Date: 20 October 2012 | Season: London Film Festival 2012 | Tags: London Film Festival
MATI DIOP
Saturday 20 October 2012, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
Among the younger generation of artists exploring new approaches to narrative, the work of Mati Diop is notable for its sensitive portrayal of characters and intimate style of filming. Diop is also an actress, playing leading roles in Clare Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum and Antonio Campos’ Simon Killer, and is the niece of legendary Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty. Her recent short films will be presented together for the first time in the UK.
Mati Diop, Atlantiques, France-Senegal, 2009, 16 min
‘A story about boys who are continually travelling: between past, present and future, between life and death, history and myth.’ (MD)
Mati Diop, Big in Vietnam, France, 2012, 29 min
When a lead actor disappears from set, the director searches for him in the city of Marseille. Stumbling into a karaoke bar, she loses herself in memories of her former home in Vietnam, and encounters a man who shares her sense of displacement. As night becomes day, they walk along the seafront and he recounts the story of his journey from the Far East to Europe.
Mati Diop, Snow Canon, France, 2011, 33 min
Stranded in her parents’ chalet in the French Alps, a teenage girl passes time chatting online with friends, until the babysitter arrives and events take an unexpected turn. Innocent pastimes give way to games of power and seduction.
PROGRAMME NOTES
MATI DIOP
Saturday 20 October 2012, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
ATLANTIQUES
Mati Diop, France-Senegal, 2009, video, colour, sound, 16 min
Sitting by the campfire, a boy from Dakar named Serigne tells his two friends the story of his sea voyage as a stowaway. Not only he, but everyone in his surroundings seems to be continually obsessed by the idea of trying to cross the sea. His words reverberate like a melancholy poem. A story about boys who are continually travelling: between past, present and future, between life and death, history and myth. (Mati Diop)
BIG IN VIETNAM
Mati Diop, France, 2012, video, colour, sound, 29 min
In the forest near Marseille, the Franco Vietnamese director Henriette Nhung is shooting Dangerous Liaisons with the help of her son Mike. But when the lead actor disappears, everything comes to a halt. The film loses its Valmont, and the director soon after. Behind her, she leaves the entire cast and crew, now passengers aboard a ghost ship with only the young Mike as captain. As she wanders the port city, Henriette discovers a world that reminds her of her former home, Vietnam. Here, she meets a man haunted by a long journey with no return. (Mati Diop)
SNOW CANON
Mati Diop, France, 2011, 35mm, colour, sound, 33 min
The French Alps, February 2011. Vanina likes to hear the chalet’s parquet floor squeaking beneath her bare feet. Vanina likes to coat herself in sunscreen cream in front of the stone fireplace. Vanina likes the tawny fur of her rabbit, Souci. Vanina likes to smell the leather of the white sofa. Vanina likes to spend hours contemplating the sultry glow of the eyes of the veiled women on the postcards in her collection. Vanina likes to chat with Eloïse on the internet. But above all, what Vanina likes is her American babysitter, Mary Jane. (Mati Diop)
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Date: 20 October 2012 | Season: London Film Festival 2012 | Tags: London Film Festival
RITES OF PASSAGE
Saturday 20 October 2012, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
Steve Reinke, Great Blood Sacrifice, USA, 2010, 4 min
‘Whatever is going on on top, there’s a precise machine at work below, and this machine is digging little grooves, and these grooves slowly join together and become the conduits by which all meaning is drained from the world.’ (SR)
Hayoun Kwon, Manque de preuves, South Korea-France, 2011, 10 min
To cleanse his village of demons, the chief of a Nigerian tribe plans to sacrifice his twin sons. One escapes and flees to Europe, where his application for asylum is dismissed through lack of material proof. Using his testimony as the basis, Kwon proposes an animated depiction of his account.
Gabriel Abrantes, Birds, Portugal-Haiti, 2012, 17 min
Pagan folk myth is juxtaposed with ancient Greek comedy as three Haitian girls witness disparate forms of storytelling. An old man tells the tale of his wife’s transformation into a goat. In a local village, an elaborately costumed theatre group performs Aristophanes’ Birds in the original Attic language.
