EVENTIDE. 2022. USA/Sweden. Directed by Sharon Lockhart. 35 min.
Goshogaoka. 1997. USA/Japan. Directed by Sharon Lockhart. 16mm. 63 min.
For this special evening, photographer and filmmaker Sharon Lockhart presents a career-spanning double bill—a format that fittingly echoes the yearslong engagement with people and places at the core of her practice. The program looks back at Goshogoaka, a major early-career work that portrays the warm-up drills of a middle-school girls’ basketball team in the Tokyo suburbs. Over six 10-minute takes filmed with a fixed camera at court level, the calisthenics’ cadence and subtle choreography shape a captivating reflection on postmodern dance, the rigors of structuralist film, and the legacy of visual ethnography.
A quarter century after its premiere in New Directors/New Films 1998, Goshogoaka screens with Lockhart’s recent work EVENTIDE, which is similarly attuned to everyday movements, group dynamics, and the passage of time. In it, a band of young women crisscross a rocky stretch of the Swedish seaside, flashlights in hand, as if exploring an unknown territory. With a single take, in which dusk recedes into inky darkness and a meteor shower flashes across the sky, the film’s choreographic exploration of landscape is full of mystery and melancholy.