Date: 30 October 2005 | Season: London Film Festival 2005 | Tags: London Film Festival
THE HEART OF THE MATTER
Sunday 30 October 2005, at 9pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, The Space Between, UK, 2005, 12 min
Time and space shattered into shards of light. Footage shot in India and thoroughly reworked in the optical printer into a rigorous, flickering duality.
Peter Tscherkassky, Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine, Austria, 2005, 17 min
Torment on the editing table: a Hollywood western persecuted by the brutal mechanics of the cinematic. A ruthless duel between character and conduit, played out to the death.
Daïchi Saïto, Chasmic Dance, Canada, 2004, 6 min
An expression of primal rhythmic energy that synthesises high-contrast film stock with exaggerated video raster lines.
Fred Worden, Blue Pole(s), USA, 2005, 20 min
Worden finds a digital outlet for the research into visual phenomena pursued in his films, creating one of the most startling abstract works of recent years. Video signal as constellation of light, piercing a cosmos of noetic possibilities. Its soundtrack is the equally mesmerising ‘London Fix’ by Tom Hamilton, an electronic composition based on the fluctuating price of gold. This strange brew is visual voodoo of the highest order.
Michael Robinson, You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, USA, 2005, 8 min
Powerful ecological omen composed of centrefold landscapes from National Geographic magazine. The seam down the centre of the images suggests the fractures caused by our reckless treatment of the planet.
Trish van Huesen, Fugue, USA, 2004, 7 min
‘Inspired by musical and psychological definitions, Fugue examines the dark flight from identity and environment. Hand processing and the juxtaposition of positive and negative footage depict the journey of a woman as she shifts between being black or white widow or bride.’ (TvH)
PROGRAMME NOTES
THE HEART OF THE MATTER
Sunday 30 October 2005, at 9pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
THE SPACE BETWEEN
Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, UK, 2005, 16mm, colour, silent, 12 min
The Space Between tackles the context of the recycled image. Exploring the space between frames and within frames, conventional photographic representation gradually metamorphoses into abstract patterns of pulsing coloured light. What begins as an image of looking at (and through) a high-rise building offers viewers an opportunity to experience shifting relationships between perception and cognition, from realism to painterly abstraction. (Karen Mirza & Brad Butler)
www.mirza-butler.net
INSTRUCTIONS FOR A LIGHT AND SOUND MACHINE
Peter Tscherkassky, Austria, 2005, 35mm, b/w, sound, 17 min
The hero of Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine is easy to identify. Walking down the street unknowingly, he suddenly realizes that he is not only subject to the gruesome moods of several spectators but also at the mercy of the filmmaker. He defends himself heroically, but is condemned to the gallows, where he dies a filmic death through a tearing of the film itself. Our hero then descends into Hades, the realm of shadows. Here, in the underground of cinematography, he encounters innumerable printing instructions, the means whereby the existence of every filmic image is made possible. In other words, our hero encounters the conditions of his own possibility, the conditions of his very existence as a filmic shadow. Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine is an attempt to transform a Roman Western into a Greek tragedy. (Peter Tscherkassky)
www.tscherkassky.at
CHASMIC DANCE
Daïchi Saïto, Canada 2004, 16mm, b/w, silent, 6 min
A visual metaphor for the creative process as a sustained state of flux, whereby the deconstruction and reconfiguration of source material manifest themselves as a series of rapid abstract movements. Alluding to the cosmic dance of Shiva, the film is an expression of primal rhythmic energy, moving dialectically but without sublimation. Regeneration ignites destruction, and transformation invites mutation, through clashes of opposing modes such as video/film, surface/depth, and light/darkness. The original materials used in the film were images of the human body shot on 16mm film; they were modified through accidental processes in video transfer, and the resulting images were re-filmed back on 16mm, passing through multiple stages of printing on a modified Steenbeck. The film was hand-processed, optically printed and contact printed by the filmmaker. (Daichi Saito)
BLUE POLE(S)
Fred Worden, USA, 2005, video, colour, sound, 20 min
For 25 years I’ve been interested in an optical/perceptual cinema. A cinema where the eye is called out from its routine and autonomic operations and is challenged to make sense of stimuli coming not from the natural world out in front of the eyes, but rather from a source behind the eyes, the conscious mind. A kind of feedback loop in which the conscious mind employs the seductive powers of cinema to seed the perceptual mind with curiosity and imagination, qualities not native to perception. Blue Pole(s) tries hard to up the ante on the notion that film is a visual rather than literary art and that seeing as a perceptual process precedes and models thought. Music by Tom Hamilton. (Fred Worden)
YOU DON’T BRING ME FLOWERS
Michael Robinson, USA, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 8 min
Viewed at its seams, a collection of National Geographic landscapes from the 1960s and 1970s conjure an extinct American romanticism currently peddled to propagate entitlement and bigoted individualism from sea to shining sea; the slideshow deforms into a bright white distress signal. (Michael Robinson)
www.poisonberries.net
FUGUE
Trish van Huesen, USA, 2004, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min
This film, as with all of my work, is an exploration of change. It was a difficult film for me to make. I was living in the United States, and all of the horror, fear and nationalistic fanaticism after September 11th began to permeate my consciousness. The heroine of the film, as she began her descent, started to look as much like the image of a country as the image of a human being. During the editing process, as America dropped bombs on Iraq, I could not seem to get her out of “hell”, and then suddenly, just as a thunder storm strikes and then passes, the darkness broke and she ascended again. It was the collaboration with my partner in sound, Eyvind Kang, and his co-creators, which actually broke the darkness and facilitated her ascension. We were all affected by what was happening in America, but I was creating from the darkness, and they were more able to create from the light. Eyvind’s choice of ‘Emblem 50’ of Michael Maier’s fugal works, as a starting point for the soundtrack, woke me up to the reality out of which I had been creating. The result is a black and white film which examines Darkness as the partner of Light. (Trish Van Huesen)
Back to top
