Tickets: $7-10

The Nightingale is please to welcome former Chicagoan (and UIC grad) Malic Amalya, who will be in person to present a special program of films, digital videos, and a 16mm film performance with live musical accompaniment.

Amalya’s films, videos, performance works, and installations operate on the boundary lines between traditional experimental cinema (drawing from the lyrical, structural, diaristic, and “camp” strains in particular) and a more radical and critical queer-punk aesthetic. They are interstitial works that are both at home in both realms, and yet also somewhat distant from each. A sweet hardcore. Identity, performance and performance of the self, a search for grounding (aesthetically and personally), and finding meaning and understanding in the easily missed small things that surround us everyday are constant themes.

PROGRAM:

EDDIE, PAM, GARY, SUE (2007, 4 min, 16mm)
Eddie, Pam, Gary, Sue is a filmic study in semiotics and family relationships. Set in the filmmaker’s studio in Chicago and in his grandmother’s home in Vermont, this experimental film explores the deterioration and production of signifiers through time and across generations.

BOLEX STUDY #1: A CALL AND RESPONSE WITH WARHOL’S BLOW JOB (2008, 3 min, 16mm)
Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Blow Job is a 35 minute shot of a man’s head and shoulders as, the title suggests, he receives a blow job. Confined to the Bolex’s spring-wound clockwork motor and a 100ft roll of film, Bolex Study #1 supplies the missing half of Warhol’s film.

GOLD MOON, SHARP ARROW (2012, 12 min, 16mm)
Against a backdrop of electrocution, dominance, and scientific precision, wasps nest in an abandoned refrigerator, eyelashes flutter, curtains blow in open windows, and queers congregate. Adapting Stanley Milgram’s 1963 experiment on obedience to authority, Gold Moon, Sharp Arrow explores how queer communities reenact, resist, and respond to assimilation, coercion, and trauma.

DETOURS & FENCES (2012-14 ongoing series, 21 min total, Digital Video)
Landscapes, collected objects, and punk rock trace heartache, family legacies, and trans-identity.

NO. 1: DETOURS & FENCES (2012)
NO. 2: ENAMEL & DERMIS (2012)
NO. 3: ROADSIDES & WASTE GROUNDS (2012)
NO. 4: HORSES (2012)
NO. 5: MY HEART, OVERREACHES (2013)
NO. 7: LIKE LOOKING INTO THE SUN (2014)
NO. 8: I THINK YOU DESERVE BOTH; I THINK YOU DESERVE EVERYTHING (2014)
NO. 9: TO TYPE OUT YOUR NAME (2014)

TOWARDS THE DEATH OF CINEMA (2014, approx. 30 min, 16mm performance with live musical performance by Nathan Hill)
World Premiere
“Towards the Death of Cinema is a celluloid performance where I allow audience members to savor the individual photograph of the film frame for longer than 1/24th of a second at the expense of the integrity of the image. Cutting off the sprocket holes located on the edge of the frame, I bypass the projector’s inherent movement forward. By holding onto the ends of the filmstrip, I control the speed and direction of frame movement. By allowing the film to warp in the heat of the projector, the audience is also given the rare opportunity to savor the destruction of film. If, as Paulo Cherchi Usai argues, “cinema is the art of destroying moving images” (The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age, 2000), Towards the Death expedites this inherent process before the eyes of the viewing audience.”

ABOUT MALIC AMALYA:
Malic Amalya is a queercore artist working in 16mm film, video installation, and photography. His work captures processes of deterioration and formulation. Forms, sounds, signifiers, and narratives slip between recognizable and abstract. Memories are reinterpreted, desires shift, notions of the self realign, and language evolves.

Malic is the recipient of the 2014 GOLDIE Award in Film, presented by the SF Bay Guardian. In 2013, the Museum of Transgender History and Art named him as one of the “Unrecognized Artists of the Year.” In 2012, Malic’s film Gold Moon, Sharp Arrow won Best Experimental Film at the Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival in Portland, Oregon.

Malic’s films have screened widely, including in the Crossroads Film Festival in San Francisco, the TIE Cinema Exposition, the Onion City Experimental Film & Video Festival, and MIX NYC. He has also presented his work at Outpost for Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; TransOcular: New Perspectives in Transgender Art, Media, and Politics in Philadelphia; Yale University; CalArts; Chicago Filmmakers; and the TransSomatechnics Conference held at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia.

In addition to his own films and videos, Malic is the cinematographer for the award-winning documentary feature Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance. Malic also curates INFRARED: New Visions from the Queer Underground, an annual shorts program in the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

Official Website

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Tags: Colin Beckett, Noble Square, The Nightingale