FLOW AIR TEA FILM SEMINAR
AUGUST 14-16
POST MILLS AIRPORT, 104 Robinson Hill Rd, Post Mills, VT 05058
Join us for Flow Air Tea, three days of lectures, workshops, food, and films built around flight, air, and everything overhead. At Post Mills Airport, where people have long gathered to build and fly homemade balloons and airships, FLOW AIR TEA FILM SEMINAR turns a small Vermont airfield into a place for cinema, conversation, and experiments in leaving the ground.
This event bends the name of the Flaherty Film Seminar into a new form. Screenings flow into shared meals, music, movement, workshops, lectures, and time spent outside. A talk on carrier pigeons sits beside a performance about silent serial queens in hot-air balloons. Kites rise, physics becomes visible, and the weekend closes by looking into the sky. Air is the subject, but also the condition that holds the seminar together. It carries messages and sound. It lifts balloons, moves bodies, clouds the image, and gives projected light a distance to cross. Flight might appear as a child’s fantasy in one film and a dangerous performance or commercial conquest in the next.
At Post Mills, these ideas remain close to the weather. A balloon leaves the earth only when conditions allow. FLOW AIR TEA FILM SEMINAR begins with that uncertainty and asks what cinema can teach us about the desire to rise, the view from above, and everything still tethering us to the ground.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 14
8PM:
JET GETAWAY: AIR-ADJACENT SHORTS FROM THE DARTMOUTH FILM ARCHIVE
Two projectors share one wall, but the audience decides what reaches it. Drawn entirely from 16mm prints in the Dartmouth Film Archives, the program follows air through many of its uses and fantasies. It carries birds and butterflies, holds airplanes aloft, opens the path to space, and becomes something to measure, master, or survive. Military training reels meet lessons in aerodynamics, natural history films, and visions of flight from another era. Two prints run at once, letting images meet that were never meant to share the same air. A bird’s wing might answer a cockpit diagram. An astronaut may rise beside an insect crossing a field. Then the audience chooses again, and the archive takes a different route through the sky.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 15
10AM:
KATIE HORNSTEIN:CARRIER PIGEONS AND THE DREAM OF FRICTIONLESS COMMUNICATION
The carrier pigeon is an atypical animal of art historical analysis and an animal whose ability to relay messages for humans presents a unique form of interspecies relationality for the study of art history, material culture and media histories. This talk reckons with some of the challenges of writing about the representation of the activities of these avian messengers across the historical time and space of the long nineteenth century and confronts a visual and material archive that is by definition fugitive, ephemeral and secret. My goal is to examine carrier pigeon work as both a figure of the imagination for artists and image makers, and as a series of actions undertaken by real birds in time and space, for which there is very little material evidence still in existence.
11:30AM:
JORDAN LONG: AIR IS WATER
This talk details the process of making a hot air balloon.
3PM:
ELYSE SINGER: HIGH HEELS, HOT AIR: A PERFORMANCE LECTURE ON CLIFFHANGERS, HOT AIR BALLOONS, AND SILENT SERIAL QUEENS
MAX LEVIN, CHIMES
EXERCISES IN AIR AND MOTION
Join us for a surprise set of motion exercises and demonstrations.
8PM:
SHORTS PROGRAM: WHAT THE AIR REMEMBERS
Across nearly a century, these films ask what happens when cinema looks up. Clouds are copied by hand and lost before the line is finished. Daredevils cling to airplanes, a giant KFC chicken drifts over a highway, and commercialism is embroidered across the sky. Elsewhere, a woman pauses beneath a passing plane, a village disappears into mist, James races after a runaway balloon, and one impossible jump carries us farther than gravity should allow. Moving between newsreels, industrial film, children’s television, animation, and hand-worked 16mm, the program finds air everywhere: as weather, advertising space, danger, escape, and a surface that refuses to hold still. By the end, the sky no longer feels like an empty background. It becomes cinema’s largest and least stable screen.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 16
10AM:
EMMA CLAIRE FOLEY: THE OVERVIEW EFFECT, A WRITING WORKSHOP
How can we hold invisible systems in the air? This generative workshop tackles a multitude of aerial perspectives alongside writing words.