Ben Russell & Jim Drain, Ponce de León, USA, 2012, 26 min
‘Our Ponce de León is an immortal for whom time poses the greatest dilemma – it is a constant, a given, and his personal battle lies in trying to either arrest time entirely or to make the hands on his clock move ever faster. For Ponce de León, time is a problem of body, and only by escaping his container can he escape time itself.’ (BR)
Ben Russell, River Rites, USA-Suriname, 2011, 12 min
‘Trance dance and water implosion.’ A constantly moving camera passes through a complex choreography of bodies engaged in rituals of work and play along the Upper Suriname River.
PROGRAMME NOTES
RITES OF PASSAGE
Saturday 20 October 2012, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
GREAT BLOOD SACRIFICE
Steve Reinke, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 4 min
A walk with shaky hand held camera through the landscape of the high desert of New Mexico, down the cliffs to a water reservoir accompanied by Reinke’s voice over. (Argos Arts)
www.myrectumisnotagrave.com
MANQUE DE PREUVES (LACK OF EVIDENCE)
Hayoun Kwon, South Korea-France, 2011, video, colour, sound, 10 min
In Nigeria, to be a twin can be a blessing or a curse. The father of O is the village chief, a witch doctor who believes in the curse of twins. One day, this witch doctor tried to kill his two sons during a ritual ceremony: O managed to escape but saw his brother being murdered. Having fled across his country, he succeeded, by chance, in leaving Nigeria and going into exile in France. In this context, he applied for asylum but his application was refused because he could not produce any proof. (Hayoun Kwon)
BIRDS
Gabriel Abrantes, Portugal-Haiti, 2012, video, colour, sound, 17 min
Three Haitian girls wander through the ripe vegetation and colonial ruins of tropical Jakmel. After listening to an old man’s perverse folk tales they make their way to the town square and see a local staging of a comic masterpiece from ancient Greece; Aristophanes’ Birds. The film’s mysterious intertwining of disparate cultural forms serves as an ode to the potentials of cultural creolization. (Gabriel Abrantes)
mutualrespectproductions.blogspot.co.uk
PONCE DE LEÓN
Ben Russell & Jim Drain, USA, 2012, video, colour, sound, 26 min
‘I could do wonders if I didn’t have a body. But the body grabs me, it slows me, it enslaves me.’
Our Ponce de León discovered the fountain of youth and drank of immortality in the waning moments of his life. In an instant, he became old forever – an 80-year old Spaniard who would continue to walk the earth for century after century after century, watching as coral foundations gave way to mangrove swamps, as swamps were drained and buildings were erected, as buildings decayed and swamps returned. Our Ponce de León is an immortal for whom time poses the greatest dilemma – it is a constant, a given, and his personal battle lies in trying to either arrest time entirely or to make the hands on his clock move ever faster. For Ponce de León, time is a problem of body, and only by escaping his container can he escape time itself. (Ben Russell)
www.dimeshow.com
RIVER RITES
Ben Russell, USA-Suriname, 2011, video, colour, sound, 12 min
A trance dance and water implosion, a kino-line drawn between secular possession and religious phenomena. Filmed in one shot at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of a Saramaccan animist everyday are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new trypps; embodiment is our eternal everything. (Ben Russell)
www.dimeshow.com
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Date: 21 October 2012 | Season: London Film Festival 2012 | Tags: London Film Festival, Peter Kubelka
PETER KUBELKA PRESENTS MONUMENT FILM
Sunday 21 October 2012, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 1
Peter Kubelka, Monument Film, Austria, 2012, c.90 min (lecture screening)
The Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka has been a vital and uncompromising force in cinema for more than half a century. In a body of work that lasts not much more than an hour in total, he condenses and articulates the essential qualities of analogue cinema, distinguishing film as an autonomous artform. His 1960 film Arnulf Rainer, composed only of the purest elements of light and darkness, sound and silence, remains one of the most radical achievements in film history. In 2012, his new work Antiphon – in equal terms a response to that earlier film and a testament to the entire medium – will be revealed in a unique lecture screening. With 35mm projectors situated in the auditorium, each film will be screened individually, then combined as double projections, both side-by-side and superimposed upon each other. Throughout the event, Kubelka will explicate his theories, communicating his enthusiasm for cinema, and the differences between film and digital media.
Please Note: The projection of Monument Film was unfortunately cancelled due to technical problems. Peter Kubelka presented a verbal lecture on this occasion, and the complete event was rescheduled for Tuesday 9 April 2013.
PROGRAMME NOTES
PETER KUBELKA PRESENTS MONUMENT FILM
Sunday 21 October 2012, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 1
I am announcing a new film ANTIPHON (2012) which is part of a new work MONUMENT FILM (2012).
ANTIPHON is constituted by the same four basic elements of cinema
– light and darkness, sound and silence – as my film ARNULF RAINER, but it has the opposite form. Negative becomes positive, positive becomes negative, silence becomes sound, sound becomes silence.
MONUMENT FILM appears in TWO forms:
I
Projection in a dark and silent space:
1) ARNULF RAINER
2) ANTIPHON
3) ARNULF RAINER and ANTIPHON projected at the same time, side by side. The appearance is continuous light alternating in space between two projectors, and continuous sound alternating between two speakers.
4) ARNULF RAINER and ANTIPHON projected at the same time on one screen with one speaker. The appearance theoretically is continuous projection of WHITE light and continuous sound, but there is a slight alternation between the two machines, articulating the materiality of classic cinema.
II
Installation in a bright rectangular space defined by three white walls:
The films are cut, each in 128 equally long strips, which hang on nails and are arranged in a rectangular, metric form.
1) Left wall: ARNULF RAINER
2) Right wall: ANTIPHON exactly opposite
3) Centre wall: ARNULF RAINER and ANTIPHON placed one over the other. The appearance is theoretically a BLACK rectangle but the antiphony is articulated by the two strips of film. (Peter Kubelka)
The Monument Film installation is on display in the BFI Southbank Atrium for the duration of the Festival.
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Date: 21 October 2012 | Season: London Film Festival 2012 | Tags: London Film Festival
WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENS
Sunday 21 October 2012, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
Peter Miller, Ten Minutiae, Germany, 2012, 5 min
A series of brief exercises in cinematographic magic.
Shumona Goel & Shai Heredia, I am Micro, India, 2011, 15 min
‘Shot in an abandoned optics factory and centred on the activities of a low budget film crew, I am Micro is an experimental essay about filmmaking, the medium of film, and the spirit of making independent cinema.’ (SG/SH)
Kevin Jerome Everson, Rita Larson’s Boy, USA, 2012, 11 min
In one of a trilogy of works based on personalities from the filmmaker’s parents’ hometown, actors audition for the role of sitcom character Rollo Larson. As they attempt to inhabit the character, subtle variations in delivery bring a hypnotic dimension to disconnected lines and repetitive actions.
Erin Espelie, True-Life Adventure, USA, 2012, 4 min
Espelie trains her camera on the myriad life forms that coexist within a small area around a mountain creek. ‘When nature writes the screenplays, she doesn’t abide by crescendos.’ (EE)
Nick Collins, Dark Garden, UK, 2011, 9 min
Contours of light define the flowers and plants of a winter garden, filmed against the black expanse of the night sky.
Robert Todd, Within, USA, 2012, 9 min
‘A film that sustains a complex condition: keeping the inner world alive as the camera looks ‘out’ upon the world.’ (RT)
David Gatten, By Pain and Rhyme and Arabesques of Foraging, USA, 2012, 8 min
An ‘experiment touching colours’ inspired by 17th Century scientist Robert Boyle, bringing together exquisite images shot over a 13-year period. Its title, from a sonnet by Jorie Graham, encapsulates the process and infers its poetic consequence.
