary and masterful deconstruction of one woman’s life and home through time.

Window Work dir. Lynne Sachs (USA, 2000, 9 mins)
Images within images dance on the screen; Sachs sits by her window, cleans it, drinks her tea, reads the paper. This film takes a meditative look at routine, and our imprecise attempts to capture it through home video.

Poetry reading by Bidhya Limbu (15 mins)
Bidhya Limbu is a Nepali-Singaporean writer and community organiser living in London. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Hajar Press’ The Hajar Book of Rage, The Quarter(ly), Seaford Review, and elsewhere. She is part of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective, a Brooklyn Poets fellow, and has received support from the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop.

The Lacey Rituals dir. Bruce Lacey, Jill Lacey, Tiffany Lacey, Saffron Lacey and Kevin Lacey (UK, 1972, 63 mins)
Content warning: nudity
The whole Lacey family gets a directorial credit on this eccentric film that maps their daily routines, including a disjointed family dynamic. This was a part of Bruce Lacey’s “Human Behaviour” series — attempts to explain humanity to incoming Martian visitors. Whether the Martians would be able to piece together a cohesive picture of our species from this film is for you to decide.