Date: 4 September 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection
PIP CHODOROV AND THE SPOOLS OF PARIS
Wednesday 4 September 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
Pip Chodorov, filmmaker and director of the video label Re:Voir will present his selection of recent films from France and report on the Paris scene, which is alive with active publishers, distributors, screenings and independent groups. The programme will feature work made at L’Abominable and MTK, two collective laboratories, and includes films by Frédérique Devaux, Rose Lowder and Nicolas Rey.
Pip Chodorov, Numéro 4, France, 1990, colour, sound, 4 min (18fps)
Mahine Rouhi, Ptkho, France, 2000, b/w, sound, 7 min
Stefano Canapa, Promenaux, France, 2001, b/w, sound, 6 min
Colas Ricard, Tandem, France, 2001, colour, sound, 6 min
Nicolas Rey, Terminus for You, France, 1996, b/w, sound, 9 min
Marcelle Thirache, L’Arbre Bleu, France, 2001, colour, silent, 4 min (18fps)
Frédérique Devaux, Logomagie, France, 1999, colour, sound, 4 min
Rose Lowder, Les Coquelicots, France, 2000, colour, silent, 3 min (18fps)
Othello Vilgarde, Terrae, France, 2001, b/w, sound, 10 min
Dominik Lange, Chrysalides en explosion, France, 2001, colour, sound-on-cd, 17 min
“In these new lyric works and optical printer films, contemporary filmmakers continue to walk through the world and report what they see, and how they see. As Pthko shows us, some of the films are misleadingly abstract. Promenaux takes us through Paris, its jazz, its streets, its train tracks. In Tandem, train tracks become a metaphor for the film strip. Terminus for You continues the analogy in the Paris metro, its moving sidewalks, its regularly spaced posters and its animated characters carrying the metaphor, until the decomposition of the film material itself reminds us that all is illusory, all is grain and light. Terminus For You, L’Arbre Bleu and Logomagie are all worked by hand on the emulsion, whereas Numéro 4 and the last three films, Poppies, Terrae and Chrysalides use the movie camera as a still camera, flickering between different stills of natural forms, proving once again that movement is not created in the film but in the brain.” (Pip Chodorov, 2002)
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Date: 18 September 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection
TOM, A STOLEN BIOGRAPHY
Wednesday 18 September 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
Crystalline glances at the life of notorious gay cineaste Tom Chomont told through a symphony of stolen footage. Chomont recounts his artistic and personal history, shadowed by his battle with AIDS and Parkinson’s Disease, while Hoolboom weaves the visual tapestry. Tom is biography told as if a dream, unconsciously drifting between private and collective experience.
Mike Hoolboom, Tom, 2002, 75 min
PROGRAMME NOTES
TOM, A STOLEN BIOGRAPHY
Wednesday 18 September 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
TOM, A STOLEN BIOGRAPHY
Mike Hoolboom, Canada, 2002, video, colour, sound, 75 min
“Tom is an ‘experimental’ feature-length documentary made almost entirely of found footage. This is cinema as deja vu, or deja voodoo; many moments will feel all too familiar, though they’ve been projected now onto the surface of a life to make up this most unusual of biographies. The history of a city, New York City, the most photographed city in the world, operates as a backdrop for the life of Tom Chomont, a key member of the New York underground, a notorious video artist, AIDS sufferer, raconteur. His fantastical stories punctuate the weave of pictures, and a rare white light which he imagines as both the beginning and end of all life. As the decades roll past, excerpts from hundreds of films, some archival documents, some well known Hollywood moments, stream past in a hypnotic rush offering a subject whose skin is cinema, whose flesh and blood has been re-made into the picture plane.
“This portrait is strained thru a history of pictures which come to inhabit their subject, this Tom, this once human. These pictures have taken hold of their subject and reshaped him, moments from a thousand movies have become his life and imagination, the possibility of love. This portrait teases these pictures out of his skin and the skin of his New York City, whose secret histories merge at last with the memories of one of its most underground citizens.
“From his mouth a confession: living is also grieving, an act accomplished in the theatre of sadomasochism where he can return to the memory of his brother, sleeping with his brother’s lovers as he once slept with him, the forbidden apple of his family’s eye, the man closer to him than any other.
“This is the society of the spectacle rewritten as biography, shooting the individual through the vanishing point until there is nothing left but masks, a face which appears as pictures and the memory of tears.”
