“Real shape of the earth”: Short Films with Ben Balcom

Join us for a program that spotlights the work of Milwaukee-based filmmaker Ben Balcom whose films turn a lens to progressive social projects of the past with a playful visual language adept in analogue techniques of experimental cinema. Across these films, rural landscapes, cities, poems, and letters combine to cast the “real shape” of places and histories into possible futures.

Included in the program is Balcom’s newest film, THE PHALANX (2025), which traces the everyday lives and utopian aspirations of participants in the Ceresco community, a vibrant yet short-lived socialist settlement in mid-19th-century Wisconsin.

To accompany Balcom’s work, this program incorporates two short films that employ kindred gestures to explore time and place: Rhea Storr’s OKAY KESKIDEE! LET ME SEE INSIDE, an account of Black community spaces in the UK lost to gentrification, and a late 70s gem, VISIBLE INVENTORY SIX: MOTEL DISSOLVE by American multimedia artist and educator Janis Crystal Lipzin.

Screening followed by a conversation with the filmmaker.

Works screened:

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NEWS FROM NOWHERE (Ben Balcom, 2020, 8 min, 16mm-to-digital)

“Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not misery but refinement.” – William Morris

Two slow pans across a public park in Milwaukee. Words from Bernadette Mayer imagining the possibility of a perfect summer day. -BB

GARDEN CITY BEAUTIFUL (Ben Balcom, 2019, 12 min, 16mm-to-digital)

One sunny afternoon in the middle west, suspended in a time between, two commuters daydream about a life lived otherwise. -BB

OKAY KESKIDEE! Let Me See Inside (Rhea Storr, 2025, 19.5 min, Super 16mm-to-digital)

A personal account of Black community spaces in the UK, focusing on Caribbean diaspora. By visiting the site of the former Keskidee Centre that is now luxury apartments, the film considers the conditions which allowed this historical space to thrive. -LUX

SILENT WITNESS (Ben Balcom, 2023, 3.5 min, 16mm-to-digital)

Filmed in Jackson Park in Milwaukee during summertime, 2020. Featuring the Statue of Commerce by Gustav Haug, 1881. -BB

VISIBLE INVENTORY SIX: MOTEL DISSOLVE (Janis Crystal Lipzin, 1978, 15 min, 16mm)

A space filled with moving…a series of panning shots of motel rooms in which the film-maker stayed during semi-annual transcontinental auto trips – homogenous accommodations lacking locational cues. Superimposed over the screen image are the names of the towns in which the rooms are located and the car’s odometer reading at each location. The sound track consists of two Gertrude Stein texts: “America I Came and Here I Am” and “American Food and American Houses” both from 1935.

THE PHALANX (Ben Balcom, 2025, 14 min, 16mm-to-digital)

Letters from the Ceresco community trace the fragility of harmony, the dream of life in association, the frictions that give way to fracture. Members of the phalanx drift apart, lingering in private corners, suspended in speculative time. -BB

Total runtime: ~ 72 min

Materials courtesy of Ben Balcom, LUX, Canyon Cinema

*Program title “Real shape of the earth” is quoted from UTOPIA by Bernadette Mayer, as voiced in NEWS FROM NOWHERE.