Date: 4 May 2002 | Season: Shoot Shoot Shoot 2002 | Tags: Shoot Shoot Shoot
SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT: SEMINAR
Saturday 4 May 2002, at 2pm
London Tate Modern
A symposium and gathering which will re-examine the period in which many British artists embarked on radical experiments with non-illusionist filmmaking and made important innovations in multi-screen and expanded cinema projection. Discussions will address the emergence of an underground movement, its international significance, and the relations between avant-garde film and mainstream cinema, experimental video, painting, sculpture, performance and photography.
Speakers include David Curtis from the AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies, film historians Ian Christie, Al Rees, and others. An artists’ panel featuring Peter Gidal, Anthony McCall, Lis Rhodes and Chris Welsby will be chaired by Michael Newman (Principal Lecturer in Research, Central Saint Martin’s School of Art). Plus selected special screenings. Many of the filmmakers whose work is featured in the season will be present and encouraged to contribute.
Presented by Tate Modern in collaboration with the School of Art at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design.
This event will be webcast at www.tate.org.uk/modern/programmes/webcasting/
Date: 16 April 2004 | Season: Gregory Markopoulos 2004 | Tags: Gregory Markopoulos, Markopoulos
GREGORY J. MARKOPOULOS
16-21 April 2004
London National Film Theatre
GREGORY J. MARKOPOULOS
Towards The Temenos: Myth, Portraiture and Films of Place
Gregory Markopoulos was the archetypal personal filmmaker: an accomplished technician, masterful editor and consummate perfectionist, who created great works of art with a minimum of means. A contemporary of Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and Maya Deren, he was a major figure of the New American Cinema, the post-war movement that developed a new, visionary approach to film.
Markopoulos regarded cinema as “a supreme art in a dark age”. His films illuminate literature, portraiture and architecture, shaping a modern mythology that owes more to European traditions of art-making than the Hollywood culture of commercial cinema. As a formal innovator, he developed rapid editing techniques which cut through time and space, shaping new narrative forms through a “fusion of classic montage with a more abstract system”.
Such a progressive approach to cinema, and the belief in its ability to convey thought and emotion, was grounded in an appreciation of early masters such as von Stroheim and von Sternberg, and a strong, personal commitment to developing the medium beyond its basic use in the narrative sense. Driven by a purity of vision that transcended cinematic conventions, Markopoulos’ sensual and poetic films shimmer with colour and resonate with passion.
This NFT retrospective, centred on key works of the 60s, is the first opportunity in decades to see a selection of Markopoulos’ work in the UK, and shows the filmmaker during his most visible and influential period. After moving to Europe in 1967, he withdrew all of his films from distribution, citing frustration with inadequate projection facilities and unappreciative audiences. Many subsequent films were completed but never shown, as Markopoulos conceived of the Temenos as the ideal site for a spectator’s quest. In this chosen place, the films may elevate the audience’s sense of time while emotionally and physically connecting them to the mythic themes and locations.
He died in 1992, shortly after final editing of the monumental Eniaios, which comprises of 22 cycles totalling over 80 hours of viewing time. This epic work combines radically re-edited versions of all his previous works, and many unseen films, into a single, unified whole. Filmmaker Robert Beavers has established the Temenos Association for the preservation, study and promotion of Markopoulos’ total vision, including his films, journals, letters and collected writings. This NFT season precedes the premiere of the first cycles of Eniaios, to be projected outdoors in the Greek countryside in late June.
www.the-temenos.org
LITERATURE AND MYTH: Fri 16 & Sun 18 Apr 2004
Swain and Twice a Man, two interpretations of classic literature that show a unique command of film language.
FILMS OF PLACE: Sat 17 & Mon 19 Apr 2004
Ming Green, Sorrows and Gammelion. Elegant portraits of architecture and interiors.
THE ILLIAC PASSION: Sat 17 & Tue 20 Apr 2004
The Illiac Passion, an underground interpretation of ‘Prometheus Unbound’, plus Bliss, a study of a small Greek church.
PORTRAITURE: Sun 18 & Wed 21 Apr 2004
Galaxie and Saint Actaeon. Portraits of the artistic community forming a who’s who of the 60s art world.
Markopoulos season curated by Mark Webber for NFT and LUX, in collaboration with Temenos Association. Supported by Greece In London 2004 / The Hellenic Foundation for Culture, UK. With thanks to Robert Beavers, Dr Victoria Solomides and Österreichisches Filmmuseum.
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Date: 2 June 2005 | Season: The Write Stuff
RITE WORDS, ROTE ORDER
Thursday 2 June 2005, at 7pm
London Corsica Studios
An evening of films that use written or spoken language to verbalise and hypnotise. A selection of works which, to a greater or lesser extent, use words and text to communicate their message or impart their expression. An event to educate, fascinate and possible aggravate. Inform and reform.
From socio-political films by Rhodes and Wieland through to the use of humour by Smith and Snow, and plenty more besides, here are some works that can easily be read (and I mean literally). For slight relief from the pressures of the text, the screening will be divided (but not interrupted) by unusual recordings of aural stimulation (speech / sound art / poetry / etc.) by great writers, advanced artists and crazy crackpots. You Never Heard Such Sounds In Your Life. Expect to be subjected to the sounds of Alvin Lucier, William Burroughs, John Cage, Gertrud Stein, concrete poets, dial-a-poets, Futurists, Dada’s, mothers and children, the obscurely wilful and the wilfully obscure.
