SWINGEING LONDON: THE SIXTIES UNDERGROUND
A Touring Programme from Filmhuis Den Haag

TOWERS OPEN FIRE
Antony Balch & William Burroughs, UK, 1963, 16mm, b/w, sound, 16 min
The remarkable Towers Open Fire was conceived by filmmaker and exploitation film distributor Antony Balch and “Naked Lunch” author William Burroughs, and features appearances by their associates Ian Sommerville, Brion Gysin and Alexander Trocchi. Envisioned as a cinematic realisation of Burroughs’ key themes, such as the breakdown in control, the film contains rapid editing, flicker, strobing and extreme jump cuts that interrupt the narrative flow. A brief passage of hand painted colour was applied to each print (during Mikey Portman’s dance sequence), and the film includes footage of the prototype Dreamachine, designed by Gysin to stimulate the brain’s alpha waves and aid hallucination. The British Censor requested removal of some offensive language from the soundtrack but passed (or failed to notice) the shots of Balch masturbating, and of Burroughs shooting up.

“Society crumbles as the Stock Exchange crashes, members of the Board are raygun-zapped in their own boardroom, and a commando in the orgasm attack leaps through a window and decimates a family photo collection …” (Tony Rayns, Cinema Rising, 1972)

LOVE LOVE LOVE
Michael Nyman, UK, 1967, 16mm, b/w, sound, 5 min
Hyde Park, 16th July 1967: Thousands attended the Legalise Pot Rally, a love-in to demonstrate the need for a relaxation of England’s strict drug laws. Love Love Love, made by composer Michael Nyman, is a pixillated record of the event with an obligatory Beatles soundtrack. The film features poet Allen Ginsberg, playwright Heathcoate Williams and artist David Medalla (leader of performance group The Exploding Galaxy). The peaceful protest was organised by SOMA (Society of Mental Awareness), who, one week later, placed a full page notice to argue their case in the Times newspaper. The advertisement was paid for by Paul McCartney and signed by 65 luminaries from both the underground and the establishment. Widely assumed to be timed in protest against the recent conviction of Jagger and Richards, the advert was more directly prompted by the swingeing sentence passed on John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, who received nine months in prison for possession of a small quantity of pot.

POEM FOR HOPPY
Boyle Family, UK, 1967, 16mm, colour, sound, 4 min (shown on video)
An improvised performance, by Soft Machine and the Sensual Laboratory, in protest against John Hopkins’ conviction for marijuana possession.

“Mark Boyle and Joan Hills lived in and around Ladbroke Grove in the middle 1960s, organising events and making sculptures that attempted to present reality as it is. The events included various projection pieces presenting physical and chemical change: boiling water, burning slides and bodily fluids that led to them being asked by Hoppy to do a presentation at the first night of the UFO club, where their liquid light of exploding colours became the main visual accompaniment to the bands that performed there. Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Jimi Hendrix, the underground scene and psychedelic lightshows exploded out of UFO, across London and around the world.” (Portobello Film Festival)

VIDEOSPACE REEL
John Hopkins / TVX, UK, 1970, 16mm, colour, sound, 15 min (shown on video)
This recently rediscovered reel of early video image processing by John Hopkins and the TVX collective begins with a music “visualisation” made for the BBC to accompany the track “Scotland” by Area Code 615. The remaining footage is an excerpt from the Videospace happening which took place inside a BBC TV studio: an un-broadcast optical dub session which incorporated music, tape, film and feedback loops, lightshows, dancing, inflatables and live video mixing.

NAISSANT
Stephen Dwoskin, UK, 1964-67, 16mm, b/w, sound, 14 min
Dwoskin’s early films were heavily influenced by Warhol, in both the visual content and extended duration. They typically consisted of long takes from a fixed or hand-held camera, with an attractive young woman as the only protagonist. Composer Gavin Bryars provided the soundtrack to Naissant and several others.

“Objective location: a bed; subjective location: in thoughts. Being with thoughts and the child to be born. Camera from three sides of the bed with three lenses working from bed level and standing level. Filmed in New York in 1964, completed in London 1967. Naissant presents being alone with one’s thoughts. Time and her inner thoughts are found out only by spending time with her in the film.” (Stephen Dwoskin)

TALK MR BARD
John Latham, UK, 1968, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min
Talk Mr Bard consists of the crude and rapid animation of a seemingly endless succession of coloured paper discs. The homemade soundtrack is a chaotic college of radio fragments and interference. A tutor at Saint Martins School of Art, Latham organised the protest Still and Chew in August 1966, for which he invited friends to chew pages from Clement Greenberg’s book “Art and Culture”, which had been borrowed from the college library. The soggy paper was spat out and fermented in a mixture of sulphuric acid, sodium bicarbonate and yeast. When he eventually received an overdue notice from the library months later, Latham encased the remaining liquid in a glass teardrop, which he labelled “Essence of Greenberg” and returned. He lost his job, but had the last laugh some years later by selling the residue of the event to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

SOUL IN A WHITE ROOM
Simon Hartog, UK, 1968, 16mm, colour, sound, 3 min
LFMC founder member Simon Hartog was one of the most politically aware filmmakers of the period. This early short film is an amusing piece of social commentary on mixed race relationships, which were hardly commonplace in the UK at that time, and has a soundtrack by The Troggs. The male character played by Omar Dop-Blondin, a Sengelese student fresh from the Paris 68 protests, and an associate of the London Black Panthers.

REIGN OF THE VAMPIRE
Malcolm Le Grice, UK, 1970, 16mm, b/w, sound, 15 min
Le Grice’s work developed through direct processing, printing and projection, gaining an understanding of the material and exploring duration while touching on aspects of spectacle and narrative, and using early computer imagery. Reign of the Vampire addresses contemporary paranoia about the military-industrial complex, the Vietnam War, and the suspected influence of American government’s intelligence agency in countercultural activities. It was the last of a group of works shown together under the collective title “How to Screw the CIA, or How to Screw the CIA ?”

“This film could be considered as a synthesis of the series. It is formally based on the permutative loop structure, superimposing a series of three pairs of image loops of different lengths with each other. The images include elements from all the previous parts of the series. The film sequences that make up the loops are chosen for their combination of semantic relationships, and abstract factors of movement. The soundtrack is constructed for the film, but independently, and has a similar loop structure.” (Malcolm Le Grice)

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SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT: EXPANDED CINEMA
Wednesday 23 May 2007, at 7PM
Wrexham Arts Centre

EXPANDED CINEMA at the LONDON FILM-MAKERS’ CO-OPERATIVE

Expanded Cinema is a term used to describe works that do not confirm to the traditional single-screen cinema format. It could mean having two (or more) images side-by-side on the screen, films that incorporate live performances or are projected in an unorthodox manner without a screen. Even light pieces that do not use any film at all. Some work demands that the filmmaker interact with the projected image, or be behind the projectors to alter their configuration throughout the screening.

The London Film-Makers’ Co-operative was an artist-led organisation formed in 1966, and uniquely incorporated a distribution office, workshop laboratory and screening room. Expanded Cinema continued the analytical exploration of the material that was conducted by filmmakers in the workshop, and emphasised the transient nature of the medium.

The Co-op’s cinema space was a flat, open room with no fixed seating. Filmmakers were free to experiment with projectors, demonstrating that the moment of exhibition can be as much a part of the work as the original concept, filming, editing and processing. The technology that puts the illusion of movement onscreen was no longer hidden away in a projection booth behind the audience, but placed amongst them.

In questioning the role of the spectator, Expanded Cinema challenged the conventions of the cinema event and introduced elements of chance and improvisation. Sometimes, what happened across the room was more important than what was up on the screen. With such work no two projections were ever the same: each screening was a unique, social, collective experience for the assembled audience.

This drive beyond the screen and theatre inevitably took the work into galleries, but only as a practical measure since open spaces and white walls were ideal for unconventional projection. The filmmakers made no attempts to commodify their work by producing editions, for many it was against their socialist principles. Though Expanded Cinema anticipated many recent trends in gallery-based moving image works and installations, there was little acceptance from the art world in the early years, or acknowledgement of this groundbreaking work today.

