LUX Salon: New German Cinema

LUX SALON: NEW GERMAN CINEMA with Thomas Draschan
Wednesday 11 September 2002, at 7:30pm
London LUX

German Filmmaker Thomas Draschan presents a special programme of new experimental cinema from Germany including work by Draschan, Ulrich Wiesner, Thomas Feldmann, Kerstin Cmelka, Goh Harada and Nino Pezzella.

Thomas Draschan was a student of Peter Kubelka at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt and co-curated the programme ‘In Kubelka’s Shadow’ at the 2001 London Film Festival, which included earlier works by several of the filmmakers that are featured tonight. He works independently to organise the Frankfurt Filmschau, and the Independent Film Show in Naples.

Thomas Draschan, Yes Oui Ja, 2003, 16mm, colour, sound, 4 min
Ulrich Wiesner, Afrika Bonus, 1982, 16mm, colour, sound, 3 min
Ulrich Wiesner, Deutschland Lacht (Germany Laughs), 1982, 16mm, colour, sound, 3 min
Thomas Feldmann, 2 Chinesische Zeichen (2 Chinese Signs), 1982, 16mm, colour, sound, 2 x 2 min
Goh Harada, Blaufilm, 1999-2000, 16mm, colour, silent, 10 min
Nino Pezzella, Zum Briefkasten, 1989-2002, 16mm, colour, sound, 17 min

LUX Salon: Philip Hoffman

LUX SALON: PHILIP HOFFMAN
Monday 18 November 2002, at 7pm
London Canada House

Philip Hoffman has long been recognized as Canada’s preeminent diary filmmaker. For over twenty years he has been straining history through personal fictions, using the material of his life to deconstruct the Griersonian legacy of documentary practice. As an artist working directly upon the material of film, Hoffman is keenly attuned to the shape of seeing, foregrounding the image and its creation as well as the manufacture of point-of-view. Hoffman’s films are deeply troubled in their remembrances; he dusts off the family archive to examine how estrangement fuels a fascination with the familiar surroundings of home.

Mortality forms the absent centre of Philip Hoffman’s oeuvre, a body of films that seems to foreshadow a penultimate loss that will take the maker to the outer and inner reaches of grief. Through the repeating figure of death – whether a boy lying on a Mexican roadside, the death of an elephant at the Rotterdam Zoo, or his uncle’s legacy of insanity and death in passing through/torn formations – Hoffman approaches the limits of representation and the ethical burdens of vision and reproduction. (Karyn Sandlos, Toronto Images Festival, 2001) 

Please Note: Opening Series 2 consists of 12 segments, each segment in its own hand- painted film canister. Through the visual references on the canisters, the audience, prior to the screening, orders the flow of the film.

Philip Hoffman, Kokoro is for Heart, 1999, colour, sound, 7 min
Philip Hoffman, passing through / torn formations, 1998, b/w & colour, sound, 43 min
Philip Hoffman, Chimera, 1996, colour, sound, 15 min
Philip Hoffman, Opening Series 2, 1993, colour, silent, 7 min

LUX Salon: Gunvor Nelson

LUX SALON: GUNVOR NELSON
Tuesday 19 November 2002, at 7:30pm
London LUX

Swedish avant-garde filmmaker, Gunvor Nelson was one of the central figures in the avant-garde film movement that emerged in the Bay Area in the 60s. Tonight she presents a selection of her work including the classic Red Shift as well as her recent videotapes.

Gunvor Nelson, Red Shift, USA/Sweden, 1984, 16mm, b/w, sound, 50 min
Gunvor Nelson, Tree-Line (Tradgrans), Sweden, 1998, video, colour, sound, 8 min
Gunvor Nelson, Snowdrift (aka Snowstorm), 2001, video, colour, sound, 9 min

Red Shift is a film in black and white about relationships, generations and time. The subtitle is ‘All Expectation’. The movement of a luminous body toward and away from us can be found in its spectral lines. A shift toward red occurs with anybody that is self-luminous and receding. There is uncertainty about how much observable material exists.

