MEETING HARM WITH HARMONY: THE PERSONAL CINEMA OF CECELIA CONDIT

Millennium Film Workshop is proud to present:

Meeting Harm with Harmony : the Personal Cinema of Cecelia Condit

FILMMAKER IN ATTENDANCE! Films will be followed by Conversation with Cecelia Condit. 

Milwaukee-based video artist Cecelia Condit has over the years forged a world through her work, a world that reflects our collective human desire to resist seeing ourselves as animals in nature, and the dark irony in the moments where that resistance reduces us to our most animalistic. Those ironies express themselves with an uncanny touch in her videos, where the tragically cute meets the acutely tragic in pageants of innocence and violence set to a casiotone soundtrack of irresistible melodies and memorably clever lyrics that question the ways of humanity and nature.

When one considers that rare gift unique to our strange species, to stare into the void, recognize it for what it is, and laugh at the absurdity of it all, or sing a little song (because what else can you do?), it’s no surprise that Cecelia’s work, most famously her 1983 video Possibly in Michigan has found resonance with a new generation, those who have come of age into an era where the ominous Signs O’ the Times are amplified by a media landscape that inundates us with strange distractions that can never quite distract. In 2020’s I’ve Been Afraid, Cecelia makes herself an animated emoji to sing of the terrors brought to us by this deluge, and in so doing, casts herself in with this generation and finds identification with their anxieties.

The films in this program, spanning several decades of Cecelia’s work from the early 80s through 2021’s AI and I, are divided into two loose programs, the first engaging with our place in a state of nature, and the second concerning the troubled position of women in the society we’ve built to escape from that state of nature. Divided though they are thematically, all of Cecelia’s works are in conversation with one another—all forming harmonic complements to each tone, light and dark struck throughout. Will Madeline from Little Spirits, cynical object of unrequited love, grow up to be Possibly in Michigan’s cannibal heroine? Have we destroyed the heavenly avian habitat of Why Not A Sparrow to sell ourselves the Suburbs of Eden, a phony idyll with unhappiness at its core? And can we hope, like the girl dressing up her dead rat playmate in About A Girl, to bring it back to life, by making it beautiful?

This program was curated by Joe Wakeman for Millennium Film Workshop.

FILMS:

Program 1:

Little Spirits 7 min 2005

AI and I 7 min 2021

Why Not A Sparrow 12 min 2002-2005

All About A Girl 6 min 2004

Pulling Up Roots 7 min 2015

Program 2 :

Suburbs of Eden 15 min 1996

We Were Hardly More Than Children 9 min 2019

Possibly in Michigan 12 min 1983

I’ve Been Afraid 7 min 2020

Curatorial Text by Joe Wakeman

Poster Art by Preston Spurlock & Joe Wakeman

Millennium FIlm Workshop Presents

MEETING HARM WITH HARMONY: THE PERSONAL CINEMA OF

CECELIA CONDIT

IN-PERSON

Millennium Film Workshop 167 Wilson Ave, Brooklyn, NY

Saturday, October 21, 2023

Doors 7:30 PM Films 8:00

ONLINE:

https://millenniumfilm.org/workshop-channel/