THE DECAY OF FICTION
Friday 31 October 2003, at 11:30pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

ULTIMA THULE
Janie Geiser, USA, 2002, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
A small silver plane navigates an ultramarine storm, flying over cloud-covered hills, an unlikely ferry to Ultima Thule: the farthest point, the limit of any journey. The seduction of immersion in blue is too strong to avoid, the land fills with water, time loses its line. This film grew out of my strong attraction to a certain blue that I found in an animated film sequence. I wanted to place images in that blue rain, and an aeroplane made its way in. I followed the plane through the night storm to this unknown destination. (Janie Geiser)

THE DECAY OF FICTION
Pat O’Neill, USA, 2002, 35mm, colour, sound, 74 min
The Decay of Fiction is an intersection of fact and hallucination in an abandoned luxury hotel. The hotel is in Hollywood. The walls of the Ambassador are cracked and peeling, the lawns are brown, and mushrooms grow in the damp carpets of the Cocoanut Grove. The pool is empty, and the ballroom where Bobby Kennedy died is shuttered and locked. A tall, elegant blonde stands transparently on the terrace of her bungalow, smoking and watching the sunrise. Voices and tinkles waft across the lawn. A contingent of vaguely sinister men arrive and ask for Jack. Jack is expecting trouble, but not this kind of trouble. Louise, a guest, replays a nightmare in which she drowns Pauline so that she can marry Dean. The sun sets and rises again. Two detectives seem to turn up everywhere, searching for Communist literature and telling one another pointless stories of underworld intrigue. In the kitchens and behind the scenes the daily routine continues, individuality melts, and workers fuse with their jobs. Winter passes, and then another summer, and finally it is Halloween, and there is a costume ball which claims the life of Rhonda the evasive soprano. And then the building comes down in a clatter of Spanish tiles and concrete, and fact has finally become fiction, once again.

I scribbled the words “The Decay of Fiction” on the back of a notebook almost forty years ago, tore it off and framed it fifteen years later, and have wanted ever since to make a film to fit its ready-made description. To me it refers to the common condition of stories partly remembered, films partly seen, texts at the margins of memory, disappearing like a book left outside on the ground to decompose back into the earth.

The film takes place in a building about to be destroyed, whose walls contain (by dint of association) a huge burden of memory: cultural and personal, conscious and unconscious. To make the film was to trap a few of its characters and some of their dialog, casting them together within the confines of the site. The structure and its stories are decaying together, and each seems to be a metaphor for the other.

I am interested in exploring the boundaries of believability. The narrative tradition insists that, no matter how fantastic the story, its surface must be seamless. By contrast, I call attention to the artifice, all the staged aspects, and allow the well-worn stories to slip over and through one another. The film’s intention could be described as wanting to take stories off the screen and into the imagination. I like to work within the gaps between reality and story, to look at what is going on around the story, its context, and to make that a part of my conversation with the audience.
—Pat O’Neill

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VIDEO VISIONS
Saturday 1 November 2003, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

LOOK AT ME STANDING HERE
Ezra Eeman, Belgium, 2001, colour, sound, 8 min
An apparently mundane view of a pedestrian area … what is happening? Image seamlessly sticks and cuts, sound drifts from super-realism to atmospheric score. Time suspends as the sense of alienation and displacement distends. The centre of the city is a lonely place. —Mark Webber

LE SILENCE EST EN MARCHE
Pierre-Yves Cruaud, France, 2001, colour, sound, 4 min
Barriers restrict the living space of more or less human apparitions. We witness the development of life forms that are already fairly regimented. —Pierre-Yves Cruaud

JET
Michaela Schwentner, Austria, 2003, colour, sound, 6 min
This video’s exhilarating dynamism results from a precisely composed interplay of colour and form which structures the viewer’s perception of it significantly. Michaela Schwentner’s work method closely resembles that of electro-acoustic sound artists Radian, who employ a variety of painterly elements that are allowed to interact, overlap or contrast. —Christa Benzer

