Film Screenings at Digital GYM Cinema
This is a part of our partnership with Digital Gym Cinema where we show bi-monthly films about photographers on the big screen, all in a state-of-the-art theater with popcorn, candy, and any beverage your heart desires
August 8, 2024 at 7 PM
Please join us for a showing of the documentary, Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters (2012), directed by Ben Shapiro. Filmed over a decade, Brief Encounters follows internationally renowned photographer Gregory Crewdson’s quest to create his unique, surreal, and incredibly elaborate portraits of suburban life. He sets a house on fire, builds 90 foot sets with crews of sixty, shuts down city streets…all in the service of his haunted image of American life, and his own anxieties, dreams and inner desires. Brief Encounters is an intimate portrait of one of the most heralded image-makers of our time.
Gregory Crewdson’s photographs have entered the American visual lexicon, taking their place alongside the paintings of Edward Hopper and the films of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch as indelible evocations of a silent psychological interzone between the everyday and the uncanny. Often working with a large team, Crewdson typically plans each image with meticulous attention to detail, orchestrating light, color, and production design to conjure dreamlike scenes infused with mystery and suspense. While the small-town settings of many of Crewdson’s images are broadly familiar, he is careful to avoid signifiers of identifiable sites and moments, establishing a world outside time.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Crewdson is a graduate of SUNY Purchase and the Yale University School of Art, where he is now director of graduate studies in photography. He lives and works in New York and Massachusetts. In a career spanning more than three decades, he has produced a succession of widely acclaimed bodies of work, from Natural Wonder (1992–97) to Cathedral of the Pines (2013–14). Beneath the Roses (2003–08), a series of pictures that took nearly ten years to complete—and which employed a crew of more than one hundred people—was the subject of the 2012 feature documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, by Ben Shapiro.
Medium Photo members pay just $9 admission ($12 general), with underground parking available.
Previous screenings include:
June 13, 2024
A screening of Hale County This Morning, This Evening, directed by artist, filmmaker, and writer, RaMell Ross. Ross, a photographer, was inspired by the work of William Christenberry and used the historic work of Walker Evans and James Agee to show a different side of Hale County, Alabama where the influential book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was created. Composed of intimate and unencumbered moments of people in a community, this film is constructed in a form that allows the viewer an emotive impression of the Historic South – trumpeting the beauty of life and consequences of the social construction of race, while simultaneously a testament to dreaming.
After the screening attendees discussed the film with the photographer Robin North.
April 11, 2024
A screening of Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People (2014), coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the release of this film. This is the first documentary to explore the role of photography in shaping the identity, aspirations, and social emergence of African Americans from slavery to the present.
Before the screening attendees enjoyed a Q&A with director, Thomas Allen Harris.
This screening was supported by the San Diego African American Museum of Fine Art.
December 14th, 2023
A screening of Bill Cunningham New York included photo ops for participants who came dressed in Cunningham-inspired attire. Special sweets were available to guests upon arrival and complimentary Prosecco from the concession stand.
October 12, 2023
A screening of The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography with a talk back led by photographer Marshall Williams and Medium Photo program manager Lauren Matley.
August 10, 2023
A screening of Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning with a talk back led by director Dyanna Taylor and Medium Photo board president Kevin Miller.
June 15, 2023
An exclusive screening of Faces Places a film by Agnés Varda and contemporary French artist JR. After the film a talk back with JR collaborator and photographer Scott Bennett and professor Alain Lescartes.
April 6 & 8, 2023
The southern California premiere of GRAIN was included in the 2023 Medium Festival of Photography. GRAIN is a film by Alex Contell and Tomasso Sacconi that highlights photographers who choose to forgo the benefits of digital in favor of technology that is vulnerable to human error and chance. After the screening we hosted a talk back with the directors and audience members.