What is the true length of a meter? Come view "The Measures" on Sept. 16 to find out!
The Measures, a documentary film with live narration by Jacqueline Goss and Jenny Perlin, will be screened at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 16, in Davis Auditorium.
Join filmmakers Gross and Perlin as they retrace the journey of two 18th-century astronomers tasked with determining the true length of the meter. From the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel, The Measures explores the metric system’s origins during the violence and upheavals of the French Revolution. Along the way, Goss and Perlin consider the intertwining of political and personal turmoil, the failures of standardization, and the subtleties of collaboration.
The screening will feature 16mm film on HD with live narration, followed by a Q & A session with filmmakers
Jacqueline Goss makes movies and web-based works that explore how political, cultural, and scientific systems change the ways we think about ourselves. For the last few years she has used 2D digital animation techniques to work within the genre of the animated documentary.
Her most recent videos are “How To Fix The World,” a look at Soviet-sponsored literacy programs in 1930s Central Asia; and “Stranger Comes To Town,” an animated documentary about the identity-tracking of immigrants and travelers coming into the United States. She is a 2008 Tribeca Film Institute Media Arts Fellow and the 2007 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in film and video. Goss teaches in the Film and Electronic Arts Department at Bard College.
Jenny Perlin makes films, videos, installations, and drawings. Her projects draw on interdisciplinary research interests in history, cultural studies, literature and linguistics. Her films incorporate innovative techniques to investigate history as it relates to the present. Perlin shoots 16mm film and digital video and combines live-action, staged, and documentary images with hand-drawn, text-based animation. Her films have been shown as single-channel works and multi-channel installations at numerous venues including the Guggenheim Museum, Mass MoCA, and MoMA.
Perlin’s work is in the public collections of MoMA, Seattle Art Museum, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among others, as well as numerous private collections.
The program is sponsored by the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative, an initiative of Project VIS, the Mellon-sponsored initiative to advance strategic, pedagogical, and liberal learning goals in the area of visual literacy and communication.
