Filmforum 50: Barbara T. Smith - The 21st Century Odyssey

Los Angeles Filmforum, EZTV, and Hollywood Entertainment present Filmforum 50, program 14: The 21st Century Odyssey, with co-director Barbara T. Smith in conversation with Michael J. Masucci. The film’s two chapters will be presented with a short intermission featuring international snacks from some of the countries visited in the film. Program notes and complete info at: https://www.lafilmforum.org/ ∆ The 21st Century Odyssey is a video travelogue through love, liberatory technology, social and personal mythology, and the pleasures and rigors of making life into art told in part through the pixelated beauty of the videophone. Though rarely screened, it is a rich and resonant chapter in the legendary Barbara T. Smith’s careerlong experiments with machine innovation. Her partnership with Kate Johnson and EZTV documents an epic befitting their shared goals of evolving and synthesizing video art and performance art’s past and future. The film’s patient veneration of the quotidian alongside the grand coupled with the ache of long-term romantic longing re-embodies the interpretive act of translating this two-year-plus durational performance project into its video form. The film sees Smith from 1991 through 1993 sending photo messages to her lover, physician Roy Walford, while he is sealed inside the Biosphere 2 and serving as its resident physician. Highlighting the newly-available and newly-aesthetically-permeable availability of transmissions via broadcast and teleconference by the Electronic Cafe International in Santa Monica, the film spans four continents and even the subject’s college reunion. Smith and Johnson’s resulting document of a durational performance is a stirring and strange tale of Smith as Odysseus. Unlike her inspiration, she can reach her (doctor) Penelope via semi-frequent messages. But the resulting tensions of their avant-garde and at-times intangible communication creates new permeations of distance-via-intimacy that are being newly defined as they happen, resonating profoundly in the world that these pioneers created for us. This is documentary as video art, love as performance piece, and a must-see for admirers of Smith, Johnson, and EZTV. Special thanks to Mara McCarthy and The Box.