Rice Cinema to host ‘The Sounds of Silence: Three Evenings of Film’

A three-part film series called “The Sounds of Silence: Three Evenings of Film” will be presented at the Rice Media Center on successive Mondays in September at 7 p.m.

Rice University’s Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts and Rice Cinema are hosting the series in collaboration with the Menil Collection on its current exhibition, “Silence,” which explores the many ways painters, sculptors, filmmakers, musicians and performance artists invoke silence to shape space and consciousness.

According to organizers, the series will track the many ways in which media artists have engaged sound and its “diminutive double,” silence. According to the Menil’s website, the series follows the artist’s use of film sound as it evolved through numerous improvisations, “from the muted films of Stan Brakhage and Nathaniel Dorsky, through the clamorous scores of Harry Smith and Peggy Ahwesh, to the sampled sonorities of Warner Jepson and Stephen Vitiello.” 

“A Kind of Hush” will be shown Sept. 10. “Sonic Slippage” will be screened Sept. 17.  “Sourcing Sound & Image” is scheduled for Sept. 24. The screenings are free and open to the public.

This program was organized by Steve Seid, video curator of the University of California, Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive, which, together with Berkeley’s Art Museum, is a co-organizer of the Menil exhibition. Seid will introduce the series Sept. 10, and Rice Cinema will host a reception in Seid’s honor at 6 p.m.

For more information about the films, visit http://www.menil.org/programs/TheSoundsofSilence.php.