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Ways of Living: a film-screening epic in chapters
Beginning in September 2008, guestroom will host a series of film events exploring ideas related to travel, migration, tourism, location and the wider concept of the journey.
The series is organised in 5 chapters and each event will screen a particular choice of mainly documentary films around the following categories:
The Visitors: films about travel to lesser known territories or environments
The Visited (urban): uses and metaphors of the urban landscape
The Visited (rural): uses and metaphors of the rural landscape
In Transit: locating the space between two fixed points in a journey
Ways of Living: intentional settlements
Each event will last a whole evening to allow room for discussions, food and drink. The deliberate intensity is an attempt to create room for a shared experience as well as constitute something of an excursion in its own right.
to book a place please email us here
These film screenings are part of our research for a library commission from Grizedale Arts. We are interested in developing a specialist film library relating to the theme Ways of Living and the discussions and feedback from the screenings may feed into the library.
Chapter 1: The Visitors:
Cannibal Tours
This is a documentary film by Australian director and cinematographer Dennis O’Rourke. While it borrows heavily from ethnographic modes of representation, the film is a biting commentary on the nature of modernity. The film follows a number of European and American eco-tourists as they travel from village to village throughout the Sepik River area in Papua New Guinea, driving hard bargains for local handcrafted items, paying to view formerly sacred ceremonies and taking photographs of every aspect of "primitive" life. With some prodding, the tourists unwittingly reveal an unattractive and pervasive ethnocentrism to O'Rourke's cameras.
Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti Maya Deren
This is a black and white documentary film about dance and possession in Haitian voodoo that was shot by experimental filmmaker Maya Deren between 1947 and 1952 and edited and completed by Deren's third husband Teiji Ito and his wife Cherel Winett Ito (1947-1999) in 1981, twenty years after Deren's death. Most of the film consists of images of dancing and bodies in motion during rituals in Rada and Petro services. The film that resulted reflects Deren's increasing personal engagement with voodoo and its practitioners. Deren was able to record scenes that probably would have been inaccessible to other filmmakers.
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus Andrew Douglas
Searching for The Wrong-Eyed Jesus
is a captivating and compelling road trip through the creative spirit of the South of the USA. Director Andrew Douglas's film the musician Jim White through a gritty terrain of churches, prisons, truck stops, biker bars and coalmines. This journey takes you through a very real contemporary Southern America, a world of marginalised white people and their unique and homemade culture. Along the way are roadside encounters with present-day musical mavericks including The Handsome Family, Johnny Dowd, 16 Horsepower and David Johansen; old-time banjo player Lee sexton; rockabilly and mountain Gospel churches - and novelist Harry Crews telling grisly stories down a dirt track.