READING BETWEEN THE LINES
Saturday 23 October 2010, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

THE INDIAN BOUNDARY LINE
Thomas Comerford, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 42 min
Over the last eight years, Chicago musician and filmmaker Thomas Comerford has been at work on a series of quietly-observed films that contemplate the entwined social, political, and environmental histories of Chicago (Figures in the Landscape, 2002; Land Marked / Marquette, 2005). The Indian Boundary Line follows a road in Chicago, Rogers Avenue, that traces the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis boundary between the United States and ‘Indian Territory’. In doing so, it examines the collision between the vernacular landscape, with its storefronts, short-cut footpaths and picnic tables, and the symbolic one, replete with historical markers, statues, and fences. Through its observations and audio-visual juxtapositions, The Indian Boundary Line meditates on a span of land in Chicago about 12 miles long, but suggests how this land and its history are an index for the shifting inhabitants, relationships, boundaries and ideas of landscape – as well as the consequences – which have accompanied the transformation of the New World.
www.thomascomerford.net

FLAG MOUNTAIN
John Smith, UK, 2010, video, colour, sound, 8 min
In Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus, a display of nationalism is taken to its logical conclusion. Moving between macro and micro perspectives, Flag Mountain sets dramatic spectacle against everyday life as the inhabitants of both sides of the city go about their daily business. (John Smith)
www.johnsmithfilms.com

WHY COLONEL BUNNY WAS KILLED
Miranda Pennell, UK, 2010, video, b/w, sound, 27 min
Triggered by the writings of a medical missionary on the Afghan borderlands, a distant relative of the filmmaker, the film is constructed from still photographs of colonial life on the North West frontier of British India at the turn of the 20th century. Searching for clues to the realities behind images framed during a time of colonial conflict, the film plays sound against image to find contemporary parallels in Western portrayals of a distant place and people. (Miranda Pennell)
www.mirandapennell.com

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SUBLIME PASSAGES
Saturday 23 October 2010, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

SHUTTER
Alexi Manis, Canada, 2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 8 min
Shutter tracks the rising sun, the lengthening shadows and the darkening day of a total solar eclipse. Shutter is a formal exploration of the phenomenon of the sun eclipsing objects in the natural world. Inspired by footage of friend and amateur astronomer Andreas Gada’s 16mm recording of the 1980 total solar eclipse, this work captures the beauty, complexity and terror of the shifting light that precedes and accompanies an eclipse. Shadow, focal variance and illumination of earth-bound nature conspire along the course to the incomparable moment of totality. (Alexi Manis)

DRIFTER
Timoleon Wilkins, USA 1996-2010, 16mm, colour, silent, 24 min
Drifter is the title; it’s essentially a collection (memoir) of footage dating back from 1996 to the present. The title, the theme, is drifting; mentally / physically. People who’ve drifted into and out of my life, and the visual themes (clouds, snow, highways, trains, oceans) that (finally) tie all my various Bolex-Kodachrome escapades together. Soft movement across the screen. My own wanderlust is in there as well. (Timoleon Wilkins)

SHRIMP BOAT LOG
David Gatten, USA, 2010, 16mm, b/w & colour, silent, 6 min
Shrimp Boat Log, the first reel of the ongoing Continuous Quantities series, contains 300 shots, 29 frames each, alternating between a notebook listing the names of shrimp boats that frequent the mouth of the Edisto River and images of these same boats. I started keeping track of these boats in 1994 when I first began visiting Seabrook Island, South Carolina, for family vacations. I’ve returned to this spot many times since, making a series of underwater, cameraless films there (the What the Water Said series), and always continuing to watch for the shrimp boats. I filmed these images during the summer and fall of 2006 and cut them – using Leonardo’s Notebooks as guide – over the next several years. (David Gatten)
www.davidgattenfilm.com

BLUE MANTLE
Rebecca Meyers, USA, 2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 35 min
blue mantle was shot along the Massachusetts coast, on Cape Cod and Cape Ann and around the South Shore. Images include paintings by Winslow Homer and illustrations from Harper’s Weekly accounts of disasters and rescues at sea. The main musical sources are Debussy’s ‘La mer’, Wagner’s ‘The Flying Dutchman’ and ‘Lowlands,’ a sea shanty. Texts range from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Thoreau to Melville to various other 19th-century (and earlier) writings. The only cinematic representations supplementing my own footage are Edison’s 1900 A Storm at Sea and a model-size Eidophusikon (a pre-cinematic 18th-century theatrical spectacle described in its day as ‘moving pictures, representing phenomena of nature’). The 40 miles of sea between Chatham and Provincetown came to be called an ocean graveyard due to the thousands of wrecks that occurred there during a time when sea-going vessels were the primary means for ‘bringing man nearer unto man’ (Longfellow). Today, among the not-invisible memorials and markers in Gloucester and along the cape of maritime histories, one can also find the remains of The Frances, a ship sunk in a December gale in 1872 and still visible at low tide at a popular Truro beach (most people walking by assume it is some kind of strange rock formation). US Life Saving Service men dragged the boat from the bay across the Cape to the outer beach and rescued all aboard. The captain died several days later from the effects of exposure and is buried in Truro. There are hundreds of stories like this one and many more with much more tragic outcomes. Cape Cod was also the site of two major developments in transatlantic communication: the termination point of ‘le Direct’, a 3200-mile submarine telegraph cable laid between France and Massachusetts in 1869, and the location of the first US wireless transmitting station established by inventor Guglielmo Marconi at the turn of the 20th century. Such historic moments of human progress striving to overcome nature’s vastness stir the imagination. (Rebecca Meyers)

TRAVELLING FIELDS
Inger Lise Hansen, Norway, 2009, 35mm, colour, sound, 9 min
Shot in Northern Russia, Travelling Fields is the third film in Inger Lise Hansen’s inverted perspective trilogy, following Proximity (2006) and Parallax (2009). The films focus on a particular phenomenon occurring through a change of perspective and animated camera movements, as a way of redefining a place and its geography. In these films sections of the landscape are documented by moving the camera one frame at the time, along a track. As each of the earlier films focus on one particular location, Travelling Fields offers a more complex viewing as it moves between different topographies and locations in the Kola Peninsula.

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EVERY TIME I SEE YOUR PICTURE I CRY
Saturday 23 October 2010, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

EVERY TIME I SEE YOUR PICTURE I CRY
Daniel Barrow, Canada, 2008, live performance, 60 min
Awarded the 2008 Images Prize at its premiere, Daniel Barrow’s ‘manual animation’ combines overhead projection with video, music, and live narration to tell the story of a garbage man with a vision to create an independent phone book chronicling the lives of each person in his city. In the late hours of the night, he sifts through garbage, collecting personal information and then traces pictures of each citizen through the windows of their homes as they sleep. What he doesn’t yet realize is that a deranged killer is trailing him, murdering each citizen he includes in his book, thus rendering his cataloguing efforts obsolete. The garbage man is a failed artist who fears becoming subject to the grip of something overwhelming. This animation traces his attempts to slow down and creatively reflect, in a process of coming to terms with his own self-loathing and fear.
www.danielbarrow.com

Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry. Yeah, that title makes me a little nauseated, too. And I would be lying if I said that wasn’t one of the many feelings that came to the surface in the midst of Daniel Barrow‘s show last night; funny, though, how nausea can feel so satisfying when paired with a helluva lot of other emotions. Barrow’s tour de force is notable in the way it combines many things: live narration, video, music, drawings and an overhead projector. Yes, a real, live overhead projector, unseen since your eighth grade biology class, on which Barrow layers and manipulates multiple transparencies. It is not the mere novelty of the tool that makes Barrow’s work worth it, but rather his complete and utter mastery of a machine more commonly considered a bygone clunker than a medium for high art. During a Q&A after the performance, he described a nun-cum-professor at his art school who had been giving the same, refined lectures for nigh on 50 years, conducted via slide and overhead projectors. Barrow was inspired to riff on her method as a parody, but soon found that the medium sincerely appealed to the ‘control freak’ and isolationist in him (‘I don’t like to work with crews, or other people, really,’ he admitted). The projector is the vehicle for Barrow’s harrowing, dreamscape-like tale of an erstwhile garbage man, art school dropout and social outcast. He spends his nights picking through residents’ detritus and peeking through their windows; he’s inspired, in his own earnest and perverse way, to create a special kind of phone book based on these findings. Each citizen will get a page of info and illustration; it’s an ‘art project for everyone,’ our garbage man intones. For reasons that remain hazy but may include childhood trauma and psychic revenge, it is slowly revealed that a serial killer stalks our stalker, the malicious and psychotic foil to his harmless voyeurism. But by the time this oddball is thrown into the mix, the audience is too thoroughly entrenchedin Barrow’s elegant, elegiac projector world to put up any sort of fight. Every Time I See Your Picture has a plot, but it is cushioned and obscured by the very narration around it, which is at once a diary entry, a cautionary tale and a philosophical tangent. A lot of it makes very little sense; some, in that illogical way personal confessions have, makes a frightening amount. Above all, though, this performance is ultimately enjoyed in the craft of the man and his machine. If the animation potential of an overhead projector has never entered your brain, see this and prepare for revelation. Barrow is fluid and holds perfect time; his narration matches the sweeping movements of transparencies placed and replaced, and the original score by Amy Linton buoys you up and into the garbage man’s musty-sherbet-toned world. I sat three rows behind Barrow (whose projection outpost is ensconced in the middle of the auditorium), and can heartily recommend this position. You watch the master make the product. It is a bizarre live experience, unlike any I’ve seen, unlikely to be forgotten any time soon. (Caitlin McCarthy, Willamette Week)

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HIT THE ROAD
Saturday 23 October 2010, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

MAKE IT NEW JOHN
Duncan Campbell, UK, 2009, video, colour, sound, 50 min
Make it New John tells the story of the DeLorean car, its creator John DeLorean, and the workers of the Belfast-based car plant who built it. The film deftly contrasts the DeLorean dream with its spectacular downfall during a critical period in Northern Ireland’s history, and the canonisation of the car – the DMC12 – as a symbol of the American myth of mobility. The son of an immigrant Romanian foundry worker, John DeLorean’s natural talent for engineering took him to the top of Chevrolet, General Motors’ most important division. Leaving this behind he persuaded the British Government to back his new venture – building a factory in Dunmurry in Belfast to produce a new sports car. Almost immediately beset by financial difficulties and allegations of embezzlement, DeLorean’s attempts to keep the factory open became increasingly desperate and corrupt, eventually leading to his arrest by the FBI. The factory – which employed 2000 workers – closed in 1982, having produced just over 9000 cars. As with the earlier works Bernadette (2008) and Falls Burns Malone Fiddles (2003), in Make it New John Campbell fuses a documentary aesthetic with fictive moments, using existing news archives and documentary footage from the 1980s as well as new 16mm material which imagines conversations between DeLorean factory workers. Campbell questions the documentary genre and reflects here on broader existential themes and narrative drives.

