WHEN LATITUDES BECOME FORM
Saturday 25 October 2008, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

IN THE KINGDOM OF SHADOWS
Francisca Duran, Canada 2006, video, b/w, sound, 6 min
In the Kingdom of Shadows documents a paragraph being typeset on an early twentieth-century Ludlow Linecaster. The text is taken from Maxim Gorky’s 1896 review of the Lumière Brothers’ film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de la Ciotat (1895). As the words melt into a pool of lead, the alchemical magic of printing is linked to that of cinema. Commissioned by the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT) for their 25th anniversary program, ‘Film is Dead! Long Live Film!’ (Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre)

HOW TO CONDUCT A LOVE AFFAIR
David Gatten, USA, 2007, 16mm, b/w & colour, silent, 8 min
An unexpected letter leads to an unanticipated encounter and an extravagant gift. Some windows open easily; other shadows remain locked rooms. Advice is sometimes easy to give, but often hard to follow. Have a cup of tea dear. I’ll trade you a stitch from the past in return for a leaf from the future. This is a Valentine and this is a fragment: for the one who mends my rips; from the next instalment of the Byrd project Secret History of the Dividing Line, a True Account in Nine Parts. (David Gatten)
www.davidgattenfilm.com

THE PARABLE OF THE TULIP PAINTER AND THE FLY
Charlotte Pryce, USA, 2008, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min
Inspired by Dutch paintings from the 17th century – as indeed are all my films – it features a tulip, the painting of a tulip and a fly. An intoxicating flower; a metaphorical insect; a longing reach across the centuries. The film is a philosophical search drenched in luminous colours and sparkling light, shot on colour reversal, entirely hand-processed and re-printed on the optical printer. (Charlotte Pryce)

DEEP SIX
Sami van Ingen, Finland, 2007, 35mm, colour, sound, 7 min
Deep Six has three starting points: a little narrative re-edited from a Hollywood B-movie (The Rage, 1998), an attempt to use the colour photocopy as a cinematic aesthetic and an exploration of the frame line as a dynamic visual element. The pictoral narrative in the work, a timber lorry racing on a mountain road, acts as a metaphor for change and of loss. In a wider sense the narrative also represents all traditional narrative structures, with the three compulsory parts: the Exposition, Rising Action and Climax. In Deep Six I strive to have the mechanical touch of my hand visible as a comment on the analogue nature of the medium – what we see depends on the condition of the lamp, the condition of the actual surface of the film print and of the projectionist’s ability to focus the film. The discrepancies in my images, made by contact printing, by hand, strips of photocopied overhead transparencies onto 35mm film, the strong frame line and sideways movement and the strong texture of the photocopied surface is an attempt to work the screen surface and the framing of the cinematic image. (Sami van Ingen)

DE TIJD
Bart Vegter, Netherlands, 2008, 35mm, colour, silent, 9 min
For almost thirty years now, Bart Vegter has been making abstract animations. His first four films were exquisitely minimal geometric compositions made using a variety of traditional animation techniques. The last fifteen years Bart Vegter has been making his films on the computer, writing his own software to explore the worlds of patterns hidden in complex mathematical algorithms. These patterns often evoke natural phenomena like the shapes of sand dunes or the weather. His most recent work De Tijd (Time) marks a return to a more geometrical world of forms. ‘A monochrome flat image changes slowly into a theatrical spectacle in which colour subtly melts and solidifies lines and conical forms. At the end, the colours lose their power and all that is left is the basic structure of the image, the skeleton.’ This is the second work by Vegter that uses Fourier transformation, this time in three dimensions. (Joost Rekveld)

HORIZONTAL BOUNDARIES
Pat O’Neill, USA, 2008, 35mm, colour, sound, 23 min
Horizontal Boundaries is a film that looks at certain aspects of the geography of California as the ground for cinematic disruption and restatement. The ‘boundaries’ in question turn out to be frame lines, the divisions between two images, one above the other on a strip of 35mm film. The projector gate is adjustable up or down in order to produce a single uninterrupted image: in this film the frame line is integrated into the compositional language of the piece. It is not a static repositioning, but rather a dynamic one, moving more or less randomly, causing image combinations to be generated unpredictably. The result is a tapestry of exquisite contradiction. Irish traditional songs ‘Carranroe’ and ‘Out on the Ocean’, performed by George Lockwood, fiddle. A portion of a composition ‘Nak Won’, by Carl Stone. Language on the track was edited from two 1955 radio shows, ‘Dragnet’ featuring Jack Webb. Other original sound sources, and mix, by George Lockwood. (Pat O’Neill)

EASTER MORNING
Bruce Conner, USA, 2008, video, colour, sound, 10 min
This is Bruce Conner’s last completed film. It is derived from the 8mm footage of Easter Morning Raga (1966). Conner originally showed Easter Morning Raga projecting at variable frame rates and with loops, some prints were made but the film was never released for circulation. Easter Morning revisits the earlier material resetting it to a version of Terry Riley’s landmark minimalist composition ‘In C’ (1964) recorded by the Shanghai Film Orchestra in 1989. The use of traditional Chinese instruments in this unusual recording gives the music a shift in timbre that is revelatory, beautifully matching the radiance and open heartedness of this mind manifesting optical poem. (Mark McElhatten, New York Film Festival Views From the Avant-Garde)

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