FREE RADICALS: A HISTORY OF EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
Friday 21 October 2011, at 6:30pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

FREE RADICALS: A HISTORY OF EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
Pip Chodorov, France, 2010, video, colour, sound, 82 min
The artists and poets of cinema since before WWI have always been free radicals, crazy about filmmaking and pushing the art form in radical new directions. Trapped in a no man’s land, excluded both from the art world and the film industry, they boldly created a grassroots network for making and showing their films in a spirit of friendship and solidarity. They also created a profound body of work that continues to influence our culture. In this film, I want to share a few of the films I love and introduce you to some of the free, radical artists who made them. (Pip Chodorov)

Paris-based filmmaker and film activist Pip Chodorov offers this affectionate overview of some of the leading figures of, 20th century experimental film. Narrating in a personal and plainspoken manner (‘I’d like you to meet some of my friends and see their films’), Chodorov combines clips and even films in their entirety with conversations with such luminaries as Hans Richter, Robert Breer, Michael Snow, Peter Kubelka, and Stan Brakhage in his final recorded interview. The film takes its title from Len Lye’s direct animation classic. It was up to visionaries like Jonas Mekas and the organizations he founded – Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Anthology Film Archives – to help struggling filmmakers out. (At one point, Ken Jacobs describes dumpster diving for food.) Warm and inspiring, Chodorov’s film is part essay and part loving tribute. (AFI Film Festival)

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TWO YEARS AT SEA
Friday 21 October 2011, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT1

TWO YEARS AT SEA
Ben Rivers, UK, 2011, 35mm, b/w, sound, 88 min
Ben Rivers’ feature Two Years at Sea follows Jake Williams (also the subject of one of Rivers’ earlier short films) over the course of two years; a man living in complete isolation in a tumbledown home nestled amidst a magnificent forest, a self-imposed solitary exile from society and modernity. Free from dialogue or interaction with his subject, Rivers’ film makes no attempt to psychologise his subject’s Walden-esque existence, instead documenting over a series of long, often static shots the minutiae of Jake’s self-sufficient relationship to his environment.

Close-ups of weathered photographs offer glimpses of a former life equally in thrall to nature; one spent with friends or family members, now simply ghosts adrift in memory. We watch Jake wake and shower, fetch water and firewood, and in an extraordinary single shot build a raft from an inflatable mattress, taking to the water to fish. His existence is one seeming to grow out of as much as disappear into his surroundings, the ramshackle remnants of modern life which fill his home reconstituted to new purpose, the house itself slowly fusing itself to the landscape. Jake too, as in certain shots reflections of foliage in the windows of his campervan create an impression of the landscape enveloping him, consuming him as he rests.

This symbiosis of the organic and mechanical is beautifully captured by Rivers’ monochrome photography; shooting on reclaimed 16mm Bolex cameras, the shifting textures of the images have a makeshift feel, as though the camera were put together by Jake from parts found in one of his many junk-filled cupboards, the pops and crackles of his bonfire at the end mirrored by those of the celluloid, the flares and white-outs adding to the very fabric of the photographed scenery; the film itself acting on what its capturing.

The serenity of Jake’s gaze in the breathtaking final shot speaks more than an hour of interview footage could, it’s a privilege to be able spend ninety minutes in the company of such an extraordinary individual, one with seemingly no need for human interaction of any kind and it’s a measure of Rivers’ respectful directorial stance that his/our presence never feels intrusive. Much as when the camera looks out from the window of Jake’s observation-tower creation, over the silent, snow-capped forest, one can begin to understand his reason for being there; when it takes in Jake, gazing through the same window, one can equally understand Rivers’ reason too.

