The Non-Event gets its name from the work of French theorist Jean Baudrillard; best described as the shadow of the real that emerges as a mediated double, like the repetitive massage of 9/11 on VHS. Quite distinct from the event itself, the non-event flirts with fourth-order simulacra, as a sign hiding its complete negation. Beginning with the legendary artist Aldo Tambellini's newly rediscovered Black Video III (with a live soundtrack performed by the program's curator, M. Woods) Agitate 21C's The Non-Event opens up Peripheries Film Festival with force; an uncompromising program of space-altering film/video - transgressing and addressing the production of hyperreality. We are proud to present this screening by four key figures in the contemporary avant-garde, Aldo Tambellini, Naz Dincel, Karissa Hahn, and Jason Halprin.

Program:

BLACK VIDEO III by Aldo Tambellini - 24 min (w/ Live Performance)

Instructions on How to Make a Film by Naz Dincel - 13 min

Please Step Out of the Frame by Karissa Hahn - 4 min

Imperfect Video by Jason Halprin - 20 min

Total runtime: 61 min

An assortment of short experimental films, programmed by Nick Swanton.

Program:

Abgad Hawaz (Robin Riad, 2m)

BOSCO (Stefano Canapa & Lucie Leszes, 8m)

Rendez-vous (Christophe Guerin, 5m)

Latitude Mesh (Agnès Hayden, 18m)

Creature of the Sun (Šima Müllerová, 30m)

Total runtime: 63 min

Daniel Barnett (United States, 2019, 92 minutes)

Science Without Substance follows a hapless band of the lost through a shifting landscape as they try to figure out WHAT'S GOING ON? First of the Sweet Dreamers Trilogy.

A six act opera in seven acts.

An assortment of short experimental films, programmed by Nick Swanton.

Program:

time (Ben Creech, 2m)

To open a window (Craig Scheihing, 2m)

Come out of your shell (Yannick Mosimann, 2m)

Notes from Gog Magog (Riar Rizaldi, 19m)

Moth Print (Sarah Bliss, 3m)

Monolithic tenderness (Kyle Joseph Petty, 7m)

Color Negative (Sara Sowell, 6m)

The Pure Guilt (Fede Coll, 20m)

Total runtime: 61 min

An assortment of short experimental films from the Sweet Void Cinema community, programmed by Nick Swanton.

Program:

I Do Not Know How to Stop (Alec Peterson, 5m)

Robin Hood 2 (Jon Anderson, 3m)

Bad Influence Turns Into A Plant Before Pure Innocence Eyes (KOG & Charli Christine Marker, 2m)

Window (Loren Ames, 2m)

What the body grasps not (Johnzee Baptiste & Madeline Blair, 6m)

Spirits Subjected (Lino Gil, 3m)

The Leisurely Pastimes (Nicholas Swanton, 10m)

Permadeath Black (Elijah Valter, 30m)

Total runtime: 62 min

An assortment of short experimental films, programmed by Nick Swanton.

Program:

A shifting pattern (Isaac Sherman, 6m)

The Swannanoa River (Drew Erin Adams, 18m)

Heat Spells (Sarah Ballard, 9m)

The Secret Garden (Nour Ouayda, 27im)

Total runtime: 60 min

Daniel Barnett (United States, 2020, 89 minutes)

Where Science Without Substance follows a hapless band of the lost through a shifting landscape as they try to figure out WHAT'S GOING ON, Substance Without Science follows the band of lost souls into dark territory. Second of the Sweet Dreamers Trilogy.

Across two programs, The States of Place considers the relationship people have with nature, domestic spaces, their country, and beyond. With poetic ruminations and abstract refractions, these filmmakers capture intimacy, beauty, confusion, and displacement as they reflect on space in lyrical fashion.

The States of Place, Pt. 1

Francisco Rojas, A Sense of Nothing (2024, 4 mins, color, silent)

Alexandra Karelina, L’ailier (2024, 5 mins, color, sound)

Leonardo Pirondi, Adrift Potentials (2024, 12 mins, color, sound)

Onyou Oh, Eternal Depth (2024, 7 mins, color, sound)

Sofia Theodore-Pierce, Desire Path (2024, 2 mins, color, sound)

Eva Giolo, Silent Conversations (2023, 8 mins, color, silent)

Blanca García, How to Make Magic (2024, 5 mins, color, silent)

Bruno Delgado Ramo, Labores en curso (2024, 30 mins, color, sound) [Super 8]

Total Runtime: 73 mins

Across two programs, The States of Place considers the relationship people have with nature, domestic spaces, their country, and beyond. With poetic ruminations and abstract refractions, these filmmakers capture intimacy, beauty, confusion, and displacement as they reflect on space in lyrical fashion.

The States of Place, Pt. 2

Ewelina Rosinska, Ashes by Name is Man (2023, 20 mins, color, silent)

Allan Gilbert Balon, Si Longtemps (2020, 8 mins, color, sound)

Kamal Aljafari, UNDR (2024, 15 mins, color, sound)

Rawane Nassif, Msaytbeh, the Elevated Place. (2024, 20 mins, color, sound)

Total Runtime: 63 mins

An assortment of short experimental films, programmed by Nick Swanton.

Program:

The Act of Not Seing With One's Own Eyes (Markus Maicher, 8m)

Me loving you/you loving me (Mikey Estes, 9m)

Bezuna (Saif Alsaegh, 7m)

Interior Shot (Charles de Agustin, 9m)

Sea of Glass (Francisco Rojas, 25m)

Total runtime: 58 min

Daniel Barnett (United States, 1987, 98 minutes)

Either Science without Substance or Substance without Science or Neither Science without Substance nor Substance without Science. This is the definitive answer! A closed loop dialectic.

Part three of the Sweet Dreamers Trilogy.

Join us on Wednesday evenings to hone your screenwriting skills and connect with fellow script writers of all skill levels. Each workshop consists of a discussion topic, feedback session, and writing time.

Free to attend in person or virtually via our Discord. Masks required.

A night of short films by a very prolific filmmaker named Agnes.

For details, follow @itslookatthis on Instagram.

An assortment of short experimental films, programmed by Nick Swanton.

Program:

P L U M E (Mike Rollo, 7m)

Cloud film (Tristen Ives, 10m)

A Message from Humboldt (Matt Feldman, 7m)

Hymn to Demeter (Danielle Wakin, 6m)

Nights on Earth (Jeremy Sie, 31m)

Total runtime: 61 min

R. Bruce Elder (Canada, 1982, 180 minutes)

“Breathtaking in its techniques, rhapsodic in its passion, and encyclopedic in its scope, the film traces the long fall from paradise into modern barbarism.”

- Art Gallery of Ontario

A very demanding work of great complexity and rigor, Illuminated Texts presents itself as a great debate between nature and technology, unity and dissolution, the divine and the demonic, and irrecoverable past and the terrible velocity of time.

R. Bruce Elder (Canada, 1997, 100 minutes)

"Having recently completed his monumental film cycle, 'The Book of All the Dead,' Elder Begins a new cycle - 'The Book Of Praise' - with 'A Man by Joy.' Elder believes that, by using speed and by creating constructions which incorporate a number of attractions that contend with each other for attention, a filmmaker can produce a form of experience that bypasses the intellect and goes straight to the body and the senses. Accordingly, he creates dense, elaborate films that make use of intricate montage construction, complex collage (combining simultaneous multiple images) and layered sound construction. In his new film, Elder depicts forms of life that have grown increasingly out of touch with the body, and attempts to elicit an experience of the delight that resultes from reconnecting with our natural being."

- Cinematheque Ontario, March 1998

AGITATE CHICAGO brings together Chicago-born avant-garde artists with an international group of filmmakers who now call Cook County home. Chicago has long been an overlooked hub for the avant-garde, but this program gives a snapshot into a flourishing local scene, creating work that plays freely with media and form while inventing new languages, non-dogmatic in their approach to documentary and narrative cinemas. Moments of overwhelming trance and noise are punctuated by deeply personal cinema, direct and emotive. The surreal and uncanny juxtaposes with verité, in what is a fitting portrait to Chicago itself, underpinned by aching personal expression and vulnerability. AGITATE CHICAGO showcases some of the best talent in our local scene, as the avant-garde continues to push the boundaries of experimental cinema.

Program:

Do Not Feed the Pigeons by Brian Zahm

at the bamboo green by Xiaolu Wang

Godspeed by Sonnie Wooden

Forgetting French #1 by Alicia Mujynya

A Place to Rest Syncopated by Oona Taper

camera roll 3 by Charles Cadkin

No More Tears by Jay Villalobos

Exit Metropolis by Alice Avery

Studies on the Negative Architectures of the Digital Sickness by M. Woods (with live sound)

Programmed by M. Woods

Total runtime: 71 min

R. Bruce Elder (Canada, 2003, 106 minutes)

The third production of Elder’s film cycle THE BOOK OF PRAISE, in this work Elder presents a hybrid of analogue and digital techniques in which chemical transformations of the image are combined with electrical modifications to produce a fantasia of vibrantly coloured alchemical forms that suggest an erotic wonder at all the world’s surfaces.

