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
Films by LARRY GOTTHEIM
Join us for a screening of films by LARRY GOTTHEIM as part of CEMA’s Visiting Artist Series. Larry Gottheim in-person with a discussion to follow the films.
CORN
A fixed camera companion to FOG LINE. Bright green leaves stripped from ears of corn, and later, the vibrant yellow ears placed steaming in the waiting bowl. Each of these actions inaugurates a period in which one contemplates an image whose steady transformation is barely perceptible–the delicate slow movement of light and shadow, the evolution of subtle steam into the film grain. A meditation on the fragile moments of corn’s passage from living sun-nourished plant to food to light image. The mind attempts to grasp duration itself, to distinguish its own creating from its perceiving, but distictions blur in the wholeness of times’s and consciousness’ flow.
MACHETE GILLETTE… MAMA
Rapid, disjunctive images and sounds from aspects of life in the Dominican Republic – a film dealing with representation itself, within ritual, within cinema, within history, within narrating. The title is a Dominican song, based on a Haitian song, meaning a razor-sharp machete; it is, of course, a complex metaphor within the cultures from which it comes, but also within the film, extending my longstanding interest in edges, borders, horizons, into material of documentary interest.
Thursday, November 13th.
Doors at 6 pm. Films begin at 6:30 pm
RSVP to CEMA@usc.edu
A Workshop with LARRY GOTTHEIM
Join us for a workshop designed as an embodied exploration of Larry Gottheim’s central question, how can a film hold deep meaning in disparate areas when those meanings were not consciously part of the making process? Participants are invited to enter this inquiry through a process of making and reflection before the screenings and discussion with Larry. The aim of the activity is to explore how coherence and significance might emerge through chance and minimal planning.
Space in this workshop is limited. RSVP to CEMA@USC.EDU.
Friday, November 14, 2025
10:00 AM – 1:00 PM
A FILM BY BEN RIVERS
EARTH NEEDS MORE MAGICIANS
Ben Rivers in – person with a discussion to follow the film.
Friday, September 26, 2025
Runtime: 98min
Doors at 9:30 am, film begins at 10:00am
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. RSVP to CEMA@USC.EDU
IMAGE TO TEXT
In this workshop, Ben Rivers will work with participants to explore writing as a catalyst for image-making. Participants are invited to bring a piece of text — such as a story, a song, a poem, a play, or even a text by a friend — and use it as a spark for a film. The emphasis will be on exploration rather than adaptation, experimenting with forms of writing that resist the conventions of the final-draft screenplay.
September 26th, 2025
2:00 -5:00pm
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. RSVP to CEMA@USC.EDU.
The Image That Eludes the Conscious Mind
About the workshop from Tenzin Phuntsog:
As a moving image artist, a visual artist and a filmmaker I am inspired by images and the image that eludes my conscious mind. What do I mean by that? Often our conscious mind is wrapped in ego, disrupted by life events, and distracted by the challenges we navigate. How can we, as humans who carry all this experience with us, be present and find an authentic image? This question has been central to the early development of my creative practice and formative to the artist I am today.
FILMS BY TENZIN PHUNTSOG
RECENT WORKS AND WORKS IN PROGRESS: Films by Tenzin Phuntsog.
PALA AMALA (or “Father Mother” in the Tibetan language) is a two-channel video featuring the artist’s parents, who fled Tibet as children in the early 1960s. Phuntsog’s slow camera moves and deliberate framing capture his parents performing as themselves, as well as serving as vessels for a diaspora family. The reduced images communicate feelings around familial expressions of care, language, and identity. Memories of and longing for a lost homeland are expressed without words, as if hanging in the air, reflected through the gaze of subjects and the camera, unresolved. On a California beach, the father relives the moment he returned to Tibet for his first and only time in the 1990s, rubbing sand—in place of soil—over his hands and body. PALA AMALA was filmed on the Pacific Coast, where Phuntsog’s family settled in 1995, and their home in suburban America.
USA / 2022 / 6 min. / 2-channel video installation / Sound 35mm Scanned to 4K
PURE LAND
A son traverses remote and dramatic natural landscapes in the United States in an effort to capture images resembling his mother’s native Tibet. In his exchange with his mother, we bear witness to the effects of exile, and the powerful relationship between people and land.
2023 / 16 mins / 35mm Scanned to 4K
DREAMS
In DREAMS, the artist’s parents—Tibetan exiles—are seen sleeping on a single mattress on the floor, akin to the one they slept on when they first immigrated to the West. The image of the pair embracing on a bed floating within an open, undefined environment—as if any place could be photoshopped around them—heightens the sense of displacement and uncertainty. The work features a soft blanket made in India that is found in many Tibetan homes of the diaspora. “This blanket was one of the things my mother brought with us when we immigrated to the US from India. In this work, I wanted to return to one of my earliest and fondest memories. I wanted to remember that time of innocence.” Tenzin Phuntsog
USA / 2022 / 2 min. / Single-channel video installation / 35mm Scanned to 4K
AND MORE.
Tenzin Phuntsog in-person with a discussion to follow the films.
September 11th, 2025
THE FLAHERTY FILM SEMINAR 2025 LA POD
The Flaherty Film Seminar, the USC Center for Ethnographic Media Arts (CEMA), USC School of Cinematic Arts, and Los Angeles Filmforum present: The 2025 Los Angeles Flaherty Pod.