WHY RE-MIX, 2002
Keiichi Tanaami, Japan, 2002, colour, sound, 10 min
Footage of a boxing match is reduced to printed stills, whose constituent dots are enlarged and contrasted into an optical moiré. Audio-visual barrage of sound and image by Japanese animator , graphic designer Tanaami, based on his 1975 film Why. Assault not insult. —Mark Webber

ANAL MASTURBATION & OBJECT LOSS
Steve Reinke, USA, 2002, colour, sound, 6 min
Ever on the lookout for learning opportunities, Reinke envisions an art institute where you don’t have to make anything, and with a library full of books glued together. All the information’s there – you just don’t have to bother reading it! —New York Video Festival, 2002

FORBIDDEN FRUITS
George Kuchar, USA, 2002, colour, sound, 15 min
The foliage and sprouting of urban greenery becomes the subject of this celebration to all things pollinated. The video explores hidden gardens that lie sequestered amid an array of dwellings inhabited by the not so rich and famous. Felines creep amid the blossoms as human entities enrich the soil with their leaking desires. —George Kuchar

THE GEOSOPHIST’S TEARS
Peter Rose, USA, 2002, colour, sound, 8 min
Shot during a seven-week cross-country road trip in the aftermath of September 11th, the work is operatic in ambition and offers a complex meditation on the iconography of the American landscape. Drawing on the stratagems of the early geosophists, who believed that through the operation of a mysterious instrument landscapes might be placed in an emotionally meaningful correspondence with one another, the work uses a variety of visual algorithms to propose and discover surprising structural features of the uninhabited American landscape. Sounds for the work were produced by a remarkable antique slide rule, dating from 1895, that was untouched for over forty years and whose peculiar threnody is both mournful and rhapsodic. In its fractured and phantasmagoric reworkings of the horizon, the work offers us unstable metaphors for the state of the union and a respectful homage to the traditions of painting. —Peter Rose

FRANZ UND KLARA
Gerhard Geiger, Germany, 2003, colour, sound, 4 min
Geiger seeks an equivalent editing style for digital video, to those techniques he has used for 16mm film. Using the same footage shot at a family house party, he presents first the concentrated short film (twice for our assimilation) and then the more recent video version. —Mark Webber

MARVELOUS CREATURES
Wago Kreider, USA, 2003, colour, sound, 3 min
From the taxidermied bestiary of a natural history museum to the life-like waxworks that haunt our pop culture memories, the convulsive beauty of animals oscillates between plenitude and punishment, attraction and repulsion, life and death. In a series of photographic shocks that flash an image of the fixed-explosive, Marvelous Creatures signal the uncanny correlation of erotic and destructive impulses. They bear witness to a primordial trauma, a confusion between the animate and the inanimate, the biological and the mechanical, Eros and Thanatos. —Wago Kreider

THE STAIRWAY AT ST. PAUL’S
Jeroen Offerman, Netherlands-UK, 2002, colour, sound, 9 min
It’s time to dive into your record collection and find out if it was all true. But first let us watch this video. Turn up the volume and remember the first time you smoked a cigarette… —Jeroen Offerman

5%
Tony Cokes & Scott Pagano, USA, 2001, colour, sound, 10 min
5% is a ten-minute work that questions the cult of pop stardom, deconstructs music industry practices, considers the problematics of live performance, and suggests other, more anonymous working strategies. For this work I decided to collaborate closely with musician, media artist, and designer Scott Pagano who, along with Marc Pierson, currently form the core of SWIPE. Our idea of generic music came out of a belief that pop music was more about life under post-industrial commodity capital than it was about ‘love’, ‘emotion’ or ‘personal expression’. Narratives of superstardom were the grease that kept the idiotic grind looped, moving in place. The soundtrack is two recent SWIPE tracks: “mm_2” and “1cc_v2+”. —Tony Cokes

I AM A BOYBAND
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Canada, 2002, colour, sound, 6 min
What are the ingredients for a boy band? A cute tune, dance moves and of course four handsome hunks, each with their own look … A cloned boyband co-opts an Elizabethan madigral to express its heartbreak over lost love. —Benny Nerofsky Ramsay

