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Chronicles of a Lying Spirit by Kelly Gabron

Chronicles of a Lying Spirit by Kelly Gabron

Cauleen Smith | USA | 1992 | 8' |

| IFFR 2019

Male and female voice-overs clash in telling the biographical story of an artist: one speaks in a monotone through media-defined stereotypes, while the other speaks in a playful, defiantly personal, way. The film returns to the same cycle of images and scrolling texts to reveal that a person’s story can depend on who is telling it.

Also in this combined programme

Pilgrim
Deep Focus Short
A recording of a piano performance by Alice Coltrane guides Cauleen Smith through three sites of creativity and generosity across the USA.
H-E-L-L-O
Deep Focus Short
Greetings to mankind! The five-note sequence from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) is performed outdoors by New Orleans musicians.
Three Songs About Liberation
Deep Focus Short
Reading as a radical act. Cauleen Smith stages three readings of excerpts from Gerda Lerner’s book Black Women in White America.
Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band
Deep Focus Short
A flash-mob performance of Sun Ra’s anthem Space Is the Place, performed by The Rich South High School Marching Band.
Lessons in Semaphore
Deep Focus Short
A silent film celebrating dialogue. Choreographer Taisha Paggett dances on a grassy empty lot in Chicago, communicating in semaphore.
Crow Requiem
Deep Focus Short
Smith brings together the forced migration of birds, the treatment of people of colour and Syracuse’s connection to the birth of stereoscopic ph