“History as she is harped, rite words in rote order.”
Marcel Duchamp, Anaemic Cinema, France, 1925, b/w, silent, 7 min
John Smith, Associations, UK, 1975, colour, sound, 7 min
Martha Haslanger, Syntax, 1974, colour, sound, 13 min
Lis Rhodes, Pictures on Pink Paper, UK, 1982, colour, sound, 35 min
Joyce Wieland, Rat Life and Diet in North America, Canada, 1968, colour, sound, 16 min
Michael Snow, So is This, Canada, 1982, silent, colour, 45 min
Stan Brakhage, First Hymn to the Night – Novalis, USA, 1994, colour, silent, 4 min
Curated by Mark Webber for The Write Stuff Literary Festival at Corsica Studios.
PROGRAMME NOTES
RITE WORDS, ROTE ORDER
Thursday 2 June 2005, at 7pm
London Corsica Studios
ANAEMIC CINEMA
Marcel Duchamp, France, 1925, b/w, silent, 7 min
Duchamp used the initial payment on his inheritance to make a film and to go into the art business. The film, shot in Man Ray’s studio with the help of cinematographer Marc Allégret, was a seven-minute animation of nine punning phrases by Rrose Sélavy. These had been pasted, letter by letter, in a spiral pattern on round black discs that were then glued to phonograph records; the slowly revolving texts alternate with shots of Duchamp’s Discs Bearing Spirals, ten abstract designs whose turning makes them appear to move backward and forward in an erotic rhythm. The little film, which Duchamp called Anemic Cinema, had its premiere that August at a private screening room in Paris. (Calvin Tomkins)
ASSOCIATIONS
John Smith, UK, 1975, colour, sound, 7 min
Images from magazines and colour supplements accompany a spoken text taken from ‘‘Word Associations and Linguistic Theory’’ by Herbert H. Clark. By using the ambiguities inherent in the English language, Associations sets language against itself. Image and word work together/against each other to destroy/create meaning. (John Smith)
SYNTAX
Martha Haslanger, 1974, colour, sound, 13 min
As the word “syntax” implies, this film deals with the way in which images and sounds come together. Its main concern, however, goes deeper, and resides within a more personalized syntax: a process of retaining a narration. Syntax is a small gem, exhibiting … a kind of joyful, competent wit and strength. Haslanger prowls her camera through several rooms in an ordinary middle class house while her voice-over describes what we are about to see or have seen, never what is actually on the screen, wringing the changes of the relationship of the spoken word, image and the printed word. It is a wonderfully self-contained and seductive film. (Jump Cut)
PICTURES ON PINK PAPER
Lis Rhodes, UK, 1982, colour, sound, 35 min
In Pictures on Pink Paper, the voices of three women describe experiences of domestic life, gradually become identifiable as belonging to specific individuals. Different generations are represented in the voices of the three women, and also in the generations of images used. Here, Rhodes engages with the representative quality of the images – throughout the film photocopies and super 8 film are blown up and re-presented. This film seeks to find a female voice, but avoids generalization of a single narrative through the interweaving of these voices. In Pictures on Pink Paper the authoritative voice is slipping between appearing to be one woman’s voice and thoughts, to the experiences of three different women. Minnie, a Cornishwoman, narrates the past, Kate imitates accents and voices, and Lis Rhodes’ voice becomes identifiable as the filmmaker. This film asks how women’s oppression can be articulated without mimicking that very expression and language which produces the unbalance. In spite of being structured around these voices this film denies narrative structure – even time here is broken down. Pictures on Pink Paper highlights the gaps between and explores language as a creator, rather than a symptom, of gender relations. It seeks to ask how a female voice can be found without reducing all female experience to a generalization. As with many of Lis Rhodes’ films, Pictures on Pink Paper looks to the ways in which women are associated with nature. The alignment of women with nature and men with culture is embedded within language: unlike French and Spanish the English language is non-gendered grammatically, yet the female pronoun is regularly used for ‘natural’ objects. Language is powerful: we become inscribed within language, and Lis Rhodes challenges these assumptions by problematising language. (Lisa Le Feuvre, www.luxonline.org)
RAT LIFE AND DIET IN NORTH AMERICA
Joyce Wieland, Canada, 1968, colour, sound, 16 min
Wieland returned to the kitchen table with Rat Life and Diet in North America in 1968, a study of her pet gerbils. She filmed them in extreme close-up among cups and dinner plates, eliminating all sense of spatial depth and place, producing luscious images teeming with texture and colour. More and more, Wieland’s films were distinguished by this sensuality, setting her apart from her male counterparts in the Structuralist movement. Interestingly, Rat Life and Diet in North America contains a narrative thread, transforming the gerbils into political prisoners who escape their American oppressors, played by Wieland’s cats. They make their way to Canada where they set up an organic farm and appear to live happily ever after until an invasion by the United States. Influenced by Vietnam War protests, this political allegory is one of the most hilarious denouncements of American imperialism found in any genre. The film also betrays a basic Canadian fear and coincides with Wieland’s increasingly nationalistic concerns. Discussions of such concerns were commonplace in Canada at the time and Wieland felt drawn in, even from as far away as New York City. Rat Life and Diet in North America marked the beginning of a shift in her career. Moving away from the purely formal, Wieland plunged head-long into the political. As she did, she felt herself both disconnected from and rejected by the very movement that had initially inspired her. (Barbara Goslawski, Take One)
SO IS THIS
Michael Snow, Canada, 1982, silent, colour, 45 min
