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Mimesis Without Organs: Eastern Anthems by Jean-Jacques Martinod & Matthew Wolkow

 
Mimesis Without Organs presents
Eastern Anthems, a filmic correspondence between Matthew Wolkow & Jean-Jacques Martinod
with filmmakers in attendance

April 18 | 7:30pm MT | Muenzinger Auditorium
in collaboration with Cinema and Moving Image Arts 
co-sponsored with the International Film Series
 
 
Synopsis:
An unfinished film is passed along from one friend to another. The dialog between them is a journey crossed by the swarming of the Great Eastern Brood X of periodical cicadas that prophetically emerge every 17 years in the United States, invoking a reflection of a post-pandemic present and our shared futures.
A road movie composed of a chorus of voices (both human and non-human), the warnings of history, the power of nature and rebirth.
 
 
EA Still
 
Eastern Anthems begins as a gesture passed from one filmmaker to another, shaped by conversation, distance, and the willingness to invite mutation as transit. In a sustained dialogue, Jean-Jacques Martinod and Matthew Wolkow create a film that stays porous to circumstance, where process remains present and form evolves in response to encounter. Shot on 16mm with expired stock and shaped through remote collaboration, the images carry a shifting light, a soundtrack that gathers a thick weave of environmental frequencies, radio transmissions, musical passages, diarist correspondence, melding it all into a restless acoustic field.
The collaboration unfolds like an ongoing exchange between friends, guided as much by intuition as by plan. Distance, technical breakdowns, and damaged footage become part of the film’s armature, folding failure into the work rather than editing it out. This shared authorship lends the film a quiet political gravitas. Without didactics, it registers a social landscape marked by fracture and unease, allowing instability in the medium to echo instability in the world it observes. As sound and image fall in and out of alignment, the film finds in that slippage both vulnerability and a shared resolve.

 

Matthew Wolkow Headshot

Matthew Wolkow is a filmmaker and visual artist whose work moves fluidly between essay and experimentation, rubbing shoulders with reality, imagination, poetry, music, and cinematic sensoria. Driven by a deep curiosity for knowledge, he creates cinema that reveals the people he meets and the stories that emerge, embracing a hybridity where form itself becomes a kind of resolution. An alchemist of images and sounds, Wolkow crafts sensitive and singular universes, often close to the fable, where the poetry of reality is made vividly seen and heard. His films have been screened at important festivals and alternative venues around the world, including Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire (RIDM), Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, WNDX Festival of Moving Image, and Antimatter Media Arts, and he is considered one of the most original new voices in Quebec documentary cinema.

 

Jean-Jacques Martinod headshot

Jean-Jacques Martinodis a filmmaker, media artist, film curator,  abyssological researcher, and clandestine anarchivist whose practice unfolds through a cinema grounded in extended modes of noetic and intersubjective experience. His work engages the human and non-human, folk mythology, anemic memory, sur-regional biomes, and techno-logical hydras, exploring ways of relating to living worlds through poetic mediation and shared cohabitation. Through this singular approach, Martinod constructs immersive and exploratory cinematic forms that blur boundaries between perception, knowledge, and environment. His work has been showcased in leading festivals, museums, and cinematheques, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, FIDMarseille, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Mar del Plata, First Look MoMI, PHI Centre Montreal, Cinemateca do MAM Rio de Janeiro, Cinemateca Nacional del Ecuador, Cinemateca de Bogotá, and the European Media Arts Festival, among many others. He received his MFA from Concordia University, where he was affiliated with the Centre for Expanded Poetics, the Global Emergent Media Lab, and the Fabrique-mondes Research Group, and is currently a PhD candidate in Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado.