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Film Screening and Discussion: Disability, Documentary, and Description
May 7, 2020 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Film Screening and Discussion: Disability, Documentary, and Description
Thursday, May 7th, 7 to 9pm
Virtual event: Zoom information provided to RSVPs.
The film, art, and writing of Jordan Lord focuses on the entanglements between access and documentary, framing and support, familial and financial debts. Integrating audio description to refract the perspectives of the people on camera and using both captions and their own body to delimit what parts of each image are shown, their films consider how access renders and interrupts standard aesthetic, social, and institutional protocols. As they observe how they and their family are caught up in various financial, legal and medical apparatuses––and how these apparatuses get involved with practices of documentary filmmaking––they seek to reflect how disability and debt both break open and intimately contract the frames placed on dependency and care.
Following a screening of three of their films, join us for a talkback and conversation on these themes and more with Jordan and artists Constantina Zavitsanos and Carolyn Lazard. Moderated by Emily Lim Rogers.
Three films by Jordan Lord:
I Can Hear My Mother’s Voice, Jordan Lord and Deborah Lord, 5 minutes, 2018.
This collaboration between Jordan and their mother Deborah documents her process of learning how to use Jordan’s camera. Deborah’s audio description of what she has recorded ranges from a reflection on filmmaking and personal observations of what she sees onscreen to a meditation on how her act of recording triggers senses of both memory and loss.
After… After… (Access), Jordan Lord, 16 minutes, 2018
This essay film follows the filmmaker’s attempt to get access to filming their open heart surgery, while confronting the inaccessibility of film and video for disabled audiences. Lord considers what it means to give varying levels of access to their body and feelings, while also thinking about the dependencies that make access to the film possible in the first place.
Shared Resources, Jordan Lord, 54 minute excerpt, 2020
This feature-length documentary is about Lord’s family and their debts. Though Jordan’s father Albert was a debt collector for over 30 years, he and Deborah are in a tremendous amount of debt––much of which stemmed from the cost of Jordan’s college education. The film spans 4 years of Deborah and Albert’s bankruptcy, as they attempt to live under austerity. Through the process of making and watching the film together, Jordan, Deborah, Albert, and Jordan’s sister Ashley reckon with each others’ very different understandings of debt, dependency, and disability.
The films are audio described and open captioned in English.
There is a strobe effect (a flickering light) about 8 minutes into the video After… After… (Access). The video also says this at the beginning.
Live audio description of event, provided by Alejandra Ospina.
CART, ASL provided.
Constantina Zavitsanos is an artist who works in sculpture, performance, text, and sound. Zavitsanos’s work elaborates what is invaluable in the re/production of debt, dependency, and means beyond measure. Zavitsanos has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the New Museum, Artists Space, The Kitchen, and Participant Inc. in New York; at Arika in Glasgow, Scotland; and at Fri Art Kunsthalle in Switzerland. With Park McArthur, they co-authored the texts “Other Forms of Conviviality” in the journal Women and Performance (Routledge, 2013), and “The Guild of the Brave Poor Things” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2017). Zavitsanos lives in New York and teaches at the New School.
Carolyn Lazard is a Philadelphia-based artist and writer. They have exhibited and screened work in various institutions including the Walker Art Center, the New Museum, Camden Art Centre, the Stedelijk Museum, Museum für Moderne Kunst, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Lazard has published writing in the Brooklyn Rail, Mousse Magazine, and Triple Canopy.