TIFF Bell Lightbox
350 King Street West
Toronto ON M5V 3X5
Canada
Presented by TIFF Higher Learning and Archive/Counter-Archive:
Crossroads and The Exploding Digital Inevitable with special guest Ross Lipman
FREE + open to the public! | Tickets at TIFF.net
In 1976, groundbreaking collagist, sculptor, and filmmaker Bruce Conner released his magnum opus, Crossroads: a 36-minute assemblage of US government footage of the iconic Bikini Atoll atomic bomb test. If Conner invented the modern found-footage film with A Movie in 1958, he re-invented it with Crossroads. His editing of the film’s brilliant “dual” score — by composers Terry Riley and Patrick Gleeson — evokes a surreal beauty, latent in the devastating images that comprise this profound meditation on the nuclear era.
The Exploding Digital Inevitable is a live documentary essay integrating an array of film and audio clips, still photographs, and rare archival documents that tell the story of Crossroads’ unique production, as well as the massive cultural spectacle of the original Bikini Atoll tests themselves. It also chronicles the extraordinary collaboration of Conner with Riley and Gleeson, including original interviews with both composers. In joint presentation with Crossroads, the entire programme runs 90 minutes.
The Exploding Digital Inevitable premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2017.
In conjunction with this event is Working with Minor Audiovisual Archives in Latin America with special guest Juana Suárez, taking place the following day on December 13.
GUEST BIO
Ross Lipman is an independent filmmaker, archivist, and essayist. His films include Notfilm (15) and The Exploding Digital Inevitable (17), which premiered at Rotterdam. He was previously Senior Film Restorationist at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. His many restorations include The Exiles (61), Wanda (70), the Academy Award–winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk (84), and works by Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Shirley Clarke, Julie Dash, and John Cassavetes. He is a three-time winner of the National Society of Film Critics’ Heritage Award. His writings on film history, technology, and aesthetics have been published in Artforum, Sight & Sound, and numerous academic books and journals.
ABOUT ARCHIVE/COUNTER-ARCHVE
Archive/Counter-Archive is a network of researchers, artists and archivists dedicated to activating and remediating audiovisual archives belonging to women, Indigenous Peoples, the LGBT2Q+ community, and immigrant communities. Political, resistant, and community-based, counter-archives disrupt conventional narratives and enrich our histories. www.counterarchive.ca