“It involves Gunvor Nelson, her mother and her daughter. Carefully and with great tenderness, it focuses on these three women, trying to show us their relationship, succeeding with an emotional impact that is hardly ever found in such a subject. It is not the social context which is exploited but the little gestures, everyday events. Red Shift is a radical film; it sets new measures for avant-garde filmmaking dealing with personal problems.” (Alf Bold, Arsenal, Berlin)

LUX Salon: Alex MacKenzie

LUX SALON: ALEX MACKENZIE
Wednesday 15 January 2003, at 7:30pm
London LUX

Alex MacKenzie works as a media curator, filmmaker and performer in the film and video fields. His works are simultaneously accessible and abstract, working from a model of both expanded cinema and performance with the serendipity of the hand-processed and degraded image integral to the work. Alex is the primary programmer and coordinator of The Blinding Light!! Cinema, an alternative and underground screening and performance space devoted to presenting cutting edge, underground, and obscure film and video six nights a week in Vancouver, Canada. He is also the Festival Director for the Vancouver Underground Film Festival. This is his first European tour.

“I am currently interested in reconfiguring, repositioning and recontextualizing outmoded and ephemeral film materials and media devices in order to examine them beyond their original intention and as a formal attempt to dehistorify and reinvent meaning.” —Alex MacKenzie

Alex MacKenzie, This Fleeting, 2003, video (originally 16mm), 45 min
Alex MacKenzie, MEDI(CINE), 2003, expanded cinema performance, 16mm, 20 min

LUX Salon: Azazel Jacobs

LUX SALON: AZAZEL JACOBS
Wednesday 12 February 2003, at 7:30pm
London LUX

First-time feature film maker Azazel Jacobs skillfully interweaves four strands of New York life. The city itself is a central character, portrayed in delicate black and white imagery. A young black man who observes and acts as our eyes through his voice-over represents another. The third, forming the central story, involves a young actress, disenchanted by an audition, now struggling to find another way to be herself, in contrast to her flat mate still dreaming of being a star. And fourth are the auditions of a pretentious young director, actually completely unclear about what he seeks, who takes his actresses through the ordeal of convincingly playing their death. While he works with some dangerously familiar motifs of the American indie cinema (agonising young actresses, the making of films about the making of movies), Jacobs gives fresh depth to this territory, always offering a completely convincing and sympathetic portrait of his young New Yorkers and their scene, always keeping us involved. He gets the best out of his actors, the auditions in particular make fascinating performance pieces within the film itself. A film with brains. Premiered at Rotterdam Film Festival 2003, and selected for screening in the Hong Kong Film Festival.

Azazel Jacobs, Nobody Needs to Know, USA, 2003, 95 min
A fresh and absorbing portrait of New York, its streets and views is folded intelligently in with a story of a young New York actress struggling to escape the shallowness of the acting world, heightened by a subtle sub-theme of almost Warholian filmed auditions.

LUX Salon: Courtney Hoskins & Mary Beth Reed

LUX SALON: COURTNEY HOSKINS & MARY BETH REED
Thursday 26 June 2003, at 7:30pm
London LUX

LUX is pleased to present the first UK show by Courtney Hoskins and Mary Beth Reed, two young American filmmakers whose films combine photographed footage with hand-painted film and manipulation of the optical printer. Both studied with Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and their works were included in the recent Brakhage fundraiser and tribute at The Other Cinema. Courtney Hoskins uses various optics techniques to create her film worlds. Using the properties of the light waves themselves (twisting and bending certain wavelengths), she develops an otherworldly palette that shows the complexities and surprises found in the seemingly mundane objects of our daily lives. Mary Beth Reed mixes animation and abstraction into a kaleidoscopic flow of hand painted and optically printed film. She creates films of exquisite colour and imagery that dance across the screen with a mesmerising and unique rhythmic quality. The programme will be in two discreet parts, with a short interval, and both Courtney and Mary Beth will be here to discuss their work.

