Early Monthly Segments

Guest Programmed by Derek Jenkins

Family Portrait Sittings is most immediately notable for having the audacity to call itself interesting. Comprising contemporaneous documentation and travel footage, oral histories, home movies, and family photos, it presents as personal, as of a narrowness, but vibrates natively with the political.

There is simple charm in competing claims of authority, but here is an orchestration of apparent conflict—between spoken memories and other forms of representation, between the object and its image—produced by a filmmaker who will not consent to privilege one story or another. Guzzetti, over a career that spans decades, in the marked variety of his art and his writing, has consistently and explicitly been occupied by the representation of subjective experience.

In Family Portrait Sittings, he offers nested removes: a rememberer speaks, a still image floats, a film bleeps and crackles out—the relationship between these objects never direct, only phenomenal and continuous. His subjects discover and encounter questions of radical politics, of reproduction, of labour (aesthetic, domestic, provisional) stowed in the shoebox of practical history. They test out theories on each other, are distracted at times by verification. If by temperament they resist one form, they prove generous in another. Guzzetti himself prods and challenges intermittently but freely: openly participant.

Divided into three parts, thematized (roughly) by genealogical, individual, and generational concerns, the film stitches accidental resonances of autobiography into a momentarily stable image of the family, activated at last by the cold intimacy of spectatorship. A few years prior to its release, Guzzetti discussed the movies as a “fugitive experience,” one that, after it is spun, can exist only in memory. If so, what fitter subject than memory itself?

Programme:
Family Portrait Sittings, Alfred Guzzetti, 1975, USA, 16mm, 103 min

@ Gladstone Hotel, Art Bar | 1214 Queen St West
Monday November 18, 2013 | 8:00 PM screening | $5 suggested donation

 Upcoming #58 = Monday 12/9/2013 = Wallace Berman + Kim Ku-lim + Taylor Mead