Film Screening : Lex Brown “Carnelian”

Join TU’s Department of Film Studies for the film screening of Carnelian, a contemporary mythology, created as an artifact for a deep future. Named for the stone which is believed to give courage in speaking, Carnelian is an eclectic musical work that exists as film, live performance, and album. At the List Center, Brown debuted the piece as an immersive 3-channel video installation alongside a quartet of significant new paintings.

In three acts – Dawn, Afternoon, Dusk – three characters await the imminent arrival of a cataclysmic event, referred to as the “Boom.” With songs and script written by Brown and co-composed by Samuel Beebe, the work offers a complex take on contemporary conditions marked by polarizing rhetoric, authoritarian structures, and the looming threat of human extinction. Brown based the characters — Necyria, Orachrysops, and Bicyclus, and the Auctioneer — on archetypes associated with the animistic qualities ascribed to fire, earth, air, and the void. Each character contends with their own definition of power, whether it be natural, political, technological, or spectacular.

Riffing on both the ancient and technological understandings of ‘the scroll,’ this new, single-channel adaptation of the film moves through each of the three characters in their distinct environments. Evoking early cinematic technology such as the cyclorama and the zoetrope, the continuous and modulated motion speaks to the ever-constant pace of contemporary life.