In December 2007, Ballroom Marfa launched film.text.performance.film, a two-part program organized by Ralph McKay, pairing seemingly disparate areas of contemporary cinematic practice and bringing together a diverse roster of artists with established international reputations rooted in either filmic performance or visual text. Live cinema as experienced in December gives way to the projected word in April with Part II: text. Normally consumed as a solitary, interior experience, words will be amplified and magnified for contemplation by a theater audience.

In 1921 Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand collaborated on the short film Manhatta, which intercuts images of Manhattan with lines lifted from a Walt Whitman poem. The goal was not to tell a story, but to create a new cine-poetry of text and image. From this early instance, poetic cinema has evolved over epochal rifts and mergers, from Surrealism and the advent of sound in movies, through Structuralism and Postmodernism. Contemporary artists interested in the intersection of text and image, whether they take the digital road or detour around it, are defining what this tradition looks and sounds like in a time when information saturation, not to mention distortion, challenges the very meaning of word and image.

Assembling in Marfa will be a faction of contemporary artists who are peeling the page one frame-at-a-time in an inquiry into the visual dimension of language, ranging from David Gatten’s reflection on the role of documents and Michael Tracy’s secret, worldly recitations to Julia Meltzer and David Thorne’s digital archives where images become a fault-line between world views and hidden narratives.

Friday 11 April, Goode Crowley Theater

7:00pm
Michael Tracy (Director) and Christopher Rincon (Cinematographer & Editor)

Ultramarine (work in progress, 59 min. An allegory about aesthetic crisis finds two characters, Sculpture and Music, separated by emotional and geographic distance, the alienation of urban space. Architectural settings from Mumbai and St. Petersburg are woven into a bleak pinnacle of gripping remembrance from times of final empire, creating a universe of anxiety in which neither society’s decadence, nor its burden of consumption, is sustainable.

Saturday 12 April, Goode Crowley Theater

5:00pm
Julia Meltzer and David Thorne (www.speculativearchive.org)

It’s Not My Memory of It (2003, 25 min) is a documentary about secrecy, memory, and documents. Mobilizing specific historical records as memories, which flash up in moments of danger, the tape addresses the logic of the bureaucracy of secrecy.

We Will Live to See These Things, or, Five Pictures of What May Come to Pass (2007, 47 min. Competing visions of an uncertain future shot in Damascus, Syria —the chronicle of a building in downtown Damascus, a recitation anticipating the arrival of a perfect leader, an interview with a dissident intellectual, a portrait of a Qur’an school for young girls, and an imagining of the world made anew.

6:45pm
David Gatten

Secret History of the Dividing Line (2002, 20 min). Paired texts as dueling histories. A journey imagined and remembered. 57 mileage markers produce an equal number of prospects.

The Great Art of Knowing (2004, 37 min). Find yourself resting uneasily half way up the stairs: Something has left the body, yet the body remains: what has left is on its way Elsewhere but cannot help but look back: this look animates the world

How To Conduct a Love Affair (2007, 8 min). An unexpected letter leads to an unanticipated encounter. Have a cup of tea dear. I’ll trade you a stitch from the past in return for a leaf from the future.

8:00pm
Panel discussion with moderator Christian Gerstheimer, El Paso Museum of Art