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LIGHT TRACES
Saturday 1 November 2003, at 4pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

UNTITLED (LIGHT)
Julie Murray, USA, 2002, colour, sound, 5 min
A moving reflection on September 11, Untitled (Light) finds beauty in minutiae, breaking down the skyward searchlights memorializing the fallen towers into a constellation of illuminated dust motes. —Onion City Film Festival, 2003

ANIMAL STUDIES
Guy Sherwin, UK 1998-2003, b/w, silent, 25 min
A variable set of perceptual studies on the inconsequential movements of animals. The films are made partly in the camera and partly in the printer, and most are derived from a single take. Fluctuations of light, geometry and time reveal what might be hidden in the photographic depths of the material. My filmic interest in animals is that they are unselfconscious, authentic, and don’t act. This is part of an ongoing series of films which developed out of the Short Film Series, and can be shown in any order or number, giving an openness of connection between images, ideas, thoughts, themes. —Guy Sherwin

PRINCE HOTEL
Karl Kels, Germany 1987-2003, b/w, silent, 8 min
In 1986 Kels received a fellowship that allowed him to study at Cooper Union in New York. During his stay there, Kels spent some six months at the Bowery in Lower Manhattan. He began hanging out with the less fortunate who eke out an existence in cheap hotels or on the street, and became friendly with many of them. In the lives of the mostly male alcoholics who survive on open camaraderie and cheap alcohol, he discovered a rich unstaged world, which he slowly started to film. Bowery / Fragment [the working title for Prince Hotel] is but a short fragment of what a final film on this subject could offer, yet it stands by itself and clearly bears the director’s marks. Against the background of a run-down Prince Hotel we see men who pass time together, deliberately portrayed by Kels’ clear eye for framing and detail, and yet whose acts and movements cannot be controlled. —Miryam Van Lier, Millennium Film Journal

EMBERS
Jimmy Robert, UK, 2003, colour, silent, 7 min
Using the modest super-8 gauge to film his immediate personal surroundings, Jimmy Robert has developed a profound personal style. Fleeting moments are combined in editing, evoking moods through the juxtaposition of images. —Mark Webber

THE VISITATION
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2002, colour, silent, 18 min
The Visitation is a gradual unfolding, an arrival so to speak. I felt the necessity to describe an occurrence, not one specifically of time and place, but one of revelation in one’s own psyche. The place of articulation is not so much in the realm of images as information, but in the response of the heart to the poignancy of the cuts. —Nathaniel Dorsky

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ILLUMINATION
Saturday 1 November 2003, at 7pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

GLOW IN THE DARK (JANUARY-JUNE)
Rebecca Meyers, USA, 2002, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 min
Radiators clang while spheres and cypridina phosphoresce. A rubber ball held up to light becomes a snowy crystal. Looking out and up when the sun is down. Home science experiments and other attempts to see with the camera in the dark. —Rebecca Meyers

LAMPENSCHWARZ
Goh Harada, Japan-Germany, 2001, 16mm, b/w, silent, 12 min
Black surface made with black pigment meets white surface created by the projection lamp. The film Lampenschwarz was made solely by manual work only using black pigment (Lampenschwarz), transparent glue and blank film. These materials were brought onto the transparent film with the tips of the fingers, frame by frame. This film shows 17,000 of these different black and white images through the rapid speed of the projector, thus creating ‘black and white movements’. —Goh Harada

IF ONLY
Fred Worden, USA, 2003, 16mm, b/w, silent, 7 min
The bubble shaped orb of the human head, perched atop its touchy-feely transport system has seven moist oval openings through which everything outside comes in: two eyes, two nostrils, one mouth and two ears. Inside the bubble head, bubble universes spawn ad infintum and the only passable direction is directly into the steady headwinds of an ever advancing infinity of veils. A high wire bobbing and weaving just to stay upright. These artful if endless veil penetrations are at once the human job description as well as nature’s shot at vindicating the transient in the face of the impassive infinite. Nature makes the orifices moist so things can stick, at least momentarily. The intoxicated camera operator shoots the moon slipping through the barren trees. The rabbit hole’s light shadow appears and he obliges, head first, no looking back. His cranium (like yours) is packed with illusions, but down the rabbit hole they treasure the same just so long as they’re custom fabricated, hand tooled and conscious. Down this hole, stalking the unforeseen non-translatable is all. Join in here. —Fred Worden

