Event Details
Location: Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn, NY
Date: May 9, 2025
Time: 8:00 PM (Screening + Conversation)
Where NYC Experimental Film Meets the Line
This special evening brings together three moving image works that contemplate grief, time, birth, and departure through a distinctly avant-garde lens. From Larry Gottheim’s timeless filmic grammar to Clare Archibald’s deeply somatic and tactile filmmaking, these works reject linearity and collapse the divide between presence and absence, arrival and departure.
Together, they form a curated meditation on mortality, memory, and transformation, offering a space where art confronts the most profound human experiences with honesty, intimacy, and invention.
The Screening Program: Avant-Garde Cineman at Its Most Profound
HARMONICA (1971, 10 min) – Larry Gottheim
A one-take marvel of cinema vérité, HARMONICA captures spontaneous breath as music, wind as improvisation. It's a landmark of early American experimental film — playful, elemental, and foundational.
A PRIVATE ROOM (2019, 14 min) – Larry Gottheim
A metaphysical coda from one of America’s greatest avant-garde artists. With references to quantum theory and psychic interiority, A Private Room offers a ghostly meditation on language, death, and the unseen.
CAN YOU HEAR THE INTERIM (2020, 21 min) – Clare Archibald
A film of rare emotional gravity, Can You Hear the Interim documents the unthinkable: the birth of a child expected to die. Filmed with ultrasound gel, baby toys, and heartbeats, Archibald crafts a tactile sonic landscape that holds space for grief, transformation, and embodied witnessing.
Why This Screening Matters: Curatorially, Historically, and Personally
This program is not only a tribute to film as an expressive force — it is a conversation across generations of experimental cinema. By pairing Larry Gottheim, a foundational figure in American avant-garde film, with Clare Archibald’s raw, contemporary feminist filmmaking, the evening draws a line between legacy and future, structure and surrender, theoretical inquiry and lived experience.
As curator, Michèle Saint-Michel — herself a poet-filmmaker known for work exploring grief, quantum entanglement, and somatic memory — creates a space of radical softness and fierce clarity, where experimental film doesn't merely reflect life, but moves through it.
"Grief, for me, is a medium as much as film or sound. These works don’t observe life and death from afar — they enact them. They breathe, they ache, they shimmer."
— Michèle Saint-Michel
About the Filmmakers
Larry Gottheim
A giant in avant-garde cinema, Gottheim has been making films since the 1960s. His practice, spanning single-shot film to digital meditations, centers perception, presence, and metaphysical inquiry. This screening pairs one of his earliest 16mm pieces with his final digital work — a rare and moving juxtaposition of youthful improvisation and late-life reflection.
Clare Archibald
Scottish writer-artist Clare Archibald works across media, using sound, text, and film to explore intimate geographies of experience. Can You Hear the Interim is both a stand-alone film and a chapter of her forthcoming book, The Absolution of Shyness. Her work is a beacon in contemporary feminist and autobiographical film practice.
About the Curator: Michèle Saint-Michel
Michèle Saint-Michel is a filmmaker, curator, and intermedia artist based in New York City. Her works explore grief, feminist ecologies, and quantum mechanics through somatic movement, poetry, and cinema. At Millennium Film Workshop, she curates programs that bring tenderness and rigor into conversation, foregrounding care, embodiment, and radical intimacy in experimental film.
Millennium Film Workshop
Founded in 1966, Millennium Film Workshop has supported generations of visionary moving image artists. A filmmaker-led nonprofit, it offers affordable access to film equipment, screenings, and community programming. It’s the place where avant-garde cinema is not only shown — but shaped.
Why You Should Attend
Discover rare and historic experimental films by icons of the avant-garde.
Witness a deeply moving contemporary work about motherhood, death, and love.
Be part of NYC’s experimental film scene, in conversation with curators and fellow cinephiles.
Sit in stillness, uncertainty, and awe — and find meaning in the flicker between life and death.
Reserve tickets now and witness what it means when avant-garde film dares to confront the most sacred transitions we face.
