Date: 17 April 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection
INFINITE PROJECTION
17 April–18 December 2002
London The Photographers’ Gallery
Despite a rich history and a dedicated, continuously expanding audience, an important area of the arts is being neglected in our capital city. No venue in London is committed to showing artists’ film and video in its purest form, specific to its medium, truly independent. The arts centres, galleries, colleges and museums are not our advocates, institutions are failing us.
There’s heart and passion, but no hub. Infinite Projection does not aspire to be that centre, more a satellite cell. A meeting point, a principle, an impulse, a SCREEN. A starting point for further action and a statement of intent. They tell us film is dead, but they haven’t eradicated us yet. Film is thriving and we are digging in, powerful and resolute, here for the DURATION, shining forth into infinity.
Infinite Projection is presented by Mark Webber and co-ordinated by Lisa Le Feuvre.
Thank you Ben Cook & Mike Sperlinger, David Leister, Michael Zimmerman, Stefanie Schuldt Strathaus & Karl Winter, Deirdre Logue & the Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre, Christophe Bichon, Barbara Pichler & Brigitta Burger-Utzer, Dominic Angerame, Michael Sippings, Rob Gawthrop, Hogge, Paola Igliori and Jonathan Swain
Films and videos distributed by Anthology Film Archives (New York), Lightcone (Paris), Collectif Jeune Cinema (Paris), Fringe Films (Toronto), Lux (London), Film Form (Stockholm), Filmmakers’ Information Centre (Tokyo), Canyon Cinema (San Francisco), Video Data Bank (Chicago).
Supported by the Arts Council of England’s DNet exhibition screenings 2002 and assisted by LUX. Supported by London Film & Video Development Agency.
Date: 17 April 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection
GUSTAV DEUTSCH: FILM IST 1-6
Wednesday 17 April 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
Drawing on a vast accumulation of material from archives throughout the world, Deutsch multiplies content against form to magnify the power of each image, and presents a rigorous and entertaining exposition of film’s unique qualities. The initial six sections of this tableaux film focus primarily on scientific and medical footage concerning the birth of cinema and the phenomena of sight and perception.
Gustav Deutsch, Film Ist 1-6, 1998, 60 min
Thomas Draschan, Metropolen des Leichtsinns, 2000, 12 min
The screening of Film Ist 1-6 is supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum.
PROGRAMME NOTES
GUSTAV DEUTSCH: FILM IST 1-6
Wednesday 17 April 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
FILM IST 1-6
Gustav Deutsch, Austria, 1998, colour, sound, 60 min
“Film Ist consists, almost exclusively, of sequences from existing scientific films. These films are about the acrobatic flights of pigeons, the intelligence testing of apes; about ‘reversed worlds’ and stereoscopic vision; hurricanes and impact waves in the air. They depict paper projectiles penetrating bubbles of air and bullets passing through ostrich eggs. They concern the dynamics of the diaphragm as one breathes, sings or makes music. They show how glass breaks, children walk and how a Mercedes Benz crashes into a stone wall in slow motion.
“As with all images which issue from the area of the natural sciences, scientific films almost always follow a special educational line – they address the viewer as a beneficiary of their discoveries and thus, in a wider sense, as a patient. They attempt to create the ideal, insightful, patient. In order to be comprehensible and convincing outside of their specialist sphere they do not present the arguments in scientific language (mathematics) but detour into the world of aesthetics. Here they encounter other conventions – visual, narrative and poetic. The collective ‘aesthetic knowledge’ stored in these conventions lends form to the scientific knowledge.
“And this a kind of ‘ideography’ is created which almost everyone has learned to read during their school days or from school television. But I think this process contributes more to cinematographic education than to the scientific. The contempt with which scientific films are received is not directed against the content, but rather against their conventional, unimaginative, ridiculous and commentary-contaminated appearance. Similarly, the fascination with some teaching films, which is certainly less common, can be attributed almost exclusively to the power of their imagination – images which one has never seen, even in the cinema.”
(Alexander Horwath, Austrian Film Archive, Vienna)
METROPOLEN DES LEICHTSINNS
Thomas Draschan, Germany, 2000, colour, sound, 12 min
Found-footage collides together to consider the lifestyle options of modern man.
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Date: 1 May 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection | Tags: Shoot Shoot Shoot
JEFF KEEN
Wednesday 1 May 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
A special Mayday Rayday expanded cinema performance to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first Rayday broadsheet. Using 8mm, 16mm and video, Jeff Keen bridges the gap between 1969’s Raydayfilm and his recent Artwar: The Last Frontier. A unique and spontaneous mixed-media collage from Britain’s first and most productive independent filmmaker.
Jeff Keen, From Raydayfilm to Artwar, UK, 1969-2002, colours, sounds, c.70 min (multi-media performance)
“Keen is indebted to the Surrealist tradition for many of his central concerns: his passion for instability, his sense of le merveilleux, his fondness for analogies and puns, his preference for ‘lowbrow’ art over aestheticism of any kind, his dedication to collage and le hazard objectif. But this ‘continental’ facet of his work – virtually unique in this country – co-exists with various typically English characteristics, which betray other roots. The tacky glamour/true beauty of his Family Star productions is at least as close to the end of Brighton pier as it is to Hollywood B-movies… The heroic absurdity and adult infantilism that are the mainsprings of his comedy draw on a long tradition of post-Victorian humour: not the ‘innocent’ vulgarity of music hall, but the anarchicness of The Goons and the self-lacerating ironies of the 30s clowns, complete with their undertow of melancholia.” (Tony Rayns, “Born to Kill: Mr. Soft Eliminator”, Afterimage No. 6, 1976)
This event is related to the Shoot Shoot Shoot season at Tate Modern throughout May 2002.
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Date: 15 May 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection
WARREN SONBERT
Wednesday 15 May 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
Carriage Trade is Sonbert’s masterwork, a personal film postcard that weaves together glimpses of world travels collected over a six-year period. Its meticulously crafted form builds each adjacent shot in a musical rhythm, matching and contrasting, to create an effervescent and sophisticated silent meditation.
Warren Sonbert, Carriage Trade, 1971-72, 60 min
PROGRAMME NOTES
WARREN SONBERT
Wednesday 15 May 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
CARRIAGE TRADE
Warren Sonbert, USA, 1971-72, 16mm, colour, silent, 60 min
“With Carriage Trade, Sonbert began to challenge the theories espoused by the great Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s; he particularly disliked the ‘knee-jerk’ reaction produced by Eisenstein montage. In both lectures and writings about his own style of editing, Sonbert described Carriage Trade as ‘a jig-saw puzzle of postcards to produce varied displaced effects.’ This approach, according to Sonbert, ultimately affords the viewer multi-faceted readings of the connections between shots through the spectator’s assimilation of ‘the changing relations of the movement of objects, the gestures of figures, familiar world-wide icons, rituals and reactions, rhythm, spacing and density of images.’” (Jon Gartenberg, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1973)
“I think the films I make are, hopefully, a series of arguments, with each image, shot, a statement to be read and digested in turn. Each work as well is about a specific topic: Carriage Trade is about travel, transportation, anthropological investigation: four continents, four organized religions, customs; about time with its six years in the making and cast of thousands; about how the same people age and grow and change apartments … Some people are disturbed by the brevity of some of the images – particularly those that one might label ‘beautiful’ or ‘ecstatic’. They are over before one has a chance barely to luxuriate in them, they are taken away before one can nestle and coo and cuddle in the velveteen sheen of it all, so that feelings of deprivation, expectations dissolved, even sadomasochism arise. Very often a cut occurs before an action is complete. This becomes both metaphor of frustration, hopes dashed, and yet of serenity if you like – that perhaps all of this activity has been going on, will be going on, yet even all at the same time. That we are privileged viewers of many sectors of humanity, none taking precedence over the other. I believe that the nature of film lends itself to density: one can’t pack in too much, albeit with rests, breathing spaces. It isn’t necessary to have the totality of resonances immediately graspable, one should be able to return.” (Warren Sonbert, excerpt of a lecture at San Francisco Art Institute, August 1979)
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Date: 29 May 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection, Shoot Shoot Shoot 2002 | Tags: Shoot Shoot Shoot
8MM FILMS FROM THE LONDON CO-OP
Wednesday 29 May 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
The home movie format of 8mm can empower artists to make extremely personal and direct film observations. Spontaneity and intimacy are inherent to this pocket sized system. This special evening of single and multi-screen small gauge wonders concludes Shoot Shoot Shoot, a major retrospective of British avant-garde film, which screens at Tate Modern throughout May. Many of the makers will be on hand to introduce their work.
David Crosswaite, Puddle, UK, 1968, b/w, silent, 4 min
Mike Dunford, Four Short Films, UK, 1969, b/w & colour, silent, 10 min
Mike Dunford, One Million Unemployed in Winter 1971, UK, 1971, colour, sound-on-tape, 4 min
Jeff Keen, Wail, UK, 1960, colour, silent, 5 min
Jeff Keen, Like the Time is Now, UK, 1961, colour, silent, 6 min
Malcolm Le Grice, China Tea, UK, 1965, colour, silent, 10 min
Annabel Nicolson, Black Gate, UK, 1976, colour, silent, 4 min
Sally Potter, Jerk, UK, 1969, b/w, silent, 3 min (two screen)
William Raban, Sky, UK, 1969, colour, silent, 5 min (four screen)
John Smith, Out the Back, UK, 1974, colour, silent, 4 min
David Crosswaite, Mike Dunford, Malcolm Le Grice, Sally Potter, William Raban and John Smith in attendence.
PROGRAMME NOTES
8MM FILMS FROM THE LONDON CO-OP
Wednesday 29 May 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
IN CELEBRATION OF 8MM
“What first attracted me to 8mm film in particular was its materiality and the way it produced tangibility problematics on all levels: the acquiring and setting up of increasingly scarce, quality projection equipment, the physicality of the sound made by the film strip running through the projector gate continuously reminds the viewer of the machine’s presence in the room, the attention to projection speed (variable fps), and the frequent act of projecting camera originals (the horror!) instead of film prints. And then there is the film itself – the sensuous texture of the projected image, the subtlety or sumptuousness of gradations in black-and-white or the discriminating use of colour, the graininess of the image (as emotionally satisfying and particular as the actual silver sparkles on 35mm nitrate stock), the unpredictability of the sound stripe, and the fragility and fleeting sense of the image’s presence on the screen. All these qualities contribute to the intimacy created between the projected films and any group able to give themselves over to the act of actually seeing.” (Jytte Jensen, Museum of Modern Art, in the exhibition catalogue “Big As Life”, 1999)
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Date: 19 June 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection
TRUE PATRIOT LOVE: THE FILMS OF JOYCE WIELAND
Wednesday 19 June 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
In her short films, Joyce Wieland managed to distil the essence of Canadian national pride and the purest vision of a female artist. Profoundly political and inveterately sensitive, Wieland addressed the real issues from a humble perspective, but with a rigorous formality. This programme presents work seldom seen in this country, and includes the classic Rat Life and Diet in North America, which humorously depicts the plight of a group of gerbils who escape from suppression in the US to pursue an ecological future north of the border.
Joyce Wieland & Hollis Frampton, A & B in Ontario, Canada, 1967-84, b/w, sound, 17 min
Joyce Wieland, Patriotism I, Canada, 1964, colour, sound, 4 min
Joyce Wieland, Handtinting, Canada, 1967, colour, silent, 6 min
Joyce Wieland, Sailboat, Canada, 1967, colour, sound, 3 min
Joyce Wieland, Water Sark, Canada, 1966, colour, sound, 14 min
Joyce Wieland, Patriotism II, Canada, 1965, colour, silent, 3 min
Joyce Wieland, Peggy’s Blues Skylight, Canada, 1965, b/w, sound, 11 min
Joyce Wieland, Rat Life and Diet in North America, Canada, 1968, colour, sound, 14 min
Joyce Wieland, Birds at Sunrise, Canada, 1972-86, colour, sound, 10 min
“Joyce Wieland’s films elude easy categorisation. The body of work as a whole is varied – some of a formal nature, others less so. Several are political, concerned with technology, ecology and her native land, Canada. Her films are informed by her involvement in other, more directly tactile art forms – painting, drawing, construction, and work derived from quilting, such as stuffed wall hangings, pillowed quilts and embroidery. There is always a concern with textures and/or colours and their relationships within the frame and within the shaping of each film as a whole. Moreover, there is an ongoing dialogue, a cross-fertilisation between film and the other forms of art in which she works.” (Regina Cornwell, 1971, reprinted in The Films of Joyce Wieland (ed. Kathryn Elder), 1999)
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Date: 3 July 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection
HARRY SMITH: AMERICAN MAGUS
Wednesday 3 July 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
A documentary by Paola Igliori (editor of an indispensable book with the same title) which provides a fascinating insight into the life and work of singular genius Harry Smith, whose pioneering abstract films were only a small part of his anthropological pursuits. His broad range of interests, including alchemy, the occult, folk music, field recordings, Seminole textiles and Ukranian Easter Eggs, are represented in this suitably kaleidoscopic film which flits between mysticism and secularity.
Paola Igliori, American Magus, Italy/USA, 2002, video, colour, sound, 93 min
PROGRAMME NOTES
HARRY SMITH: AMERICAN MAGUS
Wednesday 3 July 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
AMERICAN MAGUS
Paola Igliori, Italy/USA, 2002, video, colour, sound, 93 min
(UK premiere)
“It took a little time, but now at last a full length documentary has been made about the cult figure Harry Smith, one of the hidden jewels of the intellectual and artistic history of America in the 20th century. Smith became known to a certain extent with his Anthology of American Folk Music in 1952, but his brilliant spirit and versatility extended much further. In 1950, he received a Guggenheim grant for his non-objective films and paintings, as anthropologist he was interested in anything from peyote to string figures. He was a revolutionary collector looking for the synchronous patterns in different kinds of objects to find their inner language and he was one of the most grisly and erudite occultists ever.
“Filmmaker and poet Paola Igliori, who had an intense relationship with Smith in the last months of his life, uses interviews with Allen Ginsberg, Robert Frank, Jonas Mekas and others, and pictures from his films, his countless collections, synthetic diagrams and rare archive material, to sketch a fascinating portrait of the man who influenced artists from Gregory Corso to DJ Spooky, and of whom was said that he lived a thousand lives in one. Or, to quote one of the many eloquent statements: “Without Harry Smith I wouldn’t have existed!” (Bob Dylan).”
(Catalogue of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2002)
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Date: 17 July 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection
THE FILM ACCORDING TO OWEN LAND (FORMERLY KNOWN AS CINEMA ACCORDING TO GEORGE LANDOW)
Wednesday 17 July 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
Ranging from the celebrated early structural films through to the post-modern and referential works which combine/confuse humour with dense theoretics, here are the incredible works of cinema’s mystery man Land(ow) (including the rarely screened original version of Institutional Quality). He exposed the material of film, deconstructed the process and the effect, while covering the ‘big topics’ of religion, psychoanalysis, capitalism and pandas making avant-garde movies. Last reported to be making a feature length revisionist history of underground film on 35mm.
Owen Land, Diploteratology or Bardo Follies, USA, 1967, silent, colour, 20 min (full version)
Owen Land, The Film that Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter, USA, 1968, b/w, sound, 10 min
Owen Land, Institutional Quality, USA, 1969, colour, sound, 5 min (original version)
Owen Land, Wide Angle Saxon, USA, 1974, colour, sound, 22 min
Owen Land, “No Sir, Orison”, USA, 1975, colour, sound, 3 min
Owen Land, Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present: 1, USA, 1973, colour, sound, 6 min
Owen Land, A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley, California, USA, 1974, b/w, sound, 11 min
Owen Land, On the Marriage Broker Joke as cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious, or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed?, USA, 1980, sound, colour, 18 min
PROGRAMME NOTES
THE FILM ACCORDING TO OWEN LAND (FORMERLY KNOWN AS CINEMA ACCORDING TO GEORGE LANDOW)
Wednesday 17 July 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
“My films are not intended as entertainment or easy viewing. They do not attempt to engage the spectator on an emotional level. Therefore audience reactions are unpredictable, especially during Diploteratology or Bardo Follies. A showing for the wring type of audience could be commercially disastrous, though not necessarily without benefit.” (Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow), Film-Makers Lecture Bureau Catalogue No.1, 1969)
“Since the late 1960s, the films of Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow) have punctured education’s pretensions and avant-garde premises and styles. His work stands comically against disciplines – artistic and pedagogic. The wry humorist deflates current fashion – avant-garde film tenets, audiences, student films, psychoanalysis and structural film. In many ways, all of his works, including performance and then video, are critiques of avant-garde practises. Land uses the stuff of education, including the arbitrary pleasures of language’s puns and sounds, to marshal his attack on the lunacy of disciplines. His films depict simulations of simulations of ‘real’ life that become increasingly fantastic and elaborate. Land’s work is a playful theory of comedy and a compendium of the sound-image-audience triangle. His films address art with forms of popular culture, recycling old formulas into critique, of commodity culture and art, without the ponderous baggage of moral condemnation.” (Patricia Mellancamp, extracts from “Indiscretions: Avant-garde Film, Video & Feminism”, 1990)
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Date: 31 July 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection
THE BASQUE MASTERPIECE
Wednesday 31 July 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
Ere Erera Baleibu Icik Subua Aruaren traverses infinite dimensions in its abstract, cinemascopic passage. This epic voyage was hand painted onto 35mm by the Spanish artist José Antonio Sistiaga, and his collaborators, over an eight-month period in 1970. The film’s continually changing chromatic structures almost caused riots at early screenings, but it is now widely regarded as an exemplary achievement of moving visual music and spiritual devotion.
