Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa
BENJAMIN SCHULTZ-FIGUEROA is an artist and independent curator based out of Santa Cruz, CA. He recently completed his M.A. in Media Studies at the New School for General Studies and it currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Schultz-Figueroa has curated and screened works at venues such as Anthology Film Archives, Light Industry, Artists? Television Access, Northwest Film Forum, and Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
In the Fall of 2017, the filmmakers Irene Lusztig and Julie Wyman orchestrated a joint project between two classes being taught at the Universities of California, Santa Cruz and Davis.
Trinh T. Minh-ha has made a career of working between disciplines—troubling the foundational precepts of both anthropology and documentary. Her first film Reassemblage (1982), and her written critical analysis of ethnographic methods, effectively shaped a generation of debate over feminism, racism, empiricism, and colonialism in nonfiction filmmaking.
With her latest film, The Motherhood Archives (2013), Irene Lusztig engages with birth as a cultural phenomenon, a topic that sparks passionate beliefs, yet is rarely discussed critically or publicly.
Aya Hanabusa’s Tale of a Butcher Shop begins and ends with the processing of a cow into packaged meat.
Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa speaks with filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson about Everson's new work.
October 2013Film
Upside Down Cameras and Other Wonders Ernie Gehr's Signal--Germany on the Air and Side/Walk/Shuttle at Light Industry, October 8
Ernie Gehr’s Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991) and Signal—Germany on the Air (1985) are unlike any other city symphony films.
In the month of May in 1962, 5,056 people were imprisoned in the prisons of Paris. This statistic comes with others toward the end of Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme’s 1963 film Le Joli Mai, a film that begins as a reverie and ends as an indictment.
A young woman enters her chic quarters. She begins to disrobe, preparing for bed. A hand wearing a black leather driving gloves reaches out and cuts the cord for the lights.
July/August 2012Film
SCISSOR SPECULATIONS Cut & Paste: Contemporary Collage Animation From North America at Anthology Film Archives
Lawrence Jordan’s Sophie’s Place (1986) begins with a title card describing the etymology of the Greek word for philosophy, “philosophia.”
Jacqueline Goss’s new film The Observers (2011) follows two climatologists through their daily routine of recording weather patterns at the top of Mount Washington.
I worked for a year at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative just before it left its location in the Clocktower Gallery. The majority of my time there involved cleaning and inspecting films, and while generally speaking, this was a pretty tedious task, it was fascinating to spin certain films through the rewinds and imagine what they would look like projected.
Taschen’s resuscitation of John Gould’s series of prints, The Family of Toucans, comes in an impressively unwieldy box, measured at 13.3 by 19.3 inches.
From Jean-Marie Straub’s didactic elegies for Kafka and Orpheus to Michael Robinson’s A Line Describing Your Mom, and wacky new work by the late, great George Kuchar, there was much seriousness and much fun to be had at this year’s Views, which utilized the new venue to showcase more work than ever before.
Andy Warhol’s immense body of work can at times seem to cover every subject under the sun. The equally immense amount of criticism and conjecture about his oeuvre makes the whole subject of Warhol’s art fraught with polarization and speculation.
