Date: 25 October 2009 | Season: London Film Festival 2009 | Tags: London Film Festival
WHIRL OF CONFUSION
Sunday 25 October 2009, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
Mary Helena Clark, And the Sun Flowers, USA, 2008, 5 min
‘Notes from the distant future and forgotten past. An ethereal flower and disembodied voice guide you through the spaces in between.’ (Mary Helena Clark)
Greg Pope, Shot Film, UK-Norway, 2009, 4 min
Taking the expression ‘to shoot a film’ at face value, this 35mm reel has been blasted with a shotgun.
Matthias Müller, Christoph Giradet, Contre-Jour, Germany, 2009, 11 min
My Eyes! My Eyes! Flickering out from the screen and direct to your retina, Contre-jour is not for the optic neurotic. Take a deep breath and try to relax as Müller and Girardet conduct their examination.
David Gatten, Film for Invisible Ink Case No. 142: Abbreviation for Dead Winter (Diminished by 1,794), USA, 2008, 13 min
‘A single piece of paper, a second stab at suture, a story three times over, a frame for every mile. Words by Charles Darwin.’ (David Gatten)
Paul Abbott, Wolf’s Froth / Amongst Other Things, UK, 2009, 15 min
By chance or circumstance, wolf’s froth’s covert syntax refuses to be unpicked. Entangling anxious domesticity with the spectre of aggression, it conjures a mood of underlying discomfort and intrigue.
Lewis Klahr, False Aging, USA, 2008, 15 min
Klahr’s surreal collage journeys through lost horizons of comic book Americana and is brought back down to earth by Drella’s dream. And nobody called, and nobody came.
Oliver Husain, Mount Shasta, Canada, 2008, 8 min
What is ostensibly a proposal for a film script is acted out, without artifice, in a bare loft space as Mantler plays a plaintive lament. A puppet show like none other that will leave you bemused, befuddled and bewildered.
PROGRAMME NOTES
WHIRL OF CONFUSION
Sunday 25 October 2009, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
AND THE SUN FLOWERS
Mary Helena Clark, USA, 2008, video, colour, sound, 5 min
Henry James had his figure in the carpet; Da Vinci found faces on the wall.
Within this Baltimore wallpaper: a floral forest of hidden depth and concealment, the hues and fragrance of another era. Surface decoration holds permeable planes, inner passages. There emerges a hypnotic empyrean flower, a solar fossil, a speaking anemone, of paper, of human muscle, of unknown origin, delivering an unreasonable message of rare tranquillity. (Mark McElhatten)
SHOT FILM
Greg Pope, UK-Norway, 2009, 35mm, colour, sound, 4 min
A shotgun is aimed onto filmstrips. Images and sound are created through the destructive force and spread of the shot. Images as wound – entry and exit points. A pattern sliced and spliced, a single instant re-presented and duplicated through time. A literal interpretation unmasks the implied violence embedded in a common phrase ‘to shoot a film’. (Greg Pope)
CONTRE-JOUR
Matthias Müller & Christoph Giradet, Germany, 2009, 35mm, colour, sound, 11 min
The look with which we comprehend the world and which it casts back at us in response breaks up in Contre-jour into disquieting fragments. Blurs, flashes and stroboscope montages disintegrate reality into shadowy images that inflict pain on the eye. A spotlight precisely cuts the individual out of the darkness.
‘I wish you could see what I see’ remains a futile hope. Blind spots gape between self-perception and the perception of others. (Kristina Tieke)
FILM FOR INVISIBLE INK CASE NO. 142: ABBREVIATION FOR DEAD WINTER (DIMINISHED BY 1,794)
David Gatten, USA, 2008, 16mm, b/w, sound, 13 min
Gatten’s Film takes up Darwin to nearly fossilize his words and attempt minute rediscovery in a paper’s inky fibres. Constantly turning the focus (so it seems), Gatten lets these gossamer ink-strands ripple into view out of total blankness (an empty world), more and more, so that even when they are in focus, they’re still just an abstraction: a bunch of fibres entwined. And even, then, of course, there’s the feeling that if Gatten keeps refocusing he’ll discover entirely new strands as well; appropriate to a film whose words are from Darwin, Film feels like an archaeological dig. (David Phelps)
www.davidgattenfilm.com
WOLF’S FROTH / AMONGST OTHER THINGS
Paul Abbott, UK, 2009, video, colour, sound, 15 min
FALSE AGING
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2008, video, colour, sound, 15 min
It’s hard to believe that False Aging clocks in at under 15 minutes, given how powerfully it evokes passing decades punctuated by muffled eruptions of longing and regret. A button revolves around a clock – and the world moves with it. Klahr shares Joseph Cornell’s alchemical genius, but his collaged reveries cast deeper shadows and offer little magical protection from death and disappointment. The soundtrack draws on The Valley of the Dolls, Jefferson Airplane, and Lou Reed & John Cale’s ‘Songs for Drella’.
‘As Cale channels Warhol, recounting a nightmare involving a snowy park under the stairs and anxieties about troubles real and imagined, a blond man peers at cityscapes, a skeletal hand snatches a fortune, and no-longer-redeemable trading stamps flutter by.’ (Kristin M. Jones)
MOUNT SHASTA
Oliver Husain, Canada, 2008, 16mm, colour, sound, 8 min
Pastel-coloured institutional walls contain fabric-and-pipe-cleaner inventions of a whimsy that almost seems forced, were it not for the total belief evinced by those participating in it. In the background, a man at a cheap keyboard (again, of the sort familiar from middle-school music rooms of a certain era) warbles a story-song as half-formed handkerchief puppets fly around each other on visible wires, the puppeteers made ‘invisible’ by their white canvas beekeeper suits. Husain’s story is about a mountain trip waylaid by a fog which turns out to be the smoke from a destructive fire. In a sense, this could be a way of understanding Mount Shasta as a film. The elements that envelop this gorgeous film in mystery (is this avant-garde? a narrative short?
a children’s film?) are also the ones that threaten to unmake it at every turn, since ‘the spell’ is always already about our ability to turn away from its blatant disenchantment. (Michael Sickinski)
www.husain.de
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