Jenny Perlin
2021The Measures
Jenny Perlin, Jacqueline Goss
Jacqueline Goss and Jenny Perlin retrace the journey of two eighteenth 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 politic and personal turmoil, the failures of standardization, and the subtleties of collaboration.
The Measures
Tender Not Approved
Jenny Perlin
Secret messages are present in the receipts you hold in your wallet right now. The codes, however, can't be cracked. Infrared is a light wave past the visible spectrum, just after red, invisible to the human eye. In 1800, physicist and astronomer Sir William Herschel accidentally discovered infrared while conducting experiments with a prism and a thermometer. Hands describing, constructing, arranging. Spontaneous creations, untranslatable texts. These hands see what is invisible to me.
Tender Not Approved
Associated
Jenny Perlin
Brooklyn, 4 July 2004. Jenny Perlin spends her entire Independence Day filming her neighbourhood supermarket. Although the front of the building is dilapidated and the sign is so old you can barely read it, this shop has everything a larger supermarket has, "and sometimes even more," according to its proud owner Mr. Leem. He and his brother work 14-hour days in the supermarket. In an off-screen interview, he tells about the shop's history and about his favourite music: Johnny Cash and Najwa Karam. Every two hours, Perlin grabbed her 16 mm Bolex camera to shoot two and a half minutes of film (the time it takes for the spool to unwind). This "arbitrary" style of filmmaking emphasises not the action, but the rhythm. The beauty of the shop is not in the extraordinary events taking place there, but in the fixed patterns of plodding and rummaging.
Associated