José Antonio Sistiaga, Ere Erera Baleibu Icik Subua Aruaren, 1970, 75 min (Cinemascope)
PROGRAMME NOTES
THE BASQUE MASTERPIECE
Wednesday 31 July 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
ERE ERERA BALEIBU ICIK SUBUA ARUAREN
José Antonio Sistiaga, Spain, 1970, 16mm, colour, silent, 75 min (Cinemascope)
“A rare screening of the cameraless, hand-painted, abstract epic commonly referred to as The Basque Masterpiece. José Antonio Sistiaga (born 1932 in Saint-Sébastien) began his career as a painter. He was responsible for founding the Gaur group of Basque artists, who conducted research in style and studied the connection between education and art. After his three-part experimental film (his first foray into filmmaking) won an award at the Bilbao festival, he expanded the final section into a feature. More orchestral in form than a Brakhage hand-painted film, Sistiaga’s modulates gradually through monochromatic movements which build to a vibrant multi-coloured finale.” (Cinematheque Ontario programme notes, 2002)
“Believe it or not, all 75 minutes are fascinating, with a cumulative satisfaction.” (Dr. William Moritz)
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Date: 21 August 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection | Tags: Jonas Mekas
JONAS MEKAS VIDEO SHOW
Wednesday 21 August 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
A rare opportunity to view videotapes by the legendary advocate of avant-garde film. His organisation Anthology Film Archives began to show videotapes by artists as early as 1974, and Mekas himself has been regularly using video since the mid-1980s, amassing footage and creating tapes which are largely unknown or unseen. Jonas Mekas will be in the UK for a retrospective at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and will join us to introduce this screening.
Jonas Mekas, Self-Portrait, 1980, 11 min
Jonas Mekas, Remedy for Melancholy, 1993-97, 28 min
Jonas Mekas, Autobiography of a Man Who Carried his Memory in his Eyes, 2000, 50 min
Jonas Mekas, Cinema is Not 100 Years Old, 1996, 5 min
“I got into video when a New York Sony representative decided to hand for free Sony 8 video cameras to ‘famous’ New Yorkers in exchange for a few minutes of video they would use then to promote the cameras. So I got one, and gave them my first very, very bad five minutes of video. They also gave one camera to Allen Ginsberg, who took it on his trip to Israel where it was stolen from him; Sony got no footage. Anyway, that was the beginning.
“That was in late 1987. The camera was Video 8. Later I switched to Video Hi-8, and that’s where I still am. Because I like to do all my editing at home and at weirdest and unpredictable hours, I cannot yet afford digital video due to the expensive editing equipment. But Hi-8 editing is cheap.
“Jokingly I say, when asked, that I use the video camera as I would use a tape recorder. There is some truth to it. It’s opposite to what I do with my Bolex. No single frames. No emphasis on colour. It’s more stress on mood, atmosphere, and you can’t get mood or atmosphere in single frames. Which means, in my video diaries I record a different aspect of reality than what I do with a Bolex or in my written poetry.
“I have collected by now, that is, by June 1st, 2002, c.750 hours of video material. During the next 12 months or so my intention is to prepare a c.24 hour video volume of my life in New York.”
(Jonas Mekas, 1st June 2002)
PROGRAMME NOTES
JONAS MEKAS VIDEO SHOW
Wednesday 21 August 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
SELF-PORTRAIT
Jonas Mekas, USA, 1980, colour, sound, 11 min
One twenty minute take, a soliloquy, myself talking about myself. Taped in collaboration with Robert Schoenbaum, at the house / porch of Sally Dixon, St. Paul.
REMEDY FOR MELANCHOLY
Jonas Mekas, USA, 1993-97, colour, sound, 28 min
Includes four sketches: With Peter Kubelka at St. Michel; our cat Apache and Nina Hagen; children of the School for Violin; the books of Ken Jacobs.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A MAN WHO CARRIED HIS MEMORY IN HIS EYES
Jonas Mekas, USA, 2000, colour, sound, 50 min
A condensed survey of my first 50 years in New York – physically and mentally.
CINEMA IS NOT 100 YEARS OLD
Jonas Mekas, USA, 1996, colour, sound, 5 min
The true history of the cinema is the hidden history of friends who meet to do what they love. For us the cinema starts with each humming of projector, with each new buzz of our camera, our hearts are projected forwards. My friends, cinema is not yet 100 years old.
We appreciate the help of Louis Benassi and the Edinburgh Film Festival in making this event possible. Thanks also to Jane Giles.
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