Common Carrier
Arts + Literature Laboratory 111 S. Livingston St., Madison, Wisconsin 53703
press release: Mills Folly Microcinema will screen Common Carrier, the latest feature from Brooklyn-based filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins on Thursday, August 30 at 7:30 p.m. Admission will be $5, or free for Arts + Literature Laboratory members. Seating is limited, and doors open at 7:15 p.m.
“The movie weaves scripted performances by real people playing versions of themselves with intimate conversations about art making, labor, technology, and life,” filmmaker Wilkins explains, “The layered images and sounds—inspired to an extent by my interest in visual techniques developed in early Modernist art—contrast with the technologies and unavoidable airwaves of the 21st century to become what I consider a fair use cinematic ‘mixtape.’ It was my goal to reflect our multifaceted contemporary world where there is no one right way to look or listen: we are perpetually barraged by a sea of information, histories, and the promises of absolute connection, while remaining fundamentally alone.”
James Lattimer at Slate Magazine writes that Common Carrier “is a dizzying experimental essay on what the everyday life of an artist looks like in the 21st century. Yet describing the various protagonists in such a way makes Common Carrier sound far more like a conventional documentary than it actually is, as the film endeavors to smudge boundaries and create a mood of dispersion and interference at all times.”
James N. Kienitz Wilkins is a filmmaker and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Filmmaker Magazine listed Wilkins in their “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2016. That same year, he was awarded the Kazuko Trust Award presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, a scholarship fund for experimental filmmakers featured in the New York Film Festival. In 2017, he was included in the Whitney Biennial and a retrospective of his work was showcased at Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montreal (RIDM). His work has screened at the New York Film Festival, Toronto (Wavelengths), Locarno, Rotterdam, Migrating Forms, Ann Arbor, CPH:DOX, MoMA PS1, BAMcinemaFest, Images, and beyond. He is a graduate of the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City.