Visual artist Sharon Lockhart will screen two of her films on April 3

Cornell Cinema welcomes visual artist Sharon Lockhart at a screening of her films "Goshogaoka" and "Teatro Amazonas" on Tuesday, April 3, at 7 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre. Admission is $4.50 general/$4 students and seniors.

A scene from Sharon Lockhart's "Goshogaoka."

A Massachusetts native, Lockhart received her MFA from the Art Center College of Design, and her photographs have been exhibited internationally.

In 1996 she was awarded a grant from the Asian Cultural Council to spend three months in Japan. While there, she made her first feature film, "Goshogaoka" (1997, 63 minutes). Goshogaoka is a suburban junior high school outside of Tokyo with a girl's basketball team, and Lockhart's film records the systematic, artful, athletic drills enacted by the girls, revealing issues of corporeal discipline, masculinity/femininity and the individual versus the group.

"Goshogaoka" will be shown with "Teatro Amazonas" (1999, 40 minutes), which was featured in last fall's Views from the Avant-Garde section of the New York Film Festival. Set in the Amazonas Theater in Manaus, Brazil, an emblem of the region's history as a European colony, the cast is made up of residents from Manaus who sit in the theater's auditorium. The audience was chosen based on local demographics and represents all the cultural and ethnic variations of the city. The camera was placed on the stage and filmed in one continuous take, without cuts, for approximately 30 minutes. The soundtrack was performed live by a chorus of 60 and was composed using the mathematical model of a cone, beginning with all the voices and ending with one. Lockhart also incorporates the sound of the audience moving in their seats, their conversations with each other, even a baby's cry. The result is both an anthropological and artistic tour de force.