(Mathew Thrift, www.cinephile-uk.com)

I made a shorter film about Jake called This is My Land five years ago, and as time has passed and other films have been made, I have had a continual feeling that I should go back. The first film was based solely on observation; standing back and watching Jake go about his business in the forest. I wanted Two Years at Sea to move beyond this, so Jake and I worked on scenes that either re-enacted parts of his daily doings, or were fictions not far from his life. The film embraces the slower perception of time, following rhythms that Jake and his environment have, shot over the course of a year in all the seasons. Two Years at Sea has at its core the relationship between a person and the place they have chosen to live out their life, and the deep connection there is between them. Originally the film was going to be shot in colour, then Kodak announced they were discontinuing my favourite black and white film stock, which prompted me to buy as much as I could and make one of the last films with Kodak Plus-X. The film was hand developed in my kitchen. www.benrivers.com

(Ben Rivers)

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ALTERED STATES
Saturday 22 October 2011, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

ALTERED STATES

TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS)
Ben Russell, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 10 min
Trypps #7 (Badlands) charts, through an intimate long-take, a young woman’s LSD trip in the Badlands National Park before descending into a psychedelic, formal abstraction of the expansive desert landscape. Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell’s unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence. (Michael Green)
www.dimeshow.com

WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING
Mary Helena Clark, USA, video, colour, sound, 2010, 9 min
‘This is your life. It rides like a dream.’ (Mary Helena Clark)

SANS TITRE
Neil Beloufa, France, 2010, video, colour, sound, 15 min
A cardboard decor and photographs reconstitute a luxury Californian-type villa in Algeria. Its inhabitants, neighbours and other protagonists imagine themselves there to explain why and how the latter was occupied by terrorists in order to hide whilst, paradoxically, it is entirely in glass. They even polished it clean so as to leave no traces. This improbable and irresolvable anecdote encourages the characters to invent images of an event given media coverage without the images nor the story and thus missing the main point. (Neil Beloufa)

THE PIPS
Emily Wardill, UK, 2011, video, b/w, silent, 4 min
Emily Wardill’s films encourage imagination as an unpredictable tool to surpass rational thought. The Pips explores movement and the materiality of it, the instigation of one and the duration of the other. Shot in black and white on 16mm, then transferred to a digital projection, The Pips focuses on British gymnastics champion, Francesca Jones. The film begins with a straight depiction of Jones’ routine; the patterns created by her ribbon baton trace her movements in the air. It is a reflection of her actions, imitating her and existing because of her. Near the end of the film, the gymnast’s body becomes stretched, elongated and distorted ultimately breaking into a series of mutant parts. Her face remains unfathomed and she gives no acknowledgement to her own decay. As Jones becomes still, her actions take on their own identity; their materiality deconstructed by Wardill’s emphasis on the physical replication of movement. The body and its motions become contained in the object, revealing an inherent plasticity in the gymnast’s performance. (Ian White)

… THESE BLAZEING STARRS!
Deborah Stratman, USA, 2011, 16mm, b/w, sound, 14 min
Since comets have been recorded, they’ve augured catastrophe, messiahs, upheaval and end times. A short film about these meteoric ice-cored fireballs and their historic ties to divination that combines imagery of 15th-18th century European broadsides with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory footage. … These Blazeing Starrs! juxtaposes a modern empirical desire to probe and measure against older methods, when we translated the sky to predict human folly. These days, comets are understood as time capsules harbouring elemental information about the formation of our solar system. We smash rockets into them to read spectral signatures. In a sense, they remain oracles – it’s just the manner of divining which has changed. (Deborah Stratman)
www.pythagorasfilm.com

THESE HAMMERS DON’T HURT US
Michael Robinson, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 13 min
Looking to a future beyond death, Michael Robinson’s These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us, one of the filmmaker’s most sophisticated found footage concoctions yet, combines Michael Jackson’s Remember the Time music video with footage of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra and roughly a dozen other sources, creating for the late pop star a solemn passage into a bedazzled Egyptian afterlife tenderly ushered by his real-life confidante. (Genevieve Yue, Reverse Shot)
www.poisonberries.net

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NATHANIEL DORSKY / BEN RIVERS
Saturday 22 October 2011, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

