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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DISTANCE AND DISPLACEMENT
Saturday 28 October 2006, at 4pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

LET THERE BE WHISTLEBLOWERS
Ken Jacobs, USA, 2005, video, b/w, sound, 18 min
A train passes through a tunnel and hurtles on to a station. Time and space is toyed with, things enter an impossible state of on-going movement while going nowhere. The actual tunnel experience sets off a metaphysical one. Composed to the first part of ‘Drumming’ by Steve Reich. (Ken Jacobs)

UNIFINISHED PASSAGES
Brett Kashmere, Canada, 2005, video, b/w, sound, 17 min
This five-part film cycle emphasizes instants, rather than developing situations. Designed using indeterminate loop forms, and organized around themes of dislocation, transition, settlement, modernity and transportation, Unfinished Passages traces my great-grandfather’s journey from London, England to Golden Plains, Saskatchewan at the turn of the 20th century. Using the shadow play of light and darkness as a metaphor for human memory, Unfinished Passages reframes his forced immigration , orphan experience through the developing lens of the cinema. In bringing to light this aspect of my family history I draw upon the language of early cinema, beginning with the straightforward visual simplicity of Lumière demonstration pieces such as Boat Leaving the Harbour (1896) and The Arrival of a Train at the Station (1895), and Birt Acre’s Rough Sea at Dover (1895). The second part, inspired by Georges Méliès, follows the pattern of a dream and, as in a dream its real meaning is displaced and dispersed through associative connections. Part three forms a transitional pivot, seizing on the romanticized image of a moving train as an emblem for cinematic and technological progress. In part four the film proceeds to a more constructive, layered assembly based on the theory and practice of Dziga Vertov. Part five draws on the individual self-expression and open-ended conclusion of Francois Truffaut’s 400 Blows (1959). The reconstruction of my great-grandfather’s passage from Europe to Canada is, at the same time, expressed as a coterminous movement through film history. (Brett Kashmere)
www.brettkashmere.com

THIS IS MY LAND
Ben Rivers, UK, 2006, 16mm, b/w, sound, 14 min
A portrait of Jake Williams, who has lived in the middle of Clashindarroch Forest, Aberdeenshire, for over twenty years. Jake always has a hundred jobs on at any one time, fragmenting them into a system that he says eventually gets them all done some day; an expert mandolin player; a committed permaculturist who never throws anything away in the conventional sense, and has compost heaps going back many, many years. He has a different sense of time to most people in the 21st Century, which is explicitly expressed in his idea for creating hedges by putting up bird feeders. It struck me straight away that there were parallels between our ways of working – I have tried to be as self-reliant as possible and apart from the idea of filmmaking as an industry – Jake’s life and garden are much the same – he can sustain himself from what he grows and so needs little from others. To Jake this isn’t about nostalgia for some treasured pre-electric past, but more, a very real future. (Ben Rivers)

THE OTHER SIDE
Bill Brown, USA, 2006, 16mm, colour, sound, 43 min
Rooted in the true sense of ‘independent’ in voice and image, The Other Side is a personal essay documentary imbued with magical landscapes and searing observations softly spoken during the director’s cinematic trek along the United States-Mexican border. Throughout the 2,000-mile journey, Texas-based filmmaker Bill Brown considers the border as an historical and political geography of aspiration, insecurity, and transition. He talks to undocumented immigrants who have risked their lives to cross the border and to border activists whose politics have put them at odds with the guardians of homeland security. A native Texan who has made several documentary shorts, Brown is a sublime, poetic master of wide-open, in-between spaces, of desert and deserted vistas. The Other Side is a rare chance to discover one of America’s leading new cinematic voices. (Film Society of Lincoln Center)
To describe myself as documentary filmmaker is to own up to a troubled profession, what with its unfortunate aspiring to Truth and Objectivity. I’ve tried to cope with this by personalizing my films, insinuating my own voice and disavowing any pose of authority or conclusiveness. More than that, I’m interested in moving the documentary toward something like a metaphysics of fact, where fact materializes for a moment, only to dissolve into daydreams and melancholy and goose bumps.
I find myself drawn again and again to the same spaces: those wide open in-between spaces; landscapes of abandoned things; border zones and landscapes of transition, whether on the far edges of Las Vegas suburban sprawl, or along the fence line of abandoned missile silos in North Dakota. I’m drawn to the drama of transits and transitions played out on landscapes like these. I find myself drawn to the uncanny, too: UFOs and crop circles and ghost stories. The uncanny short-circuits the conclusiveness of our daily lives, which is something I like about it. I’m not sure if the uncanny has some special access to truth, but the uncanny and the true both are spooky. Both haunt us, hovering close by but just out of reach. (Bill Brown)

