PEOPLE GOING NOWHERE
Sunday 24 October 2010, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

DE MOUVEMENT
Richard Kerr, Canada, 2009, 35mm, b/w, sound, 7 min
As an extension of his Industrie / Industry project, Richard Kerr furthers his appropriation of feature film trailers, formally reconstructing their cinematic language. Monochromatic French film trailers from a bygone era provide the source material, and here the actions of the actors are secondary to the physical movement of celluloid.
A brilliant formalist montage of wipes creates an awareness of film motion and rhythm. (Andréa Picard)

MAY TOMORROW SHINE THE BRIGHTEST OF ALL YOUR MANY DAYS AS IT WILL BE YOUR LAST
Ben Rivers & Paul Harnden, UK, 2009, 16mm, b/w, sound, 13 min
Somewhere in the backwoods at the turn of I’m not sure which century, a crack unit of female Japanese soldiers track a group of lost, ancient desperadoes. They dig holes, they read, their leader channels the ghost of Italian sound poets (as yet unborn?), all the while moving onward … but who is searching for who and why? Hand-processed with a soundtrack cobbled together from Dictaphone recordings, old 78s,
hiss and scratches and whines. (Ben Rivers)
www.benrivers.com

BRUNE RENAULT
Neil Beloufa, France, 2009, video, colour, sound, 17 min
Brune Renault is a kind of looped fiction that happens in a car sliced in four parts resting on small wheels; basically a sculpture. Since we can open the car, we can make impossible camera shots, moving in and out of the object. The goal of the piece was to have this car cut in four parts to give the illusion of movement, which is a paradox. I wanted the sculpture to mutate into a functional object (real car), once viewers were starting to follow and ‘suspend disbelief’ for the fiction. And then, to lose the fiction and utilise video’s function to mutate into a document about the usual contemporary art sculpture. The impossible camera shots showing the cuts of the cars had to be the disturbing element that betray the fiction, but then again the power of fiction is hard to break down. (Neil Beloufa)

VOT
Victor Alimpiev, Russia, 2010, video, colour, sound, 5 min
Alimpiev’s videos focus directly on his characters while avoiding specific narrative – close-ups reveal intimate details and personal expressions; moments of awkwardness or tension becoming magnified. Repeated gestures, passing through the group as one, are imbued with new, fugitive meaning. Meticulously staged, the videos trace the simplest of movements heightened to form a collective ritual. Group identity is further emphasised not only by carefully controlled actions and sound, but also through a uniformity of pale tones and muted colours. (Ikon Gallery, Birmingham)

KINDLESS VILLAIN
Janie Geiser, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 4 min
In Kindless Villain, two boys wander through a stone fortress, while battles wage in the waters beyond. Seemingly alone in their island world, they succumb to fatigue and to boys’ games of power. Scratched phrases from an ancient recording of Hamlet surface, including a sad cry for vengeance. War is a child’s game, played quietly in this forgotten world. (Janie Geiser)
www.janiegeiser.com

COMING ATTRACTIONS
Peter Tscherkassky, Austria, 2010, 35mm, b/w, sound, 24 min
Coming Attractions and the construction of its images are woven around the idea that there is a deep, underlying relationship between early cinema and avant-garde film. Tom Gunning was among the first to describe and investigate this notion in a systematic and methodical manner in his well known and often quoted essay: ‘An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film’ (in: John L. Fell [ed.], ‘Film Before Griffith’, Berkeley 1983). Coming Attractions additionally addresses Gunning’s concept of a ‘Cinema of Attractions’. This term is used to describe a completely different relation between actor, camera and audience to be found in early cinema in general, as compared to the ‘modern cinema’ which developed after 1910, gradually leading to the narrative technique of D.W. Griffith. The notion of a ‘Cinema of Attractions’ touches upon the exhibitionistic character of early film, the undaunted show and tell of its creative possibilities, and its direct addressing of the audience. At some point it occurred to me that another residue of the cinema of attractions lies within the genre of advertising: here we also often encounter a uniquely direct relation between actor, camera and audience. The impetus for Coming Attractions was to bring the three together: commercials, early cinema, and avant-garde film. (Peter Tscherkassky)

