People Going Nowhere

Date: 24 October 2010 | Season: London Film Festival 2010 | Tags:

PEOPLE GOING NOWHERE
Sunday 24 October 2010, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

Richard Kerr, De Mouvement, Canada, 2009, 7 min
Kerr’s mind-bending trip through the wipes and dissolves of old feature films is an exhilarating demonstration of the power of cinema.

Ben Rivers & Paul Harnden, May Tomorrow Shine The Brightest Of All Your Many Days As It Will Be Your Last, UK, 2009, 13 min
Female Japanese cadets patrol the woods and countryside where old men channel Futurist poets. Adjacent yes, but simultaneous?

Neil Beloufa, Brune Renault, France, 2009, 17 min
An abandoned car park is no substitute for the open road. Four characters find themselves in a looped fiction, replete with clichés, acting out cycles of heightened emotions. Like all teenagers, they think the world revolves around them – and in this film it almost does.

Victor Alimpiev, Vot, Russia, 2010, 5 min
As if suspended in limbo, or perhaps deep in rehearsal, five performers exchange glances, gestures and utter strange sounds.

Janie Geiser, Kindless Villain, USA, 2010, 4 min
Two boys seem trapped inside their own imaginations, dreaming of naval battles and Egyptian exotica.

Peter Tscherkassky, Coming Attractions, Austria, 2010, 24 min
With humour and materialist dynamics, Tscherkassky explores the direct relationship between actor, camera and audience. A meditation on the ‘cinema of attractions’; exploiting leftovers from the commercial industry to collide the intersecting forms of early film and the avant-garde.

Also Screening: Thursday 21 October 2010, at 2pm, NFT3

PROGRAMME NOTES

Lewis Klahr Workshop: Narrative Collage

Date: 25 October 2010 | Season: London Film Festival 2010 | Tags:

LEWIS KLAHR WORKSHOP: NARRATIVE COLLAGE
Monday 25 October 2010, from 10am to 5pm
London BFI Learning Space & Studio

Drawing on his considerable experience as an artist, Lewis Klahr will lead a masterclass on how characters, stories and atmospheres can be developed with minimal resources. Following a participatory collage exercise using copies of the day’s newspapers, Klahr will illustrate his creative process through a detailed analysis of his film Pony Glass (1998), a coming of age drama in which Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen undergoes a sexual identity crisis of epic proportions. The day will culminate in an exclusive preview of brand new works. Declared ‘the reigning proponent of cut and paste’ by critic J. Hoberman, Lewis Klahr has shown his films and digital at most major festivals and in three Whitney Biennials. He teaches directing and screenwriting at CalArts, has created effects and sequences for commercials and TV, and co-rewrote The Mothman Prophesies (2002). The workshop is a unique opportunity to explore collage, animation processes and narrative construction with a leading practitioner.

Workshop Fee: £25. Prior experience of filmmaking is not required. Limited to 25 participants. Please book early to avoid disappointment.

The workshop will take place at BFI Southbank, in the Learning Space and Studio. Please note that an incorrect date for the workshop has been listed in the Festival brochure.

Lewis Klahr will present his Prolix Satori series of recent videos on Sunday 24 October.


Lewis Klahr: Engram Sepals

Date: 25 October 2010 | Season: London Film Festival 2010 | Tags:

LEWIS KLAHR: ENGRAM SEPALS (MELODRAMAS 1994-2000)
Monday 25 October 2010, at 7pm
London Tate Modern

Collage artist Lewis Klahr introduces Engram Sepals, his celebrated sequence of seven films which traces ‘a trajectory of American intoxication’. Appropriating the imagery of pop culture from the aspirational 1940s through the free-loving 1970s, Klahr’s cut-out animations draw us into a dreamlike world of intrigue, anxiety and lust. A surreal and atmospheric epic propelled by an evocative soundtrack featuring Frank Sinatra, Morton Feldman, Mercury Rev and The Stooges.

Lewis Klahr, Altair, 1994, 8 min
Lewis Klahr, Engram Sepals, 2000, 6 min
Lewis Klahr, Elsa Kirk, 1999, 5 min
Lewis Klahr, Pony Glass, 1997, 15 min
Lewis Klahr, Govinda, 1999, 23 min
Lewis Klahr, Downs Are Feminine, 1994, 9 min
Lewis Klahr, A Failed Cardigan Maneuver, 1999, 15 min

Lewis Klahr’s work has been featured in three Whitney Biennials and is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is a faculty member at CalArts, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992, and was ranked 4th in the Film Comment avant-garde poll of this decade’s most important filmmakers. The Wexner Center, Columbus, recently presented a retrospective of Klahr’s films and contributed towards the preparation of a DVD box set.

Curated by Mark Webber and presented in association with The 54th BFI London Film Festival.

Lewis Klahr will introduce a screening of new work at BFI Southbank on Sunday 24 October 2010.

PROGRAMME NOTES

David Gatten’s Journal and Remarks

Date: 27 October 2010 | Season: London Film Festival 2010 | Tags:

DAVID GATTEN’S JOURNAL AND REMARKS
Wednesday 27 October 2010, at 2:30pm
London Natural History Museum

David Gatten, one of the most accomplished young film artists to emerge in recent years, returns to London to discuss a visit to the Galapagos Islands and screen the film he photographed there. The journey was an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of the naturalist Charles Darwin, whose expedition in the 1830s shaped the theory of evolution. The islands off the west coast of Ecuador have changed little since that time and still sustain a unique array of endemic species. In the absence of predatory mammals, native animals do not fear humans, enabling Gatten to shoot in close proximity to such exotic creatures as giant tortoises and blue-footed boobies. ‘The sights I was able to see – and the images I was able to capture – are remarkably similar to the things Darwin saw.’ Shuttling between these observations and texts from an early edition of Voyage of the Beagle, the film is structured in accordance with Leonardo’s proposal to divide the hour into 3000 equal measures. Along with Shrimp Boat Log (also showing in the Festival), it forms part of a forthcoming cycle titled Continuous Quantities.

David Gatten,Journal and Remarks, USA, 2009, 16mm, colour, silent, 15 min
plus extended discussion

Presented as part of Nature Live, in association with the Natural History Museum.

This free event will take place in the Attenborough Studio, Darwin Centre, Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD. Nearest Tube: South Kensington. Please arrive early to avoid disappointment.