Thomas Draschan

THOMAS DRASCHAN
Carter Presents
29 April - 27 May 2007

Carter Presents is delighted to exhibit the first solo show in the UK of Austrian artist Thomas Draschan who will be presenting his installation "Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics".

In this new piece the film and video work is not only accompanied by large-scale collages, but has expanded out into the gallery. An altar-like totemic TV monitor shows the colourful flickering results of the quick fire editing of two commercials. Draschan has united the two films with around 1000 hand-made splices that almost make the TV set explode. The resulting collision of images a cacophony of stimuli is driven beyond the monitor frame by its sheer kinetic energy in to the room and beyond. The whole installation can best be seen from a seat especially made for this purpose: a Florence Knoll design classic that has been seriously abused by gluing onto it all the images that form Thomas Draschan's cosmic universe.

The complex symbolic language of Draschan's work is inspired by such thinkers and writer as j.k. huysmans, c.g. jung, gustave flaubert and Sigmund Freud. The exhibition refers both to Freud's collection of antique phallic figures surrounding his desk at the Freud Museum in London and to his book "Totem and Taboo" (1913).

Freud writes, "If the totem animal is the father, then the two principal ordinances of totemism, the two taboo prohibitions which constitute its core - not to kill the totem and not to have sexual relations with a woman of the same totem - coincide in their content with the two crimes of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, as well as with the two primal wishes of children, the insufficient repression or the re-awakening of which forms the nucleus of perhaps every psychoneurosis."

Thus the multi layering interdisciplinary and transgressive nature to the work reaches in to our primitive and damaged psyches, through barely known apocryphal religious writings, pulp novels, classic Italian porn and saccharine mass produced comics which inform and become the work. Thomas Draschan embraces the deviant pubescent miscreant in us all and this installation, at its core, is both savagely neurotic and neurotically savage.

Thomas Draschan born 1967 Lives and works in Vienna. He studied at the Academie of Fine Arts in Frankfurt and at Cooper Union in NY. He is working with video, film and collage. The re-combination of existing images into a new, condensed and enriched form is one of his main concerns. Draschan has exhibited widely in Europe and The USA since 1998, he has been the recipient of numerous awards for his experimental films. His films include documentaries on Viennese Actionist Herman Nitsch and music videos for New Order.

www.draschan.com

Private View: Saturday 28 April 2007, from 6.30-9.00pm

Please Note: The works in this exhibition contain sexual and violent content and may cause offence. Any persons under the age of 16 may only enter if accompanied by an adult.

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Carter Presents
29 Orsman Road, London, N1 5RA
MAP OF AREA

Gallery open Monday-Friday, 10am-6pm (by appointment)
Telephone: 020 7012 1203 prior to view

www.carterpresents.com

Pastoral

NEW WORK UK: PASTORAL
London Whitechapel Gallery
Thursday 26 April 2007, at 7:30pm

The first in a new series of guest-curated programmes showcasing the best of recent British work. This screening is curated by Michelle Cotton and showcases recent work by Stephen Sutcliffe and Emily Wardill.

Ben (Emily Wardill, 2007)

Stephen Sutcliffe combines sound and footage from an extensive archive of material recorded from television and radio broadcasts. English poetry is read with thespy precision and meshed with streams of music and spoken word to emphasise or undercut another story told on film. Collaging ideas from traditions in literature, encountered in neo-romantic cinema or excerpts of rogue video Sutcliffe reworks a received version of familiar, native territory recounted in a cultural heritage.

Emily Wardill’s work is concerned with the communication of ideas and agency implicit in the structure of language and formulation of material by the media. Her 16mm films isolate detail from a complex, metropolitan vernacular edited with a syntax of absences in sound and image. Structured in reference to a single metaphor or motif, Wardill’s films construct a formal investigation of the social and psychological implications of the media that she employs for the formulation of consciousness and the construction of self.

NEW WORK UK: PASTORAL
DEATH IN LEAMINGTON, Stephen Sutcliffe, 2003, 2 min
BORN WINGED ANIMALS AND HONEY GATHERERS OF THE SOUL, Emily Wardill, 2005, 9 min
TRANSFORMATIONS, Stephen Sutcliffe, 2006, 2 min
BASKING IN WHAT FEELS LIKE 'AN OCEAN OF GRACE' I SOON REALISE THAT I'M NOT LOOKING AT IT, BUT RATHER THAT I AM IT, RECOGNISING MYSELF, Emily Wardill, 2006, 8 min
‘O COME ALL YE FAITHFUL’, Stephen Sutcliffe, 2006, 1 min
BEN, Emily Wardill, 2007, 10 min
COME TO THE EDGE, Stephen Sutcliffe, 2003, 2 min

The Whitechapel Film Programme is presented in collaboration with LUX.

at

Whitechapel Gallery
80-82 Whitechapel High Street, London, E1 7QX
Nearest Tube: Aldgate East
MAP OF AREA

Tickets: £5
Telephone: 020 7522 7888
Email: film@whitechapel.org

www.whitechapel.org

The Subjective Camera

THE SUBJECTIVE CAMERA
Greenwich Picture House
25 April - 30 May 2007

The Subjective Camera is a series of retrospective film screenings of six film artists whose work examines subjectivity with an analysis of film language.

Emerging within the context of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op during the 1980s and 1990s, these artists each developed an independent practice that at once built on and countered the principles of the Structural film movement of the 1970s. Their films extend anti-illusionist explorations of the materiality of film and incorporate investigations of the materiality of the body.

With their shared history, that situates the artist at the centre of the physical process of putting the film together, sometimes as camera person as well as editor, these six artists weave into the filmmaking process a broad scope of contemporary concerns, from religion to psychoanalysis, the spaces of abstraction, voice, language and song, to the dialogue between personal and meta-narrative.

JAYNE PARKER, NINA DANINO, ALIA SYED,
MICHAEL MAZIERE, SANDRA LAHIRE, SARAH PUCILL

Curated by Sarah Pucill. Films screened in association with LUX.

Stationary Music (Jayne Parker, 2005)

Wednesday 25 April 2007, at 6:45pm
JAYNE PARKER

Whilst Jayne Parker's films have taken different directions over a span of nearly three decades, an individual approach is highly distinct. Always employing a pared down aesthetic, structural precision is conducted in each film where the direction and space of the camera's gaze in relation to the protagonist is woven into the performance of the film. Speech is absent from most of her films, leaving the structure of image and sound to speak in raw isolation.

Performance is central to all her films, the presence of the figure being conveyed as much by her image as in the surrounding space and the objects the body uses or, in the case of musical instruments, plays. Filming herself in her early work, her oeuvre emphasises performance as a generative process where self is in a state of becoming, a process of self-generation.

In much of Parker’s work, a resistance to a literal and singular interpretation is clear, and this is key to the power of her films. Sometimes it is in the interpretative gap that is created through the edit joins of obscurely related images, and sometimes it is a straight forward posturing of an 'almost as if but not quite' everyday activity. The subjective in Parker’s work rests within the body; its objects and its space, inside and out, as process, sound, texture, as light, as film.

I DISH (1982, 16mm, 15 mins)
K (1989, 16mm, 13 mins)
THE POOL (1991, 16mm, 10 mins)
BLUES IN B FLAT (2000, Beta SP, 8 mins)
STATIONARY MUSIC (2001, Beta SP, 8 mins)
CATALOGUE OF BIRDS: BOOK 3 (2006, 15 mins)

Jayne Parker will take part in a Q&A after the screening.

Stabat Mater (Nina Danino, 1980)

Wednesday 2 May 2007, at 6.45pm
NINA DANINO

Nina Danino's films draw on personal history as well as literary and artistic works, and explore the relationship between image and sound that inverts the Hollywood standard of sound being slave to image.

The structural rigour of her films pushes formalist boundaries to produce a new aesthetic that takes on the urgency of female subjectivity and desire. The immediacy and unmediated nature of the voice is core to the essence of her work, which explores that part of being and expression that speaks but is neither material nor literal. She always uses her own voice, which is sometimes combined with vocal performances by established singers and sound artists. In the films selected, a close-up voice meanders rhythmically in time with a hand-held wandering camera (or deadly slow pans in First Memory). The image is disrupted both through her structural editing process and through the intervention of sound.

In Stabat Mater and Now I Am Yours, Danino draws influence from French feminist theory and the aesthetic and cultural influence of her Mediterranean Catholic upbringing, and as with all her films we are taken on a journey. At the heart of her work is a celebration of the nature of desire; a meditative, often incantational filmic and aural flow is exorcised, a perpetual state of yearning as ecstasy, the co-existence of suffering and pleasure or to quote Helen de Witt, 'the persistence of spirit'.

FIRST MEMORY (1981, 16nn, 20 mins)
STABAT MATER (1990, 16mm, 8 mins)
NOW I AM YOURS (1993, 16mm, 32 mins)
THE SILENCE IS BAROQUE (1997, Beta SP, 12 mins)

Nina Danino will take part in a Q&A after the screening.

Fatima's Letter (Alia Syed, 1992)

Wednesday 9 May 2007, at 6.45pm
ALIA SYED

Problems of translation and framing and how the image is read, particularly in relation to gender and cultural difference, mark the key concerns of Alia Syed's work.

The use of her own spoken voice is present in all but her earliest films and in many ways this is countered with the fragmented body (pregnant stomach, feet, hands, neck and shoulders). A hallmark of Syed's work is the manipulation of the image; slowing, speeding up or holding the image still, which coupled with the use of repetition, gives it a textural quality. Denied access with the gaze, we are given instead her voice and stories - circular and repeating narratives of desire which both can and cannot be translated.

Through Syed's process of layering image on image, and text on text, by using edits and optical printing techniques, inner conflict is 'worked'. The image track weaves alongside a voice that is textured with different cultural spaces and languages; between fact, fiction, personal narrative and historical document. Her films flow between movements of sound, voice, image and subtitle; rhythms of colour and black and white examine a journey between borders that falls short of translation. The effect of this filmmaking process is to allow the viewer participation in a sensory experience that evokes a trans-cultural voyage one is taken into rather than kept outside as voyeur.

SWAN (1986, 16mm, 4 mins)
UNFOLDING (1988, 16mm, 20 mins)
FATIMA'S LETTER (1992, 16mm, 21 mins)
SPOKEN DIARY (2001, 16mm, 20 mins)
I AND YOU (2006, DV, 11 mins)

Alia Syed will take part in a Q&A after the screening.

Untitled (Michael Maziere, 1980)

Wednesday 16 May 2007, at 6:45pm
MICHAEL MAZIERE

Michael Maziere is currently best known for films that distil fragments from classical narrative cinema from the 1950s and 1960s with autobiographic and personal footage.