Mark Webber

CASTLE TWO
Malcolm Le Grice, 1968, b/w, sound, 32 min (2 screens)
“This film continues the theme of the military/industrial complex and its psychological impact upon the individual that I began with Castle One. Like Castle One, much use is made of newsreel montage, although with entirely different material. The film is more evidently thematic, but still relies on formal devices – building up to a fast barrage of images (the two screens further split – to give 4 separate images at once for one sequence). The images repeat themselves in different sequential relationships and certain key images emerge both in the soundtrack and the visual. The alienation of the viewer’s involvement does not occur as often in this film as in Castle One, but the concern with the viewer’s experience of his present location still determines the structure of certain passages in the film.” —Malcolm Le Grice, London Film-Makers’ Co-operative catalogue, 1968

“Le Grice’s work induces the observer to participate by making him reflect critically not only on the formal properties of film but also on the complex ways in which he perceives that film within the limitations of the environment of its projection and the limitations created by his own past experience. A useful formulation of how this sort of feedback occurs is contained in the notion of ‘perceptual thresholds’. Briefly, a perceptual threshold is demarcation point between what is consciously and what is pre-consciously perceived. The threshold at which one is able to become conscious of external stimuli is a variable that depends on the speed with which the information is being projected, the emotional charge it contains and the general context within which that information is presented. This explains Le Grice’s continuing use of devices such as subliminal flicker and the looped repetition of sequences in a staggered series of changing relationships.” —John Du Cane, Time Out, 1977

PLAY
Sally Potter, 1971, b/w & colour, silent, 7 min (2 screens)
“In Play, Potter filmed six children – actually, three pairs of twins – as they play on a sidewalk, using two cameras mounted so that they recorded two contiguous spaces of the sidewalk. When Play is screened, two projectors present the two images side by side, recreating the original sidewalk space, but, of course, with the interruption of the right frame line of the left image and the left frame line of the right image – that is, so that the sidewalk space is divided into two filmic spaces. The cinematic division of the original space is emphasized by the fact that the left image was filmed in color, the right image in black and white. Indeed, the division is so obvious that when the children suddenly move from one space to the other, ‘through’ the frame lines, their originally continuous movement is transformed into cinematic magic.” —Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 3, 1998)

“To be frank, I always felt like a loner, an outsider. I never felt part of a community of filmmakers. I was often the only female, or one of few, which didn’t help. I didn’t have a buddy thing going, which most of the men did. They also had rather different concerns, more hard-edged structural concerns … I was probably more eclectic in my taste than many of the English structural filmmakers, who took an absolute prescriptive position on film. Most of them had gone to Oxford or Cambridge or some other university and were terribly theoretical. I left school at fifteen. I was more the hand-on artist and less the academic. The overriding memory of those early years is of making things on the kitchen table by myself…” —Sally Potter interviewed by Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 3, 1998

DIAGONAL
William Raban, 1973, colour, sound, 6 min (3 screens)
“Diagonal is a film for three projectors, though the diagonally arranged projector beams need not be contained within a single flat screen area. This film works well in a conventional film theatre when the top left screen spills over the ceiling and the bottom right projects down over the audience. It is the same image on all three projectors, a double-exposed flickering rectangle of the projector gate sliding diagonally into and out of frame. Focus is on the projector shutter, hence the flicker. This film is ‘about’ the projector gate, the plane where the film frame is caught by the projected light beam.” —William Raban, Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film catalogue, 1977

“The first great excitement is finding the idea, making its acquaintance, and courting it through the elaborate ritual of film production. The second excitement is the moment of projection when the film becomes real and can be shared with the audience. The former enjoyment is unique and privileged; the second is not, and so long as the film exists, it is infinitely repeatable.” —William Raban, Arts Council Film-Makers on Tour catalogue, 1980

