Event

The Indian Boundary Line

Director In Attendance!
World premiere
Co-Presented By Third Eye Cinema

(Thomas Comerford, USA, 2010, DigiBeta, 41 min) Over the last eight years, local musician and filmmaker Thomas Comerford has been at work on a series of quietly-observed films that contemplate the entwined social, political and environmental histories of Chicago (Figures in the Landscape (2002); Land Marked/Marquette ( 2005)). His latest film follows, as Comerford describes, "a road very close to my home in Chicago, Rogers Avenue," that traces the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis boundary between the United States and "Indian Territory." In doing so, it examines the collision between "the vernacular landscape, with its storefronts, short-cut footpaths and picnic tables, and the symbolic one, replete with historical markers, statues, and fences." Through its observations and audio-visual juxtapositions, The Indian Boundary Line meditates on history and its relationship to the landscape, with its own shifting boundaries, designs, uses and inhabitants across two centuries.

Screens with
Land Marked/Marquette
(Thomas Comerford, USA, 2005, 16mm, 23 min) A series of clear, concisely observed landscape studies of sites and monuments in Chicago connected to 17th century exploration by Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette. In examining the monuments to Marquette, the "stories" the monuments tell, and the relationship of the monuments to their surroundings, the film deploys different audio-visual and stylistic tactics, allowing for the contemplation of both historical representation and the transformation of the land in the passage of time.