VIDEOS / FILMS / PROJECTIONS
NETWORKS / EVENTS / COLLABORATIONS
CINEMA BALASH:
PAIRINGS
DEEP DIVE
TYPOLOGIES
NO SHOW AND TELL
HOSTING AND OTHERS
PRINT PROJECTS / WRITING
CINEMA BALASH is an experimental micro-cinema and screening series. It began in 2013 as an moving-image event series that I founded at the Hunter College MFA studios in order to offer artists a space to experiment with video and screen works in progress. In 2017, I settled the nomadic cinema in a special-built 21 seat theater that I constructed within a studio building that I co-founded (100 Rochester, Brooklyn). Since its founding, Cinema Balash has aimed to offer artists a space to show their own work or the work of others and contextualize it as they think best, offering the license of a studio without reneging on the distinctive social experience of the cinema.
I have developed a collaborative, montaging curatorial model distinctive to Cinema Balash in which I invite an artist to select a theme and they in turn invite other participants to submit moving-image pieces in accordance with their theme. I then edit the submissions into a full length “found footage” film screened at the micro-cinema. Other events focus on experimenting with the reception or mechanics of cinema.
“Cinema balash” is an archaic slang term that hybridizes French, Arabic and Hebrew: “balash” meaning “without” or “gratis.”
It is what one would yell to draw a crowd if a fight broke out in the street or if someone undressed in a window: “free cinema! free cinema!” The provisional, temporary community that would come together to watch this “free cinema” is what Cinema Balash references in its name, taking as its own the shared, expanded definition of what cinema is that everyone in these crowds understood.
Pairings is a series in which artists present a scene from a movie and pair it with a counterpart — food, drinks, songs, texts, performances. The pairings affect the audience’s experience of the scene and alter its meaning.
Typologies is a guest-curated series in which movie scenes of a particular selected “type” are submitted by participants and montaged into a full-length film. Typologies takes an obsessional, encyclopedic impulse and morphs it into a form of dialogue — an idiosyncratic tour through cinema history.
No Show & Tell invited artists to “tell a movie” from memory, reproducing the experience of a friend, family member or lover relating the plot of a movie — a projection- less screening.
Deep Dive was an event at the Jerusalem Cinematheque in which I invited historians, cinema scholars, political activists, musicians, and other respondents to collectively interrogate a few seconds of film that I discovered in an archive and identified as a fragment of the earliest known Hebrew-language film shot in Palestine (Ha’Halutz, 1927). The film was never completed and all the footage was presumed to have been destroyed. The fragment, which records slivers of a lost life in Palestine during the British Mandate, was shown over and over and transformed through the layering of perspectives.
CHIASMUS
ORPHEUS, ORPHEUS
TRANSFORM - DEAD SEA
SHE MEANT TROUBLE
PROJECTORS/SCREENS
NETWORKS / EVENTS / COLLABORATIONS
CINEMA BALASH
POSTCARDS
NUMINOSUM
PRINT PROJECTS / WRITING
FOR X
MACHOL (THE DANCE)
STATIC: BLANK SCREENS, SCREEN REFUSALS AND THE MONOCHROME MOVING-IMAGE
COLOR FILM / FILM COLOR (IN SANFORD WURMFELD COLOR VISIONS 1966-2013)
STRANGE STONES AND GOOD NEIGHBORS [WITH JESSE LOCKARD] (IN “AND A RIVER WENT OUT OF EDEN”, MAAYAN ELYAKIM)
EYE OF THE CYCLOPS [HEBREW]