NATHANIEL DORSKY / BEN RIVERS

PASTOURELLE
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2010, 16mm, colour, silent, 17 min
Though silent, like all Dorsky films, Aubade and Pastourelle are named for types of love songs. His editing establishes tempo, and the shots, lyrical yet specific, thread through the film like melody lines. Music owes its universality to its abstract and primal qualities, which evoke intense emotion. Dorsky’s films operate on the viewer in this manner while still relying on recognizable images. By presenting music visually, he enlarges our sense of what songs and films alike can be. In particular Dorsky is drawn to the ways in which one thing becomes a conduit for transmitting another. Window surfaces are a recurring motif: through reflection, panes of glass contain images while remaining transparent, transforming the appearances of people or street scenes. There’s a shot in Pastourelle of vertical blinds shading a window; a strand pivots on its axis, animated by a draft. It’s mundane and magical simultaneously, an inconsequential detail that contains everything that is meaningful about seeing and being. The blind and the breeze share an interconnectedness you feel in your bones. An explication can’t do it justice. The wonder lies in the fact that it simply is. (Nicole Armour, Film Comment)
www.nathanieldorsky.net

THE RETURN
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2011, 16mm, colour, silent, 27 min
Nathaniel Dorsky, the subject of numerous recent international retrospectives, is producing some of the most resplendent art of our time; his film work stems as much from painting and poetry as the outside world. With The Return, his latest film shot on 16mm and projected at silent speed (18fps), Dorsky delves deep into multiple (under)worlds, sometimes uncanny and surreal, reflected and refracted through various natural and man-made obfuscations like grids, glass, water and brush. From its wintry willow branches to wafting hand gestures in a café, The Return harbours a phantasmal feel, offering a sentient, sometimes dark rumination
on the mysteries that await us. It is, in Dorsky’s words, ‘Like a memory already gone, this place of life’. (Andréa Picard, Toronto International Film Festival)
www.nathanieldorsky.net

SACK BARROW
Ben Rivers, UK, 2011, 16mm, b/w & colour, sound, 21 min
Sack Barrow extends Rivers’ engagement with the marginal and overlooked. The factory is not a state-of-the-art capital producing business, but a site of anachronistically uncompetitive endeavour. The years of production are evident and the regimented clocking in and out of workers attests to the outmoded practices here, unlike the liberal job-sharing egalitarianism that government policy and public expectation impose elsewhere. The run-down architecture, the drips and crusty build-ups of toxic chemicals, the dangling wires, wizened faces and the general pragmatic clutter of the place come close to the patina of the unkempt shacks of earlier films. Sack Barrow is a hymn in a new register to the steadily disappearing textures of the past. (Sally O’Reilly)
www.benrivers.com

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GABRIEL ABRANTES
Saturday 22 October 2011, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

LIBERDADE
Gabriel Abrantes & Benjamin Crotty, Portugal-Angola, 2011, video, colour, sound, 16 min
Shot in Luanda and the surrounding area, with non-professional actors, Liberdade is a cross-cultural post-capitalist love story. The film follows two young lovers – an Angolan boy, Liberdade, and his Chinese girlfriend, Betty – as they navigate through the complications of their burgeoning identities. Traveling across the stunning urban and natural landscapes of Angola, from the Chinese karaoke at Shanghai Bahia to the ship graveyard at Santiago beach, Liberdade and Betty struggle to forge the yet uncreated consciousness of their race. (Gabriel Abrantes)

PALÁCIOS DE PENA (PALACES OF PITY)
Gabriel Abrantes & Daniel Schmidt, Portugal, 2011, video, colour, sound, 56 min
Palácios de pena is about a culturally inherited fear in Portugal, linked to political and social oppression during the Inquisition and Fascism. It revolves around two upper-middle class adolescent Portuguese girls, juxtaposing their budding identities to a trial condemning two Moorish homosexuals to burn at the stake. Their ailing grandmother gives them an awareness of their heritage through the mechanism of desire, describing a dream where she is a judge of the Inquisition. The grandmother’s and the girls’ guilt is complicated by their relationship, that of family and love. As they love each other, so does what they represent: ignorance and the will to violently oppress. (Gabriel Abrantes)

