Co-directed a short film as part of Mara G. Haseltine Exhibition La Bohème: A Portrait of Our Oceans in Peril
March 9 – April 28, 2013

Opening Reception with the Artist: March 9, 6pm – 8pm
Live Opera Performance at 7pm

agnès b. Galerie Boutique50 Howard Street NYC 10013

February 28, 2013 (NEW YORK) agnès b. is pleased to announce the opening of La Bohème: A Portrait of Our Oceans in Peril an exhibition by New York-based artist Mara G. Haseltine.

In Quito, Ecuador, 25 films from France will be shown in the 2nd edition of the French Film Festival. The festival starts on November 29 at the Alfredo Pareja screening hall in La Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana (CCE) and then hits the entire city with screenings at la Alianza Francesa and the Ocho y Media Cinemas. Festival continue until December 9th.

The focus on this year’s festival is French Youth. With the La Alianza Francesa, I have organized a program of 6 short films directed by French student filmmakers from New York University, who have traveled the world to create a variety of films: fiction, documentary, docu-fiction and black and white silent films.

My film Deja Vu will be presented as part of the series and I have also be invited at the festival to speak about mixing documentary and fiction as well as science and drama.

Trailer

The American Chemical Society recently greenlighted an anthology book in its Symposium Series entitled “Hollywood Chemistry” – an examination of how chemistry is presented in mainstream media. While chemistry will be the main emphasis of the book, the overarching theme will be on science in Hollywood, and how science is made appealing to the general public.

I was asked to contribute an chapter entitled Science Mise-en-Scene. The chapter will discuss the importance of narrative structure and aesthetics in communicating science. It will also touch upon on the misconceptions and misrepresentation of science and scientists in mainstream media and highlight new avenues for better scientific dissemination.

The book will be targeted for scientists, non-scientists, and laypeople in both academia and industry. It would also be excellent for undergraduates and high school students interested in science, and would make an excellent undergraduate textbook. The editors for this book will be myself, Donna Nelson, Jaime Paglia, and Sidney Perkowitz.

Starting late January 2013, I will be Adjunct Faculty at the New School teaching a Spring semester course entitled: A Chemical Narrative of the Cell. The poster image was created in November 2012 and represents my take on the course mixing narrative structure with notions of both chaos and order. The classroom becomes the cell where some elements are methylated, folded, or solitary within the delimited zone.

The post image will be used as a means of making visible our unique, interdisciplinary curriculum. The flyers will be posted all over the Eugene Lang Cafe wall, and can be seen when when you enter the main building.

Course Description
Through a narrative and visual journey, the course will discuss fundamental chemical principles and apply this understanding to appreciate the details of a cell at the molecular level. We will explore the underlying chemistry that lead from atom to the assembly of important complex macromolecules, such as DNA and proteins. The course will use visual representations and imaging to present chemical phenomena, to help make the unseen seen, and to help students understand, describe and study the building blocks of life. Assignments will incorporate film, animation and visualization exercises to further demystify chemical principles, structures and reactions.

In November 2011, 12 directors from NYU Graduate Film program were selected to be part of a collaborative poetry to film project led by actor-filmmaker James Franco. This project is named after the collection of poems TAR by C.K. Williams. Post-production recently completed, TAR starring James Franco, Henry Hopper, Mila Kunis and Jessica Chastain will premiere in the Cinema XXI programme at the Rome International Film Festival.

For this project, I adapted the last poem of the collection “One of the Muses”, starring James Franco, Mila Kunis, and Henry Hopper. One of the Muses is a lyrical piece recounting the tumultous night of CK in his forties (James Franco). The study room becomes “the house of shadows” as C.K. prepares a lecture the following day and experiences a writer’s block. He slowly plunges into his dark memories and early relationships as a twenty-year old (Henry Hopper), a cathartic experience that strengthens his present day with his wife (Mila Kunis).

SEE FILM PAGE: ONE OF THE MUSES

TAR SYNOPSIS
TAR is based on Pulitzer prize-winning poet C.K. Williams’ collection of the same name. Written and directed by 12 filmmakers, the film blends together adaptations of numerous poems, creating a poetic road trip through C.K. William’s life. Waltzing through time over several decades, C.K. Williams goes through a certain sense of rejuvenation as well as feelings of loss, as he experiences a series of significant past and present encounters. His constant wonder at and desire to grasp his memories makes him struggle to be fully present with his wife, but he then realizes through his journey, that he is inexplicably bound to both.

DIRECTORS’ STATEMENT
“Maybe the right words were there all along. Complicity. Wonder.”

Our project began as a collaborative experiment rooted in the idea that the language and ambitions of poetry provide a fertile source from which to create a unique cinematic experience.

Our source was Tar, C.K. Williams’s 1983 poetry collection that is a narrative of a remembered life – personal stories of brief as well as
long-lasting encounters with people, places and situations. It is an extraordinary poetic achievement.

TAR, the film, consists of contributions from 12 individual directors developed in a Graduate Film class at Tisch lead by James Franco, and comes from a shared belief that a truly collaborative experiment could yield something more powerful than we each could have achieved by ourselves.

Central to the collaborative nature of the film were the actor’s improvisations, allowing little accidents to happen, letting the actors’ inventions shape the moments, and in this way helping us explore and celebrate the wonders of one man’s recollections, seen through a glass cinematically.

It is our hope, that TAR will meet an audience open to watching and experiencing this kind of improvisational and experiential cinematic jam- session.

For the last weekend of the Citizen Science program at Bard College (January 18-19), I have been invited back to the Upstate New York campus, where my interest in combining the Sciences and the Arts began. I will be presenting a Film workshop. The goal of the workshop is to spark interest in translating scientific thought into visual storytelling. By viewing films, introducing small film exercises and discussing in a collaborative setting the relationship between science and narrative structure, first year students at Bard College will explore freely how to be imaginative, unconventional and original in scientific storytelling.

About Citizen Science
http://citizenscience.bard.edu/
The Citizen Science program will introduce students to science and the ideas of the scientific method. The program is designed to promote science literacy and will utilize the theme of infectious diseases, the importance of infectious disease in a community, and the impact that infectious disease outbreaks and subsequence management can have on our global society. The curriculum will range from conducting a laboratory experiment and analyzing a scientific problem to modeling potential solutions to that problem. The program will merge three distinct, yet thematically interwoven, rotations, each designed to address the large question: