Film Details

Bruce Checefsky is a photographer and Director of the Reinberger Galleries at the Cleveland Institute of Art. For the past 13 years he has also moonlighted as a maker of short, independent films that have shown widely around the world—from MoMA and the Anthology Film Archives to the Tate Modern and the Rotterdam Film Festival. Checefsky has carved out a unique niche for himself by reimagining and making abstract and avant-garde Eastern European shorts from the 1920s to the 1940s that were either lost, destroyed, or conceived/scripted but never filmed. Checefsky’s completion of a new movie, Witch’s Cradle (2014), affords us an opportunity to show all eight of his visually dazzling short films in one comprehensive program. Witch’s Cradle reimagines an unfinished, now lost 1943 short by pioneering experimental filmmaker Maya Deren (Meshes of the Afternoon). Deren shot her film with Marcel Duchamp in Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery in New York; it was intended to be an exploration of the magical qualities of objects in the space. Checefsky’s Cleveland-made remake stars CIA alum Margaret Stamm. Also showing: Pharmacy (2001), A Woman and Circles (2003), IN NI (Others) (2005), Moment Musical (2006), Béla (2010), et al. Bruce Checefsky will answer audience questions after the screening.