I AM LOST TO THE WORLD
Ichiro Sueoka, Japan, 2003, 16mm,  b/w, sound, 7 min
This title is quoted from the poetry of Friedrich Rueckert (“Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”). This German romanticist poet wrote of the sadness of disappearance. An anonymous amateur cineaste shot and recorded the some scenes of Kyoto in 1934, but the films are suffering from vinegar syndrome, since they have been badly stored. The films were just falling into decay, and would probably only disappear, without looking back to anyone. ‘Film’ is not an immortal document, but a vanishing existence. —Ichiro Sueoka 

ENCOUNTER IN SPACE
Thomas Draschan, Austria-Germany, 2003, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min
Encounter in Space relates the story of a man and his alter egos, abandoned in the midst of an unknown extraterrestrial region, immersed in the sinister light of an unholy radiation, which arouses in him sexual craving and human desire. He has to encounter a number of adventures and to give proof of his potency, while having to cope with an eye operation and several other incidents. He is noticeably getting lost in the battles among his alter egos. Eventually, part of his personality leaves the planet, and the part of his personality that remains behind is able to embark in peace on a quest for new amusements. —Thomas Draschan

COMMON KNOWLEDGE
James Otis, USA, 2002, 16mm, colour, sound, 2 min
Upbeat, fast-paced, crowd-pleasing investigation of marketing and the original sin, based on a South African apple juice commercial. The sound track is an obsessively synchronised, mad marimba version of the old mission hymn, “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains”. —James Otis

OUTLINE
Sandra Gibson, USA, 2003, 35mm, colour, silent, 6 min
Defining the shape of everyday objects (ferns, forks and flowers), the strip of film was unwound on the studio floor and decoratively stencilled. At 24 frames per second, the objects dissolve into a filmic downpour. —Luis Recoder

JOURS EN FLEURS
Louise Bourque, Canada, 2003, 16mm, colour, sound, 5 min
A reclamation of flower-power in which images of trees in springtime bloom are subjected to the floriferous ravages of menarcheal substance. The title is based on an expression from my coming of age in French Canada, where girls would refer to having their menstrual periods as ‘être dans ses fleurs’. As a result of incubation in menstrual blood for several months, the original images on the emulsion undergo violent alterations. The shedding of the unfertilised womb depredates the fertilised blossoms and substitutes its own dark beauty. From the dissolution of the pro-filmic, the scale shifts abruptly and kaleidoscopically from the macro to the microcosmic and with it another representation of nature emerges. —Louise Bourque

RESURRECTION
Trish Van Huesen, USA, 2002, 16mm, colour, sound, 3 min
A hand processed Super-8 film, where individual frames have been scratched, painted and bleached in order to portray the emergence of consciousness. —Trish Van Huesen

DAYLIGHT MOON
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2002, 16mm, colour, sound, 14 min
There are things I could say about Daylight Moon but very few I want to before someone has seen it. But I will say this: of all the films I’ve made using collage to muck around in the past, this one gets the closest to what I’m after. —Lewis Klahr

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IMITATIONS OF LIFE
Mike Hoolboom, Canada, 2003, video, colour, sound, 75 min
Expanding on the structure of Panic Bodies, with its discrete but interconnected shorts, the latest found-footage feature from Mike Hoolboom is a ten-part meditation on childhood, visual representation and the future in a world of pictures. Breathtaking in its encyclopaedic recycling and appropriation, the film moves beyond scratch video, assemblage and recontextualisation; in Hoolboom’s words it “strains childhood through a history of reproduction, culling pictures from the Lumières to the present day in order to find the future in the past.” Much more than just a poetic essay on mediation and simulation at the end of history, the film situates the ethical challenges of the future within the context of picture making, pointing to our current crisis as one of (a failure of) imagination, representation and technology.

