CEMA hosts workshops and public screenings that feature visiting artists at the forefront of the audiovisual field. Free and open to the public, these events bring together the USC and local community, fostering dialogue and knowledge exchange
Landscapes of Resistance
In this workshop, film critic and programmer Jordan Cronk will discuss his approach to criticism and curation, and how the two practices inform one another. Participants will be given texts by various journalists and programmers about the works in the accompanying shorts program and will be asked to share a written reflection on a film of their choice. A conversation will then take place about the program’s themes of portraiture, landscape, and historical memory, followed by considerations of the participant’s texts and a larger discussion about how the people working in each of these fields approach artists’ cinema and its place in the current festival ecosystem.
Friday, October 23, 2026
10:30 AM – 1:30 PM
USC School of Cinematic Arts Complex – Room SCA 255
900 W 34th St, Los Angeles, CA 90007
FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO ALL USC STUDENTS, FACULTY, STAFF, ALUMNI, AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC.
RSVP to CEMA@usc.edu
This event is co-sponsored by USC Center for Ethnographic Media Arts and USC School for Cinematic Arts
Short Films Programmed by Jordan Cronk
We are excited to welcome acclaimed film critic, programmer, and founder of the Acropolis Cinema screening series, JORDAN CRONK, to the Center for Ethnographic Media Arts as part of CEMA’s Visiting Artist Series.
SHORTS PROGRAM
This Is My Land (Ben Rivers, 2006, 14 min)
A hand-processed portrait of Jake Williams, who lives alone within miles of forest in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Jake always has many jobs on at any one time, finds a use for everything, is an expert mandolin player, and has compost heaps going back many years. He has a different sense of time to most people in the 21st Century, which is explicitly expressed in his idea for creating hedges by putting up bird feeders. It struck me straight away that there were parallels between our ways of working – I have tried to be as self-reliant as possible and be apart from the idea of industry – Jake’s life and garden are much the same – he can sustain himself from what he grows and so needs little from others. To Jake this isn’t about nostalgia for some treasured pre-electric past, but more, a very real future. —Ben Rivers
“The red filter is withdrawn.” (Minjung Kim, 2020, 12 min)
Numerous colonial places including coastal cave and military bunkers, as well as memories of uprising and massacres are everywhere on Jeju Island. The film is based on René Magritte’s ‘La Condition Humaine’. The camera captures the landscape of caves and bunkers on Jeju Island, with the text from Hollis Frampton’s “A Lecture”, and asks the meaning of capturing and showing landscape through the media.
Barbs, Wastelands (Marta Mateus, 2017, 25 min)
In the end of the 19th century the peasants in Portugal started a courageous struggle for better work conditions. After generations of starving misery, the Carnation Revolution sowed the promise of an Agrarian Reform. Mostly in the Alentejo region, these rural workers occupied the huge properties where they were once submitted to the power of their Masters. Perhaps the lost seed of other fruits… It is said in Alentejo, when something is lost, those who are looking should start to walk back to the beginning. We must pray and ask Saint Lucy to clear our vision, so we can see and look better. The protagonists of this film, resistants of this struggle, many of them illiterate, working since childhood, tell their story to the youngsters of today, in their own words.
Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary (Sky Hopinka, 2017, 13 min)
The title of this video, taken from the texts of the architect Kengo Kuma, suggests a way of looking at everything as “interconnected and intertwined” – such as the historical and the present and the tool and the artifact. Images and representations of two structures in the Portland Metropolitan Area that have direct and complicated connections to the Chinookan people who inhabit(ed) the land are woven with audio tapes of one of the last speakers of chinuk wawa, the Chinookan creole. These localities of matter resist their reduction into objects, and call anew for space and time given to wandering as a deliberate act, and the empowerment of shared utility.
Parsi (Eduardo Williams, 2019, 24 min)
Innovatively shot on a 360-degree camera by young people from Guinea-Bissau’s queer and trans community, this breathlessly immersive work from the director The Human Surge sets a perpetually expanding poem by Mariano Blatt to a kinetic vision of their world.
