Artists Space

Attention Line Cinema Series: Manuel DeLanda

June 29 – July 9

As part of Attention Line, Artists Space presents a selection of films by celebrated Mexican author, teacher, and philosopher Manuel DeLanda in our downstairs cinema. During the mid-to-late 1970s, while still an undergraduate at the School of Visual Arts, DeLanda produced an audacious body of short Super 8mm and 16mm films that defy rational description. Inspired by critical theory and philosophy, he made these formally daring, ferocious films during a period where he was waging a graffiti turf war for 23rd St, which is where he spray painted philosophy and defaced billboard ads.

DeLanda stopped making films in 1983 to pursue computer programming and other endeavors. He has written and edited more than ten books on science, perception, assemblage theory, and other topics that, in many ways, tie back to the interests first explored in his early films. DeLanda’s movies fell out of circulation by the late 1980s and were restored by Anthology Film Archives in the mid-2000s. Thankfully, DeLanda rediscovered moving image making in 2012 with his first digital work Molecular Populations, and has gone on to make many more videos that rather amazingly pick up where he left off. The series will include most of DeLanda's early works from the 1970s, as well as a significant selection of his recent shorts.

A color image of a man and a woman standing facing each other. The man in the red shirt, with his back facing the viewers, points to himself; the woman in the blue top puts her hands on her hips and stares back at the man. A reflection of the man
Manuel De Landa, still from The Itch Scratch Itch Cycle, 1976, 16mm, color, sound, 8 minutes. [A color image of a man and a woman standing facing each other. The man in the red shirt, with his back facing the viewers, points to himself; the woman in the blue top puts her hands on her hips and stares back at the man. A reflection of the man's irate facial expression is cast on a glass surface, overlapping onto the woman's body.]

All of the following films will play during open hours on a continuous loop:

Saliva Dildo – Premature Ejaculators
1976, 16mm-to-digital, Color, Sound
2 minutes (surviving excerpt)
Stop motion street antics featuring M. Henry Jones.

The Itch Scratch Itch Cycle
1976, 16mm-to-digital, Color, Sound
8 minutes
A breaking of the 180 degree rule and many other editing rules at the same time.

Raw Nerves: A Lacanian Thriller
1980, 16mm-to-digital, Color, Sound
30 minutes
The ultimate student thesis film, a whodunit noir shot in psychedelic colors with gumshoe dialogue and brain melting optical wipes.

Judgment Day
1980, Super 8mm blown-up to 16mm on digital, Color, Sound
8 minutes
A bad day for a cockroach.

Magic Mushroom Mountain Movie
1973-1981, Super 8mm-to-Digital
10 minutes
DeLanda's earliest Super 8 footage documents the trips he took to visit a Mexican village for rituals related to the titular magic mushrooms.

Harmful or Fateful if Swallowed
1982, Super 8mm blown-up to 16mm on Digital
12 minutes
A psychotronic city symphony made with reckless abandon and energy galore.

Natalie Didn't Drown: Joan Braderman 'Reads' the National Enquirer
Co-directed with Joan Braderman
1983, U-Matic Video-to-Digital
28 minutes
A critical analysis of all the fake news that is barely fit to print by Joan Braderman, with visual delirium provided by DeLanda.

Joan Does Dynasty
Co-directed and co-edited with Joan Braderman
1986, U-Matic Video-to-Digital
32 minutes
A guided deconstruction of America’s most popular prime time soap opera.

Molecular Populations
2012, Digital
13:11 minutes
“This is NYC using populations of particles as the means to do image processing. The music was done by layering loops downloaded from the net.”
– DeLanda

Geometric Becomings I
2013, Digital
6:48 minutes
“Using Groboto, a 3D program that never stores shapes geometrically but purely mathematically, I was able to create these continuous transformations.”
– DeLanda

Disjointed Foldings
2014, Digital
5:21 minutes
New album covers to infect your ipod and Apple Music library.

Fractured Landscapes
2014, Digital
10:54 minutes
DeLanda’s return to digital picks up where he left off with Harmful or Fatal if Swallowed, only more so, and much more digital. A true return to form for DeLanda.

Anonymous Multitudes
2014, Digital
7:42 minutes
A wonderful companion to Fractured Landscapes in which innocent bystanders find themselves digitally reconstructed by DeLanda’s take-no-prisoners technology.

Home Movie #1
2015, Digital
4:28 minutes
Teeth, lips, nostrils, pores, the body at rest and in motion..

Electric Arthropods
2017, Digital
3:39 minutes
An updated Judgement Day with spiders instead of cockroaches!

Lucha Libre
2018, Digital
2:20 minutes
Mexican wrestling made even more colorful and bizarre.

Atomic Flesh
2018, Digital
2:35 minutes
Distorted and contorted bodies in flagrante delicto.

Home Movie #2
2018, Digital
2:18 minutes
A hysterical and horrendous look at and within the artist.

Colors At War
2019, Digital
2:33 minutes
The hell of war (movies) made remarkably vivid and surreal.

Geometric Becomings II
2019, Digital
6:03 minutes
Shapes becoming shapes…becoming shapes…..

Amoeba MD
2020, Digital
2:29
A hospital you don’t want to visit, but which you can’t avoid.

Gangster Scribbles
2020, Digital
2:22 minutes
A beguiling swirl of movie references buried beneath oscillating animated interventions.

Polygon West
2020, Digital
2:32 minutes
The western genre ripped apart and taped back together.

Geometric Becomings III
2021, Digital
4:20 minutes
Further formal explosions as seen from all sides and from within, too.

Home Movie #3
2021, Digital
3:26
A kaleidoscopic self-portrait.

Program support is provided by Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation, The Cowles Charitable Trust, The Cy Twombly Foundation, The David Teiger Foundation, The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, Imperfect Family Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, The Stavros Niarchos Foundation, The Willem de Kooning Foundation, The Fox Aarons Foundation, Herman Goldman Foundation, The Destina Foundation, The Luce Foundation, May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Arison Arts Foundation, The David Rockefeller Fund, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, The Jill and Peter Kraus Foundation, The Richard Pousette-Dart Foundation.