“With formalist belligerence, So Is This threatens to make its viewers ‘laugh cry and change society,’ even promising to get ‘confessional.’ Although the film does reflect Snow’s personality – his Canadian-ness, preference for humor over irony, obsession with art world chronology (who did what first) – its only confession is the tacit acknowledgement that he’s sensitive to criticism. Snow takes full advantage of his film’s system of discourse to twit restless audiences. A lot of this is pretty funny but So Is This is more than a series of gags. Snow manages to de-familiarize both film and language, creating a kind of moving concrete poetry while throwing a monkey wrench into a theoretical debate (is film a language?) that has been going on sporadically for 60 years. If you let it, Snow’s film stretches your definition of what film is – that’s cinema and So Is This. (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice)
FIRST HYMN TO THE NIGHT – NOVALIS
Stan Brakhage, USA, 1994, colour, silent, 4 min
This is a hand-painted film whose emotionally referential shapes and colors are interwoven with words (in English) form the first Hymn to the Night by the late 18th Century mystic poet Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg, whose pen name was Novalis. The pieces of text which I’ve used are as follows: ‘the universally gladdening light … As inmost soul … it is breathed by stars … by stone … by suckling plant … multiform beast … and by (you). I turn aside to Holy Night … I seek to blend with ashes. Night opens in us … infinite eyes … blessed love. (Stan Brakhage)
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Date: 29 October 2005 | Season: London Film Festival 2005 | Tags: London Film Festival
VIDEO VISIONS
Saturday 29 October 2005, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
Manuel Saiz, Specialized Technicians Required: Being Luis Porcar, Spain, 2004, 2 min
A well-known Spanish voice-over actor gives a witty demonstration of the art of dubbing.
Jacqueline Goss, How to Fix the World, USA-Uzbekistan, 2004, 28 min
A 1930s Soviet literacy study of Central Asian farmers is brought to life in this stylized digital animation. The responses of the collective workers are both humorous and revealing: the clash of ideologies is as apparent as the difference between the cognitive processes of written language and their oral tradition.
Guy Ben-Ner, Wild Boy, Israel-USA, 2004, 17 min
With a minimum of means, Ben-Ner tames and domesticates a young boy discovered living like a wild animal in the woods. A real kitchen sink drama told with the delicate humour of classic silent cinema.
Chris Haring & Mara Mattuschka, Legal Errorist, Austria, 2005, 15 min
Stephanie Cumming’s astonishing dance performance has her twitching and thrashing like an android on a bad data day. Abandoned in a dark void, the Legal Errorist is a brain in overload, a ‘creature that cannot stop crashing.’
Oliver Pietsch, Tuned, Germany, 2004, 14 min
Scenes from mainstream movies skilfully edited into a stream of unconsciousness and elevated by an emotive sound mix. Sneak a peek at high times in Hollywood with this compilation of fake intoxication.
Kenneth Anger, Mouse Heaven, USA, 2005, 10 min
Not a work we would have expected from the Magus who was reportedly working on a production of Aleister Crowley’s ‘Gnostic Mass’. Mouse Heaven is a lively romp through the world’s largest collection of antique Mickey memorabilia, assembled (like the masterpiece Scorpio Rising) as a series of vignettes to different musical tracks, ranging from The Boswell Sisters to – bizarrely – the Proclaimers! Puckish fun from the maestro.
PROGRAMME NOTES
VIDEO VISIONS
Saturday 29 October 2005, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
SPECIALIZED TECHNICIANS REQUIRED: BEING LUIS PORCAR
Manuel Saiz, Spain, 2004, video, colour, sound, 2 min
Manuel Saiz has done it! The Famous Hollywood Actor has once again gracefully accepted to be or not to be what he is. Witness the film that inspired the pun in the title of this short video – he is not afraid of a few digs at his person and status. He probably has a small army of agents, managers and assistants around him, to keep all those who are trying to make use of him because of his name at a distance. Perhaps Manuel Saiz was lucky, perhaps he knows the friends of the friends of – perhaps he has been waiting on the doorstep and hanging on the phone for months, driving the whole army crazy. He probably just used a sympathetic argument that struck the right cord: Would the actor who likes role reversals for once lend his charismatic voice to a man who is used to doing precisely that? A man who always obligingly keeps out of sight, but who is, to the Spanish speaking part of the world population, the actor’s mouthpiece, and therefore to a great extent ‘is him’. Being Luis Porcar is part of the series Specialized Technicians Required, and it makes you wonder who actually is the specialized technician in this construction. Is it the main character, the man who does the dubbing, or is it the artist himself, who nowadays has to master so many different skills in order to be able to carry out his profession properly? (Vinken & Van Kampen)
HOW TO FIX THE WORLD
Jacqueline Goss/USA-Uzbekistan 2004, video, colour, sound, 28 min
How To Fix The World is a digitally animated video adapted from Soviet psychologist A.R. Luria’s research in Central Asia in the 1930s. In Luria’s book ‘Cognitive Development: Its Social and Cultural Foundations’, the author presents data collected from three years of interviews with Uzbek and Kyrgyz farmers who lived on or near the Soviet-sponsored collective farms in the 1930s. During this time, the Soviets introduced literacy programs into these primarily Muslim oral-based agricultural communities. Interested in documenting the cognitive changes that people experience when learning to read, Luria also captured the cultural conflict of Soviet Socialism and Islam. In How To Fix The World, the conversations transcribed into Luria’s book are brought to life via simple animation techniques. Max Penson’s photographs of the collective farms serve as the visual model for the animations and they play against a backdrop of landscape images shot in Central Asia in 2004. At once humorous, conflicting and revelatory, these conversations between Luria and his subjects illustrate a particular historical moment when one culture attempted to transform another in the name of education and modernization. The subtleties of this transformation are found in the words exchanged and documented seventy years ago. (Jacqueline Goss)
www.jacquelinegoss.com
WILD BOY
Guy Ben-Ner/Israel-USA 2004, video, colour, sound, 17 min
Wild Boy tells the story of a wild child and his educator, a story of power relations and the fantasy of bringing somebody up after one’s own image. It is the story of every parent-child rearing, but more than that, it is a story of a director and his child-actor, raising the question of what it means to direct a child, to contain a child inside a fixed frame, to command him in and out of the frame (as if it is his private room). On another level, it also raises the possibility of looking at early cinema (the “cinema of attractions” as was coined by Tom Gunning), as a mute wild child that was tamed, eventually, by language (sound, narrative). Wild Boy is based on several case histories, some myths, some educational manuals and refers to a wide range of movies, from old photos left of the vaudeville acts by father and son Buster and Joe Keaton, through Truffaut’s Wild Child to The Kid by Chaplin. (Guy Ben-Ner)
LEGAL ERRORIST
Chris Haring & Mara Mattuschka, Austria, 2005, video, colour, sound, 15 min
A performance of transformation, a transformance, changes its medium and encounters a camera, which plays dance music – under the secret eye of a room that bends and twists along with it. The Legal Errorist – personified by the dancer Stephanie Cumming – is a creature that cannot stop crashing. The sudden overpowering by the ‘error’, the system error, engenders the creature’s obsession. She commences with great relish through a series of transformations; that which hits upon the limits of a simple machine serves as a learning program for the Legal Errorist. Film and performance – parallel projection or articulated interference? Massively, like a mountain, the body of the Errorist falls to the floor and lands with an obstinate sound whose source seems remote from anything human. As though she were her own director, she speaks animatedly with numerous invisible colleagues. She speaks to the microphone, not through it: an eerie animated world of objects, which become fellow creatures when one creature cannot categorise herself precisely. “What?!?” roars the Legal Errorist defiantly – as though to a higher being in the dark and not the diffuse collective of the audience. And she begins to lure the gaze through the catalogue of her body parts. The voyeur’s fatally bundled attention seems inverse to the body set against it, anamorphically distorted by the extremely wide- angled lens. Does this gaze document a foul subjectivity or does this closed world look back as its own lens? The camera is a shrewd ally in the counterattack launched by the body on display. (Katherina Zakravsky)
TUNED
Oliver Pietsch, Germany, 2004, video, colour, sound, 14 min
Portraits of people consuming drugs taken from film history are edited together in rapid succession. All appear radically isolated, their inward-looking eyes looking out from the screen, appearing helpless and disorientated. Their trip alternates between giggling lust and panicked anxiety, turning increasingly into blank horror. The paradox: In these edited sequences, the crazed and overwrought figures once again build a community whose unifying core is the flight from the community and the search for the true self in itself. The film can here be understood as a metonym for western culture. (Ute Vorkoeper)
MOUSE HEAVEN
Kenneth Anger, USA, 2005, video, colour, sound, 10 min
It’s a study of animated toys of a rare nature. These are collectables of early Walt Disney toys. I’ve always loved Mickey Mouse since I was a little boy and I’m outraged about the current Disney company’s attitude to Mickey Mouse. I mean they think they own it, but all the children of the world own Mickey Mouse. And I have devised a way to star Mickey Mouse in a film that the current Disney company can’t legally object to, by filming an antique toy collection of early Disney toys. And it’s just a coincidence all those toys happen to be Mickey Mouse. I’m actually being very respectful of early Mickey Mouse. I hate later Mickey Mouse, because from Fantasia on, the Disney people decided to humanise the mouse, remove his tail – which is a kind of castration – and turn him into a little boy who is a sort of a goody-two-shoes. And he’s no longer the mischievous, sadistic mouse that he was in the beginning. He used to do nasty little tricks like twist the udders of cows and things like that. And that’s the only mouse I’m interested in, this kind of demon ‘fetish’ figure. (Kenneth Anger)
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Date: 29 October 2005 | Season: London Film Festival 2005 | Tags: London Film Festival
DESOLATION ROW
Saturday 29 October 2005, at 9pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
Jonathan Schwartz, For Them Ending, USA, 2005, 3 min
A crudely animated bucolic reverie that is undermined by its exaggerated, incongruous soundtrack.
Joell Hallowell & Jacalyn White, Neptune’s Release: A Shot in the Dark, USA, 2004, 17 min
Found footage assembled into a crushing observation of the futility and inevitability of life. Escape into spiritual or hallucinogenic diversions probably won’t help you: lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void.
Louise Bourque, The Bleeding Heart of It (L’eclat du mal), Canada, 2005, 6 min
‘In my dream there’s a war going on. It’s Christmas time. I’m running and I’m carrying myself as a child. It’s dark in the tunnel and I’m heading towards the light, the daylight.’ (LB)
Janie Geiser, Terrace 49, USA, 2004, 6 min
Geiser creates cryptic dreamscapes by mapping video images onto filmic terrain. In Terrace 49, ‘images of impending disaster collide with the image of a woman, who disappears into the texture of the film itself.’ (JG)
Lewis Klahr, The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy, USA, 2003-04, 33 min
Armed only with four issues of ‘77 Sunset Strip’ comic books, Klahr depicts events building up to a bank heist, literally shaking life into the images. As tension rises and time closes in on the moment of truth, the soundtrack shifts from light 60s psychedelic pop to 80s no wave / avant rock.
