SEVEN EASY PIECES BY MARINA ABRAMOVI?
Sunday 28 October 2007, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank Studio

SEVEN EASY PIECES BY MARINA ABRAMOVI?
Babette Mangolte, USA, 2007, HD video, colour, sound, 93 min
Bruce Nauman, Body Pressure, 1974
Vito Acconci, Seedbed, 1972
Valie Export, Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969
Gina Pane, The Conditioning, the first action of Self-Portrait(s), 1973
Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965
Marina Abramovi?, Lips of Thomas, 1975
Marina Abramovi?, Entering the Other Side, 2005

In Seven Easy Pieces Abramovi? re-enacted seminal performance works from the 1960s and 70s by Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Valie Export, Gina Pane, Joseph Beuys and herself, interpreting them as one would a musical score. The film is a reflection on performance art and body art outlining physical fragility, versatility, tenacity and unlimited endurance as seen in the work of Marina Abramovi?. The film of Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovi? is about the performing body and how it affects viscerally the people who confront it, look at it and participate in the transcendental experience that is its primary effect. The ceremonial and meditative are the common responses to the week-long series of performances that took place in November 2005 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. From an art event to a social phenomenon, the seven performances became the talk of the town because they created among the visitors a sense of sublimation, like prayer. The film attempts to reveal the mechanisms of this transcendental experience by simply showing the performer’s body living the events inscribed in each piece with details that outline the body’s fragility, versatility, tenacity and unlimited endurance. The fascination comes from the revelation of the physical transformation of Marina Abramovi?’s exposed body due to the rigorous discipline of being there on display each day for seven hours without any restrictive boundaries. The relentless progress of time is revealed each day by the acoustics of the building with its waves of crowds that roll like an ocean and marvel at the performer’s steadfastness with respectful silence. That the performer’s required discipline had to be so different from one piece to the next is one of the mysteries. How the attentive audience fed into the art and Marina’s aesthetics is what is explored. It is as if a monastic urge attracted the mystical among us viewers who were there to participate. And the film, by focusing on Marina’s minute changes and strain during the long seven hours of each piece, explores in a systematic way a body without limit and increases the awareness of how participatory body art is. The film follows the linearity inscribed in the weeklong event, from body pressure, audience participation and confrontation in the first three pieces to the ceremonial in the last four pieces as mapped out by Marina Abramovi?. It is only after the fact that the film viewer will realize how much the project’s concept enlightens us on aesthetics that place physical experience over reason, process over iconography and testify to the power of audience participation over passive spectatorship. (Babette Mangolte)
www.babettemangolte.com

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THE ANAGOGIC CHAMBER
Sunday 28 October 2007, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

FILM FOR INVISIBLE INK, CASE NO: 71: BASE-PLUS-FOG
David Gatten, USA, 2006, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
David Gatten’s placid, comically lyrical new Film for Invisible Ink, Case No. 71: Base-Plus-Fog calls to mind the self-referential highjinks and bone-dry textual wit of Owen Land. But Gatten’s approach is in some ways more classically minimalist than Land’s. Invisible Ink is largely composed of a series of sprocket-hole outlines that seem to materialize from the white screen, the ‘image’ consisting of clear leader and its dust granules until one of the rounded rectangles dips down and floats forward into the frame of reference. They each occupy pretty much the same position and, although they are mostly identical, the ongoing procession gives us time to notice their differences – a smudged lower boundary, say, or an unstable corner. In between, Gatten silently presents texts from a Kodak manual, detailing what I can only assume to be the film-developer hazard that we’re observing – problems in base-plus-fog density. (Don’t ask me. For all I know, this could refer to an ambiance management conundrum at a discotheque.) Gatten has been working for years now with the particular juncture at which text and image become indistinguishable, but Film for Invisible Ink displays an impressive recommitment to the less-is-more aesthetic that lent such subtlety and refinement to his earlier What the Water Said series. The new work is as delicate yet muscular as an Agnes Martin canvas or a Fred Sandback string sculpture. (Michael Sicinski, Green Cine Daily)
www.davidgattenfilm.com