OLYMPIA I & II
Gabriel Abrantes & Katie Widloski, Portugal-USA, 2008, video, colour, sound, 7 min
1. A female professional sex worker is visited by her homosexual adolescent brother and his two dogs. He confronts her about her line of work after having played trivial pursuit with mother on the sun deck. He wouldn’t pay a dime for her disgusting breasts.
2. A transvestite professional sex worker from a middle class Texan family waits for customers while listening to Henry Gorecki and drinking mini Diet Coca-Cola. His maid, the ‘chocolate covered strawberry’, comforts him by rubbing his ‘soft batch’ and they begin making love. (Gabriel Abrantes)

www.mutualrespectproductions.blogspot.com

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SLEEPLESS NIGHTS STORIES
Saturday 22 October 2011, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

SLEEPLESS NIGHTS STORIES
Jonas Mekas, USA, 2011, video, colour, sound, 114 min
For two hours we stroll with Jonas Mekas through New York nights, through apartments, studios, backstage rooms, galleries, bars and clubs. We meet old acquaintances like Ken and Flo Jacobs, Yoko Ono, Patti Smith, Carolee Schneemann, Marina Abramovi?, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pip Chodorov, friends, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, and we also make many new acquaintances. The father of the diary film begins a film with the words ‘I can’t sleep’. Who hasn’t been in this situation? Sleepy and yet wide awake at the same time, you find yourself in the world of those exhausted from the day’s exertions; the drunk, the relaxed, the dancing, the brooding, the mourning, the pensive, the partiers. In this film Mekas dives into a time vacuum … and it becomes increasingly unclear whether we really did get up and go out, whether what we’re seeing are remnants of the day that we’re remembering, or remnants of films by one of the greatest avant-garde filmmakers whose life wrote film history. (Berlinale)

This film originated from my readings of the One Thousand and One Nights. But unlike the Arabian tales, my stories are all from real life, though at times they too wander into somewhere else, beyond the everyday routine reality. There are some twenty-five different stories in my movie. Their protagonists are all my good friends and I myself am an inseparable part of the stories. The storyteller of the Arabian Nights was also part of his or her tales. Some of the people in the movie you’ll recognize, some not. The fact that some of them you’ll recognize has no bearing on the stories: after all, we all recognize John Wayne or Annette Bening, but in their stories they are no longer the people we know. The subjects of the stories cover a wide range of emotions, geographies, personal anxieties, anecdotes. These are not very big stories, not for the Big Screen: these are all personal big stories … And yes, you’ll also find some provocations … But that’s me, one ‘me’ of many. The very question ‘What is a story?’ is a provocative question. (Jonas Mekas)

www.jonasmekasfilms.com

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INTIMATE VISION: FILMS BY CHICK STRAND
Sunday 23 October 2011, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

For most of her filmmaking career, the integrity of Chick Strand’s vision lay aslant of prevailing fashions, so that only belatedly did the full significance of her radically pioneering work in ethnographic, documentary, feminist, and compilation filmmaking – and above all, in the innovation of a unique film language created across these modes – become clear. Though feminism and other currents of her times are woven through her films and though her powerful teaching presence sustained the ideals of underground film in several film schools in Los Angeles, hers was essentially a school of one. (David James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde)

CARTOON LE MOUSSE
Chick Strand, USA, 1979, 16mm, b/w, sound, 15 min
Chick Strand is a prolific and prodigiously gifted film artist who seems to break new ground with each new work. Her recent ‘found footage’ works, such as Cartoon le Mousse, are extraordinarily beautiful, moving, visionary pieces that push this genre into previously unexplored territory. If poetry is the art of making evocative connections between otherwise dissimilar phenomena, then Chick Strand is a great poet, for these films transcend their material to create a surreal and sublime universe beyond reason. (Gene Youngblood)