Ben Rivers, The Creation As We Saw It, UK-Vanuatu, 2012, 14 min
Unexpectedly given the opportunity to travel anywhere in the world, Ben Rivers chose Vanuatu in the South Pacific. Amidst the villages and landscapes of this remote archipelago, he sought out the creation myths and folktales of a distant culture.
Erin Espelie will give a talk and screening at The Natural History Museum on Mon 22 Oct 2012, at 2:30pm.
PROGRAMME NOTES
WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENS
Sunday 21 October 2012, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
TEN MINUTIAE
Peter Miller, Germany, 2012, 16mm, b/w, silent, 5 min
Minutiae are ‘little things’. Here are ten. These little things comprise an exhibition exalting the cinema. (Peter Miller)
www.petermiller.info
I AM MICRO
Shumona Goel & Shai Heredia, India, 2011, 35mm, b/w, sound, 15 min
I Am Micro is an experimental film portrait of an anonymous filmmaker struggling to make films against innumerable odds. A stream of consciousness voiceover describes the film artist as a fragile, amorphous being, working in isolation, within a competitive film industry built by businessmen. The film was shot on black and white 16mm at National Instruments Limited, a now defunct factory in Calcutta which once produced cameras. I Am Micro combines lyrical tracking shots of obsolete machinery and dismembered cameras, with behind the scenes footage of an independent film production in Bombay. (Shumona Goel & Shai Heredia)
RITA LARSON’S BOY
Kevin Jerome Everson, USA, 2012, video, b/w, sound, 11 min
Rita Larson’s Boy portrays ten actors auditioning for the role of Rollo Larson in the 1970s TV sitcom Sanford and Son (the American remake of Steptoe and Son). It is one of three films included in the Tombigbee Chronicles Number Two. The series of films is based on famous people and objects from Columbus, Mississippi, hometown of Everson’s parents (the Tombigbee is the river the runs though the city). The actor Nathaniel Taylor, raised in Columbus, portrayed Rollo Larson – Rita Larson’s boy. (Kevin Everson)
TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE
Erin Espelie, USA, 2012, video, colour, sound, 4 min
When nature writes the screenplays, she doesn’t abide by crescendos but makes up each adventure as she goes along. A rivulet of time encased in a sliver of space reveals an abundance of life, an expression of persistence, and a vision of a world expanding beyond the limits of human attempts to contain or conclude. (Erin Espelie)
DARK GARDEN
Nick Collins, UK, 2011, 16mm, b/w, silent, 9 min
Dark Garden is a short film that captures the ghostly images of the artist’s garden in wintertime, a silent world of ghostly apparitions. Skeletal and silvery plants and their supports are conjured out of the black of the screen as a series of filmic epiphanies. (Cinecity)
WITHIN
Robert Todd, USA, 2012, 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min
Within is a film that sustains a complex condition: keeping the inner world alive as the camera looks ‘out’ upon the world. The film, edited mainly in-camera, dives into an interior that drifts increasingly internally, seeking a sort of cave-like milieu that dissolves into abstraction (forms seen in the dark, lacking firm definition, confusing both scales and distances), and then employs real-time complications to bring this internally-directed way of feeling space along with us as it moves into the outside world, or is it an imagined outer world? The film is a further complication of the perspectival explorations present in my film Undergrowth: rather than looking either at a figure or what some imaginary figure might be looking ‘at’, Within lives in a state that seems to resist perspectival definition, hovering somewhere between what is ‘out there’ and an internally defined image space that sees along with it. The film exists in a space that is at once shallow and deep, layered and reflective, barely there and yet very much alive. It is twilight. (Robert Todd)
www.roberttoddfilms.com
BY PAIN AND RHYME AND ARABESQUES OF FORAGING
David Gatten, USA, 2012, video, colour, silent, 8 min
Fourteen years of foraging, repeated attempts at rhyming, painful process of pruning. A love letter of sorts to Robert Boyle, FRS of The Invisible College and the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, in a visual embodiment of an obscure poetic form known as an ‘exploded Petrarchan sonnet.’ Lines by Jorie Graham in ‘Of Forced Sightes and Trusty Ferefulness’, after Sir Thomas Wyatt, informed both the impulse for the journey itself and destination I ultimately sought. (David Gatten)
www.davidgattenfilm.com
THE CREATION AS WE SAW IT
Ben Rivers, UK-Vanuatu, 2012, video, b/w, sound, 14 min
Three mythical stories from the island nation of Vanuatu, South Pacific, concerning the origin of humans, why pigs walk on all fours, and why a volcano sits where it does. (Ben Rivers)
www.benrivers.com
Erin Espelie will present a free screening and talk in the Attenborough Auditorium of the Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre on Monday 22 October 2012, at 2:30pm.
