Ela Troyano & Tessa Hughes-Freeland

Ela Troyano and Tessa Hughes-Freeland are co-founders of the New York Film Festival Downtown as well as award-winning filmmakers: Troyano's include "Latin Boys Go to Hell", "The Bubble People" and "Totem of the Depraved", and Hughes-Freelan, who has created "Baby Doll", "Dirty", and "Nymphomania" is also a noted film theorist. This videotape captures their unique live multi-projection visual improvisation performance, an "expanded cinema" collaboration to the music of composer John Zorn's "Godard". Utilizing Jean-Luc Godard's classic film "Contempt" as a constant element, Troyano and Hughes-Freeland overlay slides of that comment upon and extend the imagery of the film, creating meta-texts and sub-texts that excite subjective responses. The duo subtly manipulate colored gels, guide crossfades with their hands, and "play" their assembly of equipment. In their post-performance interview, Troyano and Hughes-Freeland outline the development of the expanded cinema concept, discuss the influence of aleatoric procedures leading toward "happy accidents" in their live performances, and compare the notion of the "voyeuristic gaze" in films by women and men. Click here to view clip.