Entering its 70th year, the Flaherty Film Seminar is revered as one of the most significant convenings around non-fiction cinema. Each year filmmakers, scholars, students, curators, critics, archivists, and cinephiles gather for an immersive, week-long program of film screenings, in-depth discussions, artist talks, installations, and/or performances around a theme.
June 26-29, 2025
LÁZARO AT NIGHT, FLORA, and DEAR CHANTAL
LÁZARO AT NIGHT, FLORA, and DEAR CHANTAL: Films by Nicolás Pereda
DEAR CHANTAL: A miniature homage to Chantal Akerman, conceived as a series of playfully impossible letters that respond to her inquiry about renting my sister’s home in Mexico City. FLORA: A reflection on the nature of representation and the ongoing drug war in Mexico, Nicolás Pereda’s Flora revisits locations and scenes from the mainstream 2010 narco-comedy El Infierno, exploring the paradoxes of depicting narco-trafficking on film—its tendency both to romanticize and to obscure. To screen is both to project and to conceal. LÁZARO AT NIGHT : Lázaro at Night follows three friends in their early forties as they audition for a coveted film role. Amid the process, one of them interviews a former literature teacher whose voice transports us to their past—a time when literature offered them an escape, allowing them to dream and hope in ways the dull, unforgiving real world never could. As they reminisce, their deep friendship becomes tangled in an uneasy love triangle, blurring the lines between memory, desire, and reality.
Friday, April 11th, 2025
Possibilities of Voice-Over
Possibilities of Voice-Over – A Workshop with Nicolás Pereda
This workshop takes an experimental approach to exploring the possibilities of voice-over narration in film, examining its different forms and effects. We will discuss the distinctions between documentary and fiction voice-overs, as well as hybrid approaches that combine elements of both. Topics will include embodied vs. disembodied narration, how the use of different verb tenses affects audience engagement, and conceptual vs. material narration. Participants will do one short exercise. To take part, please bring a photograph of your choice.
Friday, April 11, 2025
GOOD LUCK
GOOD LUCK: A film by Ben Russell
Filmed between a state-owned large-scale underground mine in the war-torn state of Serbia and an illegal mining collective in the tropical heat of Suriname, Good Luck is a visceral documentary portrait of hope and sacrifice in a time of global economic turmoil. Beginning with a 600 meter descent into the depths of the earth, Good Luck shines a flashlight onto the human face of labor in the time-warp’d working conditions of an underground state-owned mine in Serbia. The hiss of oxygen cuts through the diesel rumble, the walls of the office vibrate with explosions two levels below ; war-torn and half-forgotten, these miners’ physical struggle finds its mirror a continent away – in the tropical heat of an illegal Surinamese gold mine. The water pumps roar under the blinding sun ; silver liquid rolls across the hand of a Saramaccan Maroon as he adds mercury to dirt in a never-ending search for gold. Formed between dark and light, cold and heat, North and South, Good Luck immerses its viewer in the precarious natural and social environments of two distinct labor groups so as to better understand the bonds that men share. In a time of global economic turmoil, here is the human foundation of capital, revealed.
Thursday, March 27
ATTENTION!
ATTENTION!: A Workshop with Filmmaker Ben Russell
ATTENTION! is a practical workshop exploring perceptual re-engagement, one that seeks to re-orient the audiovisual attentions of its participants towards the present. Participants will be led in a series of walking and recording exercises that explore the possibilities of objective and subjective observation under the loose frames of “documentary” and / or “psychedelic ethnography.” This workshop draws its inspiration from sources as diverse as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Maryanne Amacher’s third ear compositions, LSD test subjects, hydrophone coral reef recordings, Jean Rouch’s idea of trance-cinema and more – all in the name of recognizing one’s own intuitive, cognitive and perceptual processes within the construction of the Here and Now.
Friday, March 28
JUST A SOUL RESPONDING
Just a Soul Responding – Short Films by Sky Hopinka:
Visions of an Island, 2016, Sunflower Siege Engine, 2022, Kicking the Clouds, 2021, Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary, 2017
Sky Hopinka in-person with a Q&A to follow the films.
Thursday February 20th, 2025
A CONVERSATION WITH SKY HOPINKA
A conversation and Artist Talk with artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka.
Friday February 21st, 2025
EVENTIDE
EVENTIDE: A film by Sharon Lockhart
In what is both a culmination and a departure, Sharon Lockhart’s latest film, Eventide (2022), is a meditative, non-narrative long shot that uses choreography to explore landscape, communal relations, solitary searching, psychic endurance, and the play of light moving through darkness. Locating drama in the real-time shift of evening fading into night, this is perhaps Lockhart’s most optical and painterly moving image to date, composing figures, scenography, and soundscape into allegory and abstraction. The artist’s investment in forms of dance in previous works is felt here too as the initial appearance of an individual slowly builds into a culture and a gathering. An astounding number of stars emerge bright in the dusking sky, blazing as a distant corollary to the growing constellation of roving bodies scanning the rock- strewn beach by cell phone light for what we do not know. The streaking of shooting stars and gliding of satellites throws the otherwise measured pace into relief. Shot on the Swedish coast with a close-knit group of friends Lockhart has been involved with for years, Eventide is concerned with the future and what it might hold.
Sharon Lockhart in-person with a Q&A to follow the film, and a workshop to follow the Q&A.
January 31st, 2025