His early films were rooted in a Structuralist approach to the phenomenology of perception in film and this attention to formal structure and perception persists in his later work. Although his approach has changed significantly, a quality of restlessness pervades the breadth of his films; a tension in the dynamic between stasis and motion.

Personal and collective memory, fiction and autobiography are literally fused as clips, dialogue, music, and subtitle explore something in-between. This mosaic of film fragments discovers new cinematic territory, where suspension and loss pervades and the binding effects of explanation and closure are absent. In Blackout and Delirium, a crisis of masculinity is hinted at; in the key films that are cited, The Swimmer and The Lost Weekend, the Hollywood hero is undone.

Maziere's films challenge assumed separations between outer and inner worlds, personal and meta-narratives, while offering a dislocated yet seductive cinematic space.

THE BATHERS (1986, 16mm, 6 mins)
SWIMMER (1987, 16mm, 7 mins)
UNTITLED (1980, 16mm, 18 mins)
DELIRIUM (2001, DV, 10 mins)
BLACKOUT (2000, DV, 10 mins)
ASSASSIN (2007, DV, 10 mins)

Michael Maziere will take part in a Q&A after the screening.

Johnny Panic (Sandra Lahire, 2000)

Wednesday 23 May 2007, at 6:45pm
SANDRA LAHIRE

Sandra Lahire's use of light and sound as raw elements generates an energy throughout the body of her work, which fuses magical poetics with a piercing severity that swings between blinding light and pitch dark - the raw bones of film material. Interweaving her own body into her films, connections between the personal and the social were core to her practice. Lahire eliminated the borders of discipline and genre; the documentary, the avant-garde, the autobiographic and the biographic.

Her first film Arrows, draws on fellow anorexic sufferers as shared experience. In her Uranium Trilogy, interviewing (Uranium) minors in Canada, she places herself physically into the position of her subject. This self-other interchange is explored later in her trilogy based on the writings of the poet Sylvia Plath; where viewer and viewed, reader and writer turn place.

Lahire's films are constructed in the form of a weave, building layers of image, sound and voice, drawing circular and plural narratives. The work is often confrontational. No subject was taboo and in her final film, Johnny Panic, Lahire goes deepest into her exploration of the complex relationship between death and its attractions. Moving between micro and macro politics, her work tackled the impossible, from her own suffering to the political realities of Fascism, McCarthyism and ecological disaster.

NIGHT DANCES (1995, 16mm, 17 mins)
JOHNNY PANIC (2000, 16mm, 46 mins)

Taking My Skin (Sarah Pucill, 2007)

Wednesday 30 May 2007, at 6.45pm
SARAH PUCILL

Subject-object relations and the space between are core concerns in the breadth of Sarah Pucill's work. From the surface of a face projected on objects, hair entangled in crockery, a bowl as mouth gasping for breath, to her more distanced and contemplative later works that feature her mother and late partner, there is a turning and switching of place between inside and outside. The body as expression, as surface, and as film underscores the trajectory of her practice.

The unsettling character of Pucill's early films, derived from their formality and stillness, remains present in her more recent work. However, films such as Stages of Mourning and Taking My Skin, while still rooted in concerns of femininity and sexuality, shift emphasis and employ a more meditative approach that foregrounds the film-making process, mortality, death and being.

Sarah Pucill's films explore a sense of self which is fluid and transformative, where mirroring and merging are sought in the Other. Her work is concerned with the idea that as subjects we are not separate, and draws together surfaces of inside and outside, the animate and inanimate.

MIRRORED MEASURE (1996, 9 mins)
STAGES OF MOURNING (2003, 16mm, 19 mins)
TAKING MY SKIN (2006, 16mm, 35 mins)

Sarah Pucill will take part in a Q&A after the screening.

all screenings at

Greenwich Picture House
180 Greenwich High Road, London, SE10 8NN
Nearest Train: Greenwich BR / Greenwich DLR / Cutty Sark DLR
MAP OF AREA

Tickets: £6
Box Office: 087 0755 0065
www.picturehouses.co.uk

Alfred Leslie

A WEEKEND WITH ALFRED LESLIE
London Whitechapel Gallery
21 & 22 April 2007

Alfred Leslie is a pivotal American artist-painter-filmmaker whose work spans the past fifty years. A celebrated contemporary of the Abstract Expressionists and a key figure in the extraordinary social milieu of downtown New York from the 1950s and 60s to the present, his own canvases were amongst the most revered of his peers. In 1958-59 he made Pull My Daisy with the photographer Robert Frank and in 1964 collaborated with the inimitable poet Frank O’Hara on The Last Clean Shirt. In 1960 he edited and published the amazing collection of texts and drawings that form the “one shot review” The Hasty Papers – in and of itself a summation of cultural activity with contributions from Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery and Fidel Castro amongst may others.

Leslie dramatically moved away from abstraction to make giant almost hyper-real portraits, the majority of which were destroyed in the now infamous fire that ripped through his studio and its neighbouring blocks on 17 October 1966. This utterly devastating event, that completely destroyed paintings, films and manuscripts, continues to inform his practice today. Invariably articulated by an initial process of reconstruction Leslie’s recent work makes memory new through its radical re-imagining. He lives and works in New York.

This weekend-long season is the first major presentation of Alfred Leslie’s films in the UK. It is introduced and discussed by Leslie who is an extraordinary orator and includes two exclusive screenings of works in progress.

