Two films from Mariah Garnett now available

Posted November 20th, 2017 in New Acquisitions, New Films, News / Events

Canyon Cinema is pleased to welcome Mariah Garnett to the catalog. Garnett moves freely between documentary, narrative, and experimental modes to create cinematic allegories that codify and locate identity. Her films Encounters I May or May Not Have Had with Peter Berlin and Signal are now available to rent.

Garnett_Encounters_15

Encounters I May or May Not Have Had with Peter Berlin (2012 | 14 minutes | COLOR | SOUND)

Encounters I May Or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin deals primarily with monumentality, narcissism and the ways in which our heroes are embedded into our identities, and manifested through the body. Through a variety of gestures, the pervasiveness of this practice is highlighted alongside its ultimate, inevitable failure. The viewer moves through various stages of anxiety, idolization and actual touchdown with 70’s gay sex icon Peter Berlin himself, capturing both the apparent and the hidden. The film guides the viewer through the process of making contact with a figure who exists only in his own photographs. The film culminates in an interview with Peter Berlin in his apartment, describing a moment of exchange that crosses lines of gender and generation, a moment where the identities of two filmmakers briefly coalesce.

It received the \aut\FILM Award for Best LGBT Film at theAnn Arbor Film Festival in 2013.

 

Garnett_Signal_1

Signal (2012 | 7 minutes | COLOR | SOUND)

The script for Signal, a 7-minute, 16mm film, attempts to narrativize a collection of spam emails gathered over a 3-year period, and is staged in or near “sacred spaces”. The landscape of Pyramid Lake, on the Paiute Indian reservation is populated by 10,000-year-old rock formations, many of which are off limits to the public. They loom in the background as characters banter in the sometimes awkward, sometimes solicitous, sometimes nonsensical dialog of spam. The Black Rock Desert Playa, while vacant most of the year, is home to close to 60,000 people annually during Burning Man. These locations were chosen because they act as both mirror and foil for the internet – at once wastelands and gathering sites for millions of people, while maintaining an ancient physicality that transcends any inhabiting group.