Josephine Massarella: Green Dreams

AD HOC #48: Josephine Massarella: Green Dreams

Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave.
November 22, 2023, 7PM

The films of Josephine Massarella cover a vast territory, from durational, performance-focused films that bridge everyday experiences with ritual and symbol, to aesthetic transformations of landscape and wilderness through the eye of the camera. This program focuses on her maturation as an artist concerned with figure and landscape, through to her triumphant return to filmmaking in the 2010s. Massarella's ecstatic, poetic, ecofeminist cinema explores the relationship between figure and setting, between word and image, between material fact and evanescent experience.

This event also marks the public launch of a new blu-ray collection, Josephine Massarella: Green Dreams, from home video publisher Black Zero, a showcase for Massarella’s complete works, including a selection of her early student films, all paired with new critical commentaries and other contextualizing features. AD HOC is proud to co-present this event with the Cinema Studies Institute at Innis College, Black Zero, the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre.

Program:
One Woman Waiting (1984, 16mm, col., sd., 8 mins.)
No. 5 Reversal (1989, 16mm, b/w, sd., 10 mins.)
Interference (1991, 16mm, b/w, sd. 20 mins.)
Green Dream (1994, 16mm, col., sd., 23 mins.)
Night Stream (1996, 16mm, col., sd., 12 mins.)
Light Study (2013, 16mm, col./b/w, sd., 12 mins.)
No End (2015, digital, col., sd., 6 mins.)
165708 (2017, 16mm, col., sd., 7 mins.)

TRT: 98 minutes

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, Tess Takahashi, Bart Testa.