The Last Clean Shirt (Alfred Leslie & Frank O'Hara, 1964)

Saturday 21 April 2007, at 3pm
THE CEDAR BAR
THE CEDAR BAR
Alfred Leslie, USA, 2001, video, 84 min
Originally written as a play in 1952 based on actual conversations between abstract expressionists Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, April Yabolonsky, gallerist John Myers and critic Clement Greenberg in their eponymous hangout, The Cedar Bar, this video a work of such magnitude that it mocks description in its self-declared "WAR BETWEEN THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE ART AND THOSE WHO WRITE ABOUT IT". Spectacularly elusive, The Cedar Bar, genuinely yokes the push-and-pull of a once 'new' painting style with the enormity of expressionist opera into an uncontainable psycho-tornado!

Saturday 21 April 2007, at 5pm
THE LAST CLEAN SHIRT & USA POETRY: FRANK O'HARA
USA POETRY: FRANK O'HARA
Alfred Leslie, USA, 1966, 35 min
Frank O'Hara discusses with Al Leslie, a filmmaker and artist, his work and the relationship between poets, playwrights, and artists. O'Hara also reads some of his poetry and talks about some of his friendships with other artists. Filmed off-air by WNET on March 5, 1966 at the home and studio of Frank O'Hara in New York City.
THE LAST CLEAN SHIRT
Alfred Leslie & Frank O’Hara, USA, 1964, 16mm, 39 min
In a letter to his friend and collaborator, the poet Frank O'Hara, Leslie writes: "We will shoot for two SEPERATE LEVELS on the film. One is the VISUAL, the other the HEARD & the spectator will be in TWO places or more SIMULTANEOUSLY. NOT AS MEMORY BUT AT THE SAME MOMENT. PARALLELISM! MULTIPLE POINTS OF VIEW!" It is a blueprint for The Last Clean Shirt in which a man and a woman take a car ride through the streets of downtown Manhattan. A clock on the dashboard foregrounds the fact that the film is a single shot. The woman speaks in Finnish gibberish, interpreted by the beautiful and brilliant story told via O’Hara’s subtitles that run throughout.

Saturday 21 April 2007, at 7pm
ALFRED LESLIE INTRODUCES
BIRTH OF A NATION (work in progress)
Alfred Leslie, USA, 1966-present, c.40 min
Referring to – and revising - D.W. Griffith’s notorious film of the same name, Alfred Leslie's Birth of a Nation is a reconstruction of a never-completed, mutating essay. Originally shown in a variety of unfinished states, this current version reworks the only remaining 11 minute fragment to survive.
AND OTHER WORKS

Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie, 1959)

Sunday 22 April 2007, at 3pm
GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933
GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933
Mervyn LeRoy, USA, 1933, 16mm, 96 min
Virtuosic, geometry-defying choreography from Busby Berkeley combines with Depression-era slapstick wisecracks. Gold Diggers of 1933 is an outstandingly delirious film reflects Leslie’s love of the musical, and the influence of a form that combines comedy, spectacle and song on his own practice.

Sunday 22 April 2007, at 5pm
ALFRED LESLIE IN CONVERSATION
Al Leslie discusses his work plus screenings of The Anatomy of Cindy Fink and Pull My Daisy.
THE ANATOMY OF CINDY FINK
Richard Leacock, Patricia Jaffe & Paul Leaf, USA, 1960, 16mm, 12 min
Cinema verité portrait of a teenage girl’s first jazz dance audition in a Greenwich Village studio. With Larry Rivers, Al Leslie, and Louise Lassier.
PULL MY DAISY
Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie, USA, 1959, 16mm, 27 min
Based around Jack Kerouac's narration from the last section of his unproduced play 'The Beat Generation' (itself based on an incident between Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn), Pull My Daisy as much a document of its own unravelling as it is footage of some of the most acclaimed writers and painters of its generation at play. Caught between the socio-historical cult of itself and its Beatnik players, and the excitement of its discreet yet radical formalism, Pull My Daisy has been pawed over by the watchdogs and self-appointed guardians of avant-garde film since its first double-bill showings with John Cassavete's 'Shadows' in the late 1950's. With its bawdy gags and caustic, iconoclastic humour, the film is actually predicated on the delicacy of a subtly shifting interplay between modes of 'depiction', between record and fiction, self-awareness and dubious, willful naivete, debunking the ordinarily stable registers its surface (and our own viewing habits) would otherwise invoke.

Sunday 22 April 2007, at 7pm
LOST IN THE FIRE
LOST IN THE FIRE (work in progress)
Alfred Leslie, USA, 2007, video, c.50 min
A rare screening of Alfred Leslie's work in progress Lost in Fire, an intimate memoir based around the 1966 studio fire that had such a radical and lasting impact on Leslie’s practice.
AND OTHER WORKS

at

Whitechapel Gallery
80-82 Whitechapel High Street, London, E1 7QX
Nearest Tube: Aldgate East
MAP OF AREA

Single Screening: £5
One Day Pass: £15 / £12 (members & concessions)
Full Weekend Pass: £25 / £16 (members & concessions)

Telephone: 020 7522 7888
Email: film@whitechapel.org
www.whitechapel.org

Peter Todd

FOR YOU. PETER TODD: FILM WORKS 1990-2005
Greenwich Picturehouse & Hammersmith Riverside
21 & 22 April 2007

Two afternoon screenings introduced by Peter Todd of 16mm films, in conjunction with the exhibition Outside Inside Inside Outside at The Surgery, London.