Jordan Cronk in-person with a discussion to follow the films.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
Doors at 6:30 PM, film begins at 7:00 PM.
Runtime 88 min.
USC School of Cinematic Arts Complex – Room SCI 106
900 W 34th St, Los Angeles, CA 90007
FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO ALL USC STUDENTS, FACULTY, STAFF, ALUMNI, AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC.
RSVP to CEMA@usc.edu
This event is co-sponsored by USC Center for Ethnographic Media Arts and USC School for Cinematic Arts
LONDON
LONDON a film by Sebastian Brameshuber
Bobby drives back and forth between Vienna and Salzburg, picking up strangers along the way and sharing conversations that drift from the everyday to the deeply personal. In this tender portrait of today’s Europe, anonymity and warmth still go hand in hand.
Sebastian Brameshuber in-person with a discussion to follow the film.
Friday, September 25th, 2026
Doors at 4:30 PM, film begins at 5:00 PM.
Runtime 124 min.
USC School of Cinematic Arts Complex
900 W 34th St, Los Angeles, CA 90007
FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO ALL USC STUDENTS, FACULTY, STAFF, ALUMNI, AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC.
RSVP to CEMA@usc.edu
This event is co-sponsored by USC Center for Ethnographic Media Arts, USC School of Cinematic Arts, and the Austrian Consulate General in Los Angeles.
THE PRESENT, THE ABSENT
How can a place become visible through the everyday conversations of the people who inhabit it? In this workshop, participants collaboratively explore how a film about their shared experience might emerge from fragments collected across campus. How far can the idea of a “conversation” be pushed—into memory, imagination, silence, presence, and absence? Letting the process shape the form, the workshop invites participants to find and create scenes on camera that delineate the place as much by what is withheld as by what is shown.
Thursday, September 24th, 2026
10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Space in this workshop is limited. RSVP to CEMA@usc.edu
This event is co-sponsored by USC Center for Ethnographic Media Arts and the Austrian Consulate General in Los Angeles.
ATMOSPHERES with Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Atomspheres is a series of performances on elemental listening engagement and meditative environmental attunement, leading to a participatory performance with the co-listeners. The performances attune to the macro-scale crises of the climate and ecology in a planetary context and bridges its intersection with micro-level coping strategies to the crises in a regenerative gathering. The performances resonate with the tradition of free improvisation as well as communal and participatory sonic gatherings for affective and discursive engagement with crises and conflict, practiced in many Global Souths cultures. These performance gatherings involve field recordings of climate variables like wind, water, and woods, comprovised by chance generative processes, accompanied by radio interferences transducing situated weather patterns, weaved together by meditative instrumental interventions of traditional instruments, as well as live electronics and algorithmic interpretation of data and assemblages embracing free improvisational techniques and ethos. As an invocation, the series invites the co-listeners into an exercise of slow listening and slow breathing that try to suspend time, control, ego, and individuality to tap into a humbler mode of fatalism and a distributed self-hood. This philosophical positioning stresses the subjugation of events or actions to fate or destiny and is commonly associated with an attitude of acceptance in the face of future events, which are thought to be inevitable. This approach manifests into yielding control by an emergent form of togetherness, intersubjectivity, and kinship when listening transcends an overt causality, and the psychosomatic condition embraces slow breathing to contemplate, and affective attunement. The project is inspired by the micro-level entanglements of human, more-than-human, and other life forms in a survival context, and explores sensory transduction of environmental conditions to figure how to make them post-immersive and attuning experiences in an openly circular, collaborative performance setting.
Thursday, April 2nd, 2026
7:30 – 8:30 PM
USC School of Cinematic Arts Complex
Room SCA 120A
900 W 34th St, Los Angeles, CA 90007
FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO ALL USC STUDENTS, FACULTY, STAFF, ALUMNI, AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC.
RSVP to CEMA@usc.edu
This event is co-sponsored by USC Center for Ethnographic Media Arts and USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Spring 2026 Visiting Artist Series
