Video Rituals: New Experimental Film

A program of new work by Erica Schreiner and David Finkelstein, including Schreiner’s short Blue Transcendence (2022) and the world premiere of Finkelstein’s feature Dirt. A series of video rituals, designed to connect us to ancient networks and gateways to hidden knowledge, these films celebrate video technology for its magickal potential. The program is 90 minutes and will be followed by a discussion with the artists.

Program includes:

Blue Transcendence (2022, 9 minutes, Erica Schreiner)
Blue Transcendence is a montage of blue butterflies, a performance in blue, and time lapse of a candle burning during a magical spell. The narration guides the audience through a psychedelic experience, reflecting on real friendships and the importance of being silly. Blue Transcendence was filmed by Erica Schreiner on her VHS camera in her apartment.

Dirt (2024, 79 minutes, David Finkelstein, world premiere)
Dirt is an extended poetic meditation on the American relation to the soil, and the energies buried within it. Notions of “dirtiness” and “cleanliness” are re-examined. Centuries of history, of conquering and re-conquering, lie beneath our feet, and the return of the vanquished is inevitable. There has also always been an alternative possibility, within the American landscape, inspired by indigenous culture, of a more peaceful relationship with the soil, the resting place of our ancestors.

A collage of poetic imagery, music, and invocatory language, the film follows two men in a series of esoteric experiments. Their words take us to unexpected landscapes, populated by revengeful toasters, flying fiddles, an unusual game of tennis, and a mountaintop crowned with an electric guitar. A postmodern video opera, Dirt bathes the viewer in music, language, and visual spectacle.


"A hypnotic dance of delicate analog images and tender, resonant voiceover— no film has ever represented this myriad of emotions so accurately as Erica Schreiner’s Blue Transcendence.”
—Warren Xian (Art Label)

Dirt is a brilliant film and a work of extraordinary beauty. 
—Christian Serritiello, filmmaker

If you surrender to the manic maximalism of this symphonic, psychedelic cinema, you will be transported beyond yourself to a place where everything (past ghosts, repressed history, buried treasure, the ashes of a friend) has been returned and reduced to the earth, yet where dirt itself has been re-valorized as not just resting ground for the dead, but as fertile medium for future growth.
—Anton Bitel, writing about Dirt in Projected Figures