MOSORI MONIKA
Chick Strand, USA, 1970, 16mm, colour, sound, 20 min
An expressive documentary about women in the Third World. This is an ethnographic film about two cultures that have encountered one another. The Spanish Franciscan Missionaries went to Venezuela in 1945 to ‘civilize’ the Warao Indians, who live in the swamps on the Orinoco River Delta. Before the missionaries came, the Waraos lived in relative isolation and were little affected by the outside world. The relationship between the Indians and the missionaries is simple on the surface, but it is manifested in a complex change of techniques, values and lifestyle which have indelibly altered the Warao vision of life. The acculturation is presented from two viewpoints. A nun tells how the Indians lived when the missionaries arrived and what the nuns have done to ‘improve’ conditions, both spiritually and materially. An old Warao Indian woman tells what she feels has been the important experiences in her life. The two viewpoints are structured in counterpoint so that the deeper aspects of the juxtaposition of the modern culture over the old becomes apparent through the revelations of the two women. (Chick Strand)

ANGEL BLUE SWEET WINGS
Chick Strand, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 3 min
An experimental film poem in celebration of life and visions. Techniques include live action, animation, montage and found images. (Chick Strand)

LOOSE ENDS
Chick Strand, USA, 1979, 16mm, b/w, sound, 25 min
Loose Ends is a collage film about the process of internalizing the information that bombards us through a combination of personal experience and media in all forms. Speeding through our senses in ever-increasing numbers and complicated mixtures of fantasy, dream and reality from both outside and in, these fragmented images of life, sometimes shared by all, sometimes isolated and obscure, but with common threads, lead us to a state of psychological entropy tending toward a uniform inertness … an insensitive uninvolvement in the human condition and our own humanity. (Chick Strand)

ARTIFICIAL PARADISE
Chick Strand, USA, 1986, 16mm, colour, sound, 13 min
Aztec romance and the dream of love. The anthropologist’s most human desire – the ultimate contact with the informant. The denial of intellectualism and the acceptance of the romantic heart, and a soul without innocence. (Chick Strand)

KRISTALLNACHT
Chick Strand, USA, 1979, 16mm, b/w, sound, 7 min
Dedicated to the memory of Anne Frank, and the tenacity of the human spirit. (Chick Strand)

Loose Ends was preserved by Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley. All other films preserved by Pacific Film Archive and Academy Film Archive, Los Angeles, with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.

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PHIL SOLOMON’S AMERICAN FALLS
Sunday 23 October 2011, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

PHIL SOLOMON’S AMERICAN FALLS

AMERICAN FALLS
Phil Solomon, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 60 min

Conception and Direction – Phil Solomon
Sound Design – Wrick Wolff & Phil Solomon
5.1 and Stereo Mixes – Wrick Wolff
Alchemy – Phil Solomon & Jessica Betz
Optical Printing – Phil Solomon & Jessie Marek
Technical Advisor – Christopher Osborn

Should anyone imagine that the art of alchemy died with the Middle Ages, Phil Solomon’s American Falls testifies to the contrary: both to the possibilities of photographic and digital transformation and to the magical emanations of their fusion. The work is epic in conception and form, with a surface texture that, as it refashions and transmutes archival footage from myriad sources, resembles something between a palimpsest of chemical and photographic strata and the impasto of a painter’s canvas. The incipient visions of Solomon’s previous labours in this style here burst forth, unleashed, with images from America’s collective unconscious.

Burnished bronze and pulsing forward through layers of idiosyncratic techniques, they flesh out a three-framed canvas with ‘monumental’ aspirations, sometimes invoking the nation’s war memorials. Images are conjured into transient visibility before dissolving back into the recesses of historical memory. This is as much about inviting instant recognition as it is about limiting exposure of the overfamiliar. Similarly, popular songs are gently deconstructed through the rhythmic protractions of an intricate sound design (co-created and mixed by Wrick Wolff) that freshens their nostalgic currency.