(Mike Hoolboom, 2002)
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Date: 16 October 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection
COLLAGE FILMS OF GUNVOR NELSON
Wednesday 16 October 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
Gunvor Nelson’s collage work extends the artistic possibilities of animation and layered imagery, combining disparate elements into a temporal, cinematic painting. In this sequence of films from the 1980s, journeys through the Swedish landscape are used to depict a sense of displacement from her native country. By showing animation as a process, Nelson creates a unique and freewheeling chain of evocative transformations.
Gunvor Nelson, Light Years, Sweden, 1987, colour, sound, 28 min
Gunvor Nelson, Frame Line, Sweden, 1984, b/w, sound, 22 min
Gunvor Nelson, Light Years Expanding, Sweden, 1987, colour, sound, 25 min
This screening takes place in conjunction with a retrospective of Swedish avant-garde film presented by the Baltic Centre, Gateshead.
PROGRAMME NOTES
COLLAGE FILMS OF GUNVOR NELSON
Wednesday 16 October 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
Gunvor Nelson, Light Years, Sweden, 1987, colour, sound, 28 min
Gunvor Nelson, Frame Line, Sweden, 1984, b/w, sound, 22 min
Gunvor Nelson, Light Years Expanding, Sweden, 1987, colour, sound, 25 min
“Frame Line is a collage film in black and white. Glimpses (both visual and audible) of Stockholm, people, gestures, flags and the Swedish national anthem appear through drawings, paintings and cut-outs. It is a film with an eerie flow between the ugly and the beautiful about returning, about roots and also about reshaping. Light Years is a collage film and a journey through the Swedish landscape, traversing stellar distances in units of 5878 trillion miles. It is a film acutely in the present reflecting our temporal existence … continuous and imperfect.” (Gunvor Nelson, Canyon Cinema catalogue)
“Light Years continues to develop the concerns and techniques begun in her earlier film Frame Line. In Light Years Nelson blends collage animation with highly textured live-action material to create a haunting evocation of her displacement from her native Swedish culture. Particularly striking is her use of wet ink on glass to create a constantly shifting image of a path leading to a house. With these passages of the house and moving images of the Swedish landscape as threads, Light Years becomes a tapestry of change as experienced through constant motion. It is a personal reflection on the filmmaker’s memories of her past. The film is so filled with visual ideas that Gunvor Nelson has extended the film’s themes and techniques in her subsequent effort Light Years Expanding. All her recent films suggest that while the distance of time makes home further, the intensity of memory makes it richer.” (Parabola)
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Date: 16 October 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection
JACK CHAMBERS’ HART OF LONDON
Wednesday 16 October 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
Canadian artist Jack Chambers made Hart of London at a time when he was diagnosed with leukaemia and given two months to live. Developing from his concept of ‘perceptual realism’, this incredible film rises from dense layers of superimposition before slipping into sharp focus and powerful clarity. The accumulation of images evokes universal memory through waves of nostalgia, emotion and wonderment. An awesome contemplation on mortality, creation and destruction: All life (and death) is here, humanity laid bare.
Jack Chambers, Hart of London, 1969-70, 79 min
Presented in association with the Canadian High Commission, who have generously bought a new print of the film for European distribution by LUX. With thanks to John Chambers and Maggie Warwick.
PROGRAMME NOTES
JACK CHAMBERS’ HART OF LONDON
Wednesday 16 October 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
HART OF LONDON
Jack Chambers, Canada, 1969-70, b/w & colour, sound, 79 min
“Hart of London (1969-70), Chambers’ last film, is a dense, feature-length, multi-image symphonic work whose scope is breathtaking. Without doubt it is a masterwork. In its quick cutting, its transitions from positive to negative imagery, its jittery, anxious camera movement, its vision of death as the slaughter of innocents, and above all its deep interest in the qualities of light, it resembles the work of American avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, whom Chambers much admired. Although Chambers’ familiarity with Brakhage’s work may have expanded his formal vocabulary, the film remains unmistakably his own. Hart of London is composed largely of newsreel, proto-cinematographic images which are wedded to a particular place and time. For this reason they evoke a sense of loss. These images are often arranged in patterns which consist in the alternation of icons of birth with icons of death. Made shortly after Chambers learned that he was suffering from leukaemia, the film, rather than suggesting that death balances birth, implies that death sooner or later savages every living thing.” (R. Bruce Elder, Image and Identity: Reflections of Canadian Film and Identity, 1989)
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Date: 14 November 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection
REQUIEM FOR THE AVANT-GARDE
Thursday 14 November 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
Using Super-8, 16mm and video, Ichiro Sueoka is a creating an evolving series which revisits classics of the 1960s and 1970s structural avant-garde. This programme will present the original inspirational works, followed by Sueoka’s “imitation films”. The modern interpretations refer to popular Hollywood cinema while investigating the conceptual ideas behind the earlier uncompromising masterpieces.