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Date: 21 October 2012 | Season: London Film Festival 2012 | Tags: London Film Festival
FLY INTO THE MYSTERY
Sunday 21 October 2012, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
Laida Lertxundi, A Lax Riddle Unit, Spain-USA, 2011, 6 min
‘In a Los Angeles interior, moving walls for loss. Practicing a song to a loved one. A film of the feminine structuring body.’ (LL)
Beatrice Gibson, Agatha, UK, 2012, 14 min
Strangers in a strange land. As the narrator recounts a dream by composer Cornelius Cardew, the viewer is transported from the hills of Snowdonia to a mental landscape where sci-fi commingles with sexual fantasy.
Lewis Klahr, Well Then There Now, USA, 2011, 11 min
Loosely interpreting a scenario by John Zorn, Klahr uses subconscious logic to weave strands of suspense from collaged images and fragments of voiceover.
Mary Helena Clark, The Plant, USA, 2012, 8 min
‘A film filled with clues and stray transmissions built on the bad geometry of point-of-view shots.’ (MHC)
Janie Geiser, Arbor, USA, 2012, 7 min
The layered imagery of Geiser’s uncanny animations suggest surreal worlds and spectral presences. ‘I was wide awake, in a dream.’
Beatrice Gibson, The Tiger’s Mind, UK, 2012, 20 min
Again referencing Cardew, Gibson’s new project The Tiger’s Mind takes his 1967 text score and applies it to the process of making a collaborative film, for which each contributor assumes the role of a character. The result is an abstract psychodrama and crime thriller set against the backdrop of a modernist house. Commissioned by The Showroom and CAC Bretigny.
PROGRAMME NOTES
FLY INTO THE MYSTERY
Sunday 21 October 2012, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
A LAX RIDDLE UNIT
Laida Lertxundi, Spain-USA, 2011, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 min
A Lax Riddle Unit shows a series of gentle transformations. Each of the film’s turns reveals a surprise: a woman suddenly appearing in bed, and, from behind an album cover, her shy smile. With the film’s elements of Los Angeles landscape, houseplants, and James Carr’s plaintive ‘Love Attack’, continually rearranged like the letters of the title, which is an anagram for Lertxundi’s own name, there is the sense of kaleidoscopic rotation, breathtaking views made with the slightest of movements: changing light, cuts, and slowly revolving camera pans. (Genevieve Yue)
AGATHA
Beatrice Gibson, UK, 2012, video, colour, sound, 14 min
The side of the frame flares out so you know it’s a dream. It becomes apparent that, although similar, there are profound differences between this planet and our own. The most startling is the lack of verbal language. The narrator, our guide to this world, tells us how communication happens, based on interactions with Gladys and Agatha, two beings that confound as they draw the observer in. The names are created for our benefit, and one must wonder if any observations can be trusted, are they all too written, too read from dialogue that isn’t there? What may be certain is the loosening that happens with regard to interpretation. If words cease to have importance then how can the experiences on this planet be readily expressed? Instead of syntax and meaning we are left with rhythm and colour. Based on a dream had by the radical British composer Cornelius Cardew. (Images Festival)
www.dliub.org
WELL THEN THERE NOW
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2011, video, colour, sound, 11 min
An unfaithful interpretation of John Zorn’s early 80’s film script ‘A Treatment For A Film in 15 Scenes’. I consider Well Then There Now a ‘list’ film since Zorn’s text is really a shot list. An exploration of the singularity of the image but, a playful one. Script and Music by John Zorn; Additional Text Lifts from Philippe Soupalt and Alain Robbe Grillet; Voiceover by Slater Klahr.
