CAPITALISM: CHILD LABOR
Saturday 27 October 2007, from 12-7pm
London BFI Southbank Studio

CAPITALISM: CHILD LABOR
Ken Jacobs, USA, 2006, video, colour, sound, 14 min
A stereograph celebrating factory production of thread. Many bobbins of thread coil in a great sky-lit factory space, the many machines manned by a handful of people. Manned? Some are children. I activate the double-photograph, composer Rick Reed suggests the machine din. Your heart bleeding for the kids? The children will surely be rescued and by their bosses! ‘Boys,’ they will say, ‘Have we got a war for you.’ (Ken Jacobs)

Capitalism: Child Labor is another masterful manipulation of old imagery. Ken Jacobs reworks a pair of stereoscopic photographs of barefoot children in a textile factory. The sepia-tone shots were originally taken with side-by-side cameras separated by the short distance between our two eyes. When placed in stereoscopic viewer, with the right eye seeing the right-hand image and the left eye seeing the left-hand image, you get a three-dimensional effect of depth. Jacobs begins his 14-minute video with tiny, twitchy pans across the two stereoscope photos. The highly repetitive imagery matches the highly repetitive tasks of the child workers frozen in time. Then Jacobs deconstructs the scene into overlapping insets and close-ups. Jacobs extracts a Cubist kaleidoscope from a vintage image. As for the critique of capitalism implied in his title, that’s for the viewer to extract. (Bill Stamets, Chicago Sun Times)

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THE ‘I’ AND THE ‘WE’
Saturday 27 October 2007, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

SEEING RED
Su Friedrich, USA, 2005, video, colour, sound, 27 min
Su Friedrich created her latest experimental documentary, the half-hour Seeing Red, from just three elements: video diaries, shot from the chin down, in which she wears a red top; seemingly aleatory footage, often taken on the sly, of red things found on streets, in parks, or in backyards; and snatches of Glenn Gould’s rendition of Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’. At times, red bits of the world dance ecstatically to Gould’s cascading keys. Alone, to her camera, Friedrich confesses a string of related fears: Having turned 50, she faces the stubborn constancy of her self-identified ‘control freak’ patterns and insecurities and wonders if she still has time to change for the better. Friedrich is one of the most accomplished avant-garde filmmakers of her generation, with a career of films and videos whose masterful construction and precise beauty attest to the positive aspects of her self-criticism, and her stature only makes the humbling existential crises in Seeing Red more poignant. Yet she has always found ways to create beauty that resist the illusion of transcendence by sticking close to the grounds of hard reality – an influence and logical extension of her feminist politics. (Ed Halter, Village Voice)
www.sufriedrich.com

JE SUIS UNE BOMBE
Elodie Pong, Switzerland, 2006, video, colour, sound, 7 min
In her video Je suis une bombe, which is part of the ‘Supernova’ cycle, Elodie Pong presents a young woman wearing a panda bear costume who dances and writhes around a pole, in the manner of striptease performers. At the end of the performance, the young woman takes off her panda head and, holding it in her hand, moves towards the camera. Repeatedly and with a sense of urgency, she says ‘Je suis une bombe’, as if she needed to convince herself of her own peculiarity. In her videos Pong paints a kaleidoscopic picture of her own generation which she has pegged as narcissistic, searching, and performance-oriented. She remains a bit aloof, but never severs the ties with her protagonists – she knows, after all, that she herself is deeply involved. The body becomes the carrier of communication. This is not surprising as it is mainly the body which shapes our identity today. Pong tries to capture the reality of a generation by juxtaposing the subjective and the objective, as well as the real and the illusionary. The artist runs the entire gamut of contemporary emotions, and underneath some innocuous looking surfaces she discovers the depths of a silent world drowned out by ambient noise. (Kunsthaus Baselland)

I JUST WANTED TO BE SOMEBODY
Jay Rosenblatt, USA, 2006, video, colour, sound, 10 min
‘I believe, more than ever before, that there are evil forces round about us. Maybe even disguised as something good.’ These are the ironic words of the former beauty queen Anita Bryant, who became the face of homophobia in the United States in the 1970s. In I Just Wanted to Be Somebody, director Jay Rosenblatt sketches a portrait as funny as it is serious of the woman who unleashed the first public controversy over civil rights for homosexuals in 1977 by leading a successful local campaign against them. ‘In Florida, you won the battle, but lost the war. You gave a face to fear and ignorance’ was the response that Fenton Johnson, a gay American writer, wrote in a letter to her as an invitation to keep the debate alive. Rosenblatt creates comic effects by combining the public appearances in which Bryant warns against gay love with commercials that have her singing the praises of orange juice and vitamin C. But in no way does this make the danger of fear and ignorance any less recognisable. I Just Wanted to Be Somebody takes a stand for the importance of a discussion that Bryant is no longer willing to participate in. She lost her career and her family, but not her convictions. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)
www.jayrosenblattfilms.com

REGARDING THE PAIN OF SUSAN SONTAG (NOTES ON CAMP)
Steve Reinke, Canada, 2006, video, colour, sound, 4 min
This short video gets its name from two pieces of writing by Susan Sontag: her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others, a meditation on empathy and the photograph as document; and the highly influential essay, now close to fifty years old, Notes on Camp. Sontag’s work often questions photography’s ability to elicit empathy within the viewer. She analyzes whether personal topics, such as gender and disease, can be addressed given the vast dissemination of photographic images. Outed in the invite as a rehabilitation of the ‘tired indexicality of photograph’, Regarding the Pain of Susan Sontag (Notes on Camp), shows images that evoke a contemporary emotional ground zero, combined with Reinke’s pithy voice-over narration. (LUX)
www.myrectumisnotagrave.com

PART TIME HEROES
Mara Mattuschka, Chris Haring, Austria, 2007, video, colour, sound, 33 min
The search for fame’s elevator goes up and down, the ego’s bust and boom. Each character is isolated in his or her anachronistic, film-star dressing room, left alone, subjected to the sinister fittings: a hopelessly out-dated microphone, radio, crutches for communication. Each character gets a small chance to show that he or she alone is better at embodying that self, which is just as good as every other self. However, as though it were an uncanny copy machine of star production, the golden room, which houses the greatest striptease talent – since she constantly undress yet is never naked – generates a momentary double. The film checks these beings, isolated through their hero competition, into the lonely heart hotel where they eavesdrop on one another through thin walls, often over a film cut. Frivolous encounters slip in. A helplessly obscene seduction attempt mutates to telephone terror, confirmed by the humorous play of the eyes from the other side. From out of the elevator, an elevator technician – a show master, so to speak, a running gag, a lascivious ‘cursor’ in a boiler suit – creeps down the hallways. He alone seems to connect everything, but finds no one. Until the final take, a generous long shot in which all three heroes are left to their own showcases, whereby they attempt all together, each alone, to seduce their audience. Yet unimpressed passers-by give our heroes the cold shoulder, making the camera on the other side of the street their only audience. The Oseifabrik, furnished with technology from days gone by, lends eccentric historicity to one of the programmatic statements: ‘How do I become timeless?’ that releases this outcry for fame in a hopeless but unique vitality. (Katherina Zakravsky)

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PAST IMPERFECT
Saturday 27 October 2007, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

HYSTERIA
Christina Battle, Canada, 2006, 35mm, colour, sound, 4 min
Like nostalgia (april 2001 to present), this film is made up entirely of drawings. They show a house from the past century, the cartoonish figure of a man, a woman’s uplifted face praying, and then another. They are lent movement through the act of hand processing, a hail of scratches and blemishes course through the picture, reminding us that we are watching a loop of emulsion unspool. The image turns briefly and occasionally from positive to negative, the likely result of ‘flashing’ the film in the development process, quickly exposing it to light ‘prematurely’. This technique emphasizes the dual nature of the chemical image. Typically negatives are printed to create a positive for viewing. By showing us both at the same time, the artist remarks upon the usually hidden ‘dual’ nature of the picture – and it is hardly a coincidence that these technical namings (negative versus positive) carry distinct moral implications. A Puritan woman points at another in a gesture of accusation while a crowd looks on, an arm points at a woman praying in front of a tribunal. Near the two-minute mark the cartoonish figure of a man returns, this time emulsion lifted, flickering and shaking in an agitated dance. Dark figures in distress slide through the frame, there is a hanging, and then the emulsion lift frenzy is over. The silhouette of a hanged woman stands clear, a reminder of witch hunts past and present, the easy seduction of surfaces, and the migrations of names to these surfaces. Kike, polack, fairy, nigger, witch. (Mike Hoolboom)

DANGEROUS SUPPLEMENT
Soon-Mi Yoo, USA-Korea, 2006, video, colour, sound, 14 min
Most of the archival footage in Dangerous Supplement comes from US military footage under the titles Supplement to ‘This is Korea’, Korea Gun Camera and Native Life, shot during the Korean War. Dangerous Supplement originated from these questions: Is it possible to see the landscape of the past even though it was first seen by the other’s murderous gaze? Did the mountains and waters manage to escape it? Is there a space in-between? Dangerous Supplement is an incomplete index for memory, a substitute for a vision that is yet to exist. (Soon-Mi Yoo)

CATALOGUE OF BIRDS: BOOK 3
Jayne Parker, UK, 2006, video, b/w, sound, 16 min
Catalogue of Birds: Book 3, ‘The tawny owl and the woodlark’, is an interpretation of Olivier Messiaen’s music for piano, played by Katherina Wolpe. The imagery and music evoke the habitat and song of these nocturnal birds. Filmed in black and white, symbolic of the cycle of life and death, the owl is a harbinger of transformation, mediating between two worlds – the seen and unseen, the physical and spiritual. From the terror of night, the forest opens to grassland and we hear in the music, the transcendent song of the lark. (Jayne Parker)

HIS EYE ON THE SPARROW
Bruce Conner, USA, 2006, video, colour, sound, 4 min
Why should my heart be discouraged, why should the shadows come?
Why should my heart be lonely and long for heaven and home?
In the 1930s jubilee gospel singing underwent a metamorphosis when Roy Crain joined up with R.H. Harris and developed a new style of vocal arrangement with The Soul Stirrers. (Later members included Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls) The Soul Stirrers introduced a more complex kind of vocal presentation employing the innovations of falsetto and swing lead tradeoffs with guitar accompaniment and complex background singing with reiterated words or delayed echoing responses. Bruce Conner began working on By and By, a documentary about The Soul Stirrers several decades ago, shooting their reunion concert with four cameras and accumulating interview material. Conner was poised to finish the piece in the mid-1980s but the project was abandoned for a variety of financial and personal reasons. From the ashes of this project arises a new collage film miniature … thimble sized epiphany of conflicted history. In the past Conner created masterful pairings of sound and image with the music of Dylan, Ray Charles, Devo, Byrne and Eno, Respighi, Sibelius, Riley, Gleeson and others. His Eye on the Sparrow takes its name from a classic gospel song written by Lettuce Guest. The Soul Stirrers cut their version in Chicago on October 10, 1946, and it is this recording that is heard on the track. Carefree and complex the song moves in tandem with a set of found images that seem utterly transparent yet are evocative of other mysteries just out of reach. (Mark McElhatten)

MARGUERITE DURAS / ALAIN RESNAIS (0.65, 0.85, 1.0 FPS)
David Dempewolf, USA, 2007, video, b/w, sound, 19 min
Hiroshima mon amour (1959) is utilized as the central narrative that has been dissected into thematically ordered motifs. Marguerite Duras / Alain Resnais (0.65, 0.85, 1.0 fps) is set within the documentary opening of the film. The cinematic flow of the original has been drained and strung together in a series of still sequences. These sequences are determined by the frames per second export rates of 0.65, 0.85, and 1.0. The differences between frame rates in the video mean to invoke an awareness of the accumulation of synchronous and agonistic narratives over time, where the original historical event is a breech of interpretive models, and the temporal present is an unfixed state of intertextual stratifications. Each frame is marked with a number to track variations of the exported stills. The stills that correspond to the spoken dialogue are synchronous with the audio, and the stills that are without dialogue are shown for a single second. By isolating the enunciation of the script, Duras’ text as opposed to Resnais’ editing – becomes the temporal ordering format for the video. (David Dempewolf)

HELENÉS (APPARITION OF FREEDOM)
Christoph Draeger, Switzerland, 2005, video, colour, sound, 18 min
The Cold War was based on fear and deterrence. In both the East and the West, propaganda films were made to prepare people for the worst: a nuclear attack. Nowadays when we watch these films from the 1950s and 1960s, we are often struck by the naive clumsiness of the representation, usually culminating in the advice to take shelter under the stairs. However, some of these films were rather more realistic, as can be seen from the Hungarian 16mm film Helenés (‘Apparition’ in Hungarian) which Christoph Draeger used as an unaltered basis for his piece. Draeger found this film among a stack of 16mm rolls in a defunct disaster training camp of the Hungarian army in 1997. The editing, soundtrack and monotonous voiceover all bring to mind Alain Resnais’ masterpiece, the documentary Nuit et brouillard (1955). This was also impressionistic and remarkably silent, but incredibly threatening as a sad observation on the human condition. Unfortunately it applies to our times as well, possibly it is even a statement of all times. Draeger subtitled the voiceover of this film by using most of George Bush’s famous (or infamous) inauguration speech, in which, in anticipation of his military campaigns, he inflicted serious inflationary damage upon the concept of ‘freedom’ by repeating it no less than 41 times. (Netherlands Media Art Institute)

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CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN PRESERVATIONS
Saturday 27 October 2007, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

FUSES
Carolee Schneemann, USA, 1964-67, 16mm, colour, sound, 29 min
I wanted to see if the experience of what I saw would have any correspondence to what I felt – the intimacy of the lovemaking … And I wanted to put into that materiality of film the energies of the body, so that the film itself dissolves and recombines and is transparent and dense – as one feels during lovemaking … It is different from any pornographic work that you’ve ever seen – that’s why people are still looking at it! And there’s no objectification or fetishization of the woman. (Carolee Schneemann)

By interweaving and compounding images of sexual love with images of mundane joy (the sea, a cat, window-filtered light), she expresses sex without the self consciousness of a spectacle, without an idea of expressivity, in her words, ‘free in a process which liberates our intentions from our conceptions’. Carolee and her lover James Tenney emerge from nebulous clusters of colour and light and are seen in every manner of sexual embrace … one overall mosaic of flesh and textures and passionate embraces. Every element of the traditional stag film is here – fellatio, cunnilingus, close-ups of genitals and penetrations, sexual acrobatics – yet there’s none of the prurience and dispassion usually associated with them. There is only a fluid oceanic quality that merges the physical act with the metaphysical connotations, very Joycean and very erotic. (Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema)

Pornography is an anti-emotional medium, in content and intent, and its lack of emotion renders it wholly ineffective for women. This absence of sensuality is so contrary to female eroticism that pornography becomes, in fact, anti-sexual. Schneemann’s film, by contrast, is devastatingly erotic, transcending the surfaces of sex to communicate its true spirit, its meaning as an activity for herself and, quite accurately, women in general. Significantly, Schneemann conceives the film as shot through the eyes of her cat – the impassive observer whose view of human sexuality is free of voyeurism and ignorant of morality. In her attempt to reproduce the whole visual and tactile experience of lovemaking as a subjective phenomenon Schneemann spent some three years marking on the film, baking it in the oven, even hanging it out the window during rainstorms on the off chance it might be struck by lightning. Much as human beings carry the physical traces of their experiences, so this film testifies to what it has been through and communicates the spirit of its maker. The red heat baked into the emulsion suffuses the film, a concrete emblem of erotic power.’ (B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Art Institute)

The preservation of Fuses by Anthology Film Archives, New York, was supported by the University of Chicago Film Studies Center and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

KITCH’S LAST MEAL
Carolee Schneemann, USA, 1973-76, 2 x 16mm, colour, sound-on-cd, 3 x 20 min
In Kitch’s Last Meal synchronicity becomes a physical property, as with accident, as with joke – double entendre. The actual projection system is of two simultaneous Super 8 reels – vertical, one above the other. The disjunctive imagery has been intricately edited: two reels periodically phrase simultaneous images of the local freight train, which ran behind our house, as well as domestic events between the artist couple and the thematic constancy of the cat, Kitch, eating during the last four years of her life.

The film is composed of five hours of double co-ordinated reels; each set approximately twenty minutes long, so that various time units can be shown. The reels were edited over the five years of the filming. The sound was edited on cassette tapes.

The double vertical projection was intended to increase perceptual tension and its incremental satisfactions during the unexpected synchronisation of the horizontal entrance and exit of the train, of the figures moving in space, of the cat leaning to her dish. The verticality emphasises the axis of the body – its aspect of elongation in contrast to more predictable bilateral symmetry, the horizontal nature of stereoscopic vision. The repeated motions of the freight train situates a narrative physicalisation, corresponding with film itself moving through the mechanisation of the fixed track. Here the edge of the frame implies a leakage of time existing both before and after, just as the train enters our perceptual field seemingly from elsewhere (behind, moving forward to an invisible destination). At the conclusion of reels 11 & 12, I stand in the railroad tracks filming a train in diminishing perspective – as if time is actually being pulled away, as if the scale of an object can be reduced to a grain, a blur.

The visual parameters were determined by placing the camera close to positions occupied by the cat. The sound was recorded by suspending a microphone adjacent to the cat both indoors and outdoors. My premise was to film fragments of Kitch’s observations so long as she lived. I began this diary film on returning home to the Hudson Valley with the cat after dislocated years in Europe. Kitch, returning to her original house was already 16 years old. Since death and film seemed in a determined interchange, my intention was to film the cat in our domestic surround until she died.

Stan Brakhage always told me how mysteriously and consistently places he filmed were subsequently destroyed – houses disappeared, bridges were taken down; friends appearing in his films would soon move away, often without a trace. With Fuses, the celebration of an equitable and passionate relationship unexpectedly dissolved; Plumb Line became the imprints of a deforming love affair; Viet-Flakes observed fragments of brutality and disaster; while my small film portrait Carl Ruggles Christmas Breakfast captured the composer at 84 years old – the unintended poignancy of a simple meal. By 1973, the premise of Kitch’s Last Meal seemed to provide certain safety valves.

Our collusion was such that Kitch died almost 20 years old while eating a lamp chop. Kitch died on February 3rd. In March, the Walkill Valley Railroad announced that the small freight running behind the house from Albany to Walkill would be discontinued and the tracks dismantled. In May, my partner Anthony McCall decided we should separate and in June I was informed my teaching position would not be renewed. So much for my anticipated trade-off with film-death!

(Carolee Schneemann)

The 16mm blow-up and preservation of Kitch’s Last Meal by Anthology Film Archives, New York, was supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

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MYSTERIOUS EMULSION
Saturday 27 October 2007, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

WATER SPELL
Sandy Ding, USA, 2007, 16mm, b/w & colour, sound, 42 min
Sandy Ding’s Water Spell is a bold, abstract journey that takes us into the psychic interior of our very cellular structure … and back. For me, this film is about reincarnation and transformation, on both the spiritual and sub-atomic levels. This is not an easy film, but it is a powerful one. (Nina Menkes)

BLUE MONET
Carl E. Brown, Canada, 2006, 2 x 16mm, colour, sound, 56 min (double screen)
This is an homage to Claude Monet and Eustace R. Brown who both taught me to ‘cultivate my garden’. In my film work over the past twenty years water has always been a touchstone for my emotional state. To look out at the water whether it be lake or sea is to face the two endless zones, that of water and sky and the mysterious edge at which they meet. I find this vision one of the strongest intimations of infinity. Monet is an artist that I have always greatly admired. His use of colour through water and sky to convey his emotional state has had a great influence on me. Whether it was the first rays of light glinting the water’s edge or the magic time just before nightfall, Monet’s sense of colour and colour conveyance has always been perfect. I have used my techniques of alchemical film to translate onto film my impressions of Monet’s sense of colour, water, sky and his most powerful icon the water lily. Using my toning, liquid emulsion, reticulation, dried crystal bleach formations and stacking techniques to just name a few I have translated the Monet experience onto the surface of my film. An illustrational form tells you through its intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a nonillustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into fact. Alchemical work provides both illustration and nonillustration simultaneously … the experiential depth of representation (the photographic source), and a sensuous (abstract) surface of the wild, both seen and unseen … but felt. That is what is art creation; a union between the beauty that is Monet converted through my alchemical nature into a new form for a new generation of viewers. (Carl E. Brown)

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NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR
Sunday 28 October 2007, from 12-7pm
London BFI Southbank Studio

NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR
Rachel Reupke, UK-China, 2007, video, colour, sound, 9 min
This video work reflects Rachel Reupke’s long-standing fascination with science fiction and the inherent problem of visualising the future.

Beijing is in the throws of a construction boom, break-neck in speed. Building sites are hemmed in by developers’ hoardings, each displaying an architect’s visualisation of what is to come in ambitious, blurry-soft style. Thousands of these billboards intrude on the streets: the future of the city rendered as illustrated inserts into the reality of its present – just as Beijing’s tourist maps pre-empt the completion of these projects, in order to keep up with the relentless pace of change. This visual overlay of proposed onto existent gives the impression that time is being compressed, and that tomorrow might actually be running concurrently with today.

Now Wait for Last Year takes the idea of these developers’ hoardings as its starting point. In a hybrid of architect’s projection and corporate video, Beijing’s buildings are presented in single-shot fixed frames, both monumental and unreal. Photographic in nature, but with visible post-production, the idea is that these images resist being located in a specific time or place. The collage aesthetic coupled with the incongruous design of some of these structures prompts the question as to whether these buildings actually exist in present day Beijing, are plans for future developments, or are sheer fantasy.

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OVER LAND AND SEA
Sunday 28 October 2007, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

THE IVALO RIVER DELTA
Patrick Beveridge, UK, 2007, 16mm, colour, silent, 17 min
The title of this film refers to the landscape where it was shot – an open marshland in northernmost Finland. This terrain, which is covered in thick snow during the winter months, provided a surface for filming changes in nocturnal light that are in response to the movement and position of the moon, and the sporadic displays of the polar lights. Such a project inadvertently raises the problem of landscape film as a genre in its own right. However, the film also has elements of astronomical and atmospheric photography. In particular, some experiments using film cameras placed on rotating celestial mounts lead to the unpredicted outcome of both the earth and the sky staying in focus with prolonged exposure for each frame. The film has a number of tracking shots, assembled in the chronological order they were taken, that document the events of particular nights. In filming above the horizon the camera moved with the stars across the northern sky. Against this backdrop displays of the polar lights occurred on clear nights, of which, during the unusually warm winter of 2005, there were few. (Patrick Beveridge).

AT SEA
Peter Hutton, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, silent, 60 min
Films by Peter Hutton appear more closely related to landscape painting and still photography than contemporary cinema. In their stately portrayal of urban and rural locations, they afford the viewer a rarefied and highly-focused mode of looking, a stillness seemingly at odds with everyday life. Over shots of extended duration, the world reveals itself before the camera, which often records only subtle changes of light and atmospheric conditions. Peter Hutton began making films in 1970 and has work in the collections of the Whitney Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou and the Austrian Film Museum. A former merchant seaman, he has been a professor of film at Bard College in the Hudson River Valley since 1985. (Mark Webber)

Put simply, the film tells the story (‘the birth, life and death’, in the director’s words) of a container ship – but there are no words to adequately describe the film’s awesome visual expedition. Hutton knows the sea. His experiences as a former merchant seaman have informed his filmmaking practice, known for its rigour and epic beauty. At Sea begins in South Korea with diminutive workers shipbuilding. The colossal vessel is revealed in de Chirico-worthy proportions, its magnitude surreal to the human eye. Off to sea, the splendour and intensity of the water – set against the vibrant colours of the containers – causes us to see the world anew. The film concludes in Bangladesh amidst shipbreakers as enthralled by Hutton’s camera as we are by his images. (Andréa Picard, Toronto International Film Festival)

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THE PERCIPIENT IMAGE
Sunday 28 October 2007, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

DISCOVERIES ON THE FOREST FLOOR 1-3
Charlotte Pryce, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min
‘Three miniature, illuminated, hagiographic studies of plants observed and imagined, hand-processed and optically printed.’ (Charlotte Pryce)

THE SKY WALKS ME HOME
Allen D. Glass II, USA-China, 2005, 16mm, colour, silent, 24 min
Humankind in the unfamiliar landscape, composing itself rhythmically and even lovingly into poetry. Nature as mammal music. The Life Dance. Foreign smells. And silences that are, of course, their own music. (Dorothea Grossman)

THE CROSSING
Timoleon Wilkins, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, silent, 6 min
This film was born on two lazy afternoons – a product of my child’s eye fascination with the (always black) magic of viewfinder perception vs end product (the film). At the time I was deeply affected by Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Crossing, the second in his ‘border trilogy’ coming-of-age sagas set during the last vestiges of the truly wild west (Mexico-US border region circa 1930-40). The central character of this eerily perfect novel is a beautiful and adept teenage idealist who journeys on horseback into Mexico with the goal of returning a captured wolf to its native land. McCarthy’s seamless alternation between adventurism and spiritual naturalism is my inspiration. The resulting images of my ‘crossing’ are abstract by varying degrees. I later edited the film during a period of the most intense depression and self-doubt I have ever experienced: The resulting film-rhythms are punctuated by retinal afterimage and the odd alternation between the soft/tentative and the harsh/concrete. There is a visual allusion to crossing a river, and so this may also be interpreted as a contemplation of death’s journey. In actuality, it is the most highly worked-over of all my films, a departure that seems to be an appropriate nod to middle age and the peeling away of old concerns – my own, belated ‘coming of age’ story. (Timoleon Wilkins)

THE BREATH
Minyong Jang, Korea, 2007, 16mm, colour, silent, 10 min
An immersion in a bamboo grove, displaying all of Jang’s characteristic technical skill and capacity for abstemious observation. The Breath is a process of tension and release. The camera alternately distills and frees its attentions, cycling from tautly-held focus to diffuse, verdant colour fields. It’s light-as-air, following the breeze to track and rack down stalks, up stems, through leaves – ultimately following the rhythm of the filmmaker’s own respiration, merging Jang’s vital nature with its photosynthetic object. (Jeremy Rigsby, Media City)

PITCHER OF COLORED LIGHT
Robert Beavers, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, silent, 24 min
I have filmed my mother’s house and her garden. The shadows play an essential part in the mixture of loneliness and peace that exists here. The seasons move from the garden into the house, projecting rich diagonals in the early morning or late afternoon. Each shadow is a subtle balance of stillness and movement; it shows the vital instability of space. Its special quality opens a passage to the subjective; a voice within the film speaks to memory. The walls are screens through which I pass to the inhabited privacy. We experience a place through the perspective of where we came from and hear someone else’s voice through our own acoustic. The sense of place is never separate from the moment. (Robert Beavers)