Georges Rey, La vache qui rumine, France, 1970, b/w & colour, silent, 3 min
Ichiro Sueoka, Pourquoi la vache qui rumine?, Japan, 2000, colour, sound, 5 min
Malcolm Le Grice, Little Dog for Roger, UK, 1967, b/w, sound, 13 min
Ichiro Sueoka, Little Cat for Flix, Japan, 2000, b/w, sound, 5 min
Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow), Film in which there appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc., USA, 1965-66, colour, silent, 5 min
Ichiro Sueoka, A Film in Which There did NOT Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering without Dirt Particles, Japan, 2002, colour, sound, 4 min
Wojciech Bruszewski, Yyaa, Poland, 1973, b/w, sound, 5 min
Ichiro Sueoka, A film as the subject of Judy Garland, under the score of Wojciech Bruszewski’s film “YYAA”, Japan, 1999, colour, sound, 5 min
Peter Kubelka, Arnulf Rainer, Austria, 1960, b/w, sound, 7 min
Ichiro Sueoka, A flick film in which there appear Liz and Franky, is composed under the score of ARNULF RAINER by P. Kubelka on NTSC, Japan, 2001, colour, sound, 7 min
“The works in the Requiem for the Avant-Garde series make reference to the representative films of the experimental work of the 1960s and 1970s – work not actively engaged with today – and re-examine the ideas developed in these works. I am quoting from popular Hollywood cinema, sources that are easier to understand as representation. These works aim to show the concepts behind the films. Here, the object of inquiry is the history of film itself.” (Ichiro Sueoka)
Presented in co-operation with the 46th Regus London Film Festival. With thanks to Jeremy Rigsby & Media City/Artcite Inc.
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Date: 4 December 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection
23RD PSALM BRANCH: A MEDITATION ON WAR BY STAN BRAKHAGE
Wednesday 4 December 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
For the 23rd in his series of 8mm Songs, Stan Brakhage assembled a meditation on the nature of war. The film, which was blown up to 16mm in 1978, is an intricate montage in which the material is manipulated to depict his personal response to the horrific events in Vietnam. “A study of war, created in the imagination in the wake of newsreel death and destruction.”
Stan Brakhage, 23rd Psalm Branch: Part I, USA, 1966/78, colour, silent, 44 min (18fps)
Stan Brakhage, 23rd Psalm Branch: Part II, USA, 1966/78, colour, silent, 41 min (18fps)
“The furthest that Brakhage came in extending the language of 8mm cinema was his editing of the 23rd Psalm Branch … The phenomenal and painstaking craftsmanship of this film reflects the intensity of the obsession with which its theme grasped his mind. In 1966, out of confusion about the Vietnam War and the American reaction to it, Brakhage began to meditate on the nature of war. He amassed a collection of war documentaries and diligently studied newsreels and political speeches on television to the point of speculating on the significance of recurring clusters and shapes of the dots on the television screen. The fruit of his studies and thoughts was the longest and most important of the “Songs”; 23rd Psalm Branch is an apocalypse of the imagination. The conscience of the filmmaker moves between his idea of home and the self and his vision of war. At times the montage of horrors pursues its own split-second dynamic as if forgetting to relocate itself in the passing American landscape.”
(P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film, 1974. An updated 3rd edition of the book was published by Oxford University Press in 2002)
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Date: 18 December 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection
GEORGE KUCHAR’S CHRISTMAS CRACKER
Wednesday 18 December 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
Celebrate the season of good cheer with George, as he serves up a smorgasbord of Yuletide yearning. Since 1986, Kuchar has produced over 300 tapes; each infused with heaps of humour and piles of pathos. This selection of his annual Christmas videos will warm our winter wonderland. Happy holidays!
George Kuchar, Holiday Xmas Video of 1991, USA, 1991, colour, sound, 20 min
George Kuchar, Xmas 1987 (New Year’s), USA, 1987, colour, sound, 13 min
George Kuchar, Dingleberry Jingles, USA, 1994, colour, sound, 21 min
George Kuchar, Fill Thy Crack with Whiteness, USA, 1989, colour, sound, 11 min
George Kuchar, Kingdom by the Sea, USA, 2002, colour, sound, 20 min
“Amid the greenery of what should be a White Christmas there sits the blackness close to my heart, and beyond that there bellows a legion of behemoths who know not shame nor guilt.”
“A veneer of good cheer coats the surface like thin ice, so proceed with caution!” (George Kuchar)
With plentiful seasonal gratitude to Steve Reinke and Abina Manning. Please bring festive treats to share with fellow audience members.
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