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LEWIS KLAHR: ENGRAM SEPALS (MELODRAMAS 1994-2000)
Monday 25 October 2010, at 7pm
London Tate Modern

ALTAIR
Lewis Klahr, 1994, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 8 min
“Altair offers a cut-out animation version of colour noir. The images were culled from six late 1940s issues of Cosmopolitan magazine and then set to an almost four-minute section of Stravinsky’s Firebird (looped twice) to create a sinister, perfumed world. As in my 1988 visit to this genre, In the Month of Crickets, the narrative is highly smudged, leaving legible only the larger signposts of the female protagonist’s story. The viewer is encouraged to speculate on the nature and details of the woman’s battle with large, malevolent societal forces and her descent into an alcoholic swoon. However I feel it is important to add that what interested me in making this film was very little of what is described above, but instead a fascination with the colour blue and some intangible association it has for me with the late 1940s.” (Lewis Klahr)

ENGRAM SEPALS
Lewis Klahr, 2000, USA, 16mm, b/w, sound, 6 min
“The dead body remembers. The Tibetan book of the dead meets film noir. An elliptical narrative of adultery and corporate espionage set to a score by Morton Feldman.” (Lewis Klahr)

ELSA KIRK
Lewis Klahr, 1999, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 5 min
“In the mid-1990s I unearthed three photographic contact sheets of three different women in a thrift store in the East Village. Only one was named and dated – Elsa Kirk, Feb 22 ’63 – but all looked like they were from the same photographer and time period. There were 12 images per sheet of these models/actresses and I found myself quite moved by the strong sense of aspiration in their poses, by the poignant blend of fiction and reality. At first, I was unable to translate these images into collage animation. So instead, I began making Xerox enlargements of the sheets that I turned into a series of flat collages. Eventually these became storyboards for the films and led to the hieroglyphic montage style of the completed [work] – an approach that I had intuited when first attracted to the potential of cut-outs two decades ago, but had never been able to capture on film.” (Lewis Klahr)

PONY GLASS
Lewis Klahr, 1997, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 15 min
“Pony Glass is the story of comic book character Jimmy Olsen’s secret life. In this 15-minute cut-out animation, Superman’s pal embarks on his most adult adventure ever as he navigates the treacherous shoals of early 1960s romance trying to resolve a sexual identity crisis of epic proportions. A three-act melodrama – each act has its own song – filmed in my signature collage style that ‘unmasks’ our collective iconic inheritance as Americans while significantly expanding the notion of what a music video can do.” (Lewis Klahr)

GOVINDA
Lewis Klahr, 1999, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 23 min
“A three act countercultural coming of age melodrama told from a generational rather than individual point of view. Beginning with appropriated student, Super-8 footage of a 1970s alternative high school and finishing with footage I shot a month after college graduation of my brother’s hippie wedding, Govinda charts a path from innocence to too much experience.” (Lewis Klahr)

DOWNS ARE FEMININE
Lewis Klahr, 1994, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min
“Lewis Klahr’s Downs Are Feminine unveils a kind of rainy day, indoor, peaceable kingdom of desultory and idyllic debauchery, masturbatory reveries and hermaphroditic transformations. Klahr’s oneiric collages graft 1970s porn of pallid stubbly flesh flagrantly onto Good Housekeeping / Architectural Digest décor (varicoloured crab-orchard stone foyers, modacrylic sunbursts, jalousie windows and orientalist metal scrollwork), interior states where characters despoil themselves in Quaalude interludes of dreamy couplings. In this out-of-touch realm, touching is intelligence gathering for a carnal knowledge that will never attain its platonic ideal. The whole atmosphere is pervaded with euphoria, a hopelessness without despair, a contentment beyond longing.” (Mark McElhatten, New York Film Festival)

A FAILED CARDIGAN MANEUVER
Lewis Klahr, 1999, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 15 min
“Children in a garden of outsized fruit dream of food and love, then grow up to have unhappy office love affairs in the glamorous Manhattan of the late 1950s.” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice)

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