Here’s where I’ll post any screenings coming up that Zena and/or I are programming!
>>>(Click pictures for links to info/tickets!)<<<
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The Alchemical Furnace of Jan Švankmajer
complete short film retrospective!
Four Thursdays:
October 1, 22, 29, & November 12
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
(individual ticket links can be reached by clicking the corresponding images below!)
Lightstruck is honored to present a complete retrospective of the astonishing short films of the surrealist Czech artist and filmmaker Jan Švankmajer, taking place at 2220 Arts + Archives over the course of four evenings. Working in collaboration with his studio, Athanor, this retrospective occasions the first time all of Mr. Švankmajer’s shorts will screen in Los Angeles in recently remastered copies overseen by the artist himself.
Born in 1934 and directing films since 1964, Švankmajer is one of the single most influential and idiosyncratic artists in animation and cinema history. Often mixing multiple techniques, including stop motion, puppetry, and collage, Švankmajer’s films mine the endlessly spellbinding and uneasy realms of the individual and cultural subconscious, giving life and form to deeply affecting images steeped in his singular imagination and morbid, beguiling wit. Characterized by exquisitely unique and expressive approaches to design, photography, editing, and sound, Švankmajer’s cinematic worlds are intensely engaging, tactile, mesmerizing, and often darkly hilarious.
Each program is designed as a cross-section of Švankmajer’s thrillingly eclectic output, with iconic classics and remarkable obscurities sharing the screen on each evening.
Programs curated by Zena Grey & Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. This series would not have been possible without the wonderful help of Pavla Kallistová from Athanor, and of course Mr. Švankmajer himself.
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The Film Strip: The 16mm Medium as Subject
Thursday, December 10, 2026 @ 8:00pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
Lightstruck presents:
THE FILM STRIP: The 16mm Medium as Subject
Featuring 16mm short films by Tacita Dean, Sandy Ding, Nathaniel Dorsky, Amy Halpern, Kurt Kren, Standish Lawder, Rose Lowder, Dana Plays, Charlotte Pryce, Guy Sherwin, & Chris Welsby!
Conceived in response to the exhibition of Tacita Dean’s monumental 35mm installation FILM on view September 18 to February 27 at the Marciano Art Foundation, Lightstruck presents The Film Strip, a program of 16mm films in which the material of film itself is foregrounded through a multiplicity of approaches. Since the earliest years of the avant-garde, the film strip has been a focus of fascinated exploration in a wide range of techniques and aesthetic strategies, revealing and contemplating the rich, fundamental duality of the medium as both tangible object and ephemeral experience. In this program, Guy Sherwin, Dana Plays, Sandy Ding, and Charlotte Pryce use rephotography tools to extrapolate film’s instrinsic materiality into new planes of perspective and vision, while Rose Lowder and Kurt Kren poetically exploit the medium’s nature as a succession of discrete frames, passing the film through their cameras numerous times to create mosaics of intimate, poetic rapture. In photographing the flow of a rural stream, Chris Welsby envisions the film reel as a river of images cascading through the projector, while offerings from Tacita Dean and Standish Lawder consider the literal film strip itself. The program concludes with Nathaniel Dorsky’s rarely screened Pneuma, in which the filmmaker hand-processed archaic rolls of expired film without shooting them, allowing the latent poetry of the film stock’s exquisitely decayed chemistry to quietly and profoundly mesmerize.
PROGRAM
(all films screening in 16mm)
Invocation (1982) by Amy Halpern, color, silent, 2m
At the Academy (1974) by Guy Sherwin, bw, sound, 5m
Colorfilm (1972) by Standish Lawder, color, sound, 3m
Grain Graphics (1978) by Dana Plays, color, sound, 6m
Prima Materia (2015) by Charlotte Pryce, color, silent, 3.5m
Quiproquo (1992) by Rose Lowder, color, sound, 13m
Noir et Blanc (2006) by Tacita Dean, bw, sound, 4m
River in Castle (2016) by Sandy Ding, bw, silent, 4m
Stream Line (1976) by Chris Welsby, color, sound, 8m
31/75 Asyl (1975) by Kurt Kren, color, silent, 9m
Pneuma (1983) by Nathaniel Dorsky, color, 18fps silent, 28m
above = 87m
Program and notes by Mark Toscano. Prints of Invocation, Colorfilm, Prima Materia, and Noir et Blanc courtesy of the filmmakers or their estates. Prints of At the Academy, Quiproquo, River in Castle, Stream Line, and Pneuma courtesy of Canyon Cinema. Print of Grain Graphics courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. Print of 31/75 Asyl from the Lightstruck collection.
