Sat 13th 6:30 pm

Penny Lane & Jessica Bardsley US The Commoners 12min 30sec 2009

In 1890, a wealthy eccentric named Eugene Schieffelin collected every bird ever mentioned by Shakespeare and released them into Central Park. The only one to survive in the New World was the European Starling, now among the commonest – and most despised – urban birds in America. THE COMMONERS is an essay film about European Starlings, poetry, the rhetorical relationship between nationalism and environmentalism, and the paths people forge through history as they attempt to improve the natural world.

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Thomas Comerford US The Indian Boundary Line 42min 00sec 2010

Over the last eight years, Chicago musician and filmmaker Thomas Comerford has been at work on a series of quietly-observed films that contemplate the entwined social, political, and environmental histories of Chicago (Figures in the Landscape, 2002; Land Marked/Marquette, 2005).
His new film, The Indian Boundary Line, follows “a road very close to my home in Chicago, Rogers Avenue,” that traces the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis boundary between the United States and “Indian Territory” and examines the collision between “the vernacular landscape, with its storefronts, short-cut footpaths and picnic tables, and the symbolic one, replete with historical markers, statues and fences.
In its observations and audio-visual juxtapositions, THE INDIAN BOUNDARY LINE meditates on history and history’s relationship to the landscape, with its shifting boundaries, designs, uses and inhabitants across two centuries.”

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