HAND GRENADE
Gill Eatherley, 1971, colour, sound, 8 min (3 screens)
“Although the word ‘expanded’ cinema has also been used for the open/gallery size/multi screen presentation of film, this ‘expansion’ (could still but) has not yet proved satisfactory – for my own work anyway. Whether you are dealing with a single postcard size screen or six ten-foot screens, the problems are basically the same – to try to establish a more positively dialectical relationship with the audience. I am concerned (like many others) with this balance between the audience and the film – and the noetic problems involved.” —Gill Eatherley, 2nd International Avant-Garde Film Festival programme notes, 1973

“Malcolm Le Grice helped me with Hand Grenade. First of all I did these stills, the chairs traced with light. And then I wanted it to all move, to be in motion, so we started to use 16mm. We shot only a hundred feet on black and white. It took ages, actually, because it’s frame by frame. We shot it in pitch dark, and then we took it to the Co-op and spent ages printing it all out on the printer there. This is how I first got involved with the Co-op.” —Gill Eatherley, interview with Mark Webber, 2001

LIGHT MUSIC
Lis Rhodes, 1975-77, b/w, sound, 20 min (2 screens)
“Lis Rhodes has conducted a thorough investigation into the relationship between the shapes and rhythms of lines and their tonality when printed as sound. Her work Light Music is in a series of ‘moveable sections’. The film does not have a rigid pattern of sequences, and the final length is variable, within one-hour duration. The imagery is restricted to lines of horizontal bars across the screen: there is variety in the spacing (frequency), their thickness (amplitude), and their colour and density (tone). One section was filmed from a video monitor that produced line patterns on the screen that varied according to sound signals generated by an oscillator; so initially it is the sound which produces the image. Taking this filmed material to the printing stage, the same lines that produced the picture are printed onto the optical soundtrack edge of the film: the picture thus produces the sound. Other material was shot from a rostrum camera filming black and white grids, and here again at the printing stage, the picture is printed onto the film soundtrack. Sometimes the picture ‘zooms’ in on the grid, so that you actually ‘hear’ the zoom, or more precisely, you hear an aural equivalent to the screen image. This equivalence cannot be perfect, because the soundtrack reproduces the frame lines that you don’t see, and the film passes at even speed over the projector sound scanner, but intermittently through the picture gate. Lis Rhodes avoids rigid scoring procedures for scripting her films. This work may be experienced (and was perhaps conceived) as having a musical form, but the process of composition depends on various chance operations, and upon the intervention of the filmmaker upon the film and film machinery. This is consistent with the presentation where the film does not crystallize into one finished form. This is a strong work, possessing infinite variety within a tightly controlled framework.” —William Raban, Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film catalogue, 1977

“The film is not complete as a totality; it could well be different and still achieve its purpose of exploring the possibilities of optical sound. It is as much about sound as it is about image; their relationship is necessarily dependent as the optical sound track ‘makes’ the music. It is the machinery itself which imposes this relationship. The image throughout is composed of straight lines. It need not have been.” —Lis Rhodes, A Perspective on English Avant-Garde Film catalogue, 1978

LINE DESCRIBING A CONE
Anthony McCall, 1973, b/w, silent, 30 min (1 screen, smoke)
“Once I started really working with film and feeling I was making films, making works of media, it seemed to me a completely natural thing to come back and back and back, to come more away from a pro-filmic event and into the process of filmmaking itself. And at the time it all boiled down to some very simple questions. In my case, and perhaps in others, the question being something like “What would a film be if it was only a film?” Carolee Schneemann and I sailed on the SS Canberra from Southampton to New York in January 1973, and when we embarked, all I had was that question. When I disembarked I already had the plan for Line Describing a Cone fully-fledged in my notebook. You could say it was a mid-Atlantic film! It’s been the story of my life ever since, of course, where I’m located, where my interests are, that business of “Am I English or am I American?” So that was when I conceived Line Describing a Cone and then I made it in the months that followed.” —Anthony McCall, interview with Mark Webber, 2001