“They stay long enough to reveal what you’d miss in passing, intimate enough to make you linger, thoughtful enough to make you, in turn, think.” (Alan Alderson-Smith, Phoenix Arts)

“… crafter of poetic ruminations about ordinary life … No special effects: just a camera trained on nondescript surroundings, made poignant by the soundtrack’s medley of voices and director’s sensitivity to the layers of emotions that shape the most ordinary of lives.” (Geoff Brown, The Times)

“One’s own mundane circuit is often so internalised, that it takes the visualisation of another’s … to let us see our own afresh. To be benignly jolted, calmly encouraged to reconsider the possible immanence of awe, is one of the recurrent effects of Todd’s work in this vein.” (Gareth Evans, Vertigo)

FOR YOU. PETER TODD: FILM WORKS 1990-2005
Saturday 20 April 2007, at 2pm, Greenwich Picture House
Sunday 21 April 2007, at 3pm, London Hammersmith Riverside

The programme will include the following films by Peter Todd: OUT (1990), TO RED (1995), DIARY (1998), DAY OUT OR 100’ OF FILM (1998), FOR YOU (2000), AN OFFICE WORKER THINKS OF THEIR LOVE, AND HOME (2003), WHERE YOU HAD BEEN (2005).

The screening concludes with works by two film makers who Peter Todd has included in his curated programmes: AERIAL (Margaret Tait, 1974) and TREE AND CLOUD (part of ANIMAL STUDIES; INCLUDING SOME OF THEIR HABITATS) (Guy Sherwin. 1998-2003).

All works on 16mm film, total running time approximately 70 minutes. A specially commissioned essay by Lucy Reynolds is published in conjunction with FOR YOU, supported by Arts Council England.

also visit the exhibition

Outside Inside Inside Outside.
A photographic piece by Peter Todd.
13-29 April 2007
at
The Surgery, 123 Evelina Road, Nunhead, London, SE15 3HB.
MAP OF AREA

Open Fri-Sun 12-6 or by appointment.
Telephone: 07906 206 166.
www.surgery123.org

Our Technicolor Dream

OUR TECHNICOLOR DREAM
London ICA
21 April 2007

2007 is a year of many anniversaries: twenty years since Acid House, thirty since the release of Never Mind The Bollocks, forty since Sgt. Pepper's and fifty since the publication of Jack Kerouac's On The Road. One event that gets far less publicity, but that was at the heart of everything that came both before and after it also sees its 40th anniversary this year. The 14-Hour Technicolor Dream took place on 29 April 1967 and was the UK's first mass-participational all-night psychedelic freakout !

Organised and in a matter of weeks, the event was held in the cavernous confines of Alexandra Palace. The vision of Hoppy Hopkins and Miles, the night saw a glorious mingling of freaks, beats, mods, squares, proto-punks, pop stars and heads come together to dance, trip, love and be. To celebrate the anniversary, the ICA presents Our Technicolor Dream - a one-off multi-media event that features an array of cult 60s films and animation, full-on psychedelic lightshows, groovy DJs, avant-garde theatre, a Q&A session with the leading lights of the 60s underground and live music with The Amazing World of Arthur Brown, The Pretty Things, Circulus and Mick Farren.

Marvo Movie (Jeff Keen, 1967)

Saturday 21 April 2007, at 12:30pm (Cinema 1) & 2:30pm (Cinema 2)
WHAT’S A HAPPENING ?
In conjunction with the BFI, we bring you 90 minutes of rare, lost and unseen psychedelic masterpieces. We kick off with the 1967 BBC documentary about the original Alexandra Palace event Man Alive: What's a Happening ? This splendid period-piece documentary includes interviews with such legendary characters as Suzy Creamcheese as well as cameos from bemused Ally Pally security staff and assorted underground hipsters. Anthony Stern's 1968 San Francisco follows, featuring a startling flash and freeze frame technique edited to a unique demo version of Pink Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive". Stern's rapid, closely cut sequences form a colorful montage of bizarre images, creating a portrait of the city in all its photogenic glamour and kooky excess. Next up is the Jeff Keen trilogy of Cineblatz, Marvo Movie and White Lite, which all epitomise the director's weird, wonderful and most surreally British take on Pop Art. Keen's 10-minute short, Meatdaze is next up - six segments containing a wild and pleasurably eccentric mix of cartoon, newsreel and featurettes. Finally, we have the deranged Pythonesque comedy of John Beech's Postal Delivery and Arthur Johns' extraordinary essay on colour effects, Solar Flares Burn For You, set to a hypnotic Robert Wyatt soundtrack.

Saturday 21 April 2007, at 2:30pm (Cinema 1) & 4:30pm (Cinema 2)
WEIRD & WONDERFUL 60s ANIMATION
In 1967, Dick Arnall launched the first British Animation Festival, and in tribute to his work, the current organiser of the London International Animation Festival, Nag Vladermersky presents a dizzying array of 60s and 70s multi-national cartoon craziness. First up is Jan Lenica's Labyrinth, a Kafka-esque tale of a winged and lonely man devoured by totalitarian rule. Labyrinth is considered to be one of the finest political animations ever made. Next come two 1969 Jan Svankmajer works, The Flat and A Quiet Week In The House: both are dark, disturbing domestic parables. Les Astronautes by Walerian Borowczyk and Chris Marker is a co-directed short about an eager inventor and his homemade spaceship. Renowned Polish animator and erotic film director Borowczyk is a key influence on directors like Terry Gilliam and David Lynch. This is followed by Ryan Larkin's Oscar-nominated Walking. Using a combination of line drawing and colour wash, Larkin observes the movements of a variety of urban characters. Finally, Street Musique, another Larkin work, opens with live-action footage of street musicians, before changing into a staggeringly animated stream-of-consciousness piece.