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JACK SMITH & THE DESTRUCTION OF ATLANTIS
Saturday 28 October 2006, at 9pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

JACK SMITH & THE DESTRUCTION OF ATLANTIS
Mary Jordan, USA, 2006, video, colour, sound, 96 min

In 1964, the year Lenny Bruce was convicted of obscenity after a New York stage appearance, Jack Smith’s pansexual phantasmagoria Flaming Creatures was busted by the NYPD. It was eventually banned in 22 states and four countries; as late as 1968, Lyndon Johnson’s Attorney General was impounding prints of the movie.

Documentaries need self-dramatizers, and being a diva was Jack Smith’s art and life. At the start of Mary Jordan’s irresistible documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, the artist’s reedy voice is heard intoning, “Doctor, doctor, tell me, please: Is my brain a germ or a disease?” Late in life, he says of his work: “I was knocking myself out to make this stuff. And I always assumed that people would see this and have pity and give me a little support. [Now he shouts:] They didn’t!”

Smith was inspired as a kid by the Scheherazade schlock of B-movie queen Maria Montez. As a director, he renamed one of his drag stars Mario Montez and starred him in no-budget avant-garde movies of delirious (and now endearing) Caligulan excess. Both Mario and Jack went to work for Andy Warhol, who called Smith “the only person I would ever copy. He’s just so terrific, and I think he makes the best movies.” Warhol’s Factory and the films that emerged from it – Chelsea Girls and the rest – might not have existed without Smith’s influence. Consider that a curse or a blessing.

With Mephistophelean good looks swathed in leopard-skin couture, Smith was a ready-made icon of the Underground, and an easy magnet for police and politicians. “Moral decay is spreading through our country and our society,” declaimed one bluenose, brandishing a poster for Flaming Creatures – thus giving priceless free publicity to the film he meant to denounce.

What was the big deal? Languid displays of male and female genitals. As one of Smith’s avatars, John Waters, says: “Seeing a limp penis – in an arty way, in a way that was intellectual – was revolutionary. The police came because of it! Imagine, calling the cops because you saw a dick in a movie.” The furor made Smith notorious but not famous. Within a few years of the Flaming Creatures fracas, new and more lurid displays of artistic obscenity were on display without police interruption. Smith kept at his mission for another quarter century, but audiences didn’t always come. Yet he soldiered on – even, one night, when no paying customers showed up for one of his live performances. He did it anyway, all seven hours.

Avant-garde art is hard; dying is easy. In 1991, languishing with a fatal bout of AIDS in a Manhattan hospital, the lifelong kvetch was suddenly buoyant. The longtime starving artist told playwright Ron Tavel, “It’s the best food I’ve had in my life.” His mind has sustenance too: dreams of his eternal movie goddess, Maria (not Mario) Montez. It would be lovely if lots of people saw this documentary about an avant-gardist who loved old Hollywood movies. It might remind them that there are lands beyond today’s blockbusters and timid dramas that are worth visiting and, for an hour and a half, living in.

