Expanding the Frame challenges you to take a journey

Expanding the Frame: Journeys
WHERE: Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Ave., Mpls
WHEN: Jan. 21 - Feb. 28
TICKETS: $24 for five films

The Walker Art Center is all about opening up the minds of those who come to ponder over its rooms of sculpture, installation and performance art. Wandering through its stark white rooms can reveal to an art explorer gilded toilets, Swedish architecture and even an exhibit of phallic caterpillars. The modern art bastion on Hennepin seeks to further that endeavor with their exploratory six-month film series “Expanding the Frame,” an ambitious project that Walker curator of film and video Sheryl Mousley explains has the aim of “expanding the idea of filmmaking in a different way.”
Though no single idea unites each offering, the works selected by the Walker’s film staff during months of research all seek to challenge our pre-existing ideas of film and performance art and strive to transcend limits and conventions. “Sometimes [the films are] physically changing the shape, such as using multiple screens or using the frame in a different way,” Mousley said. “We isolate the time frame to look at people who are doing something unusual with the format.”
Particular emphasis is placed upon the work of cinematographer Ellen Kuras and Chinese filmmaker Zhao Liang , both of whom will appear at the Walker for various events supporting their work. Here are a few A&E recommend you check out.

“Petition — The Court of the Complainants”
DIRECTED BY: Zhao Liang
WHEN: 7:30 p.m., Friday, Jan. 29

In concurrence with his running exhibition at the Walker, “Heavy Sleepers ,” visiting artist Zhao Liang pushes us into the world of the impoverished Chinese lower-class in his 2009 documentary “Petition — The Court of the Complainants.”
Liang examines the hardships of the Chinese working-class when they are wronged by the government. Many of the people in the film have been wrongfully fired without benefits or robbed of all of their belongings. The only means of righting these bureaucratic wrongs is to draft a petition and move to a remote town in China in an effort to have their voices heard. However, these citizens often find themselves spending years in poverty as they wait for the government to hear their pleas.

“Crime and Punishment (Zui yu fa)”
DIRECTED BY: Zhao Liang
WHEN: 7:30 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 30

Liang’s second film follows a set of border guards along the border between China and North Korea. “Crime and Punishment (Zui yu fa)” shows several raids of delinquents’ houses, followed usually by a disproportionately harsh verbal lashing. The guards are often summoned for menial civil problems, like phony calls to police officers about a dead body or a stolen mah-jongg board game. Liang draws attention to the constant tension present along the border of North Korea, where the government seeks to immediately crush any form of ostentatious behavior, whether it be public drunkenness or the pilfering of a simple board game.
The film opens with four straight minutes of different guards frantically folding their bed sheets several times until they are molded into perfect rectangular prisms. The succession of extended, one-shot scenes emphasizes both the monotony of the border patrols’ job and the perfection sought by the military higher-ups.

“The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)”
DIRECTED BY: Ellen Kuras/Thavisouk Phrasavath
WHEN: 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 18

After shooting for nearly 23 years, Ellen Kuras’s film “The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)” was finally released in 2008. The narrative follows a Laotian mother and son as they are exiled and forced to move to Brooklyn during the hushed United States war in Laos. The documentary follows the son Thavisouk Phrasavath working through the reconciliation of his separate homelands, and the hardships suffered by those living in a place that will always regard them as foreign.
Kuras has worked as a cinematographer in the past, most notably in such stylistic movies as “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Blow.” This extreme attention to detail is reflected in her documentary work, which plays out more like a blockbuster drama, often changing between decades and generations to mirror experiences in Laos and the United States. Kuras places emphasis on the Phrasavath’s adolescence complicated by his obvious outsider perspective. The factual masterpiece was nominated for the Academy Award for best documentary in 2008.

“I Shot Andy Warhol” and “Berlin”
DIRECTED BY: Mary Harron/ Julian Schnabel
WHEN: 7:30 p.m., Friday, Feb. 19

At the hedonistic height of Andy Warhol’s foil-covered silver studio/hangout called the “Factory,” two days before Robert Kennedy was assassinated, a woman named Valerie Solanas walked in and shot the Pop artist. He didn’t meet his maker, but Warhol’s life was changed and so too was Solanas’ — she gained a cult following for her “S.C.U.M. Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men )” and a lasting reputation as the woman who, well, shot Andy Warhol.
In a Factory tie-in, Mary Harron’s 1996 version of this chaos, “I Shot Andy Warhol” plays as a double feature with Julian Schnabel’s experimental concert film “Berlin,” a reimagining of Factory mainstay Lou Reed’s failed concept album of the same name. The traditional narrative of “I Shot Andy Warhol,” with cinematography by Kuras, occasionally breaks for shots of Solanas’ rapid-fire feminist fuming. Schnabel, who helmed the dreamlike “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” has brought Reed’s tragic druggie heroine Caroline to the screen in a darkly romantic reimagining set to a rare live performance of the album done by Reed (along with Sharon Jones and Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons) in 2006.
“Berlin” is rarely screened anywhere, so if you consider yourself a Reed fan, don’t miss your chance to catch it now.