Scriptings is having a special screening with acclaimed American filmmaker Leslie Thornton next Sunday, 29/05.

The screening will be followed by a conversation between Leslie and Berlin-based film curator​ Uli Ziemons. They will also introduce the upcoming Scriptings-issue #43 with a transcript of Thornton's recent film “They Were Just People“ as well as an interview with Polish filmmaker Monika Czyzyk.

Leslie Thornton has long been considered a pioneer of contemporary media aesthetics, working at the borders and limits of cinema, video and digital media. Such seminal works as her ongoing series Peggy and Fred in Hell operate in the interstices between various media-forms, often using simultaneous, interacting projections of film and video to address both the architectural spaces of media, and the imaginary spaces of the spectator’s involvement. Thornton uses the process of production as an explorative process—a collective endeavor “position(ing) the viewer as an active reader, not a consumer.” She is a contemporary of such fellow explorers as Chris Marker, Chantal Ackerman, Gary Hill, Michael Snow, Alan Sondheim and Harun Farocki, all artists who are opening up new spaces for media, re-mapping its boundaries within the projective spaces of the museum or gallery as well as within the public spaces of the cinema, television and internet transmission. Thornton's career to date has been a unique and unusual one. She was one of the first artists to bridge the boundaries between cinema and video, to explore their complicities and resistances, and to embrace their differences as positive, and even complementary, attributes. Thornton’s complex articulations are both edifying innovations in media form and content and tacit deconstructions of the principles, presumptions and promises of technically reproducible artworks. Her projects are ongoing and provisional, and she has been unafraid to return to, and rework, and rethink, issues, topics, subjects. Her works have had a profound impact, and an enduring influence on, an entire generation of media artists, critics and theorists. Thomas Zummer

Leslie Thornton films, videos and installations have been featured at dOCUMENTA, PS1, Centre Pompidou, Serpentine Gallery, the Wexner Center, the Armory Show, the Whitney Biennial, Marian Goodman Gallery, Winkleman Gallery, the Moving Image Fair, and the New York, Buenos Aires, Ambulante and Rotterdam Film Festivals, among others. Permanent collections include Jeu de paume, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Centre Pompidou, MoMA/NYC, and the Walker and Pacific Art Centers. Thornton is professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, US, and guest professor of Film at The European Graduate School, CH.

please see for the extensive version of Thomas Zummer's text and more information
on Leslie Thornton's work here:

http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/thornton-2/
http://artforum.com/film/id=24509
www.edhalter.com/Halter-Thornton.pdf

Monika Czyzyk is a Polish interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker living and working in Helsinki, Finland. She holds a Masters in Painting and a Bachelors in Time and Space Arts. In her practice, Czyzyk works with various forms and lengths of the moving image. Her experimental, lens-based methodology combines theory with practice, the artistic with the political, professionalism with amateurism. 

Ulrich Ziemons is a film curator based in Berlin. He is one of the co-curators of the Forum Expanded program at the Berlin International Film Festival. Since 2014 he has been a member of the short film selection committee of Dokfest Kassel. In 2014 his book "Aufzeichnungen eines Storm Squatters" was published, the first German language monograph on the American underground filmmaker George Kuchar and his influential "Weather Diary" video series.