(Richard Corliss)

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WITHIN YOU, WITHOUT YOU
Sunday 29 October 2006, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

SONG AND SOLITUDE
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2006, 16mm, colour, silent, 21 min
Song and Solitude was conceived and photographed with the loving help and kindness of Susan Vigil during the last year of her life. Its balance is more toward an expression of inner landscape, or what it feels like to be, rather than an exploration of the external visual world as such. (Nathaniel Dorsky)

MURIEL’S SONG
Grant Wiedenfeld, USA, 2006, 16mm, colour, silent, 3 min
A hand-painted, hand-processed film only bent thru the lens of the projector and your pearly-crowned pair. Never before have light and shadow sung so well without a camera. When feeling overwhelms my voice I sing; mine eyes, what visions imagine they?
(Grant Wiedenfeld)

ACROSS THE VALLEY
Nick Collins, UK, 2006, 16mm, colour, sound, 20 min
Across the Valley was shot, and the sound gathered, between July, 2004 and January, 2006, in the Cevennes, in the south of France. The film is from a single vantage point, a small area of flatness on the side of a steep valley. I filmed the view of the landscape from this point, through three of the four seasons, as well as elements of the scene closer to the camera. The resulting film draws on, and develops, my existing interests in the time-based representation of simultaneity, and in the temporal and sequencing possibilities inherent to film editing. (Nick Collins)

KOLKATA
Mark LaPore, USA, 2005, 16mm, b/w, sound, 35 min
Bodies emerge from vaporous passageways, figures traverse flooded streets. Silver packets dance as if sentient, humans linger somnolent or at the average tempo required by their trades. Calcutta, an actual city like all cities nested on the meridian between the imaginary and the mundane is here immersed in a pandemonium of sonic distortion, the cawing of scavenger crows, the mad repetitions of competing pitches and a toxic reduction of Beethoven fit for the realms of merger between capital and carrion. In time the observer is observed as openly as those who he portrays, at a reflective standstill or at a stately yet exhilarating pace transported through the arteries of the main printing district. LaPore revisits and rephrases some of the elements presented in The Glass System, adding a new dimension to his explorations of shots of extended duration (in the spirit of both Warhol and the Lumières) in one of his most spare and eloquent films. (Mark McElhatten)

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KENNETH ANGER 35MM PRESERVATIONS with KENNETH ANGER IN PERSON
Sunday 29 October 2006, at 4pm
London National Film Theatre NFT1

FIREWORKS
Kenneth Anger, USA 1947, 35mm, b/w, sound, 15 min

In Fireworks I released all the explosive pyrotechnics of a dream. Inflammable desires dampened by day under the cold water of consciousness are ignited that night by the libertarian matches of sleep and burst forth in showers of shimmering incandescence. These imaginary displays provide a temporary release. A dissatisfied dreamer awakes, goes out in the night seeking a ‘light’ and is drawn through the needle’s eye. A dream of a dream, he returns to a bed less empty than before. (Kenneth Anger)

Fireworks, Anger’s first extant film, was made when he was 17, shot in three days in his parents’ home while they were attending the funeral of a relative. Unexpectedly powerful and disturbing, the film was described by Jean Cocteau as coming “from that beautiful night from which emerge all the true works. It touches the quick of the soul and this is very rare.” When the film was shown in San Francisco for the first time, Maya Deren made a comparable observation, suggesting that Anger had opened a window on our common dreams. Anger’s own remarks on the work range from “A dissatisfied dreamer awakes, goes out in the night seeking ‘a light’ and is drawn through the needle’s eye,” to this less cryptic comment: “It’s a personal statement about my own feelings about violence and a certain kind of masculinity. Also a treatment of a kind of myth in America which relates to the American sailor. That’s part of history now, but the sailor then was a kind of sex symbol on one another level there was a great deal of ambivalence and hostility, latency, and fear in the image …” (Robert Haller)

RABBIT’S MOON (LA LUNE DES LAPINS)
Kenneth Anger, USA-France 1950-71, 35mm, b/w, sound, 16 min

A fable of the unattainable (the Moon) combining elements of Commedia dell’Arte with Japanese myth. A lunar dream utilizing the classic pantomime figure of Pierrot in an encounter with a prankish, enchanted Magick Lantern. (Kenneth Anger)

Pierrot is the poet reaching for the unattainable. The moon is his mama and woman and illusion ill met by moonlight. Harlequin is the cruel jester, the trickster with his slapstick. Other people’s tragedies make us laugh. The huckster of invisible wares and the magic lantern. My art. Columbine is full of grace and teasing malice, and prettily mocks the poet and his moon. The rabbit is my soul. Thus before the concluding shot of Pierrot’s fall from the sky, the entire film preceding is a flashback – dying memory of the adolescent’s life experience – what I know of life up to this time. And cutting the film is what I have learned since.
(Kenneth Anger, letter to Stan Brakhage)

SCORPIO RISING
Kenneth Anger, USA 1963, 35mm, colour, sound, 29 min

A ‘death mirror held up to American culture’ – Brando, bikes and black leather; Christ, chains and cocaine. A ‘high’ view of the myth of the American motorcyclist. The machine as totem from toy to terror. Thanatos in chrome and black leather and bursting jeans.
Part I – Boys and Bolts (masculine fascination with the Thing that Goes)
Part II – Image Maker (getting high on heroes; Dean’s Rebel and Brando’s Johnny; the true view of J.C.)
Part III – Walpurgis Party (J.C. wallflower at the cyclers’ Sabbath)
Part IV – Rebel Rouser (the gathering of the Dark Legions, with a message from Our Sponsor)
(Kenneth Anger)

Surely the most widely seen film in the history of the American avant-garde. With its self-conscious media quotations, mock-heroic view of urban youth culture, knowing homoeroticism and smashing use of rock ‘n’ roll, Scorpio Rising burst dramatically onto the American scene. If its acceptance was not completely universal – the Los Angeles Police Department confiscated the print during its initial midnight run, and Anger was sued by the American Nazi party for ‘desecrating’ the swastika – no other underground movie has ever had a comparable effect on Hollywood production. The Wild Angels, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, Mean Streets and American Graffiti can all be seen as part of its ripple effect. Not the least important aspect of the film was Anger’s dense, almost subliminal editing style. It’s a truism that television commercials are heir to the theories of Sergei Eisenstein, but I’d venture that Madison Avenue learned more about the power of associative montage from Scorpio Rising than Battleship Potemkin. (J. Hoberman)

KUSTOM KAR KOMMANDOS
Kenneth Anger, USA 1965, 35mm, colour, sound, 4 min

Pygmalion and his machine mistress. To the soundtrack of ‘Dream Lover’ a young man strokes his customized car with a powder puff. (Kenneth Anger)

If Scorpio Rising hints at the supernatural power of gleaming metal, Kustom Kar Kommandos dwells on it. If preternatural light is glimpsed against the darkness of deep-shadowed garages, black leather, and night in Scorpio Rising, it boldly and steadily shines forth in Kustom Kar Kommandos. If parts of the motorcycles are sometimes jewel-like, the customized car is itself a single, complete jewel. It is placed on display in a clean, well-lighted room and attended by a blond young man in pristine blue who worshipfully dusts it with a feathery white puff. Then he climbs inside, encasing himself in an interior of polished chrome and red leather seats. While the whispery voices of the Parris Sisters sing about a “dream lover” and their longing to “know the magic of his charms,” Anger’s gliding camera movements and smoothly articulated montage turn the car’s polished surfaces into silvery streams of light, leaving no doubt that the car is a “dream lover” and a magical “charm.” (William C. Wees, Light Moving In Time)

The films of Kenneth Anger have been preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The preservations were funded by The Film Foundation. Rabbit’s Moon was preserved through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. With thanks to Ross Lipman for his assistance in making this screening possible.

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ANGER ME
Sunday 29 October 2006, at 7pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

ANGER ME
Elio Gelmini, Canada, 2006, video, colour, sound, 72 min

The documentary Anger Me is the story of the life, literary and motion-picture accomplishments of Kenneth Anger, a pivotal figure in the history of experimental film. An innovator and a pioneer, he literally blazed his own trail. Considered to be one of the major personalities of the 1960s and 1970s underground art scene, Kenneth defined himself as a ‘cinematographic magician’ and his cinema as a ritualistic form. Anger’s films have taken audiences places where only great film poets can arrive. In 1947 in Los Angeles, while his parents were away, a young Kenneth took his family’s film camera and shot a short, dramatic film entitled Fireworks, which is now considered one of the seminal works of experimental film. Expressive, imagistic, sexually charged, and made with the help of friends (and apparently without a script), Fireworks brought to the screen an unconstrained vision and an almost unbelievable candor. Kenneth Anger also led in the field of visualization of homoerotic imagery. Fireworks was a film that went beyond maturity and sexual conscience – an extraordinary event considering that it was made in 1947. Kenneth did not cross over to commercial cinema. Throughout his career he has been completely devoted to uncompromising expression. Since the 1960s, Kenneth Anger’s films have been the subject of many books, film panels and film theory courses. Although he has never made a commercial music video, he has even been called the ‘Godfather of MTV’.

