DESOLATION ROW
Saturday 29 October 2005, at 9pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

FOR THEM ENDING
Jonathan Schwartz, USA, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 3 min
swallowed up in the sky,
the sound sustained by echo, always fading.
the nature of a season,
moving forward with growth or death and growth.
or i was wondering how to make new england fall colours linger so if you couldn’t visit soon
the yellows oranges and reds would still be waiting for you.
(Jonathan Schwarz)

NEPTUNE’S RELEASE: A SHOT IN THE DARK
Joell Hallowell & Jacalyn White, USA, 2004, 16mm, colour, sound, 17 min
In a collage of 16mm found footage and sound, Neptune’s Release: Shot in the Dark is a dialogue between the purveyors of salvation and the seekers, between the past and the present, the hopeful and the hopeless, the humorous and the devastating. In the human search for profound answers to complex questions we are often thrown onto the path of false prophets, indecipherable jargon, bad advice and mixed messages. But as we shoot into the dark, hoping to find a worthy target, we occasionally hit upon accidental wisdom that is surprisingly relevant and life changing. It’s an action-packed film with a star-studded cast. See Janis Joplin tussle with Timothy Leary and Shirley McClaine in a dark alley. “The day it happened was just an ordinary day.” Hear Jack Kornfield perform eye surgery, and watch Zippy the Chimp save the day. Collecting obscure advertisements of the fifties, spiritual audiotapes from the sixties and seventies, obsolete medical films and some of their own editing-bin discards, the filmmakers are a product of this jumble of material. As a consequence they have formed unique connections linking sound and image, dark and light, and the sacred and profane. It’s a 16mm roller coaster ride through time and space – where the end is just the beginning. “You will find the results unusually refreshing.” (Joell Hallowell & Jacalyn White)

L’ECLAT DU MAL
Louise Bourque, Canada, 2005, 35mm, colour, sound, 6 min
We were promised a perfect world growing up. We woke up one day and realized that those vows were little more than wishful thinking. There is a war going on. The memories of our childhood have melted, deteriorated, like the footage of Bourque’s childhood (shot by her father). An oppressively grim vision of innocence lost, of promises unfulfilled. (Ivan Lozano, Cinematexas)

TERRACE 49
Janie Geiser, USA, 2004, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 min
Images of impending disaster – slamming doors, a truck careening down a hill, and a frayed, almost snapping elevator rope – collide with the repeated image of a woman-body, cycling toward ephemerality as the woman disappears into the texture of the film itself. In my recent films, I have been exploring the possibilities found in merging video texture with film, creating a lush, disorienting, ambiguous film space, and an atmosphere of temporal suspension. In Terrace 49, I further break up this space, dividing the film frame into shards, as fractured as memory and as fragile as glass. (Janie Geiser)

TWO MINUTES TO ZERO TRILOGY
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2003-04, 16mm, colour, sound, 33 min
1. Two Days To Zero (2004, 23 min)
2. Two Hours To Zero (2004, 9 min)
3. Two Minutes to Zero (2003, 1 min)
A feature length narrative compressed three different times into three separate films of diminishing duration until the synoptic is synopsized. A crime story told three different ways concerning the events of a two month period leading up to, and immediately following a bank robbery. The imagery has all been appropriated (the fancy, art world sanctioned term for stealing) from four issues of an early 1960s comic book version of the then popular, American TV show ‘77 Sunset Strip’. […] When I first started ‘time travelling’ via collage in my mid-twenties, I naively figured I’d immerse myself, exhaust the impulse by coming to grips with some core revelation about my childhood and get back to describing the present. If someone had told me that more than two decades later I’d still be unpacking that trunk of veils where memory and history intersect and collide, I wouldn’t have believed them (back then I still believed in catharsis). So what exactly has been taking so long? What I underestimated is the degree of difficulty, despite how one pointed my focus has often been, to ‘unpack that trunk’. It’s been a long, slow wind inside, to penetrate collage and experimental film deeply enough to fine tune the empathetic projection required to reach the far shores of memory both lived and imagined. Only now, perhaps aided by the distance of middle age, am I feeling the control and insight to fully engage the found images and sounds that provoked this journey of (re-?) animation in the first place. (Lewis Klahr)

TRILOGY ABOUT CLOUDS
Naoyuki Tsuji, Japan, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 13 min
Three short animation films about clouds. It is based in charcoal drawing. The clouds without fixed forms are the worlds which surround us.
1. Breathing Cloud (Eros) (3 min)
People’s bodies and souls transform into a large cloud and are mixed with erotic shapes.
2. Looking at a Cloud (Memory of Childhood) (5 min)
Something happens at the junior high school. When a boy starts to draw a cloud,
the drawing begins to move and eat the students …
3. From the Cloud (Fantasy) (4 min)
A funny little story about people living on the soft cloud. A look at their daily life.
In the morning, they hear the bell and begin to come down from the sky.
(Naoyuki Tsjuji)

NOSTALGIA (APRIL 2001 TO PRESENT)
Christina Battle, Canada, 2005, 16mm, b/w, sound, 4 min
“The picture of the world that’s presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality.”
(Noam Chomsky)
www.cbattle.com

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