Boyle Family projections for Soft Machine

Saturday 21 April 2007, at 4:30pm (Cinema 1) & 6:30pm (Cinema 2)
BOYLE FAMILY FILMS & SOFT MACHINE
Mark Boyle and Joan Hills were pioneers of British projections with events such as Son et Lumiere for Insects, Reptiles and Water Creatures and the infamous Bodily Fluids and Functions, which included blood, vomit, tears and semen. Their liquid light show of exploding colours and foaming bubbles became a major feature of the psychedelic scene through their residency at the UFO club and their work with Soft Machine, who played what Boyle described as 'acetylene music'. Their farewell lightshow films Beyond Image and Son of Beyond Image were shot for a circular screen environment as part of their 1969 ICA exhibition 'Journey to the Surface of the Earth' and will be remixed live by Joan Hills and Sebastian Boyle to a live recording of Soft Machine from the technicolor era.

Saturday 21 April 2007, at 6pm
TELL IT LIKE IT WAS: ROUND TABLE
60s underground luminaries offer their own takes on what the original 14-Hour Technicolor Dream event was like, where it came from and where it ended up. This will be followed by a Q & A session. The cast includes:
Joe Boyd: In 1967, Joe was an American record producer living in London, co-running the legendary UFO Club in Tottenham Court Road and producing, among others, The Pink Floyd, The Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention.
Miles: Instrumental in setting the UK's first underground newspaper, International Times, Miles also ran the Indica bookstore, the hub of counter-cultural activity during the period.
Hoppy Hopkins: Hoppy helped resurrect the Notting Hill Carnival, along with activist, Michael X, and then went on to co-run UFO and organise the original 14-Hour Technicolor Dream event, before going down for possession of hash in the week Sgt. Pepper's was released!
John Dunbar: John Dunbar was instrumental in bringing The Beatles into the avant-garde and set up the Indica art gallery, which featured early work by Fluxus and all kinds of other kinetic, experimental and conceptual art.

Saturday 21 April 2007, at 8pm
FREAK OUT ETHEL !
The evening's festivities commence with Malcolm Boyle's one-man play, The Madcap: a journey into the psychedelic underground as seen through the distorted mental lens of Syd Barrett. Boyle combines tragic-comic performance, hallucinatory film and slide projections with his own interpretations of Barrett's songs. Next up is The Amazing World of Arthur Brown. Now performing as part of a two-piece, Arthur is perhaps best remembered for his hit, 'Fire', and for his flaming headgear and incredible stage presence. The Crazy World of Arthur Brown were regulars at the UFO club and performed at the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream. Then come Circulus, Britain's finest neo-medieval psychedelic folk-rock band. The group are a collective of anything from 5 to 11 and have thus far released two LPs to much critical acclaim. Finally, we take great pride in presenting The Pretty Things. Following a string of seminal punk R'n'B hits in the mid-60s, the group mutated into an inspired psychedelic band and cut the first 'rock-opera', S. F. Sorrow and are still gigging today, with a fanatical worldwide following. The whole show will be augmented by Optikinetics, Britain's premier purveyors of psychedelic visual experiences.

at

ICA
12 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH
Nearest Tube: Charing Cross / Piccadilly
MAP OF AREA

Screenings: £8 / £7 concessions / £6 members
Discussion: £10 / £9 concessions / £8 members
Concert: £20 / £18 concessions / £16 members
Box Office: 020 7930 3647

www.ica.org.uk

What Do We Get Out Of It ?

WHAT DO WE GET OUT OF IT ?
London LUX Salon
Wednesday 18 April 2007, at 7pm for 7:30pm start

Three selected episodes from Is That It ?: Images Of Young People, a rare film made by Wilf Thust for Four Corners Film Workshop, based in Bethnal Green. Four Corners was one of several workshops throughout the UK which benefited from funding by the nascent Channel 4, as well as a relaxation of broadcast union laws, to work with people and audiences outside of the normal context for film and video practices in the 1980s.

Is That It ? Scene 4 (Wilf Thust, 1985)

IS THAT IT ?
Wilf Thust / Four Corners (UK, 1985, 16mm)

Produced from material gathered during a series of Monday workshops with young people in Tower Hamlets, Is That It ? frames the relationship between the film maker and the workshop participants as it develops over a two-year period. Photographs, plays, drawing and writing by the group are cut together with socio-economic statistics on the borough, and reflections on the workshop process. Open ended and at times problematic, the film can be seen as a treated document of an attempt to open up communication “in a group where different classes, races, ages meet.” (W.T.)

The screening will be accompanied by an audience discussion with the filmmaker (and other guests to be announced). The discussion will centre on the implications of the historical model of ‘integrated practice’ for contemporary film and video institutions, and the recent shift toward top-down policy models for social inclusion.

SCENE 4: IMAGES OF THE EAST END (Wilf Thust, 1985, 12 mins)
SCENE 5: IMAGES OF FEAR (Wilf Thust, 1985, 10 mins)
SCENE 6: IMAGES OF CONTROL (Wilf Thust, 1985, 21 mins)

Selected and chaired by Tom Roberts.

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LUX Salon
3rd Floor, Shacklewell Studios, 18 Shacklewell Lane, London, E8 2EZ
Nearest Train: Dalston Kingsland
MAP OF AREA

ADMISSION FREE
Places are extremely limited so booking is essential
To book a place send your name to salon@lux.org.uk
Please be on time - no late entry
Telephone: 020 7503 3980

www.lux.org.uk

The Secret Public

THE SECRET PUBLIC
London ICA
15-30 April 2007

Further exploring the concerns of other moving image work in the exhibition, The Secret Public: The Last Days of the British Underground 1978-1988, this series of four screenings presents works made by artists for whom the gathering and disseminating of information has critical and political imperatives.

Close Up (Peter Gidal, 1983)

Sun 15 Apr, 13:30 / Mon 23 Apr, 20:15 / Sat 28 Apr, 16:00
BRED AND BORN & CLOSE UP
Both made in 1983, these films are experimental and formally radical. Bred and Born is shaped by the artists’ research into and interviews with three generations of women on an estate in East London. In Close Up the polemical, disembodied voices of Nicaraguan revolutionaries become an equal part in a film that profoundly problematises representation.
BRED AND BORN
Mary Pat Leece & Joanna Davis, 1983, 16mm, 75 min
CLOSE UP
Peter Gidal, 1983, 16mm, 70 min

Handsworth Songs (Black Audio Film Collective, 1986)

Sun 15 Apr, 16:30 / Mon 23 Apr, 18:30 / Sun 29 Apr, 14:00
THIS IS NOT AN AIDS AD & HANDSWORTH SONGS
BAFC’s first major film, Handsworth Songs is a brilliant and deeply affecting account of the Birmingham riots of 1985. Told through montage, interview footage, reportage and archival material it examines race, class and ideology in Britain’s colonial history. Isaac Julien’s video extends these concerns to incorporate sexuality through the excavation and re-presentation of images from the past.
THIS IS NOT AN AIDS AD
Isaac Julien, 1987, video, 11 min
HANDSWORTH SONGS
John Akomfrah & Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), 1986, video, 58 min

Plutionium Blonde (Sandra Lahire, 1986

Mon 16 Apr, 20:45 / Tue 24 Apr, 18:45 / Sun 29 Apr, 16:00
NUCLEAR TRILOGY & CARRY GREENHAM HOME
Sandra Lahire’s trilogy is a benchmark of personal filmmaking. Flickering through rapid-fire montage and turning the camera onto herself she finds disturbing metaphors for the body in nuclear power. Carry Greenham Home is closer to traditional documentary, detailing with heartfelt attention the lives and activities of the women involved in the peace camp. It bristles with song and combats the media’s fragmented portrayal of events.
PLUTONIUM BLONDE
Sandra Lahire, 1986, video, 15 min
TERMINALS
Sandra Lahire, 1986, 16mm, 15 min
URANIUM HEX
Sandra Lahire, 1988, video, 11 min
CARRY GREENHAM HOME
Beeban Kidron, 1983, 16mm, 66 min

Bright Eyes (Stuart Marshall, 1984)

Tue 17 Apr, 20:45 / Sun 22 Apr, 16:30 / Mon 30 Apr, 18:45
BRIGHT EYES
‘One of the most important videos about AIDS’ (Douglas Crimp
Bright Eyes is an explication of the relationship between representation and prejudice. It is also a manifesto, documentary and information film. Utilising peculiar re-enactments and a parallel with the rise of Nazism, it addresses the appalling institutional and personal intolerance and ignorance of what was already a definitive epidemic.
BRIGHT EYES
Stuart Marshall, 1984, video, 80 min

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ICA
12 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH
Nearest Tube: Charing Cross / Piccadilly
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Tickets: £8 / £7 concessions / £6 members
Box Office: 020 7930 3647
www.ica.org.uk

Two Wrenching Departures

TWO WRENCHING DEPARTURES
London Roxy Bar and Screen
Tuesday 3 April 2007, at 8pm

Secret Cinema presents a FREE screening of a major new work by Ken Jacobs. UK Premiere !!!

Two Wrenching Departures (Ken Jacobs, 2006)

TWO WRENCHING DEPARTURES
Ken Jacobs, USA, 2006, video, b/w, sound, 90 mins

In his amazing live performances, Ken Jacobs breathed new life into archival film footage, teasing frozen frames into impossible depth and perpetual motion with two 16mm analytic projectors. Now aged 74, the artist explores new ways of documenting and developing his innovative Nervous System techniques in the digital realm.

Two Wrenching Departures, featuring the legendary Jack Smith (both clownish and devilishly handsome circa 1957), extends five minutes of material into a ninety-minute opus of eight movements. In and out of junk heap costume, Smith cavorts through the streets of New York (much consternation from the normals) and performs an impossible, traffic island ballet.

His improvised actions are transformed into perceptual games as Jacobs’ interrogates his footage, using repetition and pulsating flicker to open up new dimensions and temporal twists: The infinite ecstasy of little things. In commemorating two dear departed friends, with whom he collaborated on Blonde Cobra and other works, he propels their image into everlasting motion. These mindbending visions are juxtaposed with the soundtrack of The Barbarian, a 1933 Arabian fantasy starring Ramon Navarro and Myrna Loy, and music by Carl Orff.

“In October 1989, estranged friends Bob Fleischner and Jack Smith died within a week of each other. Ken Jacobs met Smith through Fleischner in 1955 at CUNY night school, where the three were studying camera techniques. This feature-length work, first performed in 1989 as a live Nervous System piece is a ‘luminous threnody’ (Mark McElhatten) made in response to the loss of Jacobs’ friends.”

Two Wrenching Departures (Ken Jacobs, 2006)

Ken Jacobs (born 1933) is one of the key figures of post-war cinema, whose films include Little Stabs at Happiness (1958-60), Blonde Cobra (1959-63), Tom Tom the Piper’s Son (1969-71), The Doctor’s Dream (1978), Perfect Film (1986) and Disorient Express (1995). He has also presented live cine-theatre (2D and 3D shadow plays) and developed the Nervous System and Nervous Magic Lantern projection techniques. Since 1999, Jacobs has primarily used electronic media, both in preserving his live performances and creating new digital works in a variety of styles. His 7-hour epic Star Spangled To Death (1957-2004) is now available on DVD from Big Commotion Pictures at www.starspangledtodeath.com

FREE ADMISSION
No reservation necessary, but arrive early to avoid disappointment.

Please Note: This screening is not suitable for those susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy due to the extensive use of flickering and throbbing light.

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The Roxy Bar and Screen
128-132 Borough High Street, London, SE1 1LB
Nearest Tube: Borough / London Bridge
MAP OF AREA

www.roxybarandscreen.com

Mike Hoolboom / Colin Campbell

MIKE HOOLBOOM / COLIN CAMPBELL
London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival
Sunday 1 April 2007

Fascination (Mike Hoolboom, 2006)

Sunday 1 April 2007, at 6:10pm, NFT 3
FASCINATION

Prolific fringe filmmaker Mike Hoolboom (Panic Bodies, Tom) turns his lens to the fallen video 'art star' Colin Campbell (1942-2001) in this deeply affecting experimental portrait. Video artist and charming gender provocateur on the Toronto art scene, Campbell pioneered video art in the 1970s, creating drag personas that paralleled conceptual performance of the time. As Hoolboom notes in his voiceover, he does not merely tell Campbell's story but accompanies it. Contextualising Campbell's art practice within the TV generation and the Cold War, Hoolboom enters the video milieu by mixing a dreamlike cocktail of found footage with Campbell's hilarious, poignant videos. Interviews with friends, lovers and art world companions such as John Greyson and Tanya Mars add an intimate layer to this thought-provoking tribute to an important artist rarely screened in the UK. (Kyle Stephan)

Fascination
Mike Hoolboom, Canada, 2006, 70 mins

Sackville I'm Yours (Colin Campbell, 1972)

Sunday 1 April 2007, at 8.30pm, NFT 3
COLIN CAMPBELL FOREVER !

Three Colin Campbell video works preceded by a taped introduction by guest curator Mike Hoolboom.

Sackville I'm Yours
Colin Campbell, Canada, 1972, 15 mins
In Campbell's first tape, he plays the first of his many personas 'Art Star', a legend in his own mind, in the midst of (sigh) yet another media interview.

Conundrum Clinique
Colin Campbell, Canada, 1981, 14 mins
Playing a NASA scientist, Campbell involves militarists in a melodrama of sex and violence. He has two lovers in Clinique, his boss (played by Ann McFarland) and the gorgeous Alex Wilson.

Disheveled Destiny
Colin Campbell, Canada, 2000, 29 mins
'Art Star', Campbell's very first Frankenstein, returns to Sackville on his silver anniversary. He interweaves documentary moments with camped up recollections that embody new winds of change.


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BFI Southbank
Belvedere Road, South Bank, London, SE1 8XT
Nearest Tube: Waterloo / Embankment
MAP OF AREA

Tickets: £8.50 / £6.25 concessions
Box Office: 020 7928 3232

www.llgff.org.uk

Videa Democrazy

VIDEA DEMOCRAZY
London Candid Arts Trust
Sunday 1 April 2007, at 4pm

Stefan Szczulkun will offer people a chance to choose which of his videos they watch, including titles such as Big Willow Eco Camp, Morris Dancers at The Sweeps Festival, Tributes to Princess Diana and My Life in T Shirts.

To preview see the selection on Google
http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?q=szczelkun

My Life in T Shirts (Stefan Szczelkun, 2006)

VIDEA DEMOCRAZY

Cinema Action thought of their films as primarily 'triggers' for discussion. John Porter even encouraged the audience to talk through his Super 8 films as shown at cogcollective on 4 February 2007. Szczelkun is interested in how culture can be more or less democratic.

If the core purpose of culture is to continually evaluate our totality how does this work in relation to experimental venues such as cogcollective? What attitude do we take to the essential silences in our rituals of knowledge? How do we kick out the jams?

Consensii of selection - public rituals of observance - responsive and reactive discourses.

VIDEA DEMOCRAZY is presented by COGCOLLECTIVE.

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Candid Arts Trust
3 Torrens Street, London, EC1V 1NQ
Nearest Tube: Angel
MAP OF AREA

Tickets: £5 / £3 concessions
Email: info@cogcollective.co.uk

www.cogcollective.co.uk