Already acclaimed as a short in its own right, Jack works as the heart of the film, with Hoolboom’s familiar, wryly wise voice-over recounting visits with his nephew as we witness Jack growing up in processed Bolex images. Here we see possibility, for Jack makes happiness his profession and ponders if politics could ever be an expression of love.

Throughout the film, the presence of childhood, whether in pictures, voice, story, or reflection, forces us adults to rethink our responsibility, imagination, apocalyptic terrors and the formation of our own memories. The title section itself, proposes science fiction as a species of film haunted by science, obsessed with death and always about catastrophe. With visuals weaving together Riefenstahl, Terminator and many more familiar images, it leaves us with the challenge of how we will invent the future. —Ken Anderlini, Vancouver International Film Festival, 2003

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JONAS AT THE OCEAN
Sunday 2 November 2003, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

JONAS AT THE OCEAN
Peter Sempel, Germany, 2002, 16mm, colour, sound, 93 min
It’s actually a prolongation of Jonas In The Desert, so Part Two, but with less talking and more music. I think , feel with music you can come nearer to something , someone than with any words (of course there are also interviews, for example with Jonas, Robert Frank, Nam June Paik, Phil Glass…) I’ve been filming Jonas (not shown at all in Part One) and also new scenes as I kept on filming after 1994, actually ’til, 2001. It starts with Jonas at the seashore in Lithuania laughing and filming children and running into the water with his Bolex camera, with ‘Starlight’ by Lou Reed and John Cale (about Warhol films), his hat flies away in the wind … He reads from his book, about the days in Germany … A wonderful scene where he repeats the landing at the Hudson with Algis and his brother Adolphas (filmed in slow motion – Jonas Scholz, the cameraman did a great job!) … Him running through the wide fields of his home country, chasing cows, hugging a white horse, and running to the horizon and back into the camera … Of course also in New York, and Torino, Barcelona, Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, Sao Paulo, Washington, Montauk and … and …

Some highlights: Robert Frank in his studio, talking about the old days, a ‘light show’ with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Nick Cave reads from ‘I Had Nowhere To Go’ (the scene with the peepshow in the 1950s, 42nd Street, it’s beautiful and sad. Nick reads in his little green backyard house in London, dramatically (black + white, 16mm), it’s great.) … More guests: Rudy Burkhardt talking wildly about Maya Deren, Allen Ginsberg, Julius Ziz, Kenneth Anger, Tony Conrad (with a great performance in Buffalo), Stan Brakhage, Vincent Canby, Raimund Abraham, Peter Kubelka, Michael Snow, Fernando Arrabal, Zoe Lund and Harvey Keitel, Wim Wenders (calling Jonas the James Joyce of film art …), Blixa sings a song, Kiki and more … Jonas doing an Artaud performance on the Anthology-stage, at the top of his voice … Really quite crazy he is sometimes, how wonderful! Music: from underground, classical to Lithuanian folksongs. Okay, this could give you a little idea. The whole film is 93min on 16mm. —Peter Sempel

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THE ILLUSION OF MOVEMENT
Sunday 2 November 2003, at 4pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

WORST CASE SCENARIO
John Smith, UK, 2003, video, colour, sound, 18 min
For his latest work, Worst Case Scenario, Smith took four thousand still photographs of daily life on a Viennese street corner. The film re-orders and manipulates a selection of these images, and as it progresses the static world slowly and subtly comes to life. As Sigmund Freud casts his long shadow across the city, an increasingly improbable chain of events and relationships starts to emerge. —Open Eye Gallery

LIKE ALL BAD MEN HE LOOKS ATTRACTIVE
Michele Smith, USA, 2003, video, colour, silent, 23 min
THEY SAY
Michele Smith, USA, 2003, video, colour, silent, 49 min
This new work consists of one film split into two parts. Two parts which can be seen in either order, or separately if one so chooses.