Naoyuki Tsuji, Trilogy About Clouds (Mittsu no Kumo), Japan, 2005, 13 min
Gloomy clouds herald mysterious incidents in this exquisite work, whose naïve pencil animation belies its dark meaning.
Christina Battle, Nostalgia (April 2001 to Present), Canada, 2005, 4 min
Fractured memories of an idyllic childhood. Hope springs life eternal.
PROGRAMME NOTES
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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Date: 30 October 2005 | Season: London Film Festival 2005 | Tags: London Film Festival
HISTORY AS SHE IS HARPED
Sunday 30 October 2005, at 4pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
Leslie Thornton, Let Me Count The Ways: Minus 10, 9, 8, 7, USA, 2004, 20 min
A meditation on the bombing of Hiroshima, matching found footage with revealing audio interviews with survivors, and informed by the film-maker’s personal connection to the horrific event. It opens with amateur movies of Thornton’s father (a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project) at the Los Alamos Air Base. Later sections concern the effects on vegetation in the devastated region.
Jayne Parker, Stationary Music, UK, 2005, 15 min
Poetic record of ‘Sonata 1’ (1925) by modernist composer Stefan Wolpe – a Jewish communist who was forced to flee Germany in 1933, ultimately making the transition from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College. An appropriately still and empathetic camera captures this vibrant solo piano performance by his daughter Katerina, who first recounts some of the history of the piece.
Abigail Child, The Future Is Behind You, USA, 2004, 16 min
Fictional biography woven around home movie footage shot by an anonymous German family in the 1930s. The relationship of two adolescent sisters, and how it may have been affected by the turbulent times ahead, is the focus of a work that raises questions about the interpretation of personal and public histories.
Deborah Stratman, Energy Country, USA, 2003, 15 min
Stratman’s impressionistic essay on the oil industry implicitly refers to ulterior motives behind the invasion of Iraq. The dreamlike tour of petrochemical sites in Southern Texas contrasts with the harsh realities of Christian fundamentalist attitudes to homeland security that are heard on the soundtrack.
Fréderic Moser & Philippe Schwinger, Capitulation Project, Germany-Switzerland, 2003, 21 min
What at first looks to be historical footage of the Performance Group’s ‘Commune’ (1971) – a stark work of environmental theatre about the My Lai massacre – is in fact a carefully re-staged interpretation featuring German actors. Its apparent authenticity, which reflects the Group’s constant shifting between performance, improvisation and rehearsal, oscillates the viewer’s concentration between the various levels of reality it presents.
PROGRAMME NOTES
LET ME COUNT THE WAYS: MINUS 10, 9, 8, 7
Leslie Thornton, USA, 2004, video, b/w, sound, 20 min
Let Me Count the Ways is an ongoing serial about violent terror and its aftermath. In episodes Minus 10, 9, 8, and 7, personal reminiscence is mixed with archival and new footage in an exploration of the interior of fear. From footage of the artist’s father on the way to Hiroshima, through reference to 9/11, the phenomenology of horror and the echo of its rupture are presented with an intensity which moves the viewer from history to the present and beyond. (Leslie Thornton)
STATIONARY MUSIC
Jayne Parker, UK, 2005, video, b/w, sound, 15 min
Stationary Music takes its name from the first movement of Stefan Wolpe’s ‘Sonata 1’ composed in 1925. The sonata is introduced and performed by his daughter, pianist Katharina Wolpe. Stationary Music: music that doesn’t develop/music that stands still.
(Jayne Parker)
after the fire what Shall we do?
“firsT
onE step;
aFter
thAt,
aNother.”
We’re
alOne
the music is difficuLt
to Play.
wE must work at it.
In Memoriam S. W., acrostic by John Cage
THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU
Abigail Child, USA, 2004, video, b/w, sound, 16 min
Music by John Zorn, arranged and played by Sylvie Courvoisier and Mark Feldman. The Future is Behind You creates a fictional story composed from an anonymous family archive from 1930s Europe, reconstructed to emphasize gender acculturation in two sisters who play, race, fight, kiss and grow up together under a shadow of oncoming history. I am looking, as always in found material, for the story below the story. Here there are at least three levels: 1) the home movie in which a family from 1930s Germany near the Swiss border poses for the camera, preternaturally happy. Unusually, the mother is main cinematographer; 2) the historical moment which remains as text trace, undermining the image and serving as covert motive for the action; 3) the development of gender identities – the innocent freedom of the elder transformed into socially bruised ‘bride’, the irrepressibility of the younger moving from tomboy to awkward, diffident adult. At once biography and fiction, history and psychology, The Future is Behind You excavates gestures to explore the speculative seduction of narrative; it seeks a bridge between private and public histories. (Abigail Child)
www.abigailchild.com
ENERGY COUNTRY
Deborah Stratman, USA, 2003, video, colour, sound, 15 min
The frenzied detritus of trading floors, smart weaponry and the religious right are woven through the petrochemical landscapes of Southeast Texas. This short video harangue questions land use policy as it serves the oil industry, patriotism as it absolves foreign aggression, and fundamentalism as it calcifies thinking. (Deborah Stratman)
www.pythagorasfilm.com
CAPITULATION PROJECT
Frédéric Moser & Philippe Schwinger, Germany-Switzerland, 2003, video, b/w, sound, 21 min
The New York-based Performance Group staged their piece ‘Commune’ for the first time in February 1971. The play included a short scene referring to the My Lai massacre. If members of the audience refused to participate actively in what was happening on stage during this scene, the actors interrupted their performance – sometimes for as long as three hours, depending on the audience’s reaction. The group experimented with several variations of the scene. Starting with photographs of the performance and the notes of Richard Schechner, the theorist of environmental theatre, we came up with a new version of the My Lai sequence. We worked with the statements of soldiers involved in the massacre, criminal investigation reports, and contemporary articles in the press. In the process, we developed a scenario that enabled us to translate the historical documents into a form suitable for the stage. We aimed at representing an event of war without using any of the film industry’s spectacular devices. What means do we have, as individual citizens, to come to terms with an act of terror? We followed the trail of the Performance Group. Their attempt to create a platform for self-criticism within the context of a theatre performance motivated our dramatic intentions. For this we reconstructed the stage set of ‘Commune’: a wave, evoking a landscape and also functioning as an agora, and scaffolding around the stage with seating for the audience. In 1971 the performers were inspired by rituals: they danced and they sang. We did not attempt to re-create this authenticity in our production. Although we do evoke the symbolic level of their representation, we chose to develop our play with the actors on two different levels. Each of the performers takes on a function, for example, as a reporter, but they can also intervene at any time in their own name. Thus, there is a constant back and forth between the actors and the characters they are representing. This method of dramatic framing enabled us to establish an analogy with film. There is no live performance in Capitulation Project. The scene was filmed in about 30 sequences during two night shoots, with extras as a ‘fake’ audience. The distance from the performance that is created through the process of filming is comparable to our detachment from current political events. We intentionally moved back a few steps in time. We evoked the massacre by means of a contemporaneous artistic form in order to demonstrate that the grasp of an event of war is coupled with its transmission. (Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger)
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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)
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Date: 31 March 2006 | Season: London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival 2006 | Tags: London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival
IN LUST WE TRUST: 8MM FILMS BY THE KUCHAR BROTHERS
Friday 31 March 2006, at 6:30pm
London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival at BFI Southbank
KUCHAR BROTHERS: PROGRAMME ONE
George Kuchar, Sylvia’s Promise, USA, 1962, 9 min
Love comes in all sizes. But the bonds of love extract a terrible price to be paid in flesh.
Mike Kuchar, Born of the Wind, USA, 1962, 24 min
‘A tender and realistic story of a scientist who falls for the mummy he restored to life. 2,000 years as a mummy couldn’t quench her thirst for love!’ GK
George Kuchar, The Thief and the Stripper, USA, 1959, 25 min
An unlikely ménage à trois, doomed to end in a tornado of wanton violence.
George Kuchar, A Town Called Tempest, USA, 1963, 33 min
‘What happened that afternoon that left a town in shambles, its people in search of God?’ GK
PROGRAMME NOTES
IN LUST WE TRUST: 8MM FILMS BY THE KUCHAR BROTHERS
PROGRAMME 1
Friday 31 March 2006, at 6:30pm
London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival at BFI Southbank
SYLVIA’S PROMISE
George Kuchar, USA, 1962, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min
‘Love comes in all sizes. But the bonds of love extract a terrible price to be paid in flesh. A vow weighs heavily on the heart. Sylvia makes a promise but can she keep it ?’ (George Kuchar)
BORN OF THE WIND
Mike Kuchar, USA, 1962, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 24 min
Donna Kerness and Bob Cowan, whose torrid off-screen romance caused a sensation in the steam room of the St. George Hotel, are teamed for the first time in this poignant film of shriveled beauty and bloodless vengeance. Mr. Cowan is a striking performer resembling a vulture with shoestrings on its head. He and the buxom Miss Kerness battle front and center in the biggest clash of the hams since Godzilla and King Kong, and it’s one of the mysteries of gravity that Kerness doesn’t flop on her face, she being so top-heavy.
‘A tender and realistic story of a scientist who falls in love with a mummy he has restored to life … 2,000 years as a mummy couldn’t quench her thirst for love!’ (George Kuchar)
THE THIEF AND THE STRIPPER
George Kuchar, USA, 1959, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 25 min
Three years to complete … It dares to lay bare the naked carcass of a generation gone mad with moral decay. Starring Tony Reynolds and Candy Newman in the film that got them married!
‘An early film, depicting today’s youth … raw and brutal.’ (George Kuchar)
A TOWN CALLED TEMPEST
George Kuchar, USA, 1963, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 33 min
Rarely has the cinema equaled such spectacle! Seldom have movies probed so deeply in the rotten core of hypocrisy and weakness! Only the talents of Larry Leibowitz and Zelda Kaiser, his cousin from Hawaii, could make this tale of hatred and fanaticism come alive from the screen and hit you in the face with truth.
‘What happened that afternoon that left a town in shambles, its people in search of God?’ (George Kuchar)
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DOWNLOADS
LINKS
www.llgff.org.uk
Programme Notes PDF 2.1 MB
Programme Notes 2.1 MB
Date: 2 April 2006 | Season: London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival 2006 | Tags: London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival
IN LUST WE TRUST: 8MM FILMS BY THE KUCHAR BROTHERS
Sunday 2 April 2006, at 4:15pm
London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival at BFI Southbank
KUCHAR BROTHERS: PROGRAMME TWO
George Kuchar, A Woman Distressed, USA, 1962, 12 min
Her destiny is to be condemned to an insane asylum, where the staff are as crazy as the inmates.
Mike Kuchar, Night Of The Bomb, USA, 1962, 18 min
Only the chaos of an atomic blast can interrupt the erotic mission of these Cold War kids.
Mike Kuchar, The Confessions Of Babette, USA, 1963, 15 min
How much depravity can one woman crave?
George Kuchar, Anita Needs Me, USA, 1963, 16 min
‘All the horrors and guilt of the human mind exposed! Your emotions will be squeezed.’ GK
Mike & George Kuchar, I Was A Teenage Rumpot, USA, 1960, 10 min
‘A documentary about people like you and me, people with a zest for life.’ GK
Mike & George Kuchar, The Slasher, USA, 1958, 21 min
An insane killer stalks the grounds of a resort house, bringing sudden violence to those of easy virtue and godlessness.
PROGRAMME NOTES
IN LUST WE TRUST: 8MM FILMS BY THE KUCHAR BROTHERS
PROGRAMME 2
Sunday 2 April 2006, at 4:15pm
London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival at BFI Southbank
A WOMAN DISTRESSED
George Kuchar, USA, 1962, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 12 min
‘The movie club put out a newsletter and one of my early 8mm films, A Woman Distressed, was the only picture that they ever panned in the pages of their cinematic rag. The film was a brash, reckless, comic-drama about the drug Thalidomide and its deforming effect upon the offspring of a big-city maternity ward. Stories of the horrors caused by the drug were permeating the newspapers at the time and I used the reported material as a basis for the comic-drama (or dramedy as it is now called by prime-time practitioners of the TV medium). ’ (George Kuchar)
NIGHT OF THE BOMB
Mike Kuchar, USA, 1962, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 18 min
Teenage lust and deranged delinquence combine to create a cautionary tale for the ages. The Chernobyl of Comedy!
‘The bomb in Night of the Bomb was a vehicle to use as a spectacular image – people in conflict – otherwise it’s hard to make a narrative if something drastic doesn’t happen.’ (Mike Kuchar)
THE CONFESSIONS OF BABETTE
Mike Kuchar, USA, 1963, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 15 min
Following on the heels of Powell’s Peeping Tom, it almost matches that film classic in progressing truly disturbing psychological horror in contemporary cinema. (www.imdb.com)
ANITA NEEDS ME
George Kuchar, USA, 1963, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 16 min
‘As one man learns of another man’s troubled relationship, he understands how to handle his own troubles at home. The only film to have any dialogue, this tale of tragedy and the scars it leaves on the human psyche is wonderfully told through a voice-over monologue that dives into the deepest shades purple prose.’ (Ryan Sarnowski)
‘All the horrors and guilt of the human mind exposed! It reaches deep into the workings of a woman’s cravings. Your emotions will be squeezed.’ (George Kuchar)
I WAS A TEENAGE RUMPOT
Mike & George Kuchar, USA, 1960, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
With the birth of I Was A Teenage Rumpot, George and Mike Kuchar stumbled upon something big: their names were Arline, Edie, and Harry. Sensing the tremendous physical potential embedded in this trio’s glands, plans were immediately drawn up to star them in two new films: The Flesh Is Plentiful and Butterball 8. Arline and Harry’s divorce shattered all future films and Arline went on a drunken binge which ended with her head being shaved by a French woman on grounds of ‘husband-stealing’.
‘A documentary about people like you and me, people with a zest for life.’ (George Kuchar)
THE SLASHER
Mike & George Kuchar, USA, 1958, 8mm on 16mm, colour, sound, 21 min
‘An insane killer stalks the grounds of a resort house, bringing sudden violence to those of easy virtue and godlessness.’ (George Kuchar)
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DOWNLOADS
Programme Notes PDF, 2.1 MB
Date: 28 October 2006 | Season: London Film Festival 2006 | Tags: London Film Festival
GAMES PEOPLE PLAY
Saturday 28 October 2006, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
Miranda Pennell, You Made Me Love You, UK, 2005, 4 min
‘Twenty-one dancers are held by your gaze. Losing contact can be traumatic.’
Shannon Plumb, Olympics 2005 Track and Field, USA, 2005, 18 min
From the opening ceremony to awarding the medals, Plumb plays all the characters in this burlesque of the trials and triumphs of the summer games. Rooted in silent comedy, its homespun style references equal parts Keaton and Riefenstahl, and is the vehicle for a series of witty observations.
Victor Alimpiev, Sweet Nightingale, Russia, 2005, 7 min
In a theatre, a crowd perform a series of choreographed gestures facing the stage. Left unexplained, this mysterious ceremony appears more symbolic than absurd.
Judith Hopf, Nayascha Sadr Haghighian & Florian Zeyfang, Proprio Aperto, Germany, 2005, 6 min
An off-season stroll through the temporary ruins of the Giardini, home of the national pavilions at the Venice Biennale.
Phil Solomon & Mark Lapore, Untitled (for David Gatten), USA, 2005, 5 min
Made as a ‘get well card’ for a friend, this uncharacteristic work invokes a sense of absence, and ultimately loss.
Pablo Marin, Blocking, Argentina, 2005, 3 min
By contravening archival guidelines on water damage, the original image is erased from a ‘mistreated’ filmstrip, to be replaced by an organic explosion of colour.
