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“Turn the Light Around” 16mm Film Screening
September 20, 2025 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT
Join us for screenings of 16mm plant processed performance films, presented by Katherine Bauer and Joyce Lainé, members of the film collective Le Ratoire and Atelier MTK. The images in each film emerge before our eyes through the process of a developer composed of plants, ashes, and water. The sun gives to the plants, the plants give to the silver, the silver turns the light around, to give to our eyes. The screening will be followed by a Q&A. This event is co-sponsored by iEar Presents!
In this screening, plants are collaborators in both the subject and the material revelation of the visual story. Plant is the Place. The action of creating these films are themselves performative relationships with the surroundings, the projection expanding this vision for yet more eyes to see.
Plant Processing is a collective action— particularly with the methods of Le Ratoire’s performative folk film-making style, but also with the methodologies of collective making and restraints employed by La Ratoire’s “Asphalt Splendor.” For this film, the group will set out to make a portrait of “the river that flows both ways,” or Mahicannittuk in Machican (aka The Hudson River), canoeing and camping from Troy to worlds end, plant processing all along the way with the different plants growing on the shores.
“Bat Nut,” is a poetic video document of friends gathering together to clear the locally loved Beaver Pond in Chatham, NY of the thorny Bat Nut. Other videos will show an exploration of a closed tungsten mine from WWII in Portugal, processed with the industrially farmed Eucalyptus, and a turn around a temple outside of Guadalajara, Mexico which was processed with beer and sage from their surroundings, and a film stained red from being processed with a certain seaweed, and more!
Alternative Film Processing Workshop with Le Ratoire, 2-6pm
Le Ratoire is a filmmaking collective; since 2019, composed of Léa Lanoë, Pierre Borel (Labo L’argent, Marseille, France), Katherine Bauer, Joyce Lainé, and Loïc Verdillon (Atelier MTK, Grenoble, France). They have elaborated a methodology for collective filmmaking wherein all aspects and stages of the film are made in a single go. Beginning with a constraint (a place, a theme, a technical method), embrace the unplanned that emerges within the process; the unexpected “failures” that inevitably occur are as important as the constraints that first inspired the process. The name “Le Ratoire” refers to the verb in French, rater, that means “to miss, fail, or flunk” and laboratoire, indicating the analog hand-made laboratory practices employed. Also the idea of a ratery or site for the “lab rat”; in this case we are the rats running tests on ourselves.
ATELIER MTK, founded in 1992 is the first collective film lab of France. It is an artist-run cinematographic laboratory equipped to work in all aspects of analogue films. The lab should be considered like a playground. Tools and techniques of the film medium are re-appropriated from the industrial film laboratories in order to encourage filmmakers to consider every element as a phase with creative potential. https://www.filmlabs.org/labs/mtk/.
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