GET OUT OF THE CAR
Thom Andersen, USA, 2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 34 min
Get Out of the Car could be characterized as a nostalgic film. It is a celebration of artisanal culture and termite art (in Manny Farber’s sense, but more precisely in the sense Dave Marsh gives the phrase in his book ‘Louie Louie’). But I would claim it’s not a useless and reactionary feeling of nostalgia, but rather a militant nostalgia. Change the past, it needs it. Remember the words of Walter Benjamin I quote in the film: even the dead will not be safe. Restore what can be restored, like the Watts Towers. Rebuild what must be rebuilt. Re-abolish capital punishment. Remember the injustices done to Chinese, Japanese, blacks, gays, Mexicans, Chicanos, and make it right. Put Richard Berry, Maxwell Davis, Hunter Hancock, Art Laboe, and Big Jay McNeely in the Rock’ ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Bring back South Central Farm. Only when these struggles are fought and won can we begin to create the future. (Thom Andersen)

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THREE FILMS BY NATHANIEL DORSKY
Sunday 24 October 2010, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

COMPLINE
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2009, 16mm, colour, silent, 19 min
Compline is a night devotion or prayer, the last of the canonical hours, the final act in a cycle. This is also the last film I will be able to shoot in Kodachrome, a film stock I have used since I was 10 years old. It is a loving duet with and a fond farewell to this noble emulsion (Nathaniel Dorsky)

AUBADE
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2010, 16mm, colour, silent, 12 min
An aubade is a morning song or poem evoking the first rays of the sun at daybreak. Often, it includes the atmosphere of lovers parting. This film is my first venture into shooting in colour negative after having spent a lifetime shooting Kodachrome. In some sense, it is a new beginning for me. (Nathaniel Dorsky)

HOURS FOR JEROME, PARTS 1 & 2
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA 1966-70/82, 16mm, colour, silent, 45 min (restoration print)
This footage was shot from 1966 to 1970 and edited over a two-year period ending in July 1982. Hours For Jerome is an arrangement of images, energies, and illuminations from daily life. These fragments of light revolve around the four seasons and are very much a part of the youthful energy and poignant joy of my mid-twenties. Part One is spring through summer; Part Two is fall and winter. The title of the film refers to a ‘Book of Hours’ which, in medieval European Catholicism, was a series of prayers presented eight times every 24 hours. Each ‘hour’ had its own qualities from pre-dawn till very late at night and these qualities also changed through the progressing seasons of the year. They were traditionally illustrated by luminous miniature paintings, and were often titled ‘Hours for …’. Saint Jerome was a favourite subject of these illuminations and he is often depicted at his studies accompanied by a lion. The Jerome in Hours for Jerome is a close friend and filmmaker who is seen at his work or studies, often with his cats. He is first seen reading the newspaper, then putting sugar in his coffee, contemplating a book of Mozart’s letters in a rain and lightening storm, swimming, and writing a letter in blue; and in Part Two picking an apple, editing film, standing under a tree, reading, watching television during a snow storm, and driving a car at twilight. So the title is a somewhat humorous reference to the medieval form, as this film is also a series of illuminations from different times of day and night progressing through the seasons. There is also the pun that so much of the film has to do with various kinds of time. (Nathaniel Dorsky)

Hours for Jerome has been preserved by Pacific Film Archive with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.

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LEWIS KLAHR PRESENTS PROLIX SATORI
Sunday 24 October 2010, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

This screening marks the UK premier of my new series Prolix Satori. I have often worked in series before – Daylight Moon (A Quartet), Tales of the Forgotten Future, Engram Sepals (Melodramas 1994-2000), The Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy – but never quite like this. The main difference is that Prolix Satori is both open ended and ongoing, with a variety of thematic focuses instead of a single, centralized one. As the series title suggests, it will include films that are very, very short (under a minute) and films that are feature length. Prolix Satori will also act as an umbrella for various sub-series: this program offers five films from The Couplets (Wednesday Morning Two A.M., Sugar Slim Says and all three Nimbus films). The Couplets will generally, but not exclusively, organize themselves around the pairing of various pop songs and, just as in the songs’ lyrics, the theme of romantic love. (Lewis Klahr)

FALSE AGING
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2008, video, colour, sound, 15 min
False Aging is a haunting, evocative, expertly crafted film by Lewis Klahr, using his signature style of animation made with cut-out figures, often from comic books and other nostalgic sources, and a great variety of small objects such as plastic ice cubes and trading stamps. The physical movement in the film, with individual cut-out figures moving in and out of the frame awkwardly, in a crude form of animation, effectively recreates the feeling of daydreaming, or the way one would mull through one’s deepest, least expressible emotional jumbles just before falling asleep. The fact that the imagery is not directly interpretable, not clearly and readily translatable into easily explained symbolism, yet every image in every frame clearly is a swirling vortex of powerful associations, is what gives this (and Klahr’s other films) their peculiar and transcendent power and beauty: they take you on a journey into a strange, powerful and beautiful place, without telling you where you are going or what you will find there, and so they open up many doors into hidden pavilions of feeling, without locking you into an overly narrow and intellectualized explanation of what you are seeing. (David Finkelstein)

NIMBUS SMILE
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2009, video, colour, sound, 8 min
NIMBUS SEEDS
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2009, video, colour, sound, 8 min
CUMULONIMBUS
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 10 min
In this grouping of three related videos on the subject of romantic triangles, Klahr expands his explorations of memory, love, repetition, narrative and loss in surprising new ways until the films build into complex emotional and artistic experiences. His approach to inter-film montage (the interconnected relationship of different films to each other) reaches its fullest expression with these new works. Three romantic entanglements play out in the three Nimbus videos, which extend Klahr’s interest in constructing almost legible narratives – but doing so in formalist terms that complicate and enhance the traditional pleasures of stories. The trilogy’s closer, Cumulonimbus, is a movingly mature account of grief with a puckish sting in its tail. (Chris Stults)

SUGAR SLIM SAYS
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 7 min
Same address, different buildings. ‘Put the rope in the can.’ Mark Anthony Thompson (aka Chocolate Genius) and I became friends because our sons were classmates. He played me his new album and I showed him some of my recent films and we got excited about collaborating. This is the result. He gave free reign to create a piece coupled with two tracks together: ‘Lump’ and ‘Hold Me Like A Nurse’. (Lewis Klahr)

WEDNESDAY MORNING TWO A.M.
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2009, video, colour, sound, 7 min
An intimate and poetic study of the darkness of love and the beauty of texture. Wednesday Morning Two A.M. combines figurative realism with pure abstraction to remind us of the value of the small and the handmade. (Tiger Award Jury Statement, International Film Festival Rotterdam)

LETHE
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2009, video, colour, sound, 23 min
One of Klahr’s longest films, and one of his most straightforward narrative melodramas, Lethe conjures up the full emotional spectrum and storytelling potential of a film by Vincente Minnelli or Douglas Sirk, even though the only sets and actors are cut-out pieces of paper brought to life by Klahr’s imagination and storytelling abilities. Without sacrificing his signature forms of poetic abstraction and uncanny imagery, Klahr tells a tale ripped out of a pulp novel. An older scientist devises a way to win the love of a beautiful younger woman, and the film deals with the psychic fallout that this relationship rains on the woman. (Chris Stults)

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BREAK ON THROUGH
Sunday 24 October 2010, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

GHOST ALGEBRA
Janie Geiser, USA, 2009, video, colour, sound, 8 min
Under erratic skies, a solitary figure navigates a landscape of constructed nature and broken bones. She peers through a decaying aperture, waiting and watching: the fragility of the body is exposed for what it is: ephemeral, liquid, a battlefield of nervous dreams. Using found and natural objects, rephotographed video, medical illustrations, and other collage elements, Ghost Algebra suggests one of the original meanings of the word ‘algebra’: the science of restoring what is missing, the reunion of broken parts. (Janie Geiser)