An assortment of short experimental films, programmed by Nick Swanton.

Program:

Relief (Johannes Gieriger, 9m)

Lunette (Mark Street, 8m)

An Inimitable Place Called Home (Jolene Mok, 5m)

Tape-stry (Rennie Taylor, 2m)

Stafrœnn Ljóskliki/Digital Light Leak (Zoe Chronis, 3m)

Become Ghost No Plugins (James Tabbush, 9m)

Noise study 02 (Rachel Efruss, 3m)

Terminal Island (Sam Drake, 13m)

Total runtime: 61 min

What is the space between the self and the body? The discrete space where identity emerges holds the same mystery as the border of the image or the interstitial moments of black in a film strip. In this program we explore the sometimes obscene and hidden slippages of time-space that veer us off our prescribed timebase. What is the distance between the archive and the artist, the recording and the author, the signified and signifier? In this pursuit of expressing through a nihilistic media, what traditions, cultures, techniques and cures can we look to for warding off the malignant negation and reconvening as a whole spirit? The work in this program gives an answer, recontextualizing the facticity of physical reality as a means of expressing this despair and our temporal persistence.

Program:

On Sunday by Paige Taul & Olula Negre - 5 min

The Train is Invisible Until it Crashes by Oona Taper - 4 min

Neighbour Abdi by Douwe Djikstra - 29 min

Xiuhtecuhtli by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos - 15 min

Nightmare Loops 1-4 by Michael Mersereau - 5 min

Nothingscapes (or the Inherent Politics of Texture) by M. Woods - 13 min (World Premiere with live sound)

Programmed by M. Woods.

Total runtime: 63 min

Memory Drum brings together memory, water, and family on 16mm film with a percussive throughline. The works of this program are elemental yet figurative, exploring kaleidoscopic relationships between parent and child, distortion and fidelity, rhythm and stillness. Leighton Pierce’s Glass (1998) initiates the program with an impressionistic tableau of children in the backyard through a glass menagerie of lens manipulation. Alee Peoples’ Hey Sweet Pea (2023) stages fanciful recitations that sweep us into a strange, hollowed-out nostalgia of sci-fi scripts and mama’s old voicemails in the LA suburbs. Carl Elsaesser’s How to Run a Trotline (2024) holds the drumline as the program’s luminous cornerstone, a spirited reflection on paternal tethers, both filmic and genealogical, that fishes for something alive and kicking in each of its brimming images. O Banho (The Bath) (2022) is Maria Inês Gonçalves’ turn to the phenomenology of water as filtered through childhood memories of bathing. As if beckoning us through amniotic fluid, toy boats and stuffed animals dunk and bob like repressed things, water goes where it shouldn’t go, and in the tumult we catch sight of Winnie the Pooh’s Heffalumps galloping through the ether, having long forgotten how they haunted us so.

Program:

Glass – Leighton Pierce (1998, US, 16mm film, 7:00 min)

Hey Sweet Pea – Alee Peoples (2023, US, 16mm film, 11:11 min)

How to Run a Trotline – Carl Elsaesser (2024, US, 16mm film to digital, 18:10 min)

O Banho (The Bath) – Maria Inês Gonçalves (2022, Portugal/Spain, 16mm and 8mm to digital, 8:00 min)

Total runtime: 55 mins

Cloudwards: Waiting is a Dreaming ascends through various spaces of anticipation––pauses between strikes of lightning, a bus full of passengers nodding off, city alcoves in a downpour, reality TV elimination rounds, or the instructional stage of an indoor skydiving facility. Each work dreams in such spaces, steadfastly aspiring toward flight, progress, inflation, chance encounter, the taste of winning, dry ground, or a truer sleep. Documentarian sensibilities intermingle with found footage free-form experimentation and infrared interludes. By way of bats and pilots, rockets and space dogs, earthquakes and birds, the works of this program always tilt cloudwards. (1976-2024, 46 mins, Digital Projection).

Program:

Laika – Deborah Stratman (2021, 4:33 min)

Helianthus Corner Blues – Jem Cohen, (2013, 2:48 min)

Lightning – Paul & Marlene Kos (1976, 1:23 min)

ADARNA – Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan (2017, 1:00 min)

ROCKET – Katharina Bayer (2024, 5:00 min)

Somewhere only we know – Jesse McLean (2009, 5:15 min)

All Days Make Their End – Julian Flavin, (2023, 13:30 min)

Life Without Dreams – Jessica Bardsley (2022, 13:30 mins)

Total runtime: 46 mins

Debt Quest is an experimental animated variety show inspired by RPG's like Dungeons and Dragons.