In Like All Bad Men He Looks Attractive the mixed mediums are woven together on Mini DV. The materials are one reel of 35mm film and two reels of 16mm film. Inset into the 35mm film are plastic shopping bags, translucent plastic folders and plates, Mylar drafts used as blueprints for bridge construction, Viewmaster slides, paparazzi slides found at a tourist memorabilia shop on Hollywood Boulevard (including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Charlton Heston and George Peppard with a big white rabbit), slides purchased in the gift shops at the Getty Museum and at Hearst Castle, “sign here” tabs from my accountant, the wings of a dying butterfly that I tried to rescue from the hot pavement of a grocery store parking lot, Hollywood movie trailers, 8mm home movies and stag films, 16mm footage (including an episode of Green Acres), Viewmaster stills from 1970s TV shows, etc. Some things were not inset into the reel but recorded in the same manner and later cut in digitally. Panels, or film ‘carpets’: large mats made of 16mm film. Old magic lantern slides. The base film the elements are physically cut into is a workprint of raw footage of an unknown actor with a bandaged finger standing in front of the camera. He occasionally raises an envelope and reacts to a clapboard. I received this reel of film from a friend who’s a bit of a packrat (like myself). Before I met him, his house had burned down and this reel was one of the few items which survived. The decayed parts are where the emulsion melted from the heat.

The digital transfer was hand shot frame by frame against a crafter’s lightboard with a 25 watt candelabra bulb because the plastic folders and other elements inset into the 35mm would not go through the telecine transfer machine. I decided not to set an exact frameline and moved the filmstrip casually past the camera. This process added a feeling of the material celluloid form bending and moving as fast stills in time, with light reflecting through and glaring against it. I shot each frame as a still – which then had to be loaded into the Mac and sped up. It’s approximately equal to 10 frames per second, film speed. I alter this rhythm at different points in the film. There is also a cheesy faux-shutter effect for the still shots which was built into the camera I used – it becomes a chaotic and erratic half-flicker when sped up.

Intercut into this are found VHS tapes I bought with my grandmother at the local Greek deli and produce shop. They were getting rid of their rental videos and for some reason I must have looked like someone who would buy the entire shopping cart full because the shopkeeper made a deal and offered all of them to me. I used footage from four of these films in sections during both films. While watching these tapes I decided this material would be an interesting element to add to my film. Much of it is cut at an interval of three digital frames (which is about 30 frames per second) after every 12 frames of transferred film. A friend did this while I sat by and watched and told him where to split the images because I was at that point not too keen on editing digitally and did not know how it would turn out. Regarding Penelope’s Wake was pure in its filmic structure. The only digital editing done to that film was to clean up between reel changes and breaks in the film during transfer. By the end of the digital interweaving edits in the new films, I jumped in and did it myself and reworked some rhythm structures. As the work progressed, I became quite pleased with the possibilities and interactions of this new set of elements, and with the subtle contrasts and interactions of different mediums, times, and textures.

They Say consists of two reels of heavily edited (frame by frame) and overlaid 16mm film. It was then intercut with the grainy and scratchy melodrama rental tapes. I used a few 16mm found footage source reels as the main focus to play with narrative structure in a way related to but different than in my first work. I used a lot of footage from one narrative short film about a boy and a wild horse. When nearing the end I tired of editing it and decided to put it out into my garden and then dumped a few litter boxes on top. Contents: wood pellets and bunny poop. I forgot how long I left it outside … it rained a few times. Perhaps a week. It was later washed with laundry detergent and hot water.

I want my films to be open. The viewer creates the version of the film they will see by the way in which they view it. This is on a narrative , symbolic , metaphorical level as well as on a visual and structural level. The rapid intercutting and weaving of strands of different footage and elements creates a time space where one must mix what they are seeing for themselves. There is no one way to perceive the links of still images into an illusion of movement. One can, with a readjusting of their viewing, change their experience of the work throughout. —Michele Smith

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