Kenneth Anger: The Man, the Filmmaker, and the Author

Many things have been said and written about Kenneth Anger, however, meeting the man only serves to add greater mystery to his reputation. He seems to disdain casual conversation, but when asked a question about his past or his work, he comes alive, as though he is an actor who just heard the word ‘action’. Kenneth Anger seems to have very little interest in his place in history – film history, literary history, homosexual history or otherwise. As Anger himself likes to put it: ‘I just made Kenneth Anger films’. Kenneth Anger is particularly well known for his films Fireworks (1947), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Scorpio Rising (1963) and Lucifer Rising (1970-81). He is less known as an author. In 1959, primarily to make money, Kenneth Anger published the first of a ‘tell-all’ series of books entitled ‘Hollywood Babylon’. His objective was to demonstrate the theory that Hollywood is a relentless machine, always ready to swallow and destroy whomever oversteps allowed boundaries in the search of fame, glory and celebrity.

Anger’s filmmaking style

Anger’s films incorporate the stylistic and expressive techniques of film masters such as Sergei Eisenstein, Abel Gance and D. W. Griffith. Carel Rowe offers the following thoughts on how Kenneth Anger inherited and put into practice the lessons of the great Russian master, Eisenstein: “The importance of Anger’s use of Eisensteinian principle is that it is not reduced to a craft, a trick in time, but maintained as an artistic vision. Art comes from the filmmaker’s reassembling of the splinters of time and space with the inclusion of the intellectual, psychological, or emotional content of the event. The collision of two separate images creates a third distinct impression to the viewer. Similarly, the blending of two dissimilar images into one accumulative essence yields a poetically metaphoric statement on that which is portrayed. This is the artistic importance of Eisenstein’s theory. Its potential is rarely realized in film, and even more rarely as true to theory as in Anger’s films.”

Influences on future generations of filmmakers

Anger’s film Fireworks is considered by many to be the starting point for the only movie ever made by Jean Genet, Un Chant d’Amour (1950). In Paris, Jean Cocteau, who had been much affected by Fireworks in the 1950s, called Mr. Anger and gave him permission to make a movie of his ballet, ‘Le Jeune Homme et la Mort’. Although Kenneth Anger approached many producers with Cocteau’s letter, none of them were interested, as all of Cocteau’s films had lost money. Contemporaries like Stan Brakhage, and Harry Smith were influenced by and expanded upon Kenneth Anger’s approach in what was known as the ‘underground’. Later on, this ‘underground’ influenced Martin Scorsese, the contemporary mainstream exponent of this expressionistic style, who openly acknowledges Kenneth Anger’s influence on his film technique.

Cinema as ‘magick’ and ritualistic form

Kenneth Anger has always defined himself as a ‘cinematographic magician’ and declared that his intention was that of projecting his films directly into the minds of the audience. Anger further credits the use of esoteric symbolism, prevalent in his films, to Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), the great magician, advocate of Gnosticism and neo-paganism. Crowley was a highly controversial, complex and fascinating figure of the 20th Century. Anger also consistently referenced the French poets Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) and Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91), the initiators of European Symbolism.

Aleister Crowley – Céfalù, Italy

Kenneth Anger was greatly influenced by the writings of Aleister Crowley, who lived for three years in Céfalù, in an 18th Century farmhouse, which he called the Abbey of Thelema. It was there that he put into practice the principles of his neo-pagan religion, essentially ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’. On May 1, 1923, Crowley, already a notorious figure, was expelled from Italy by the order of Mussolini’s police after an accidental death on the site. Anger himself visited Céfalù years later and documented what was left of the paintings and objects.