“One important strategy of expanded cinema radically alters the spatial discreteness of the audience vis-à-vis the screen and the projector by manipulating the projection facilities in a manner which elevates their role to that of the performance itself, subordinating or eliminating the role of the artist as performer. The films of Anthony McCall are the best illustration of this tendency. In Line Describing a Cone, the conventional primacy of the screen is completely abandoned in favour of the primacy of the projection event. According to McCall, a screen is not even mandatory: The audience is expected to move up and down, in and out of the beam – this film cannot be fully experienced by a stationary spectator. This means that the film demands a multi-perspectival viewing situation, as opposed to the single-image/single-perspective format of conventional films or the multi-image/single-perspective format of much expanded cinema. The shift of image as a function of shift of perspective is the operative principle of the film. External content is eliminated, and the entire film consists of the controlled line of light emanating from the projector; the act of appreciating the film – i.e., ‘the process of its realisation’ – is the content.” —Deke Dusinberre, “On Expanding Cinema”, Studio International, November/December 1975

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ALDO TAMBELLINI: ELECTROMEDIA & THE BLACK FILM SERIES
Saturday 26 May 2007, at 3pm
Leeds Opera North Linacre Studio

A true intermedia activist, Aldo Tambellini was a key figure of the Lower East Side arts scene, working in sculpture, painting, poetry, film, video and theatre. Believing it was “no longer sufficient for the creative individual to remain in isolation,” he co-founded the alternative arts community Group Center in 1960. After publishing counterculture newsletters and making early happenings to protest against the art establishment (such as presenting The Golden Screw Award to the Museum of Modern Art), Tambellini embraced new technology as a tool to explore the “psychological re-orientation of man in the space age.”

His first ‘electromedia event’ BLACK (1965) fused painting, music, poetry and dance with projected ‘lumigrams’ (hand-painted glass slides) in an immersive environment. The idea of ‘black’ as a spatial and psychological concept dominated Tambellini’s work for many years. “Black to me is like a beginning … Black is within totality, the oneness of all. Black is the expansion of consciousness in all directions.”

The Black Film Series, a sequence of seven films made between 1965-69, is a primitive, sensory exploration of the medium, which ranges from total abstraction to the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the Vietnam War, and black teenagers in Coney Island. Before picking up a camera, Tambellini physically worked on the film strip, treating the emulsion with chemicals, paint, ink and stencils, slicing and scraping the celluloid, and dynamically intercutting material from industrial films, newsreels and broadcast television. Abrasive, provocative and turbulent, the series is a rapid-fire response to the beginning of the information age and a world in flux.

In 1966, Tambellini purchased the first Sony video recorder and made an experimental tape by shining a light directly into the camera lens, burning out the photoconductive vidicon tube. This monochrome tape was broadcast by ABC Television in 1967. Black Video Two – spontaneously improvised from test signals whilst the first tape was being duplicated – was later colourized using the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer at WNET (1973) to create 6673.

One of the first artists to explore television as a means of personal expression, Tambellini collaborated with Otto Piene on Black Gate Cologne, an hour-long multi-media happening broadcast by WDR in January 1969, and contributed to The Medium is the Medium at WGBH Boston, alongside Nam June Paik and Allan Kaprow (also 1969). That same year, under commission from the Howard Wise Gallery, Tambellini worked with Bell Laboratories engineers to create Black Spiral, a manipulated television set, for the groundbreaking exhibition “TV as a Creative Medium”.

During his tenure at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s and 1980s, Tambellini established Communicationsphere, connecting artists with technicians and engineers to “dissolve the boundaries between media, the arts and life.” Most recently he has returned to writing and performing poetry, and made the award-winning digital video poem Listen (2005) in collaboration with Anthony Tenczar.

Reaching beyond its application as an aesthetic tool, Tambellini has consistently used media as a means of social and political communication, often working in collaboration with others to investigate the creative potential of electronics and technology.

BLACK FILM SERIES
“Tambellini is one of the pioneers of lntermedia. His Black series in film and intermedia is obsessed with Black. His Black is like a ‘blind spot’ – a phantasy with the speed of nightmare. Hypnotic effect of organic microscopic forms. From darkness of the daemon to brightness to sperm to womb to friction contraction expansion. It is a trip for blind America.” Takahiko Iimura, Eiga Hyoron (Japanese Film Review)

BLACK IS
Aldo Tambellini, 1965, 16mm, b/w, sound, 4 min
seed black
seed black
sperm black
sperm black
a film made entirely without the use of the camera
(Aldo Tambellini)

BLACK TRIP #1
Aldo Tambellini, 1965, 16mm, b/w, sound, 5 min
Black Trip #1 is pure abstraction after the manner of a Jackson Pollock. Through the uses of kinescope, video, multimedia, and direct painting on film, an impression is gained of the frantic action of protoplasm under a microscope where an imaginative viewer may see the genesis of it all. (Grove Press Film Catalog)

BLACK TRIP #2
Aldo Tambellini, 1967, 16mm, b/w, sound, 3 min
“An internal probing of the violence and mystery of the American psyche seen through the eye of a black man and the Russian revolution.” (Aldo Tambellini)

BLACKOUT
Aldo Tambellini, 1965, 16mm, b/w, sound, 9 min
This film, like an action painting by Franz Kline, is a rising crescendo of abstract images. Rapid cuts of white forms on a black background supplemented by an equally abstract soundtrack give the impression of a bombardment in celestial space or on a battlefield where cannons fire on an unseen enemy into the night. (Grove Press Film Catalog)

BLACK PLUS X
Aldo Tambellini, 1966, 16mm, b/w, sound, 9 min
Tambellini here focuses on contemporary life in a black community. The extra, the “X” of Black Plus X, is a filmic device by which a black person is instantaneously turned white by the mere projection of the negative image. The time is summer, and the place is an oceanside amusement park where black children are playing in the surf and enjoying the rides, quite oblivious to Tambellini’s tongue?in?cheek “solution” to the race problem. (Grove Press Film Catalog)

BLACK TV
Aldo Tambellini, 1968, 16mm, b/w, sound, 10 min
The film is an artist’s sensory perception of the violence of the world we live in, projected through a television tube. Tambellini presents it subliminally in rapid?fire abstractions in which such horrors as Robert Kennedy’s assassination, murder, infanticide, prize fights, police brutality at Chicago, and the war in Vietnam are out?of?focus impressions of faces and events.” (Grove Press Film Catalog)

ABC-TV INTERVIEW
Aldo Tambellini, 1967, video, b/w, sound, 3 min
This interview with Aldo Tambellini was shot on 21st December 1967, at the Black Gate Theatre, for an ABC Television series on the New York Lower East Side Arts Scene. It includes an excerpt from Black Video One, his first experimental videotape, which had been made the previous year by shining a light directly into the camera lens, burning out the photoconductive vidicon tube.

BLACK (EXCERPT FROM THE MEDIUM IS THE MEDIUM)
Aldo Tambellini, 1969, video, b/w, sound, c.6 min
“In 1969 [Tambellini] was one of six artists participating in the PBL programme “The Medium Is the Medium” at WGBH-TV in Boston. The videotape produced for the project, called Black, involved one thousand slides, seven 16mm film projections, thirty black children, and three live TV cameras that taped the interplay of sound and image. The black-and-white tape is extremely dense in kinetic and synaesthetic information, assaulting the senses in a subliminal barrage of sight and sound events. The slides and films were projected on and around the children in the studio, creating an overwhelming sense of the black man’s life in contemporary America. Images from all three cameras were superimposed on one tape, resulting in a multidimensional presentation of an ethnological attitude. There was a strong sense of furious energy, both Tambellini’s and the blacks’, communicated through the space/time manipulations of the medium.” (Gene Youngbood, Expanded Cinema)

SCREENING ON A MONITOR IN THE FOYER

6673
Aldo Tambellini, 1966-73, video, colour, sound, 55 min (looped)
6673 is based on Tambellini’s second tape, Black Video 2, which dates from 1966. It was created at the Video Flight dubbing house by manipulating test patterns and other electronic signals. The soundtrack combines audio produced by an oscilloscope (which also distorted the images) with Tambellini’s wordless, vocal improvisation. In 1973, Tambellini added colour and further manipulated the original material using the Paik-Abe Synthesiser at WNET’s artists’ television lab in New York.

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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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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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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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