SHADOW TRAP
Greg Pope, UK-Norway, 2007, 35mm, colour, sound, 8 min
Shadow Trap was conceived as a companion piece to the live film performance Light Trap. In Light Trap action is taken to remove all emulsion from completely developed black film loops; Shadow Trap operates in reverse – a film created by the application of film emulsion ‘dust’ to a clear base. In a way Shadow Trap is a documentary – a record of previously executed actions – an exhibition of the evidence. I also regard it as a found footage film, where material from one film is re-presented and re-examined in another. In this case the re-presented material has been subjected to extreme abrasion and reduced to dust. I was also excited by the notion of fragmenting the base unit of film language to a level below that of the classical single frame, where frames are ‘atomised’ and we start to examine the building blocks of film. The image-as-sound / sound-as-image crossover also mirrors the audio element in Light Trap (where a live scratch soundtrack is created). Using the inherent sound technology of 35mm projectors I can play back surround sound audio (sound which is created by the image), over which I have very limited control. (Greg Pope)

THE OBJECT WHICH THINKS US: OBJECT 1
Samantha Rebello, UK, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min
The Object Which Thinks Us: OBJECT 1 is a film about human beings in the 21st Century, though paradoxically it is a film in which the human image plays no more than a fleeting part. Objects: utilitarian articles which play a major role in our everyday existence (though to which we pay little attention) are at the core of a film which uses them as a mirror in which we are able to view ourselves. People are nowhere to be seen though human presence is felt everywhere in the things which fill the screen. Humans are modified and directed by those objects they deem to be in control of. Our gestures and movements are constantly guided by things which do more than aid us in our day to day activities. The film seems intent on opening our eyes to the hidden qualities of manufactured goods and articles, exposing them to be enigmatic and imposing operators
in our existence, and human beings are shown at the periphery of an object world. ‘Through the objects, other human beings are haunting us.’ (Samantha Rebello)

FUGITIVE L(I)GHT
Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Canada, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min
This film explores the morph-like quality of the Serpentine Dance and its intricate play on the visible and the invisible, which extends to the larger context and legacy its originator, the American born Loïe Fuller. fugitive l(i)ght is composed of elaborately reworked found footage, originally captured by Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers, of various renditions and imitations of Fuller’s Serpentine performances. These found films are woven into intricately reworked sequences using several computer programs and following poetic interpretations of several artists who experienced Fuller’s performances in person: texts of Mallarme, lithographs of Toulouse-Lautrec, sketches of Whistler, and futuristic manifesto on dance by Marinetti. The music for this film was composed by Toronto based composer Colin Clark who reworked various LP recordings of Wagner’s Die Walküre, the music that often accompanied Fuller’s Serpentine performances. fugitive l(i)ght emphasizes rhythmic structures over and above representation, by drawing the viewer’s gaze into a maze of multiple folds of continuously unfolding colour patterns. fugitive l(i)ght aims to evoke a charge of energy that might have been experienced by the audience of the 1890s in the presence of Fuller’s light performances, and therefore permitting her to meet us again, one century later by making herself and her performance (in)visible to us through its palpitating playful rhythm expressed as a field of energy that resonates within the spectator. (Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof)

SICK SERENA AND DREGS AND WRECK AND WRECK
Emily Wardill, UK, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck revels in a subset of fiction – allegory, with its roots in Medieval poetry – that ricochets retrospectively into Emily Wardill’s other films, into us watching them, into a methodology or a thought process being made manifest in which we are complicit. Allegory is an illusion of the highest order, fiction crystallised into a specific or mysterious instructional purpose. It tells two entirely co-dependent stories absolutely simultaneously, one which we are actually reading, the other the lesson to be derived from it. Through coherent, albeit often surreal narrative, we are taught something about how to behave, told our own story. These (invariably moral) coda only make sense if the narrative we are reading or watching remains in tact. Allegories are told like fairytales or made into pictures that have a similar symbolic order. Religious images are not strictly allegorical, but they are instructional and in the close-ups of Sick Serena’s stained glass the figures crunched between thick lead with animals and angels, reframed here as decapitated, broken, they are reinterpreted as mysteriously, dramatically symbolic. What is more they come to life. To ‘life’. They come to whose life? (Ian White)

VICTORY OVER THE SUN
Michael Robinson, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 13 min
Dominant sites of past World’s Fairs breed an eruptive struggle between spirit and matter, ego and industry, futurism and failure. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory; nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain. (Michael Robinson)
www.poisonberries.net

TODAY!
Jessie Stead & David Gatten, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound-on-cd, 11 min
Touch what you see when you find it or pick it up.
Fall off tomorrow’s promise, not injured and again.
In the woods there is snow, in the water there is sugar,
bodies are made of salt and (yesterday is unaware).
(Jesse Stead & David Gatten)
www.jessiestead.com
www.davidgattenfilm.com

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PETER HUTTON IN THE ELEMENTS
Monday 29 October 2007, at 7:00pm
London Tate Modern

NEW YORK PORTRAIT: CHAPTER 2
Peter Hutton, 1980-81, 16mm, b/w, silent, 16 min
The second part of an extended life’s portrait of New York.