(Elio Gelmini)

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SHINE ON
Sunday 29 October 2006, at 9pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

SAME DAY NICE BISCOTTS
Luther Price, USA, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 min
A mournful dissolving jewel set in bruised magenta sends out votive glints of dying light. A lone bird chirps and branches cover our eyes. Working from a stack of abandoned multiple film prints (nearly identical and close to thirteen in number), Luther Price makes reiterative loops that underline futility, echo hope, and mark every camera movement with the vain promise of fresh outcome and inevitable predestination. (Mark McElhatten)

KRYPTON IS DOOMED
Ken Jacobs, USA, 2005, video, colour, sound, 34 min
In his 5th floor walk-up on the Lower East Side, Jack Smith was determined to complete the beautification of his kitchen cabinet. AIDS was pressing. His friends pitched in, accepting slave status. Jack demanded this and Jack demanded that but because he wanted it perfect (as he had wanted his films to be perfect), and because perfection proved elusive, the remodeling finally had to be abandoned. Each friend going his or her own sad way. We are living under the imminent threat of GODS. The Republican ploy of allying with the religious right for votes is proving shortsighted (grasping individuals tend to be shortsighted) and, as in Iraq, our own religious crazies are now avid for fulfillment. Of prophecy. You’ve got to hand it to those who resist, for the sake of the grass and the animals and the children, and for the preservation of the occasional work of art among the Fabergé eggs, and who knows but that they will succeed against all odds and swerve their respective societies away from sure doom. We like to think so, and it’s easy to, after a lot of movies and the fact that all the living are beneficiaries of the ones who made it through – through normal attrition, that is, all those Papas and especially Mamas that did succeed in sending forward their young. In the late 1930s two Jewish teenagers came up with the story of a couple that sent their infant child on a lone trip of escape through space from an exploding planet. We all know the story: the boy would survive on Earth but would have to keep his identity secret. Were Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel dreaming out loud? Was Krypton the Old World heading into WWII and was the child escaping the fate of the Jews of Europe? The Jews then, all of us now. Jack’s friends failed to convince him to make a will. ”Why bother?” he asked. ”To protect your work in the future.” ”The future?” Jack replied, “The future will be worse.” (Ken Jacobs)

THE COUNTER GIRL TRILOGY
Courtney Hoskins, USA, 2006, 16mm, colour, silent, 6 min
To make ends meet, I took a job as a makeup counter salesperson. At first, I found this employment to be very satisfying. I was able to smell perfumes all day and ‘paint’ faces with makeup. After all, the human face is a fascinating canvass. The most subtle change can have dramatic effects (for example, it is amazing what a small touch of purple on the eyelids can do for green eyes) ! One day, that bottle of perfume came crashing down on the tile floor. The stench of reality woke me from my drugged state. I was required to go through several training seminars given by the cosmetics corporate giant. Nestled comfortably in the Rocky Mountains, I sat in horror as the ‘rep’ went over our ‘job duties’. My job went from ‘makeup artist’ to ‘scam artist’ right before my eyes! I learned that the average woman in Western society uses twenty cosmetics products each morning. I learned that this ‘average woman’ will also spend money she doesn’t have on cosmetics before spending it on anything else. Most disturbingly, I learned how to manipulate women by playing off of their insecurities. It’s no wonder these companies are so powerful. I couldn’t immediately quit my job, so I tried to make the best of it. One day, I happened upon three amazing shades of lip gloss that were hidden away in a drawer. Although they were for sale, they were not on the display wall. These particular lip glosses contain cholesterol, which in 1888, Fredrich Reinitzer discovered could be manipulated to exist as a new state of matter. He soon coined the word ‘liquid crystal’. I had been trying to purchase liquid crystal materials for my films for some time. I had only managed to find one or two different types. Because the materials are used in computer screens (and, as I learned, lip gloss), they are kept under wraps. I would never have guessed that such incredible materials would have fallen into my lap while working one of the worst jobs I have ever had. (Courtney Hoskins)

