2010-2014 / ~62 minutes / silent and sound / B&W and Color
Directed by: Stephen Broomer
16mm prints supplied by the artist

Tuesday, August 25th, 2015
6:00pm
at The Mason O. Damon Auditorium at Buffalo Central Library

Please join us for a one-night screening event of fifteen experimental short films by Stephen Broomer projected in 16mm. The director will be in attendance to introduce his films and conduct a post-screening Q&A.

Cyclists are also welcome to join Cultivate Cinema Circle for a group ride to Hydraulic Hearth afterwards for discounted drinks with your ticket. Attendees are welcome by car and foot too. Here is the map:

Stop in early to be sure to score a FREE soft pretzel from Breadhive Cooperative Bakery!

Summer 2015 Season Sponsor: Community Beer Works
Event Sponsors: Buffalo Pug & Small Breed Rescue; Perk’s Cafe and Market; BreadHive Cooperative Bakery & Hydraulic Hearth
Ticket Information: FREE

---

Schedule is as follows:
Manor Road (3.5 minutes) – silent
Queen’s Quay (1 minute) – sound
Christ Church – Saint James (7 minutes) – sound
Brébeuf (10 minutes) – sound
Spirits in Season (12 minutes) – sound
Snakegrass (1 minute) – sound
Balinese Rebar (3.5 minutes) – sound
Bridge 1A (1.5 minutes) – silent
Conservatory (3.5 minutes) – silent
Bridge 1B (1.5 minutes) – silent
Serena Gundy (3.5 minutes) – silent
Bridge 1C (1 minute) – silent
Wild Currents (6.5 minutes) – sound
Landform 1 (3 minutes) – silent
Gulls at Gibraltar (3.5 minutes) – silent

---

The Transformable Moment
by Stephen Broomer

The moment is an indefinite measure of time into which almost all experience falls. It is the conclusive present and it permeates all written past. It forms in our vision and consciousness. History enters as the moment fleeting, but the moment, in and out of time, the present moment, is our epiphany, when eternity reaches into our time and into us. Eternity carves its expression into us. It comes to us to build.

Film has allowed the artist to tame the moment, to record and possess it, to suspend it in a representation that pretends to permanence. The moment, as inscribed on film, becomes an elastic interval. In this raw form, it opens onto the many possibilities for further creation, be they achieved by distortion and obscurity, by the heightened clarity that comes in the movement study, by the divergent gestures of alternating patterns, and by other operations played on the visual field. Our mastery over the moment and its contents invites us deeper inside the instant and eternity. That moment of insight, formed in the improvisatory gesture or tempered and realized by later contemplation, might be transformed to damn out old motions, to make them new; to give polyrhythmic integrity to both moment and memory itself; to reach for the essential energy of experience. Transformations reveal a composition as a field of individual and endlessly renewed meanings and energies. But the epiphany is rare and ultimate.

Every moment possesses the power to transform itself. In its stagnant chronology, its fixed coordinate, it changes. By memory and by history, time transforms itself. We use film to alter the moment, to cradle the moment, to annihilate the moment, or at least its impression, and by these operations, the image bears out the mystical associations of consciousness. The transformable moment is the moment turning into both its opposite and its other, and meaning arises in the gap between opposition and otherness. By this transformation, the moment departs from the assurances of memory and becomes a breathing passage.