(Lewis Klahr)
THE PLANT
Mary Helena Clark, USA, 2012, video, colour, sound, 8 min
A film filled with clues and stray transmissions built on the bad geometry of point-of-view shots. (Mary Helena Clark)
ARBOR
Janie Geiser, USA, 2012, video, b/w, sound, 7 min
From a set of photographs found in a thrift store, Geiser creates a liminal space between representation and abstraction, figure and landscape, fiction and memory. Arbor suggests the fragility and ephemerality of memory and its artifacts through subtle manipulations of the photographs: reframings, layerings, inversions, and through the introduction of three dimensional elements, including flowers and thread. The photographs’ subjects are elusive; they rarely engage the camera; they are glimpsed, rather than seen. They look elsewhere, and wait for something inevitable. Gathering on a hillside, lounging on the grass beyond now-lost trees, the inhabitants of Arbor cycle through their one remembered afternoon, gradually succumbing to time or dissolving into landscape, reserving for themselves what we can’t know – and becoming shadows in their own stories. (Janie Geiser)
www.janiegeiser.com
THE TIGER’S MIND
Beatrice Gibson, UK, 2012, video, colour, sound, 22 min
The Tiger’s Mind is an abstract crime thriller set against the backdrop of a brutalist villa. Six characters, The Tiger, The Mind, The Tree, Wind, The Circle and a girl called Amy (the set, the music, the sounds, the special effects, the narrator and the author respectively) battle one another for control of the film as it unfolds on screen. The film explores the relationships between these characters as they emerge and unfold: grappling, wrestling, and dreaming with one another. The Tiger’s Mind is based on an experimental narrative score of the same name, written in 1967 by the radical British composer Cornelius Cardew. Departing from the character-based and improvisatory nature of the score and working with a fixed group of artists for over a year-long period (Alex Waterman as the Tree, Jesse Ash as the Wind, John Tilbury as the Mind, Celine Condorelli as the Tiger, Will Holder as Amy and Beatrice Gibson as the Circle) the film deployed the score as a production structure inviting the participants to develop its varying components: soundtrack, set, special effects, music and text. The resulting piece presents a portrait of its own making in fictional form, extending narrative and character to the production process itself. Tiger’s sets, Mind’s music, Wind’s effects, Tree’s foley, Amy’s narration and Circle’s authorship all knock up against each other in a battle for primacy. (Beatrice Gibson)
www.dliub.org
Laida Lertxundi will screen her work alongside films by Morgan Fisher, Hollis Frampton
and Bruce Baillie at the ICA Artists’ Film Club on Tuesday 23 October 2012, at 7pm.
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Date: 9 April 2013 | Season: London Film Festival 2012 | Tags: Peter Kubelka
PETER KUBELKA PRESENTS MONUMENT FILM
Tuesday 9 April 2013, at 6:30pm
London BFI Southbank NFT1
Peter Kubelka, Monument Film, Austria, 1960/2012, c.90 min (lecture screening)
The Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka has been a vital and uncompromising force in cinema for more than half a century. In a body of work that lasts not much more than an hour in total, he condenses and articulates the essential qualities of analogue cinema, distinguishing film as an autonomous artform. His 1960 film Arnulf Rainer, composed only of the purest elements of light and darkness, sound and silence, remains one of the most radical achievements in film history. In response to that earlier work, his new film Antiphon was revealed in 2012 as part of Monument Film, a powerful testament to the entire medium. With two 35mm projectors situated in the auditorium, each film is screened individually, then combined as double projections, both side-by-side and superimposed upon each other. Throughout this extraordinary projection event, Peter Kubelka will discuss his theories, explaining the differences between film and digital media, and articulating his belief in the survival of cinema.
Curated by Mark Webber. Presented with the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum, London. This performance was originally scheduled for the 56th BFI London Film Festival last October.