BLAH BLAH BLAH
Dietmar Brehm, Austria, 2006, 16mm, colour, sound, 13 min
An essay on restlessness: Blah Blah Blah (based on a song by Iggy Pop: Dietmar Brehm “never really liked it”, but likes it for that very reason) contains a large number of various kinds of shots in a montage which alternates between contemplative scenes and rapid cascades of images. Brehm uses sounds of rain and thunder, with which he is quite familiar, on the soundtrack. In addition a beat measures the rhythm, and its regularity is what makes the Blah Blah Blah project ‘measurable’. Dietmar Brehm has devoted himself to filming his own footage at a higher speed. He uses images typical of a still life (whisky bottles, ashtrays, etc.) and refracts them ironically (a chair stands on two legs), combines them with footage used in earlier works, and arranges them in a row like fragmentary thoughts. The result is a consciousness film par excellence. In Blah Blah Blah Brehm examines his own film oeuvre, not for the purpose of seeing what he has achieved, but in the interests of casually increasing its intensity. Instead of intruding into the images, he merely touches upon them lightly this time. All hope for calm, such as with a shot of a statue in a park, is disappointed because, in Blah Blah Blah, Brehm has applied the principle of the mental foray to his own film, which he shoots with his camera, speeds up, turns around, and makes absorb itself: Blah Blah Blah becomes ‘Blah Blah Blah’. Only those viewers who share the restlessness will recognize the inversion. (Bert Rebhandl)

SURFACING
Barbara Sternberg, Canada, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…”
(William Wordsworth)
Our busy comings and goings, on the move, working at life, are pictured through layers of images and scratched emulsion. Movement through various planes struggles towards emergence. (Barbara Sternberg)
“The process of transformation [from caterpillar to butterfly] consists mostly of decay and then of this crisis, when emergence from what came before must be total and abrupt.” (Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
www.barbarasternberg.com

AND WE ALL SHINE ON
Michael Robinson, USA, 2006, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min
An ill wind is transmitting through the lonely night, its signals spreading myth and deception along its murky path. Conjuring a vision of a post-apocalyptic paradise, this unworldly broadcast reveals its hidden demons via layered landscapes and karaoke, singing the dangers of mediated spirituality. (Michael Robinson)
www.poisonberries.net

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LUIS RECODER + SANDRA GIBSON
Monday 30 October 2006, at 7:30pm
London ICA Theatre

UNTITLED
Luis Recoder, Sandra Gibson & Daniel Menche, USA, 2006, 2 x 16mm, colour, sound, variable duration

Luis Recoder + Sandra Gibson are two filmmakers who create films and performed film installations of gracefully shifting abstractions, flickering geometry and real, honest beauty. Looped film, created without the use of a camera, is gently coaxed by hand into investigations of pure colour with the aid of water, glass and mist. The piece has been developed with Daniel Menche, a US experimental musician whose approach to sound shares startling similarities to Luis and Sandra’s approach to light and film; pure sound is born of and mediated by the body and its interaction with objects. Menche sources sound live from his heart, lungs or larynx or from contact with natural elements, a stone on glass, wind or water. (www.courtisane.be)

The hand absorbs the light. Obscures, darkens. An opaque appearance in the field of light ‘materialises’ the light. Discloses its light-ness. For light itself is not enough to show this. For light to show this it must be obscured, covered-over, withheld. It must be stopped, stopped-up, stopped-down, in order to achieve the point of clearest resolution. It is only then that the light, absorbed by the hand, returns the gesture as if reaching out to greet the latter. The cut-out dark figure in the field of light throws into relief the dialectic: light-and-shadow. Shadow points to light, and not the other way around. The one holds the key to the other and are by no means self-contained containers of metaphysical essences. If the hand in the light is a sign that the mind perceives the light, it is not the purity of light itself that issues forth this knowledge but the cut-out figure of an opacity articulating its powers of resolution. (Recoder + Gibson)

Luis Recoder + Sandra Gibson have shown their collaborative film performances and installations at many film festivals, museums, galleries and alternative venues since, 2001. Their work touches upon the material-physical properties of the film medium – its sculptural, painterly and tactile potential. In addressing the materials and processes of their medium via performance and installation, Gibson and Recoder play with and against the illusory currents of cinema. (Waves Festival)

Thanks to the ICA, Vivienne Gaskin, Emma Quinn, Lee Curran and Danni Colgan.

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