Platonic: Dani Leventhal In Person

Experimental Response Cinema is pleased to bring you a selection of experiential video works by Dani Leventhal, along with the artist herself. Leventhal peruses and captures her environment with a handheld camera that, as she describes it, functions as an extension of the body. Using intuitive montage strategies, she coaxes unexpected relationships out of tangled moments of curiosity, banality, terror, humor, and beauty. Conversations with loved ones are interrupted by examinations of road kill; mammograms and heart sonograms jut into lingering images of plant life, folds of skin, and ornate pressed tin ceilings. These works evoke emotional tones that fluctuate and clash in ways more similar to our experience of reality than of cinema, and yield diaristic style that isn’t simply recorded but actively hunted, poked and prodded. “Since 2003’s Draft 9, Leventhal has made over a dozen films that blend diaristic fragments and staged scenes from her own life, all of them arresting, intimate, and to my mind some of the most insistently vital work made in the past decade.” – Genevieve Yue, Reverse Shot Full program: http://www.ercatx.org/jan-31st-platonic-dani-leventhal-in-person