Saturday July 13, 4:00 – 5:30pm > Miles Rufelds, Screening, Durham Art Gallery
It’s Not Brakhage is a hybrid essay + fiction film, structured around an unnamed narrator’s investigation into a mysterious film reel, believed to be a lost work by beloved experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Though shrouded in speculation and actively contested, the film is suggested to be the sole remaining artifact from a ruinous 1959 film festival, which Brakhage helped organize with the DuPont chemical company.
Throughout the film, the narrator expounds on this mysterious film’s history, sifting through a patchwork of theories and speculations that have arisen since its discovery, and connecting the film reel to DuPont’s wider networks of military-industrial research and artistic patronage. Gradually, a sinister undercurrent begins to emerge, suggesting that the film might not just represent an uncanny crossover between mid-century networks of experimental film and military-industrial power, but might represent a forensic key connecting this 1959 collaboration with DuPont to Brakhage’s 2003 death from bladder cancer.
Weaving threads of speculative fiction within a wide corpus of extensive historical research, It’s Not Brakhage mixes detailed exposition, political invective, and conspiratorial intrigue to think through the uncomfortable proxies connecting histories of experimental film with military-industrial research and capitalist dominion. While the film’s narrator, the “lost Brakage” film reel, the 1959 festival, and Brakhage’s entire involvement with DuPont are ultimately fictional interventions, these fabrications serve to give structure to a pointed exploration of DuPont’s very real implication, throughout much of the 20th century, in a vast network of scientists, engineers, militarists, filmmakers, painters, and musicians, many of which hailed from the same families or drew from the same technologies.
With a blur of tropes from essayistic documentary, genre fiction, and experimental film, this work considers the ways unwelcome powers hide invisibly within artistic forms, and contemplates the vertigo of reckoning with this infiltration while under its thrall.
Miles Rufelds is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher based in Toronto. He holds a Master of Visual Studies in studio art from the University of Toronto, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Ottawa.
With strong emphases on investigative research, conceptual strategies, and experimental forms of storytelling, Rufelds’ projects explore stories of imbrication between science, industry, ecology, war, and art.
Rufelds has participated in exhibitions and screenings nationally and internationally, including the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Blackwood Gallery, PAVED Arts, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Karsh-Masson Gallery, ArtworxTO, and the SIM Gallery. Rufelds is also a co- founder and co-director of Toronto gallery ‘the plumb’.
Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film 