New Acquisition: Three Exhibition Files from Kate McCabe

Posted June 14th, 2021 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Digital Files, New Films, News / Events

Now available from Canyon Cinema: Three new exhibition files from Joshua Tree-based artist and filmmaker Kate McCabe! This acquisition includes the addition of a new film to the catalog, 2018’s There Are No Shadows in East Berlin, as well as new digital copies of McCabe’s debut feature Sabbia (2006), a visual album for stoner rock prince, Brant Bjork; and the wondrous, Anthropocene-inflected landscape film You and I Remain (2015), which is currently streaming on Canyon’s Kinoscope channel.

There Are No Shadows in East Berlin (2018, 14 minutes, color, sound, digital file)

This experimental time-lapse film was shot in East Berlin’s Lichtenberg neighborhood where the Stasi (secret police) were once headquartered. The shadows captured traverse the space giving us clues to the shadow past, the normalcy of surveillance, the old vestiges of power. The statistic states that 1 in 7 people at the Stasi’s height were informants on their neighbors. The sounds portray secret messages, and codes from numbers, numbers intended to allude to the number of people you may mistrust. The soundscape works in tandem with the shadows and the psychogeography of the darker urban past and its subtle presence felt today. The film is also a celebration of light from which all darkness can be derived, a celebration of time and space, of human resilience and possibility, and ultimately a loving look at East Berlin today.

You and I Remain (2015, 15 minutes, color, sound, 16mm or digital file)

In this portrait of a world askew, filmmaker McCabe composes an apocalyptic lullaby, a landscape film meditating on the end of the world and subtly the end of film as a medium. Incorporating timelapse cinematography shot at the Salton Sea, Big Sur and Joshua Tree, the film provides a canvas of empty and beautiful spaces with narration about the benefits of radiation with a plea to the viewer to preserve the message for the future.

Sabbia (2006, 79 minutes, color, sound, digital file or DVD)

Sabbia is a desert trip inspired by the music of Brant Bjork and visualized by Kate McCabe. Evoking the immeasurable desert landscape and old ghosts of a dusty past, the film beautifully weaves together a tapestry of perfect moments and a raw rock-n-roll way of life. As a form of psychedelic documentary, the film explores the musical wilderness of a weird and sexy Southern California wasteland. Sabbia presents the landscape’s vast sense of space and time and like a mirage, reveals the magic of desert music, art, and soul.

The vastness of the deserts, their sweep and scope and giant emptiness waiting to be filled with raw sound, has always been a prominent theme in Bjork’s music, and it finds suitable expression in McCabe’s airy, untethered visualizations of those parts of California where “wasted” describes the landscape instead of the people. Conjuring in bits and pieces everything from Van Sant’s Gerry to Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands, Bjork & McCabe’s Sabbia crowds the empty desert with sights and sounds that seem not so much natural as inevitable. – Leonard Pierce