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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SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT CONDENSED: PROGRAMME 1
November 2006—May 2008
International Tour

SLIDES
Annabel Nicolson, 1970, colour, silent, 11 mins (18fps)
“A continuing sequence of tactile films were made in the printer from my earlier material. 35mm slides, light leaked film, sewn film, cut up to 8mm and 16mm fragments were dragged through the contact printer, directly and intuitively controlled. The films create their own fluctuating colour and form dimensions defying the passive use of ‘film as a vehicle’. The appearance of sprocket holes, frame lines etc., is less to do with the structural concept and more of a creative, plastic response to whatever is around.” (Annabel Nicolson, LFMC catalogue 1974)

AT THE ACADEMY
Guy Sherwin, 1974, b/w, sound, 5 mins
“Makes use of found footage hand printed on a simple home-made contact printer, and processed in the kitchen sink. At The Academy uses displacement of a positive and negative sandwich of the same loop. Since the printer light spills over the optical sound track area, the picture and sound undergo identical transformations.” (Guy Sherwin, LFMC catalogue 1979)

SHEPHERD’S BUSH
Mike Leggett, 1971, b/w, sound, 15 mins
“Shepherd’s Bush was a revelation. It was both true film notion and demonstrated an ingenious association with the film-process. It is the procedure and conclusion of a piece of film logic using a brilliantly simple device; the manipulation of the light source in the Film Co-op printer such that a series of transformations are effected on a loop of film material. From the start Mike Leggett adopts a relational perspective according to which it is neither the elements or the emergent whole but the relations between the elements (transformations) that become primary through the use of logical procedure.” (Roger Hammond, LFMC catalogue supplement, 1972)

FILM NO. 1
David Crosswaite, 1971, colour, sound, 10 mins
“Film No. 1 is a 10-minute loop film. The systems of super-imposed loops are mathematically inter-related in a complex manner. The starting and cut off points for each loop are not clearly exposed, but through repetitions of sequences in different colours, in different ‘material’ realities (i.e. a negative, positive, bas-relief, neg-pos overlay) yet in constant rhythm (both visually and on the soundtrack hum) one is manipulated to attempt to work out the system structure … The film deals with permutations of material, in a prescribed manner but one by no means ‘necessary’ or logical (except within the film’s own constructed system/serial.)” (Peter Gidal, LFMC catalogue 1974)

DRESDEN DYNAMO
Lis Rhodes, 1971, colour, sound, 5 mins
“This film is the result of experiments with the application of Letraset and Letratone onto clear film. It is essentially about how graphic images create their own sound by extending into that area of film which is ‘read’ by optical sound equipment. The final print has been achieved through three separate, consecutive printings from the original material, on a contact printer. Colour was added, with filters, on the final run. The film is not a sequential piece. It does not develop crescendos. It creates the illusion of spatial depth from essentially, flat, graphic, raw material.” (Tim Bruce, LFMC catalogue 1993)

VERSAILLES I & II
Chris Garratt, 1976, b/w, sound, 11 mins
”For this film I made a contact printing box, with a printing area 16mm x 185mm which enabled the printing of 24 frames of picture plus optical sound area at one time. The first part is a composition using 7 x 1-second shots of the statues of Versailles, Palace of 1000 Beauties, with accompanying soundtrack, woven according to a pre-determined sequence. Because sound and picture were printed simultaneously, the minute inconsistencies in exposure times resulted in rhythmic fluctuations of picture density and levels of sound. Two of these shots comprise the second part of the film which is framed by abstract imagery printed across the entire width of the film surface: the visible image is also the sound image.” (Chris Garratt, LFMC catalogue 1978)

SILVER SURFER
Mike Dunford, 1972, b/w, sound, 15 mins
“A surfer, filmed and shown on tv, refilmed on 8mm, and refilmed again on 16mm. Simple loop structure preceded by four minutes of a still frame of the surfer. An image on the borders of apprehension, becoming more and more abstract. The surfer surfs, never surfs anywhere, an image suspended in the light of the projector lamp. A very quiet and undramatic film, not particularly didactic. Sound: the first four minutes consists of a fog-horn, used as the basic tone for a chord played on the organ, the rest of the film uses the sound of breakers with a two second pulse and occasional bursts of musical-like sounds.” (Mike Dunford, LFMC catalogue supplement 1972)

FOOTSTEPS
Marilyn Halford, 1974, b/w, sound, 6 mins
“Footsteps is in the manner of a game re-enacted, the game in making was between the camera and actor, the actor and cameraman, and one hundred feet of film. The film became expanded into positive and negative to change balances within it; black for perspective, then black to shadow the screen and make paradoxes with the idea of acting, and the act of seeing the screen. The music sets a mood then turns a space, remembers the positive then silences the flatness of the negative.” (Marilyn Halford, LFMC catalogue 1978)

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SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT CONDENSED: PROGRAMME 2
November 2006—May 2008
International Tour

THRESHOLD
Malcolm Le Grice, 1972, colour, sound, 10 mins
“Le Grice no longer simply uses the printer as a reflexive mechanism, but utilises the possibilities of colour-shift and permutation of imagery as the film progresses from simplicity to complexity … With the film’s culmination in representational, photographic imagery, one would anticipate a culminating ‘richness’ of image; yet the insistent evidence of splice bars and the loop and repetition of the short piece of found footage and the conflicting superimposition of filtered loops all reiterate the work which is necessary to decipher that cinematic image.” (Deke Dusinberre, LFMC catalogue 1993)

SEVEN DAYS
Chris Welsby, 1974, colour, sound, 20 mins
“The location of this film is by a small stream on the northern slopes of Mount Carningly in southwest Wales. The seven days were shot consecutively and appear in that same order. Each day starts at the time of local sunrise and ends at the time of local sunset. One frame was taken every ten seconds throughout the film. The camera was mounted on an Equatorial Stand, which is a piece of equipment used by astronomers to track the stars. Rotating at the same speed as the earth, the camera is always pointing at either its own shadow or at the sun. Selection of image (sky or earth; sun or shadow) was controlled by the extent of cloud coverage. If the sun was out the camera was turned towards its own shadow; if it was in the camera was turned towards the sun.” (Chris Welsby, LFMC catalogue 1978)

KEY
Peter Gidal, 1968, colour, sound, 10 mins
“Slow zoom out and defocus of …” (Peter Gidal, LFMC catalogue 1974)

MOMENT
Stephen Dwoskin, 1968, colour, sound, 12 mins
“One single continuous shot of a girl’s face before, during and after an orgasm. A concentration on the subtle changes within the face – going from an objective look into a subjective one and then back out … Moment is not a woman alone, but with her ‘in person’. Have you ever really watched the face in orgasm?” (Stephen Dwoskin, Other Cinema catalogue 1972)

DECK
Gill Eatherley, 1971, colour, sound, 13 mins
“During a voyage by boat to Finland, the camera records three minutes of black and white 8mm film of a woman sitting on a bridge. The preoccupation of the film is with the base and with the transformation of this material, which was first refilmed on a screen where it was projected by multiple projectors at different speeds and then secondly amplified with colour filters, using positive and negative elements and superimposition on the London Co-op’s optical printer.” (Gill Eatherley, Light Cone catalogue, 1997)

COLOURS OF THIS TIME
William Raban, 1972, colour, silent, 3 mins
“Whilst working on previous time-lapse films, I found that colour film tended to record the actual colour of the light source rather than local colour when long time exposures were used. Using this phenomenon, Colours of this Time records all the imperceptible shifts of colour temperature in summer daylight, from first light until sunset.” (William Raban, LFMC catalogue 1974)

ASSOCIATIONS
John Smith, 1975, colour, sound, 7 mins
“Text taken from ‘Word Associations and Linguistic Theory’ by Herbert H. Clark. Images taken from magazines and colour supplements. By using the ambiguities inherent in the English language, Associations sets language against itself. Image and word work together/against each other to destroy/create meaning.” (John Smith, LFMC catalogue 1978)

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