Matthias Müller & Christophe Girardet, Kristall, Germany, 2006, 15 min
Shards of emotions from Hollywood melodrama are combined in a Chinese box of reflection and refraction. Kristall is a cinematic hall of mirrors, which ruptures and multiplies the anxieties of narcissistic, star-crossed lovers.
Angela Reginato, Contemplando la ciudad, USA, 2005, 4 min
‘Perfectly without affect, a girl sings along with a pop tune, transporting herself through space and time to Mexico City circa 1978.’
PROGRAMME NOTES
GAMES PEOPLE PLAY
Saturday 28 October 2006, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
YOU MADE ME LOVE YOU
Miranda Pennell, UK, 2005, video, colour, sound, 4 min
You Made Me Love You, Pennell’s last film to date, is based on a sort of exercise, a game, in which a cameraman portrays 21 male and female dancers. They are asked to form a queue facing the camera (a very English idea). As with a stationary queue in which people start getting restless, those at the back try to gain a view of the counter, i.e. camera. But the picture is mostly filled by the four or five faces that are nearest to the camera, which block the view of the others. However, the camera does not allow the situation to settle; mounted on rails, it moves, sometimes slowly, then very rapidly, and always surprisingly, to the left or the right. The queue has to follow, which means that the faces that have just filled the picture suddenly disappear, allowing the deeper levels of staging, the dancers who are further away, to be seen. This video is thus shaped by a ‘constant line’, a rigid concept which, through its realisation, creates a lot of movement, overlapping, and surprising revelations. Meanwhile, within the sound track, moments of tense calm alternate with the patter of many bare feet, a noise that is all the more confusing because we never see the feet in the picture. What these 3½ minutes allow us to see instead is a wealth of strangely touching portraits: 21 people ‘making love to the camera’. (Dirk Schaefer, Oberhausen Festival)
www.mirandapennell.com
OLYMPICS 2005 TRACK AND FIELD
Shannon Plumb, USA, 2005, video, colour, sound, 18 min
Shannon Plumb’s new film is based on the summer games of the Olympics. Inspired by Buster Keaton’s College (1927) and Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 documentary Olympia, Plumb’s sketches include the opening ceremonies and several track and field game sports. Plumb’s films rely on spontaneity and character traits to investigate the possibilities of laughter in our most serious and competitive of sporting events. Through our need to achieve greatness and through the individuality of her characters, Shannon Plumb presents the humour in going for the gold. (Sara Meltzer Gallery)
www.shannonplumb.com
SWEET NIGHTINGALE
Victor Alimpiev, Russia, 2005, video, colour, sound, 7 min
In his video works, Victor Alimpiev combines elements of diverse artistic genres like painting, theatre, dance and music in the moving image. The human ‘material’ that seldom performs as individuals but mostly as a group of people in Alimpiev works, becomes a mouldable ‘mass’ formed to a living sculpture, which reacts to its surrounding space. The movements of the mass in the space are defined by the repetition of monotone gestures, whose function seems familiar, but is subordinated to the dramaturgy of the moving image and are isolated from its context. (Galerie Anita Beckers)
PROPRIO APERTO
Judith Hopf, Natscha Sadr Haghighian & Florian Zeyfang, Germany, 2006, video, colour, sound, 6 min
The artists take the viewer on a stroll through the landscape of Venice Biennale’s Giardini during winter. A voiceover talks about ruined landscapes, ghosts and living in obscurity of cultural hegemony. The work consists of photographs edited in slow pans in which different degrees of obliteration of the pavilions become the central theme of the work. Collaboration is an important aspect of the three artists’ working process. Proprio Aperto is the first collaboration between the three. They all work in a broad variety of media and materials, creating works that often investigate contemporary socio-economic structures. With very simple means they both find and create small poetic slippages in society. (Jørgen Riber Christensen,Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum)
UNTITLED (FOR DAVID GATTEN)
Phil Solomon & Mark LaPore, USA, 2005, video, colour, sound, 5 min
Mark and I made this for our friend David Gatten, as a prayer, an offering, a ‘get well soon’ card … for all three of us. It was made on the last night that I saw Mark, my best friend of 32 years. (Phil Solomon)
BLOCKING
Pablo Marin, Argentina, 2005, 35mm, colour, silent, 3 min
Made strictly by opposing the Association of Moving Image Archivist’s ‘Disaster Recovery for Films in Flooded Areas’, this film was kept under water until its emulsion started to melt, then removed, tightened up and finally dried directly by the sun. The result is what you see, a film trailer, reborn from its very own ashes, in which the few small portions of images that remain are overcome by the freed, colourful chemicals. Blocking is, thus, an homage to all the footage lost by the unpredictable dangers of nature and, at the same time, a true song to the beauty in destruction. (Pablo Marin)
KRISTALL
Matthias Müller & Christophe Girardet, Germany, 2006, 35mm, colour, sound, 15 min
Kristall creates a melodrama inside seemingly claustrophobic cabinets. Like an anonymous viewer, the mirror observes scenes of intimacy. It creates an image within an image, providing a frame for the characters. At the same time it makes them appear disjointed and fragmented. This instrument for self-assurance and narcissistic presentation becomes a powerful opponent that increases the sense of fragility, doubt and loss twofold. (Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller)
CONTEMPLANDO LA CIUDAD
Angela Reginato, USA, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 4 min
Perfectly without affect, a girl sings along with a pop tune, transporting herself through space and time to Mexico City circa 1978. (Angela Reginato)
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