A WORLD OF MOVEMENT: FILMS OF SHARON LOCKHART

Celebrated filmmaker and photographer Sharon Lockhart joins Media City Film Festival from Los Angeles to present a special selection of her films. 

NŌ (2003) and her most recent film EVENTIDE (2022) are definitive works from the artist, representing a career of consistent engagement with many of contemporary cinema’s central preoccupations: the distinction between moving and still images, the tension between the “natural” and the staged, and above all the candid invitation to participate in concentrated acts of looking and listening. 

Screening to mark the twentieth anniversary of its making, NŌ was originally inspired by the avant-garde practice of NО̄-no Ikebana, a freestyle form of Japanese flower arranging. Filmed in a continuous take from a fixed camera angle, NО̄ captures the precise movements of a Japanese farming couple, Masa and Yoko Ito, traversing horizontal fields of colour, and working the land as if covering the canvas in a living landscape painting. As Lockhart has explained, the film “highlights a relationship to nature and farming that is somewhat contrary to the overly mechanized large-scale agribusiness prevalent in the United States.”

NŌ, 32 min, 2003

EVENTIDE, 30 min, 2022

In what is both a culmination and a departure, Sharon Lockhart’s latest film, EVENTIDE (2022), is a meditative, non-narrative long shot that uses choreography to explore landscape, communal relations, solitary searching, psychic endurance, and the play of light moving through darkness. An astounding number of stars emerge bright in the dusking sky, blazing as a distant corollary to the growing constellation of roving bodies scanning the rock-strewn beach by cell phone light for what we do not know. The streaking of shooting stars and gliding of satellites throws the otherwise measured pace into relief. Shot on the Swedish coast with a close-knit group of friends Lockhart has been involved with for years, EVENTIDE is concerned with grieving and the future.—Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer