REVERENCE: THE FILMS OF OWEN LAND (FORMERLY KNOWN AS GEORGE LANDOW): Programme Two
January 2005—April 2007
International Tour

THE FILM THAT RISES TO THE SURFACE OF CLARIFIED BUTTER
Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow), USA, 1968, b/w, sound, 9 min
An illustrator is drawing figures that resemble Tibetan deities. He can’t believe his eyes when they appear to come to life and dance on the paper, taking on qualities we might associate with Disney characters. They appear trapped between 2D and 3D space, an eerie limbo which is amplified by the sinister loop of the soundtrack.

DIPLOTERATOLOGY
Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow), USA, 1967-78, colour, silent,, 7 min
A revision of BARDO FOLLIES, subtitled “the study newly formed monstrosities”. Its images represent visual phenomena seen during a passage into the afterlife, but also evoke the cellular structure of the filmstrip, and of our own bodies. “The suggestion is that death (destruction of the original image) is not an end but merely the next stage.”

“NO SIR, ORISON!”
Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow), USA, 1975, colour, sound, 3 min
After singing a vivacious song of love in the aisle of a supermarket, the performer kneels down to ask forgiveness for those involved in the commercial food industry, which substitutes natural produce with non-nutritious commodities. Orison means prayer. The title of the film (a palindrome) is the answer to a question.

WIDE ANGLE SAXON
Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow), USA, 1975, colour, sound, 22 min
An interpretation of The Confessions of Saint Augustine, featuring an ordinary middle-aged man who undergoes a conversion experience whilst watching an experimental film. The film is by Al Rutcurts (think about it) and Earl is so bored that his mind starts to wander. He realises that his possessions may be a barrier between himself and God and determines to something about it.

THANK YOU JESUS FOR THE ETERNAL PRESENT
Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow), USA, 1973, b/w & colour, sound, 6 min.
A rapturous audio-visual mix that “deliberately seeks a hidden order in randomness.” The film combines the face of a woman in ecstatic, contemplative prayer with shots of an animal rights activist, and a scantily clad model advertising Russian cars at the International Auto Show, New York.

A FILM OF THEIR 1973 SPRING TOUR COMMISSIONED BY CHRISTIAN WORLD LIBERATION FRONT OF BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA
Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow), USA, 1974, colour, sound, 12 min
A radical Christian group’s lecture tour of US colleges was filmed in the cinema verité tradition, with hand held camera, sync and wild sound. To avoid making a conventional documentary, the filmmaker created a dynamic collage by stroboscopically editing together pairs of scenes using a rapid rhythm of three-frame units.

NEW IMPROVED INSTITUTIONAL QUALITY: IN THE ENVIRONMENT OF LIQUIDS AND NASALS A PARASITIC VOWEL SOMETIMES DEVELOPS
Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow), USA, 1976, colour, sound, 10 min
The IQ test soundtrack is re-used in an entirely new work that is concerned more with the effects on the examinee, who enters a Chinese box of impossible perspectives in a hyper-realistic living room. He briefly escapes the oppressive environment of the test but passes into the imagination of the filmmaker, where he encounters images from previous films.

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RITE WORDS, ROTE ORDER
Thursday 2 June 2005, at 7pm
London Corsica Studios

ANAEMIC CINEMA
Marcel Duchamp, France, 1925, b/w, silent, 7 min
Duchamp used the initial payment on his inheritance to make a film and to go into the art business. The film, shot in Man Ray’s studio with the help of cinematographer Marc Allégret, was a seven-minute animation of nine punning phrases by Rrose Sélavy. These had been pasted, letter by letter, in a spiral pattern on round black discs that were then glued to phonograph records; the slowly revolving texts alternate with shots of Duchamp’s Discs Bearing Spirals, ten abstract designs whose turning makes them appear to move backward and forward in an erotic rhythm. The little film, which Duchamp called Anemic Cinema, had its premiere that August at a private screening room in Paris. (Calvin Tomkins)

ASSOCIATIONS
John Smith, UK, 1975, colour, sound, 7 min
Images from magazines and colour supplements accompany a spoken text taken from ‘‘Word Associations and Linguistic Theory’’ by Herbert H. Clark. 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)

SYNTAX
Martha Haslanger, 1974, colour, sound, 13 min
As the word “syntax” implies, this film deals with the way in which images and sounds come together. Its main concern, however, goes deeper, and resides within a more personalized syntax: a process of retaining a narration. Syntax is a small gem, exhibiting … a kind of joyful, competent wit and strength. Haslanger prowls her camera through several rooms in an ordinary middle class house while her voice-over describes what we are about to see or have seen, never what is actually on the screen, wringing the changes of the relationship of the spoken word, image and the printed word. It is a wonderfully self-contained and seductive film. (Jump Cut)

PICTURES ON PINK PAPER
Lis Rhodes, UK, 1982, colour, sound, 35 min
In Pictures on Pink Paper, the voices of three women describe experiences of domestic life, gradually become identifiable as belonging to specific individuals. Different generations are represented in the voices of the three women, and also in the generations of images used. Here, Rhodes engages with the representative quality of the images – throughout the film photocopies and super 8 film are blown up and re-presented. This film seeks to find a female voice, but avoids generalization of a single narrative through the interweaving of these voices. In Pictures on Pink Paper the authoritative voice is slipping between appearing to be one woman’s voice and thoughts, to the experiences of three different women. Minnie, a Cornishwoman, narrates the past, Kate imitates accents and voices, and Lis Rhodes’ voice becomes identifiable as the filmmaker. This film asks how women’s oppression can be articulated without mimicking that very expression and language which produces the unbalance. In spite of being structured around these voices this film denies narrative structure – even time here is broken down. Pictures on Pink Paper highlights the gaps between and explores language as a creator, rather than a symptom, of gender relations. It seeks to ask how a female voice can be found without reducing all female experience to a generalization. As with many of Lis Rhodes’ films, Pictures on Pink Paper looks to the ways in which women are associated with nature. The alignment of women with nature and men with culture is embedded within language: unlike French and Spanish the English language is non-gendered grammatically, yet the female pronoun is regularly used for ‘natural’ objects. Language is powerful: we become inscribed within language, and Lis Rhodes challenges these assumptions by problematising language. (Lisa Le Feuvre, www.luxonline.org)

RAT LIFE AND DIET IN NORTH AMERICA
Joyce Wieland, Canada, 1968, colour, sound, 16 min
Wieland returned to the kitchen table with Rat Life and Diet in North America in 1968, a study of her pet gerbils. She filmed them in extreme close-up among cups and dinner plates, eliminating all sense of spatial depth and place, producing luscious images teeming with texture and colour. More and more, Wieland’s films were distinguished by this sensuality, setting her apart from her male counterparts in the Structuralist movement. Interestingly, Rat Life and Diet in North America contains a narrative thread, transforming the gerbils into political prisoners who escape their American oppressors, played by Wieland’s cats. They make their way to Canada where they set up an organic farm and appear to live happily ever after until an invasion by the United States. Influenced by Vietnam War protests, this political allegory is one of the most hilarious denouncements of American imperialism found in any genre. The film also betrays a basic Canadian fear and coincides with Wieland’s increasingly nationalistic concerns. Discussions of such concerns were commonplace in Canada at the time and Wieland felt drawn in, even from as far away as New York City. Rat Life and Diet in North America marked the beginning of a shift in her career. Moving away from the purely formal, Wieland plunged head-long into the political. As she did, she felt herself both disconnected from and rejected by the very movement that had initially inspired her. (Barbara Goslawski, Take One)

SO IS THIS
Michael Snow, Canada, 1982, silent, colour, 45 min
“With formalist belligerence, So Is This threatens to make its viewers ‘laugh cry and change society,’ even promising to get ‘confessional.’ Although the film does reflect Snow’s personality – his Canadian-ness, preference for humor over irony, obsession with art world chronology (who did what first) – its only confession is the tacit acknowledgement that he’s sensitive to criticism. Snow takes full advantage of his film’s system of discourse to twit restless audiences. A lot of this is pretty funny but So Is This is more than a series of gags. Snow manages to de-familiarize both film and language, creating a kind of moving concrete poetry while throwing a monkey wrench into a theoretical debate (is film a language?) that has been going on sporadically for 60 years. If you let it, Snow’s film stretches your definition of what film is – that’s cinema and So Is This. (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice)

FIRST HYMN TO THE NIGHT – NOVALIS
Stan Brakhage, USA, 1994, colour, silent, 4 min
This is a hand-painted film whose emotionally referential shapes and colors are interwoven with words (in English) form the first Hymn to the Night by the late 18th Century mystic poet Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg, whose pen name was Novalis. The pieces of text which I’ve used are as follows: ‘the universally gladdening light … As inmost soul … it is breathed by stars … by stone … by suckling plant … multiform beast … and by (you). I turn aside to Holy Night … I seek to blend with ashes. Night opens in us … infinite eyes … blessed love. (Stan Brakhage)

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PATTERNS OF SPEECH
Friday 3 June 2005, at 7pm
London Corsica Studios

36 MESOSTICS RE. AND NOT RE. DUCHAMP
John Cage / Soho TV, USA, 1978, videotape, 26 min
“Like acrostics, mesotics are written in the conventional way horizontally, but at the same time they follow a vertical rule, down the middle not down the edge as in an acrostic, a string spells a word or name, not necessarily connected with what is being written, though it may be. This vertical rule is lettristic and in my practice the letters are capitalized. Between two capitals in a perfect or 100% mesostic neither letter may appear in lower case. …. In the writing of the wing words, the horizontal text, the letters of the vertical string help me out of sentimentality. I have something to do, a puzzle to solve. This way of responding makes me feel in this respect one with the Japanese people, who formerly, I once learned, turned their letter writing into the writing of poems. In taking the next step in my work, the exploration of nonintention, I don’t solve the puzzle that the mesostic string presents. Instead I write or find a source text which is then used as an oracle. I ask it what word shall I use for this letter and what one for the next, etc. This frees me from memory, taste, likes, and dislikes. Words come first from here and then from there. The situation is not linear. It is as though I am in a forest hunting for ideas.” (John Cage)

PARIAH
Woody & Steina Vasulka, USA, 1984, videotape, 26 min
In 1983 Tim Thompson was an artist in residence at the Las Lunas correctional facilities, New Mexico, conducting a theatre workshop. While working with the inmates, he became familiar with theirs life stories, their vocabulary and their physical demeanour. This became the source material for a composite character, later portrayed in his one-man theater production Pariah in Santa Fe. This turned out to be his last production and performance. Tim Thompson, one of the most brilliant performers we ever met has turned full time to the digital arts in both moving and still images. The performance was taped in Eve Muir’s studio in Santa Fe in May of 1984, and edited later with the addition of the Rutt/Etra scan-processing effects. The work as a whole is seldom seen, however segments of Pariah have become a part of Steinas MIDI Violin repertoire. (Vasulkas)

THE PRESSURES OF THE TEXT
Peter Rose, USA, 1983, videotape, 17 min
The Pressures of the Text integrates direct address, invented languages, ideographic subtitles, sign language and simultaneous translation to investigate the feel and form of sense, the shifting boundaries between meaning and meaninglessness. A parody of art/critic-speak, educational instruction, gothic narrative, and pornography, it has been performed as a live work at major media centres and new music festivals in the US and Europe. The piece was written, directed and delivered by Peter Rose; co-directed by Jessie Lewis; with sign language and ideographic symbols by Jessie Lewis; and with English simul-translation by Fred Curchack. (Peter Rose)

DIGITAL SPEECH
Peter Rose, USA, 1984, videotape, 13 min
Digital Speech uses a traveller’s anecdote, a perverse variant of a classic Zen parable, as a vehicle for an exploration of language, thought and gesture. The tape plays with the nature of narrative, with ways of telling, performing and illustrating, and uses nonsense language, scat singing and video rescan for comic comment. (Peter Rose)

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VIDEO VISIONS
Saturday 29 October 2005, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

SPECIALIZED TECHNICIANS REQUIRED: BEING LUIS PORCAR
Manuel Saiz, Spain, 2004, video, colour, sound, 2 min
Manuel Saiz has done it! The Famous Hollywood Actor has once again gracefully accepted to be or not to be what he is. Witness the film that inspired the pun in the title of this short video – he is not afraid of a few digs at his person and status. He probably has a small army of agents, managers and assistants around him, to keep all those who are trying to make use of him because of his name at a distance. Perhaps Manuel Saiz was lucky, perhaps he knows the friends of the friends of – perhaps he has been waiting on the doorstep and hanging on the phone for months, driving the whole army crazy. He probably just used a sympathetic argument that struck the right cord: Would the actor who likes role reversals for once lend his charismatic voice to a man who is used to doing precisely that? A man who always obligingly keeps out of sight, but who is, to the Spanish speaking part of the world population, the actor’s mouthpiece, and therefore to a great extent ‘is him’. Being Luis Porcar is part of the series Specialized Technicians Required, and it makes you wonder who actually is the specialized technician in this construction. Is it the main character, the man who does the dubbing, or is it the artist himself, who nowadays has to master so many different skills in order to be able to carry out his profession properly? (Vinken & Van Kampen)

HOW TO FIX THE WORLD
Jacqueline Goss/USA-Uzbekistan 2004, video, colour, sound, 28 min
How To Fix The World is a digitally animated video adapted from Soviet psychologist A.R. Luria’s research in Central Asia in the 1930s. In Luria’s book ‘Cognitive Development: Its Social and Cultural Foundations’, the author presents data collected from three years of interviews with Uzbek and Kyrgyz farmers who lived on or near the Soviet-sponsored collective farms in the 1930s. During this time, the Soviets introduced literacy programs into these primarily Muslim oral-based agricultural communities. Interested in documenting the cognitive changes that people experience when learning to read, Luria also captured the cultural conflict of Soviet Socialism and Islam. In How To Fix The World, the conversations transcribed into Luria’s book are brought to life via simple animation techniques. Max Penson’s photographs of the collective farms serve as the visual model for the animations and they play against a backdrop of landscape images shot in Central Asia in 2004. At once humorous, conflicting and revelatory, these conversations between Luria and his subjects illustrate a particular historical moment when one culture attempted to transform another in the name of education and modernization. The subtleties of this transformation are found in the words exchanged and documented seventy years ago. (Jacqueline Goss)
www.jacquelinegoss.com

WILD BOY
Guy Ben-Ner/Israel-USA 2004, video, colour, sound, 17 min
Wild Boy tells the story of a wild child and his educator, a story of power relations and the fantasy of bringing somebody up after one’s own image. It is the story of every parent-child rearing, but more than that, it is a story of a director and his child-actor, raising the question of what it means to direct a child, to contain a child inside a fixed frame, to command him in and out of the frame (as if it is his private room). On another level, it also raises the possibility of looking at early cinema (the “cinema of attractions” as was coined by Tom Gunning), as a mute wild child that was tamed, eventually, by language (sound, narrative). Wild Boy is based on several case histories, some myths, some educational manuals and refers to a wide range of movies, from old photos left of the vaudeville acts by father and son Buster and Joe Keaton, through Truffaut’s Wild Child to The Kid by Chaplin. (Guy Ben-Ner)

LEGAL ERRORIST
Chris Haring & Mara Mattuschka, Austria, 2005, video, colour, sound, 15 min
A performance of transformation, a transformance, changes its medium and encounters a camera, which plays dance music – under the secret eye of a room that bends and twists along with it. The Legal Errorist – personified by the dancer Stephanie Cumming – is a creature that cannot stop crashing. The sudden overpowering by the ‘error’, the system error, engenders the creature’s obsession. She commences with great relish through a series of transformations; that which hits upon the limits of a simple machine serves as a learning program for the Legal Errorist. Film and performance – parallel projection or articulated interference? Massively, like a mountain, the body of the Errorist falls to the floor and lands with an obstinate sound whose source seems remote from anything human. As though she were her own director, she speaks animatedly with numerous invisible colleagues. She speaks to the microphone, not through it: an eerie animated world of objects, which become fellow creatures when one creature cannot categorise herself precisely. “What?!?” roars the Legal Errorist defiantly – as though to a higher being in the dark and not the diffuse collective of the audience. And she begins to lure the gaze through the catalogue of her body parts. The voyeur’s fatally bundled attention seems inverse to the body set against it, anamorphically distorted by the extremely wide- angled lens. Does this gaze document a foul subjectivity or does this closed world look back as its own lens? The camera is a shrewd ally in the counterattack launched by the body on display. (Katherina Zakravsky)

TUNED
Oliver Pietsch, Germany, 2004, video, colour, sound, 14 min
Portraits of people consuming drugs taken from film history are edited together in rapid succession. All appear radically isolated, their inward-looking eyes looking out from the screen, appearing helpless and disorientated. Their trip alternates between giggling lust and panicked anxiety, turning increasingly into blank horror. The paradox: In these edited sequences, the crazed and overwrought figures once again build a community whose unifying core is the flight from the community and the search for the true self in itself. The film can here be understood as a metonym for western culture. (Ute Vorkoeper)

MOUSE HEAVEN
Kenneth Anger, USA, 2005, video, colour, sound, 10 min
It’s a study of animated toys of a rare nature. These are collectables of early Walt Disney toys. I’ve always loved Mickey Mouse since I was a little boy and I’m outraged about the current Disney company’s attitude to Mickey Mouse. I mean they think they own it, but all the children of the world own Mickey Mouse. And I have devised a way to star Mickey Mouse in a film that the current Disney company can’t legally object to, by filming an antique toy collection of early Disney toys. And it’s just a coincidence all those toys happen to be Mickey Mouse. I’m actually being very respectful of early Mickey Mouse. I hate later Mickey Mouse, because from Fantasia on, the Disney people decided to humanise the mouse, remove his tail – which is a kind of castration – and turn him into a little boy who is a sort of a goody-two-shoes. And he’s no longer the mischievous, sadistic mouse that he was in the beginning. He used to do nasty little tricks like twist the udders of cows and things like that. And that’s the only mouse I’m interested in, this kind of demon ‘fetish’ figure. (Kenneth Anger)

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LITERARY LANDSCAPES
Saturday 29 October 2005, at 4pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

THE GREAT ART OF KNOWING
David Gatten, USA, 2004, 16mm, b/w, silent, 37 min
On either side of a Life find a Library before and an Auction after: consider these figures as the sites for a collection created for the purposes of division and dispersal. The journey this time moves from the first light at dawn to the last rays of a sunset, reflected and refracted. In between find dry Fall turn toward the shadows of Spring and the stillness of death sparked by the singularities of a transcendental field. Find yourself resting uneasily half way up the stairs: Something has left the body, yet the body remains: what has left is on its way Elsewhere but cannot help but look back: this look animates the world and makes possible this Theory of Flight in the form of a bibliography. From Leonardo da Vinci to Jules-Etienne Marey practitioners of a certain mode of transcendental empiricism turned repeatedly to combinations of words and images describing the flight of birds.
In 1726 William Byrd returned to Westover in Virginia and began construction of a garden soon to be called “the finest in the country, filled with the charming colours of the Humming Bird.” In a parallel pursuit, he collected the largest library in the colonies to serve as mirror for his mind and testament to his knowledge. Evelyn Byrd was fond of sketching the birds in the garden. Her interest was more than aesthetic and scientific; she devised a very different use for her father’s vast library. This chapter of my ongoing exploration of the Byrd library finds its name and shape within a single volume from that collection: Athanasius Kircher’s 17th century encyclopaedia, ‘The Great Art of Knowing’. Herein find tangled texts and crossed destinies, filled with figures at once buried deep and tossed high by History, lined with traces of a forbidden romance. Love finds purchase between tightly shelved volumes. In the spaces between the letters. In the lines themselves. An antinomian cinema seems possible. A gentle iconoclasm? The image is always backwards in a mirror. The story unfolds slowly.
Part IV of the Byrd project. (David Gatten)

NAUSEA
Matthew Noel-Tod, UK, 2005, video, colour, sound, 53 min
Existentialism is present in so many developments in 20th Century Art History and Sartre’s debts lie as much with Cezanne and Van Gogh as with Descartes and Heidegger. The whole text of Sartre’s book ‘Nausea’, at a speed of one word per frame, lasts for 53:37 minutes, so I used this duration as a base for editing. The text was then cut up and ordered randomly – missing every other word, backwards, etc, so that what is seen is literally just ‘words’, not Sartre’s words. The text is sometimes slowed down and edited to suggest a narrative, drawing unique relationships between word and image. In 2004, I started using a mobile phone video camera to record daily images. Like early cinematograph-style inventions, this technology’s legacy seems destined be through the very simple recording of people and their backgrounds. I thought it could support an attempt to record footage that was free from mediation, which was instinctive and free from analysis and artifice, and I recorded my life for roughly a year. The variability of the video frame rate and image compression became mostly predictable, but still surprised me with unpredictable rendering of one image or another. The most constant of these artefacts was the camera’s inability to register extreme areas of light, mostly apparent when filming the sun. These areas appeared black. Many things didn’t record ‘well’, such as people and movement. Other things took on a magical, painterly aura when filmed with the phone camera – skies, landscapes, still lifes. The pure colour sections are enlargements of certain clips to the scale of one pixel filling the screen. Other ‘abstract’ images, which appear like camera-less process driven distortion, are in fact the limitation of the camera to record certain images, notably ‘nothing’. Echoing the ideas of phenomenological discovery, reflexive consciousness and modernist redemption through art which inspired this video, the often casual nature of the images in Nausea comes ultimately from an examination of a certain ‘end-point’ in cinema, wherein we only ever imagine and receive mediated images – images of images. Is creative instinct in filmmaking purely an extension of this mediated post-modern situation? A failed romantic, moribund and nostalgic ideal? Or a valid area for self-examination and analysis of aesthetics? (Matthew Noel-Tod)

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RABBIT PIX
Saturday 29 October 2005, at 7pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

“Trust and offerings”

RABBIT PIX
James Herbert, USA-Italy, 2004, 35mm, colour, sound, 75 min

Carter Davis and Maria D’Amato, the couple with French toast, lived in my house. They were lovers. James Taylor, the blond boy lifting stone while in lawn chair (opening), was a painting student of mine. (His parents warned him that I would want to use him in a film … they are artists, former students of mine). Pier Nicola Bruno, the photographer, was in La Presenza (which has never been screened publicly). His girlfriend, at the time we began the film, a Canadian living in Cortona, appears against the tree with a local boy from Cortona, Edouardo Fracasso. The attractive couple seen often, detached and posing, are Alessandro, a former model from Milan home in Cortona, and his then girlfriend Lucia. The juggler is a street performer here. The young boy dropping the glass is an Albanian immigrant we found in a neighbouring town. I have known Coky (P. N. Bruno) for five years and talked him into a film when he saw the interview with me in the Oberhausen Festival catalogue. He has opened up possibilities to use local people … with trust … but I rely on core group of American friends to get the film underway here in Italy. (Language problems etc.)

Carter has appeared in a total of four films and can intuit exactly the right moves on his own, with no direction. I pay the actors, as well as offering room, board, transportation for the Americans. I’m currently working with Maria D’Amato and a Norwegian she met in New York City. Flew him here for the new project. She suggested him and I trust her. He is great. I occasionally will get someone sight unseen but not usually. Most people have exactly the wrong idea of who to select, except kindred spirits Carter and Maria. One time I saw a beautiful German couple visiting Cortona and boldly asked them if I could film them. They were very agreeable. I showed them my book ‘Stills’ to demonstrate some credentials. Once used a kid from a town near Lago di Como and a girl from Florence, a friend of a friend. Good results, as she would not have anything to do with the lower class nude boy. A successful tension. ‘Di Luce in Luce.’ A male renting a room in my house and a female model from the art school. ‘Alcove in the Palazzo Rosso.’ They became lovers.

My partner for seven years appeared in 14 films (two a year). She also helped cast others for her to be with. Once I filmed 10 young friends on a hippie commune outside of Athens, Georgia, for Night Horses. Carter’s best friend, Andy, was flown over here for Speedy Boys. I knew what he looked like as he also lived in my house. Over the years, many people who lived in the house (it averages 13 residents, a southern mansion) have been in various films. Occasionally I use students from the UGA ‘Studies Abroad Program’ – with great care. Scars, girl in Jumbo Aqua, James Taylor in Rabbit Pix. For the females in Speedy Boys I used Carter’s then girlfriend (the only person in clothes, her choice) and two female dancers connected to a local famous modern dance company. I never use theatre or film actors or students of same as their delivery is way too dramatic and over the top for the visual treatment I like. Also I like the flatter delivery non-actors have for my purposes (this is subject to criticism of course).

For a strange selection of models in John Five I used a principle’s lover sight unseen the famous teen gothic novelist, Poppy Z. Brite. She was plump but beautiful and worked well even though out of my canon. I have an elderly couple in Automan. They came with the house in John Five. Willing eccentrics. The lead in Automan was Graham Hacker, who lived in Athens as a town kid. I used him also in Trains with his girlfriend. The white dog was hers.

Automan girl in car was a model in the art school, obtained on the day of shooting as another girl bailed in fear. People are chosen primarily on looks and physical demeanour or affect. The age range is 18 to 26 or so, lean and somewhat free spirited. Usually art kids. It is essential that they not be talking head types disconnected from their bodies. In fact, a definite natural animal grace, a kind or organic movement that is supple and confident. I can tell whether I can use them by how they sit in a chair: brittle or sprawling. I can also usually tell who will trust me and themselves in a vulnerable situation. My new project came up short on one person I riskily thought would be interesting because he was a talking head … but he bailed on hearing the content of the piece.

No directing in the traditional sense. Figures are put into events, or grounds as the painter might say, and only vague notions of content are ever suggested. I would also not direct the placement of a leg, for example, or the explicit gesture of a hand. I just bore the models until they give in to the moment. Or, in contrast, accept the urgency of the one-take sound scene. Scenes in the features are sometimes storyboarded to get people in the right frame of mind. Mostly it’s about getting on my wavelength and rhythm. Carter is amazing at this; that’s why I’ve used him so frequently. Again, most things are one take only – and by financial necessity the 35mm is always one take – without rehearsal because non-actors go too flat if they rehearse.

Only once in Q & A have the subjects of voyeurism or pornography come up, but they come up in interviews frequently. The only time at a screening was for Speedy Boys at Edinburgh. Young-ish guy asks, ‘Is this the first time soft core pornography has been shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival?’ Actually, I told him that down the street they were screening [French female director who specializes in explicit sex scenes] but that I thought pornography could always be differentiated from art because porn was utilitarian and art was useless. I added that I was glad he got hold of the wrong end of a half-truth.

I do use explicitness as another layer or texture because it sits differently in the psychic space and, like violence, gives range to the total orchestration. It also allows for dynamic range in time-based medium. But to me dropping the glass, rubbing the rabbit, hard-on by a tree are all part of the palette and not a reason for the films being. Of course I recognise narrative implications and pushing buttons, but really am most interested in dynamic range tactility, as well as psychically. It’s all well known in long range of the human condition, storytelling, painting. Nobody cares what went on in the Parthenon; we just like the way the building looks.

Nudity is a lifelong fascination but also a voice. I do love the way people change their body language when they are nude: lots of opportunities for interesting motion and twists of limbs etc. that you never witness in the clothed. Then there is the mix of innocence and remotely, (mostly for men I have discovered) threat. Someone drinking a glass of water does it differently nude, believe me. The subtle difference is everything.

In about 50 short films I always shot in 16mm, then re-photographed onto 16mm using primitive hand-operated projectors, one frame at a time in still mode, like slides. Front projection onto a piece of paper 11×14 inches. The features Scars, Speedy Boys and La Presenza were all straight 35mm no re-photography. Jumbo Aqua is the first film to shoot in 16mm and then hand enlarged to 35mm. Rabbit Pix is different still in that all the colour is 16mm hand enlarged to 35mm colour, but the black and white is straight 35mm, no re-photography. Rabbit Pix has about three seconds cannibalised from Jumbo Aqua, not Speedy Boys. That footage is all from another source. But a lot of Rabbit Pix revisits my past work, in attitude, intentionally. I thought of it as an homage to film and grain and analogue before I tried my hand at digital in all its non-plasticity and coldness. That’s what I am currently dealing with in a new piece. So Rabbit Pix may be a kind of ending or coda … but never say die.

(James Herbert, from email discussions with Mark Webber, 2005)

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DESOLATION ROW
Saturday 29 October 2005, at 9pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

FOR THEM ENDING
Jonathan Schwartz, USA, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 3 min
swallowed up in the sky,
the sound sustained by echo, always fading.
the nature of a season,
moving forward with growth or death and growth.
or i was wondering how to make new england fall colours linger so if you couldn’t visit soon
the yellows oranges and reds would still be waiting for you.
(Jonathan Schwarz)

NEPTUNE’S RELEASE: A SHOT IN THE DARK
Joell Hallowell & Jacalyn White, USA, 2004, 16mm, colour, sound, 17 min
In a collage of 16mm found footage and sound, Neptune’s Release: Shot in the Dark is a dialogue between the purveyors of salvation and the seekers, between the past and the present, the hopeful and the hopeless, the humorous and the devastating. In the human search for profound answers to complex questions we are often thrown onto the path of false prophets, indecipherable jargon, bad advice and mixed messages. But as we shoot into the dark, hoping to find a worthy target, we occasionally hit upon accidental wisdom that is surprisingly relevant and life changing. It’s an action-packed film with a star-studded cast. See Janis Joplin tussle with Timothy Leary and Shirley McClaine in a dark alley. “The day it happened was just an ordinary day.” Hear Jack Kornfield perform eye surgery, and watch Zippy the Chimp save the day. Collecting obscure advertisements of the fifties, spiritual audiotapes from the sixties and seventies, obsolete medical films and some of their own editing-bin discards, the filmmakers are a product of this jumble of material. As a consequence they have formed unique connections linking sound and image, dark and light, and the sacred and profane. It’s a 16mm roller coaster ride through time and space – where the end is just the beginning. “You will find the results unusually refreshing.” (Joell Hallowell & Jacalyn White)

L’ECLAT DU MAL
Louise Bourque, Canada, 2005, 35mm, colour, sound, 6 min
We were promised a perfect world growing up. We woke up one day and realized that those vows were little more than wishful thinking. There is a war going on. The memories of our childhood have melted, deteriorated, like the footage of Bourque’s childhood (shot by her father). An oppressively grim vision of innocence lost, of promises unfulfilled. (Ivan Lozano, Cinematexas)

TERRACE 49
Janie Geiser, USA, 2004, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 min
Images of impending disaster – slamming doors, a truck careening down a hill, and a frayed, almost snapping elevator rope – collide with the repeated image of a woman-body, cycling toward ephemerality as the woman disappears into the texture of the film itself. In my recent films, I have been exploring the possibilities found in merging video texture with film, creating a lush, disorienting, ambiguous film space, and an atmosphere of temporal suspension. In Terrace 49, I further break up this space, dividing the film frame into shards, as fractured as memory and as fragile as glass. (Janie Geiser)

TWO MINUTES TO ZERO TRILOGY
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2003-04, 16mm, colour, sound, 33 min
1. Two Days To Zero (2004, 23 min)
2. Two Hours To Zero (2004, 9 min)
3. Two Minutes to Zero (2003, 1 min)
A feature length narrative compressed three different times into three separate films of diminishing duration until the synoptic is synopsized. A crime story told three different ways concerning the events of a two month period leading up to, and immediately following a bank robbery. The imagery has all been appropriated (the fancy, art world sanctioned term for stealing) from four issues of an early 1960s comic book version of the then popular, American TV show ‘77 Sunset Strip’. […] When I first started ‘time travelling’ via collage in my mid-twenties, I naively figured I’d immerse myself, exhaust the impulse by coming to grips with some core revelation about my childhood and get back to describing the present. If someone had told me that more than two decades later I’d still be unpacking that trunk of veils where memory and history intersect and collide, I wouldn’t have believed them (back then I still believed in catharsis). So what exactly has been taking so long? What I underestimated is the degree of difficulty, despite how one pointed my focus has often been, to ‘unpack that trunk’. It’s been a long, slow wind inside, to penetrate collage and experimental film deeply enough to fine tune the empathetic projection required to reach the far shores of memory both lived and imagined. Only now, perhaps aided by the distance of middle age, am I feeling the control and insight to fully engage the found images and sounds that provoked this journey of (re-?) animation in the first place. (Lewis Klahr)

TRILOGY ABOUT CLOUDS
Naoyuki Tsuji, Japan, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 13 min
Three short animation films about clouds. It is based in charcoal drawing. The clouds without fixed forms are the worlds which surround us.
1. Breathing Cloud (Eros) (3 min)
People’s bodies and souls transform into a large cloud and are mixed with erotic shapes.
2. Looking at a Cloud (Memory of Childhood) (5 min)
Something happens at the junior high school. When a boy starts to draw a cloud,
the drawing begins to move and eat the students …
3. From the Cloud (Fantasy) (4 min)
A funny little story about people living on the soft cloud. A look at their daily life.
In the morning, they hear the bell and begin to come down from the sky.
(Naoyuki Tsjuji)

NOSTALGIA (APRIL 2001 TO PRESENT)
Christina Battle, Canada, 2005, 16mm, b/w, sound, 4 min
“The picture of the world that’s presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality.”
(Noam Chomsky)
www.cbattle.com

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FILMS BY VLADIMIR TYULKIN
Sunday 30 October 2005, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

ABOUT LOVE
Vladimir Tyulkin, Kazakhstan, 2005, video, colour, sound, 28 min
A portrait of Nina Perebeyeva, who for 30 years has dedicated her life to abandoned and infirm dogs, turning her home into Kazakhstan’s first and only animal shelter. Dogs are everywhere – constantly barking and bickering – and the house is one big litter tray, but there is such compassion in the chaos. Perebeyeva graduated from the conservatoire, but her piano has long been abandoned. She now sings in the church choir and is almost saintly in her devotion to the animals, taking care of between 50 to 120 dogs on a small salary of 40 dollars. This tender film culminates in the absolute wonder of its life-affirming ending, in which she receives an unexpected gift from the film crew. (Mark Webber)

LORD OF THE FLIES
Vladimir Tyulkin, Kazakhstan, 1990, 35mm, colour, sound, 45 min
Vladimir Tyulkin’s 42-minute epic documentary Lord of the Flies introduced Kirill Ignatjewich Spack, a wild-haired post-Soviet farm hermit who’d developed a complete self-sustaining animal ecosystem involving the farming of flies to produce maggot-feed for his animals, who one by one became the meat traps to lure in the flies. A Russian tyrant in miniature – the Stalin of his bestial gulag – he talked Tyulkin calmly through his mad methods and morals, and commended his system to Mikhail Gorbachev for national rollout. This animal kingdom seemed to have regressed to the Hobbesian idea of the state of nature: nasty, brutish and short. (Nick Bradshaw)

Lord of the Flies belongs to the literary tradition of Jules Vernes’ tale ‘Two Years Holidays’, in which he describes schoolboys who bring into being a rationality-based, ideal world after being stranded from a shipwreck. William Golding’s story, ‘Lord of the Flies’ from 1954 takes up the motif of the stranded children, but sketches far more realistically, the development of despotism in miniature format. The figure of the fly killer in Tyulkin’s film possesses many aspects: as the post-communist version of the hippie dropout, he symbolises the improvised gardening at a datscha, a way in which many Soviet citizens ensured their survival after perestroika at a primitive level. He sways back and forth between the caricature of new entrepreneurship – after all, he has managed to construct an own economic circulation on his land – and the incarnation of the last Stalinists, who are still obsessed with ridding the world of their enemies. Flies have, furthermore, a long tradition in Soviet iconography: their larvae in canteen meat are the trigger of the revolution in Battleship Potemkin, symbolic of the rotten system of the Czar, a metaphor for the later, no less degenerated Soviet system, described in the works of Ilya Kabakov. At the same time flies have always been seen as a worthless life form because of the sheer masses in which they appear and because of their short lifespan, which refers to the Gulag in its purposeful annihilation, but also refers to their ideal disposition as material for scientific experiments, just as the Soviet person in the socialist experiment. The film achieves a particular topicality not only due to the war in Chechnya with its undisguised purge terminology, but also of genetic technology, which began with flies and is now being advanced to human beings. (Craig Venter is, since his decoding of the Drosophila Genome also termed “the Lord of the Flies”.) And, it is actually so, that the notion of the New Human Being is enjoying its resurrection through genetic technology. (Marcel Schwierin)

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LET ME COUNT THE WAYS: MINUS 10, 9, 8, 7
Leslie Thornton, USA, 2004, video, b/w, sound, 20 min
Let Me Count the Ways is an ongoing serial about violent terror and its aftermath. In episodes Minus 10, 9, 8, and 7, personal reminiscence is mixed with archival and new footage in an exploration of the interior of fear. From footage of the artist’s father on the way to Hiroshima, through reference to 9/11, the phenomenology of horror and the echo of its rupture are presented with an intensity which moves the viewer from history to the present and beyond. (Leslie Thornton)

STATIONARY MUSIC
Jayne Parker, UK, 2005, video, b/w, sound, 15 min
Stationary Music takes its name from the first movement of Stefan Wolpe’s ‘Sonata 1’ composed in 1925. The sonata is introduced and performed by his daughter, pianist Katharina Wolpe. Stationary Music: music that doesn’t develop/music that stands still.
(Jayne Parker)

after the fire what Shall we do?
“firsT
onE step;
aFter
thAt,
aNother.”

                                                                                   We’re
alOne
the music is difficuLt
to Play.
wE must work at it.

In Memoriam S. W., acrostic by John Cage

THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU
Abigail Child, USA, 2004, video, b/w, sound, 16 min
Music by John Zorn, arranged and played by Sylvie Courvoisier and Mark Feldman. The Future is Behind You creates a fictional story composed from an anonymous family archive from 1930s Europe, reconstructed to emphasize gender acculturation in two sisters who play, race, fight, kiss and grow up together under a shadow of oncoming history. I am looking, as always in found material, for the story below the story. Here there are at least three levels: 1) the home movie in which a family from 1930s Germany near the Swiss border poses for the camera, preternaturally happy. Unusually, the mother is main cinematographer; 2) the historical moment which remains as text trace, undermining the image and serving as covert motive for the action; 3) the development of gender identities – the innocent freedom of the elder transformed into socially bruised ‘bride’, the irrepressibility of the younger moving from tomboy to awkward, diffident adult. At once biography and fiction, history and psychology, The Future is Behind You excavates gestures to explore the speculative seduction of narrative; it seeks a bridge between private and public histories. (Abigail Child)
www.abigailchild.com

ENERGY COUNTRY
Deborah Stratman, USA, 2003, video, colour, sound, 15 min
The frenzied detritus of trading floors, smart weaponry and the religious right are woven through the petrochemical landscapes of Southeast Texas. This short video harangue questions land use policy as it serves the oil industry, patriotism as it absolves foreign aggression, and fundamentalism as it calcifies thinking. (Deborah Stratman)
www.pythagorasfilm.com

CAPITULATION PROJECT
Frédéric Moser & Philippe Schwinger, Germany-Switzerland, 2003, video, b/w, sound, 21 min
The New York-based Performance Group staged their piece ‘Commune’ for the first time in February 1971. The play included a short scene referring to the My Lai massacre. If members of the audience refused to participate actively in what was happening on stage during this scene, the actors interrupted their performance – sometimes for as long as three hours, depending on the audience’s reaction. The group experimented with several variations of the scene. Starting with photographs of the performance and the notes of Richard Schechner, the theorist of environmental theatre, we came up with a new version of the My Lai sequence. We worked with the statements of soldiers involved in the massacre, criminal investigation reports, and contemporary articles in the press. In the process, we developed a scenario that enabled us to translate the historical documents into a form suitable for the stage. We aimed at representing an event of war without using any of the film industry’s spectacular devices. What means do we have, as individual citizens, to come to terms with an act of terror? We followed the trail of the Performance Group. Their attempt to create a platform for self-criticism within the context of a theatre performance motivated our dramatic intentions. For this we reconstructed the stage set of ‘Commune’: a wave, evoking a landscape and also functioning as an agora, and scaffolding around the stage with seating for the audience. In 1971 the performers were inspired by rituals: they danced and they sang. We did not attempt to re-create this authenticity in our production. Although we do evoke the symbolic level of their representation, we chose to develop our play with the actors on two different levels. Each of the performers takes on a function, for example, as a reporter, but they can also intervene at any time in their own name. Thus, there is a constant back and forth between the actors and the characters they are representing. This method of dramatic framing enabled us to establish an analogy with film. There is no live performance in Capitulation Project. The scene was filmed in about 30 sequences during two night shoots, with extras as a ‘fake’ audience. The distance from the performance that is created through the process of filming is comparable to our detachment from current political events. We intentionally moved back a few steps in time. We evoked the massacre by means of a contemporaneous artistic form in order to demonstrate that the grasp of an event of war is coupled with its transmission. (Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger)

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THE HEART OF THE MATTER
Sunday 30 October 2005, at 9pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

THE SPACE BETWEEN
Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, UK, 2005, 16mm, colour, silent, 12 min
The Space Between tackles the context of the recycled image. Exploring the space between frames and within frames, conventional photographic representation gradually metamorphoses into abstract patterns of pulsing coloured light. What begins as an image of looking at (and through) a high-rise building offers viewers an opportunity to experience shifting relationships between perception and cognition, from realism to painterly abstraction. (Karen Mirza & Brad Butler)
www.mirza-butler.net

INSTRUCTIONS FOR A LIGHT AND SOUND MACHINE
Peter Tscherkassky, Austria, 2005, 35mm, b/w, sound, 17 min
The hero of Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine is easy to identify. Walking down the street unknowingly, he suddenly realizes that he is not only subject to the gruesome moods of several spectators but also at the mercy of the filmmaker. He defends himself heroically, but is condemned to the gallows, where he dies a filmic death through a tearing of the film itself. Our hero then descends into Hades, the realm of shadows. Here, in the underground of cinematography, he encounters innumerable printing instructions, the means whereby the existence of every filmic image is made possible. In other words, our hero encounters the conditions of his own possibility, the conditions of his very existence as a filmic shadow. Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine is an attempt to transform a Roman Western into a Greek tragedy. (Peter Tscherkassky)
www.tscherkassky.at

CHASMIC DANCE
Daïchi Saïto, Canada 2004, 16mm, b/w, silent, 6 min
A visual metaphor for the creative process as a sustained state of flux, whereby the deconstruction and reconfiguration of source material manifest themselves as a series of rapid abstract movements. Alluding to the cosmic dance of Shiva, the film is an expression of primal rhythmic energy, moving dialectically but without sublimation. Regeneration ignites destruction, and transformation invites mutation, through clashes of opposing modes such as video/film, surface/depth, and light/darkness. The original materials used in the film were images of the human body shot on 16mm film; they were modified through accidental processes in video transfer, and the resulting images were re-filmed back on 16mm, passing through multiple stages of printing on a modified Steenbeck. The film was hand-processed, optically printed and contact printed by the filmmaker. (Daichi Saito)

BLUE POLE(S)
Fred Worden, USA, 2005, video, colour, sound, 20 min
For 25 years I’ve been interested in an optical/perceptual cinema. A cinema where the eye is called out from its routine and autonomic operations and is challenged to make sense of stimuli coming not from the natural world out in front of the eyes, but rather from a source behind the eyes, the conscious mind. A kind of feedback loop in which the conscious mind employs the seductive powers of cinema to seed the perceptual mind with curiosity and imagination, qualities not native to perception. Blue Pole(s) tries hard to up the ante on the notion that film is a visual rather than literary art and that seeing as a perceptual process precedes and models thought. Music by Tom Hamilton. (Fred Worden)

YOU DON’T BRING ME FLOWERS
Michael Robinson, USA, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 8 min
Viewed at its seams, a collection of National Geographic landscapes from the 1960s and 1970s conjure an extinct American romanticism currently peddled to propagate entitlement and bigoted individualism from sea to shining sea; the slideshow deforms into a bright white distress signal. (Michael Robinson)
www.poisonberries.net

FUGUE
Trish van Huesen, USA, 2004, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min
This film, as with all of my work, is an exploration of change. It was a difficult film for me to make. I was living in the United States, and all of the horror, fear and nationalistic fanaticism after September 11th began to permeate my consciousness. The heroine of the film, as she began her descent, started to look as much like the image of a country as the image of a human being. During the editing process, as America dropped bombs on Iraq, I could not seem to get her out of “hell”, and then suddenly, just as a thunder storm strikes and then passes, the darkness broke and she ascended again. It was the collaboration with my partner in sound, Eyvind Kang, and his co-creators, which actually broke the darkness and facilitated her ascension. We were all affected by what was happening in America, but I was creating from the darkness, and they were more able to create from the light. Eyvind’s choice of ‘Emblem 50’ of Michael Maier’s fugal works, as a starting point for the soundtrack, woke me up to the reality out of which I had been creating. The result is a black and white film which examines Darkness as the partner of Light. (Trish Van Huesen)

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