Opening with 1901 footage and a re-enactment of Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, allusions to ‘falls’ pervade: of political and inspirational leaders (from Lincoln to FDR to JFK and King), and soldiers on battlefields (the American Revolution, the Civil War, both world wars, and Korea); from pratfalls of movie comics (Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin) to baseball heroes crippled by disease (Lou Gehrig). Disillusionment with America’s promise is palpable throughout. In one triptych, George Washington in the central panel is flanked by the text of the Declaration of Independence; but in another the Liberty Bell’s crack is visible in all three panels. Still later, the looming rule of capital, evoked by the credits of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, needs only the central panel to dominate.

It is impossible to do justice here to the juxtapositions and permutations of these images, or to the aching beauty and emotional resonances of this work. Much of the latter derives from the sheer physiological spectacle of each marble or bronze tableau throbbing into life through Solomon’s midwifery. More than any other independent film or video I can think of from the past decade, American Falls invokes the spectre of a nation whose present unravelling is all too rooted in its history. How sad it is to realize that Solomon’s masterwork, painstakingly crafted over thousands of hours, cannot hope to reach as many people as the lamest television commercial. Anyone still touched by the poetic viability of the avant-garde should not miss this opportunity to see it. (Tony Pipolo, Artforum)

WHAT’S OUT TONIGHT IS LOST
Phil Solomon, USA, 1983, 16mm, silent, colour, 8 min
Adopting its title from a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, What’s Out Tonight Is Lost is an elegiac film sifting through the unrecoverable. The film is a reflecting pool where vision breaks up. The home we recognize is swallowed in the brume, the light barely penetrates; and the yellow school bus steals us away, delivering us into new clouds, embracing fear. The film has a surface of cracked porcelain and intaglio: the allergic childhood skin of cracks and bruises. This is a film of transubstantiations, the discorporation of human forms into embers. Air looms and blossoms into solidity and nearness … I hear it breathing. (Mark McElhatten)

What’s Out Tonight Is Lost was preserved by Academy Film Archive, Los Angeles.

Phil Solomon will introduce two different programmes of his earlier 16mm films at Tate Modern on Monday 24 & Thursday 27 October, 2011, from 7pm.

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THE PETTIFOGGER
Sunday 23 October 2011, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

APRIL SNOW
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 10 min
Another ‘couplet’ from my ongoing Prolix Satori series. I thought up the juxtaposition of these two pop songs while creating a mix-tape back in 1988 but never thought I’d work with them as a film soundtrack. Back then the taboo in experimental film circles about using music was so strong it seemed permanent. (Lewis Klahr)

THE PETTIFOGGER
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2011, video, colour, sound, 65 min
pettifogger: 1560s, from petty; the second element possibly from obs. Du. focker, from Flem. Focken ‘to cheat,’ or from cognate M.E. fugger, from Fugger the renowned family of merchants and financiers of 15c.-16c. Augsburg. In German, Flemish and Dutch, the name became a word for ‘monopolist, rich man, usurer’. A ‘petty Fugger’ would mean one who on a small scale practices the dishonourable devices for gain popularly attributed to great financiers; it seems possible that the phrase ‘petty fogger of the law’, applied in this sense to some notorious person, may have caught the popular fancy. (The Etymology Dictionary)

A year in the life of an American gambler and con man circa 1963. A diaristic, first person montage full of glimpses, glances, decaying ephemera and elliptical narrative. An abstract crime film and, like many other crime films involving larceny, a sensorial exploration of the virulence of unfettered capitalism. An impressionistic collage film culled from a wide variety of image and sound sources that fully exploits the hieroglyphic essence of cutouts to ponder what appropriation and stealing have in common. Definitely the longest continuous film I’ve ever completed. (Lewis Klahr)

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