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SEVEN EASY PIECES BY MARINA ABRAMOVI?
Sunday 28 October 2007, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank Studio

SEVEN EASY PIECES BY MARINA ABRAMOVI?
Babette Mangolte, USA, 2007, HD video, colour, sound, 93 min
Bruce Nauman, Body Pressure, 1974
Vito Acconci, Seedbed, 1972
Valie Export, Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969
Gina Pane, The Conditioning, the first action of Self-Portrait(s), 1973
Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965
Marina Abramovi?, Lips of Thomas, 1975
Marina Abramovi?, Entering the Other Side, 2005

In Seven Easy Pieces Abramovi? re-enacted seminal performance works from the 1960s and 70s by Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Valie Export, Gina Pane, Joseph Beuys and herself, interpreting them as one would a musical score. The film is a reflection on performance art and body art outlining physical fragility, versatility, tenacity and unlimited endurance as seen in the work of Marina Abramovi?. The film of Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovi? is about the performing body and how it affects viscerally the people who confront it, look at it and participate in the transcendental experience that is its primary effect. The ceremonial and meditative are the common responses to the week-long series of performances that took place in November 2005 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. From an art event to a social phenomenon, the seven performances became the talk of the town because they created among the visitors a sense of sublimation, like prayer. The film attempts to reveal the mechanisms of this transcendental experience by simply showing the performer’s body living the events inscribed in each piece with details that outline the body’s fragility, versatility, tenacity and unlimited endurance. The fascination comes from the revelation of the physical transformation of Marina Abramovi?’s exposed body due to the rigorous discipline of being there on display each day for seven hours without any restrictive boundaries. The relentless progress of time is revealed each day by the acoustics of the building with its waves of crowds that roll like an ocean and marvel at the performer’s steadfastness with respectful silence. That the performer’s required discipline had to be so different from one piece to the next is one of the mysteries. How the attentive audience fed into the art and Marina’s aesthetics is what is explored. It is as if a monastic urge attracted the mystical among us viewers who were there to participate. And the film, by focusing on Marina’s minute changes and strain during the long seven hours of each piece, explores in a systematic way a body without limit and increases the awareness of how participatory body art is. The film follows the linearity inscribed in the weeklong event, from body pressure, audience participation and confrontation in the first three pieces to the ceremonial in the last four pieces as mapped out by Marina Abramovi?. It is only after the fact that the film viewer will realize how much the project’s concept enlightens us on aesthetics that place physical experience over reason, process over iconography and testify to the power of audience participation over passive spectatorship. (Babette Mangolte)
www.babettemangolte.com

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THE ANAGOGIC CHAMBER
Sunday 28 October 2007, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

FILM FOR INVISIBLE INK, CASE NO: 71: BASE-PLUS-FOG
David Gatten, USA, 2006, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
David Gatten’s placid, comically lyrical new Film for Invisible Ink, Case No. 71: Base-Plus-Fog calls to mind the self-referential highjinks and bone-dry textual wit of Owen Land. But Gatten’s approach is in some ways more classically minimalist than Land’s. Invisible Ink is largely composed of a series of sprocket-hole outlines that seem to materialize from the white screen, the ‘image’ consisting of clear leader and its dust granules until one of the rounded rectangles dips down and floats forward into the frame of reference. They each occupy pretty much the same position and, although they are mostly identical, the ongoing procession gives us time to notice their differences – a smudged lower boundary, say, or an unstable corner. In between, Gatten silently presents texts from a Kodak manual, detailing what I can only assume to be the film-developer hazard that we’re observing – problems in base-plus-fog density. (Don’t ask me. For all I know, this could refer to an ambiance management conundrum at a discotheque.) Gatten has been working for years now with the particular juncture at which text and image become indistinguishable, but Film for Invisible Ink displays an impressive recommitment to the less-is-more aesthetic that lent such subtlety and refinement to his earlier What the Water Said series. The new work is as delicate yet muscular as an Agnes Martin canvas or a Fred Sandback string sculpture. (Michael Sicinski, Green Cine Daily)
www.davidgattenfilm.com

SHADOW TRAP
Greg Pope, UK-Norway, 2007, 35mm, colour, sound, 8 min
Shadow Trap was conceived as a companion piece to the live film performance Light Trap. In Light Trap action is taken to remove all emulsion from completely developed black film loops; Shadow Trap operates in reverse – a film created by the application of film emulsion ‘dust’ to a clear base. In a way Shadow Trap is a documentary – a record of previously executed actions – an exhibition of the evidence. I also regard it as a found footage film, where material from one film is re-presented and re-examined in another. In this case the re-presented material has been subjected to extreme abrasion and reduced to dust. I was also excited by the notion of fragmenting the base unit of film language to a level below that of the classical single frame, where frames are ‘atomised’ and we start to examine the building blocks of film. The image-as-sound / sound-as-image crossover also mirrors the audio element in Light Trap (where a live scratch soundtrack is created). Using the inherent sound technology of 35mm projectors I can play back surround sound audio (sound which is created by the image), over which I have very limited control. (Greg Pope)

THE OBJECT WHICH THINKS US: OBJECT 1
Samantha Rebello, UK, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min
The Object Which Thinks Us: OBJECT 1 is a film about human beings in the 21st Century, though paradoxically it is a film in which the human image plays no more than a fleeting part. Objects: utilitarian articles which play a major role in our everyday existence (though to which we pay little attention) are at the core of a film which uses them as a mirror in which we are able to view ourselves. People are nowhere to be seen though human presence is felt everywhere in the things which fill the screen. Humans are modified and directed by those objects they deem to be in control of. Our gestures and movements are constantly guided by things which do more than aid us in our day to day activities. The film seems intent on opening our eyes to the hidden qualities of manufactured goods and articles, exposing them to be enigmatic and imposing operators
in our existence, and human beings are shown at the periphery of an object world. ‘Through the objects, other human beings are haunting us.’ (Samantha Rebello)

FUGITIVE L(I)GHT
Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Canada, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min
This film explores the morph-like quality of the Serpentine Dance and its intricate play on the visible and the invisible, which extends to the larger context and legacy its originator, the American born Loïe Fuller. fugitive l(i)ght is composed of elaborately reworked found footage, originally captured by Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers, of various renditions and imitations of Fuller’s Serpentine performances. These found films are woven into intricately reworked sequences using several computer programs and following poetic interpretations of several artists who experienced Fuller’s performances in person: texts of Mallarme, lithographs of Toulouse-Lautrec, sketches of Whistler, and futuristic manifesto on dance by Marinetti. The music for this film was composed by Toronto based composer Colin Clark who reworked various LP recordings of Wagner’s Die Walküre, the music that often accompanied Fuller’s Serpentine performances. fugitive l(i)ght emphasizes rhythmic structures over and above representation, by drawing the viewer’s gaze into a maze of multiple folds of continuously unfolding colour patterns. fugitive l(i)ght aims to evoke a charge of energy that might have been experienced by the audience of the 1890s in the presence of Fuller’s light performances, and therefore permitting her to meet us again, one century later by making herself and her performance (in)visible to us through its palpitating playful rhythm expressed as a field of energy that resonates within the spectator. (Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof)

SICK SERENA AND DREGS AND WRECK AND WRECK
Emily Wardill, UK, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck revels in a subset of fiction – allegory, with its roots in Medieval poetry – that ricochets retrospectively into Emily Wardill’s other films, into us watching them, into a methodology or a thought process being made manifest in which we are complicit. Allegory is an illusion of the highest order, fiction crystallised into a specific or mysterious instructional purpose. It tells two entirely co-dependent stories absolutely simultaneously, one which we are actually reading, the other the lesson to be derived from it. Through coherent, albeit often surreal narrative, we are taught something about how to behave, told our own story. These (invariably moral) coda only make sense if the narrative we are reading or watching remains in tact. Allegories are told like fairytales or made into pictures that have a similar symbolic order. Religious images are not strictly allegorical, but they are instructional and in the close-ups of Sick Serena’s stained glass the figures crunched between thick lead with animals and angels, reframed here as decapitated, broken, they are reinterpreted as mysteriously, dramatically symbolic. What is more they come to life. To ‘life’. They come to whose life? (Ian White)

VICTORY OVER THE SUN
Michael Robinson, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 13 min
Dominant sites of past World’s Fairs breed an eruptive struggle between spirit and matter, ego and industry, futurism and failure. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory; nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain. (Michael Robinson)
www.poisonberries.net

TODAY!
Jessie Stead & David Gatten, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound-on-cd, 11 min
Touch what you see when you find it or pick it up.
Fall off tomorrow’s promise, not injured and again.
In the woods there is snow, in the water there is sugar,
bodies are made of salt and (yesterday is unaware).
(Jesse Stead & David Gatten)
www.jessiestead.com
www.davidgattenfilm.com

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