STILL RAINING, STILL DREAMING
Phil Solomon, USA, 2009, video, colour, sound, 15 min
Still Raining, Still Dreaming tracks film’s ‘wind in the trees’, those ostensibly open-air spontaneities of flickering shadows and leaves that a whole tradition of avant-garde artists (including Solomon) has tried to return to, and shows them as a Silicon Valley programmer’s machinations in a hollow, digital city from the post-apocalypse where the images again don’t always register fast enough for the camera. Buildings bend and catch up as mirages. Leaves fall and children skate by, and any video-game player wonders, as usual, whether they’re gone from the program altogether once they’ve left the screen. Solomon films only the urban after-effects of a natural world of seasonal and solar changes never seen. It’s his best Grand Theft Auto film yet, as the portrait of a world going on over the graveyard of an abandoned civilization. (Johnny Lavant)

SO SURE OF NOWHERE BUYING TIMES TO COME
David Gatten, USA, 2010, 16mm, colour, silent, 9 min
Excerpts from Sir Thomas Browne’s 1658 text ‘Hydriotaphia, Urne-Burial or, A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk’ are superimposed with the stone faces of grave markers and burial urns. This image-text bookends a series of objects framed in the ancient glass window panes of a tiny shop, in a tiny snow covered town, on a mountain top in Colorado: a pocket watch, a postal scale, a small mirror, a stop watch, some stamps, a knife, some bandages, an hourglass. Time is short. Time is running out. The time left is all the time we have. (David Gatten)

FORMS ARE NOT SELF-SUBSISTENT SUBSTANCES
Samantha Rebello, UK, 2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 22 min
The film was borne of an interest in ‘medieval’ perception through images and philosophy, the latter taken in particular from Aristotle’s ‘Categories’ and ‘Metaphysics’, which were highly influential within medieval scholarship. It uses certain passages and concepts from these works (also the origin of the title) on the themes of substance and being. It includes medieval imagery from the Cathédrale Saint Lazare, Autun – the stone carvings attributed to Gislebertus, depicting humans at the mercy of beasts and devils – and colour plates from a reproduction of the Bestiary ‘M.S. Bodley 764’. The sounds of ‘medieval’ bells, recorded in Autun and at the Basilique Saint Denis are also important. There is an interest in themes of animality and flesh through the imagined medieval sensibility. The proximity to their own bodies heightened, paradoxically, by their aspirations toward purity of spirit through the denigration of the flesh. This imagery is juxtaposed against live ‘beasts’; animals filmed in such a way as to attain a sense of distance / strangeness akin to the medieval illuminations and carvings. The idea of ‘substance’ is thrown into relief through playing with the possible ways of understanding the term through the words of Aristotle, or the tactile / haptic apprehension of the screen imagery, filmed mainly in close up. Stone, flesh, milk and blood are filmed as ‘beings’ in their own right, with thecloak of language removed on order to reveal a reality of ‘things’ ordinarily hidden from view. The tension between ‘medieval’ perception and our own is explored. Due to their remove from us, the words of Aristotle or the Bestiary imagery ignite another way of perceiving within the film. Ordinary things become out of the ordinary, on the way towards the essential. (Samantha Rebello)

FACTS TOLD AT RETAIL (AFTER HENRY JAMES)
Erin Espelie, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 9 min
In his introduction to the 1909 edition of ‘The Golden Bowl’, Henry James wrote, ‘My instinct appears repeatedly to have been that to arrive at the facts retailed … by the given help of some other conscious and confessed agent is essentially to find the whole business.’ In this film, James acts as the confessed agent, and the glass through which every image is reflected or filtered takes on a kind of consciousness. (Erin Espelie)

COSMIC ALCHEMY
Lawrence Jordan, USA, 2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 24 min
Cosmic Alchemy is thematically and visually consistent with his earlier films and yet, set to an evocative score by John Davis, Jordan has crossed into an unfamiliar and richly rewarding territory of metaphoric complexity. For the handful of folks unfamiliar with Lawrence Jordan’s work, Cosmic Alchemy will leave you desperately wanting more. For the rest, already quite familiar with his brilliance, this film will install a fresh appreciation for Jordan’s justifiable position among experimental cinema’s ascended masters. (Jonathan Marlow)

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