Courtney Hoskins, The Galilean Satellites (Europa, Io, Ganymede, Callisto), 2003
Courtney Hoskins, Munkphilm, 2001
Courtney Hoskins, Gossamer Conglomerate, 2001
Courtney Hoskins, Snow Flukes, 2002
Courtney Hoskins, Les Vitraux de St. Chappelle, 2003
Mary Beth Reed, Sunday Afternoon
Mary Beth Reed, Sand Castle, 2000
Mary Beth Reed, Pink Film, 2000
Mary Beth Reed, Montessori Sword Fight, 2002
Mary Beth Reed, Floating Under a Honey Tree, 1999
Mary Beth Reed, Moose Mountain, 2002
Mary Beth Reed, Moose Mountain 2

LUX Salon: Wojciech Bruszewski: Film / Video / Phenomena

LUX SALON: WOJCIECH BRUSZEWSKI: FILM / VIDEO / PHENOMENA
Wednesday 8 October 2003, at 7:30pm
London LUX

As a founder member of the Lodz Film Academy’s radical Workshop of Film Form in the early 70s, Wojciech Bruszewski’s multimedia experiments included YYAA, a 3-minute long primal scream in which changes in light exposure modulate the soundtrack. Other films, like Tea-Spoon and Match-Box, also challenged the viewer by manipulating expectations of synchronous sound and image, and his early video work examines the immediate relationship between camera, monitor and viewer made possible by instant playback or live feed technology. At the LUX Salon, Bruszewski will offer a selection of works by himself and his students, from his earliest days to the present. The final programme contents to be decided by the audience on the night.

Presented in association with Lumen and Evolution 03, Leeds.

LUX Salon: Taka Iimura: 2 Film Performances

LUX SALON: TAKA IIMURA: 2 FILM PERFORMANCES
Monday 13 October 2003, at 7:30pm
London LUX

Legendary Japanese avant-garde film and video artist Takahiko Iimura has rigorously explored structural, material and theoretical properties of film, video and new media for over 40 years. At the Lux Salon he will appear in person to present two of his vintage live film performance of the 1970s: Circle and Square (for 16mm film loop and hole punch) and White Calligraphy (for mobile Super-8 projector).

Presented in association with Lumen and Evolution 03, Leeds.

LUX Salon: Hannes Schüpbach: Film Solo

LUX SALON: HANNES SCHÜPBACH: FILM SOLO
Wednesday 12 November 2003, at 7:30pm
London LUX

The Swiss artist Hannes Schüpbach creates silent colour films that evoke an experience similar to poetry. He composes and varies images of places, people, and gestures, deriving from a specific living context in each film. The subtlety and distance of his images invite the eye to ‘listen’ very carefully. The program shows the gradual development of the artist’s film language, based on the nature of the film image as both trace of reality and potential metaphor. Hannes Schüpbach has been working with film, parallel to his large painting suites, since the early 1990s.

Hannes Schüpbach, Portrait Mariage, 2000, colour, silent, 9 min
Hannes Schüpbach, Spin, 2001, colour, silent, 12 min
Hannes Schüpbach, Toccata, 2002, colour, silent, 28 min

LUX Salon: Werner Von Mutzenbecher: Everyday Actions / Ordinary Objects

LUX SALON: WERNER VON MUTZENBECHER: EVERYDAY ACTIONS / ORDINARY OBJECTS
Friday 14 November 2003, at 7:30pm
London LUX

The first ever UK solo screening for this established Swiss artist, who will present a selection of his films from 1971 to present. Mutzenbecher began painting in 1958 and filmmaking in 1968, and has exhibited regularly in Switzerland and Europe. Apparently mundane actions and objects are the focus of his films, which blur the boundaries between materiality, portraiture and performance. The early works are more performative, while later films take a diaristic, personal approach to create impressions of Mutzenbecher’s immediate environment, using those characteristics unique to the medium.

Werner Von Mutzenbecher, III/71, 1971, b/w, sound, 15 min
Werner Von Mutzenbecher, XIV/82 Filme, 1982, colour, sound, 21 min
Werner Von Mutzenbecher, XV/84 Vogelhaus, 1984, b/w, sound, 9 min
Werner Von Mutzenbecher, XVI/84 Fenster III, 1984, b/w, silent, 4 min
Werner Von Mutzenbecher, XVIII/85 Untergrund, 1985, b/w, sound, 5 min
Werner Von Mutzenbecher, XIX/88 4 mal 8, 1988, colour, silent, 3 min
Werner Von Mutzenbecher, XXIV/99 Fenster IV, 1999, colour, sound, 3 min
Werner Von Mutzenbecher, XXVI/99/03 Rencontres, 1999/2003, b/w, silent, 2 min
Werner Von Mutzenbecher, XXVII/03 Filmmakers’ Afternoon, 2003, b/w, silent, 6 min