Lisa Truttmann: Tarpaulins
@ The Nightingale Cinema
1084 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL 60642
Opening Friday, August 10th, from 8 PM - 10 PM
TARPAULINS: A feature film by Lisa Truttmann
The point of departure Lisa Truttmann’s feature film Tarpaulins was a colorful disturbance on the cityscape of Los Angeles: a home in the distance festooned with a giant striped tarp. These are termite fumigation tents. The filmmaker follows their story on a two-year long investigation as she hunts down the tents, the homes, the termites inside and their traces. As the film goes on, the termites soon become our allies, guiding us through Los Angeles’ neighborhoods on their own terms. Questions of life and death, profit and loss, home and un-home, macrocosm and microcosm are brought to the fore in pursuit of the city’s tiniest inhabitants and their exterminators. The tents become temporary sculptures, beasts heaving in the wind, skeletons dressed and stripped by workers we see. Wooden structures, soon to be homes, become eroded landscapes after an attack. And there, underneath the colorful mantle and its function, Truttmann elicits revelations of the uncanny.
In a constant dialogue we hear the voices of workers, exterminators, entomologists, chemists, city planners, fellow travellers and literary authors. Contemplation is thrown into a zig-zag while an alter ego questions its own ideas and their making. Little by little the visual, political, social and economic relations of humans and nature unfold, anchored in a personal itinerary that is the framework for everything else to follow. As an essay film, Tarpaulins is a subjective view on a place and a circuitous conversation, embracing “unkempt activityâ€, restless labor, meandering thoughts and obsessive wanderings.
Austria/USA, 2017, 78 min.
Companions: Nora Sweeney, Behrouz Rae, Sonja Bertucci, Andy Rector, Ben Neufeld, a.o.
Supported by: BKA, Land Niederösterreich, Stadt Wien, CalArts
$7-10 suggested donation
Official Website
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Tags: Chicago, Lisa Truttmann, Tarpaulins, The Nightingale, West Town
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