Date: 15 January 2003 | Season: LUX Salon
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
PROGRAMME NOTES
LUX SALON: ALEX MACKENZIE
Wednesday 15 January 2003, at 7:30pm
London LUX
THIS FLEETING
Alex MacKenzie, 2003, video (originally 16mm), 45 min
In 1996 I was handed a boxfull of ten-minute reels containing 16mm home movies. Shot on gorgeous Kodachrome and in Black and White the films are an incredible document of a time in history – 1948 to 1957 Vancouver and around the world – a stunning record of people, places and activities. I was inspired to reinvent and retool meaning from these films. Until now this retooling for me has meant a conscious highlighting of intended moments of spectacle, beauty and awe. With This Fleeting, I explore precisely the opposite. What of moments that are unintentional, unplanned, and finally, undesired? This Fleeting is, then, a reconfiguring of the minute and fragile moments of unintended beauty captured by a stranger in the middle of the twentieth century. Exploring the structural and visual fields with equal interest, a language of movement and invisible history is magnified, slowed down and meticulously uncovered. “This Fleeting is a re-take on the empire of family, going back through a single family’s archive and relooking at the moments, the gestures of inclusion and exclusion, the way they’ve managed to say yes with the camera. These home movies were originally made between 1948-1957 and feature bathing beauties, parades, cars, trips abroad and much much more. Relive the dream.” —Mike Hoolboom
MEDI(CINE)
Alex MacKenzie, 2003, expanded cinema performance, 16mm, 20 min
Through a subtle and mesmerising recombination of rare 16mm American medical films (originally intended for doctors’ eyes only), MEDI(CINE) jars us with unexpected clashes of images and subtle gestures of reinterpreted visual and audio information, rendering illness as beauty – the decomposing and recomposing body as site of transformation. Using colour gels, hand-masking and image-layering in a two-screen live presentation, MEDI(CINE) blends original sounds with re-tooled audio in an expanded cinema performance of physical catastrophe. ‘The sheer virtuosity of MacKenzie’s live film performance is enough to blur the line between cinema and historical re-enactment. This is history – that which is made only when reproduced – the vital urge to comprehend what has not been lived, to find meaning in the abandoned fragments of mere grandeur.’ —Jeremy Rigsby, Artistic Director, Mediacity
Back to top