“Hutton’s black and white haikus are an exquisite distillation of the cinematic eye. The limitations imposed – no colour, no sound, no movement (except from a vehicle not directly propelled by the filmmaker), no direct cuts since the images are born and die in black – ironically entail an ultimate freedom of the imagination. If pleasure can disturb, Hutton’s ploys emerge in full focus. These materializing then evaporating images don’t ignite, but conjure strains of fleeting panoramas of detached bemusement. More than mere photography, Hutton’s contained-with-in-the-frame juxtapositions are filmic explorations of the benign and the tragic.” (Warren Sonbert)

BOSTON FIRE
Peter Hutton, 1979, 16mm, b/w, silent, 8 min
“Boston Fire finds grandeur in smoke rising eloquently from a city blaze. Billowing puffs of darkness blend with fountains of water streaming in from off-screen to orchestrate a play of primal elements. The beautiful texture of the smoke coupled with the isolation from the source of the fire erases the destructive impact of the event. The camera, lost in the immense dark clouds, produces images for meditation removed from the causes or consequences of the scene. The tiny firemen, seen as distant silhouettes, gaze in awe, helpless before nature’s power.” (Leger Grindon, Millennium Film Journal)

IMAGES OF ASIAN MUSIC (A DIARY FROM LIFE 1973-74)
Peter Hutton, 1973-74, 16mm, b/w, silent, 29 min
“Images of Asian Music represents footage compiled during 1973-74 when Peter Hutton was living in Thailand and working at sea as a merchant seaman. While the film is silent, the title was intended to evoke a comparison to the movement of classical Asian music. Images of Asian Music is a personal celebration of Asia formed by a sensitivity to filmic composition and to the perception of these images in a silent time created by the filmmaker.” (Whitney Museum of American Art)

“The camera records a ship working out of Thailand, the faces of the seamen, the sea, a storm, fireworks, a big snake coiling exploratorily about a young girl, the huge Buddha in the lotus position and landscapes and skyscapes reminiscent of the film work of Satyajit Ray. It is beautiful, mute, and meaningful in the silence.” (Archer Winston, New York Post)

LANDSCAPE (FOR MANON),
Peter Hutton, 1986-87, 16mm, b/w, silent, 19 min
“Much of the imagery in Landscape (for Manon) is suggestive of Thomas Cole’s Catskill paintings – some of Hutton’s imagery was made in and around Kaaterskill Clove. In general, the film recalls those Cole paintings usually seen as forerunners of Luminism – ‘The Clove’, ‘Catskills’ (1827), for example, and ‘Catskill Creek’ (1845) – though the sensibility it reflects and the experience it provides is quite close to Fitz Hugh Lane, Martin Johnson Heade and John Frederick Kensett. Landscape (for Manon) is made up of twenty-two shots. The first and last shots frame the film as a tribute to Hutton’s young daughter, Manon: in the film’s delicate and arresting final shot, we see her face in close-up, double exposed with mottled light.” (Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine)

IN TITAN’S GOBLET
Peter Hutton, 1991, 16mm, b/w, silent, 10 min
In Titan’s Goblet refers to a landscape painting by Thomas Cole circa 1833. The film is intended as an homage to Cole, who is regarded as the father of the Hudson River School of painting.

“Like Landscape (for Manon), In Titan’s Goblet depicts, in a series of often-stunning, silent, black and white, discrete images the Catskill Mountain area. In this case, however, a sequence of lovely images of what at first appears to be mist in the mountains is slowly revealed to be a distant fire of rubber tires that had burned out of control. That is, Hutton’s serene, evocative landscapes are, in this instance, qualified by an environmental problem – one that confronts our hunger for imagery of pristine nature.” (Scott MacDonald)

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