Date: 13 April 2007 | Season: Swingeing London
SWINGEING LONDON
13-19 April 2007
Filmhuis Den Haag
For a few years after the Beatles first shook Britain out of the Dark Ages, it seemed like London was the place to be. Maybe the seeds of this cultural Renaissance were sown a little earlier, towards the end of the 1950s with the Free Cinema movement, and British Pop Art, first seen in âThis Is Tomorrowâ at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956. Artist Richard Hamilton, who had created the iconic collage âJust What Is It That Makes Todayâs Homes So Different, So Appealing?â for that exhibition, produced a series of prints titled âSwingeing Londonâ, which reproduced a newspaper photo of his hip gallerist Robert Fraser handcuffed to Mick Jagger following their arrest for drug possession in 1967. By this time, Englandâs capital city had been characterised as âSwinging Londonâ by Time Magazine, and the artistâs satirical play on words references the severity of the sentence bestowed on Fraser by the fearful establishment.
At the end of the decade, Hamilton collaborated with filmmaker James Scott on an eponymous self-portrait that perfectly encapsulates the artistâs spirit and sources of inspiration. The exuberant film is featured in this season which explores the embryonic counterculture that developed as âflower powerâ blossomed and faded. As counterpoint to the feature films screening in the âSwinging Londonâ series, âSwingeing Londonâ excavates the underground.
It took the presence of a few key Americans in London to really get things cooking. William Burroughs lived in London from 1966-74, and had already made Towers Open Fire together with exploitation film distributor Antony Balch. The film remains the purest cinematic realisation of Burroughsâ distinct writing style. New Yorker Stephen Dwoskin was one of the founding members of the London Film-Makers Cooperative, and his fellow countryman Peter Gidal was a central figure of that organisation throughout the 1970s. Kenneth Anger lived in London after exiling himself from the US in 1967, a move prompted in part by his opposition (and fear) of the war in Vietnam, the same motive that brought Carolee Schneemann across the Atlantic. Another part-time Brit was Yoko Ono, who often resided in the apartment of artist John Latham, and famously bagged herself a Beatle.
With a little encouragement, the English shook off their innate reserve and embraced the new freedom and prosperity that modern life had to offer. London played host to several indicative and fundamental gatherings of the tribes â the International Poetry Congress at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965 (featuring Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Trocchi, documented in Peter Whiteheadâs amazing veritĂ© Wholly Communion), the Destruction in Art Symposium (very little footage circulates from this 1966 performance series), and the Dialectics of Liberation psychology conference of 1967 (captured in the documentary Anatomy of Violence by Peter Davis). The music scene was a central focus, with concerts such as the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream Festival at Alexandra Palace (1967) and the free Rolling Stones show in Hyde Park (1969).
As portable 16mm equipment made cinema a more affordable and impulsive medium, many of these events were documented on film. As in the USA, where Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, Bruce Conner and others were already using cinema as a mode of personal artistic impression, British filmmakers soon moved in this direction. Inspired by a similar organisation in New York, the London Film-Makersâ Co-operative was founded by a group of enthusiasts in 1966. Initially a film society that met in the basement of the progressive Better Books shop to view the classics of world cinema (this is before alternative distribution circuits, vhs or dvd), the LFMC soon developed into a dynamic centre for the exploration of film as an art medium under the guidance of Dwoskin, Gidal, Malcolm Le Grice and others.
During this formative period âunderground filmsâ were often to be seen projected before or during concerts by bands such as the Pink Floyd or Soft Machine at the UFO (Unlimited Freak Out) club or at all-night raves in the dilapidated Roundhouse. Artists Mark Boyle and Joan Hills (of the Boyle Family) formed the Sensual Laboratory, developing their experimental slide shows, which were already being performed in an art context, into full-blown complements to psychedelic rock concerts. Unlike the American light shows, Boyle and Hillsâ visuals operated independently of the music, rather than being a synchronous, visual accompaniment to it.
Photographer John âHoppyâ Hopkins, a legendary figure on the London scene, was a founder member of IT (the counterculture newspaper International Times), UFO, the Notting Hill Festival and the London Free School. Despite this central organising role, he spent the Summer of Love in jail for marijuana possession. The recently rediscovered short film Poem for Hoppy shows Soft Machine and the Sensual Laboratory collaborating on an improvised howl of support.
After his release, Hoppy turned to the new medium of video, using one of the earliest Sony Portapaks. Working together with the TVX collective, he attracted the attention of the BBC and was invited into the studios of Television Centre to perform a live videomix happening with a group of artists, musicians and freaks. Videospace was not broadcast, but a surviving excerpt demonstrates some of the visual invention and playful creativity that took place at this unique event. Lutz Becker also experimented with the new video technology, creating feedback loops for Horizon, a work covered in detail in Gene Youngbloodâs book âExpanded Cinemaâ but rarely seen today.
Though psychedelia dominated the pop scene, few films made in England in the sixties could truly be described as psychedelic. Mareâs Tail is a prime exception – a long, strange trip into inner space made by maverick filmmaker and photographer David Larcher. Mareâs Tail is a two and a half hour, abstract journey deep within. It was the first film shown in the cinema at the New Arts Lab (aka the Institute for Research in Art and Technology), where it ran for two successful weeks.
The original Arts Lab, on Drury Lane in the heart of Covent Garden, had been established by Jim Haynes and Jack Henry Moore in 1967. Incorporating a cafĂ©, bookstore, gallery, theatre and cinema within a single building, the Arts Lab provided a venue and meeting point for different artistic groups. Haynes, another American who galvanised Londonâs counterculture, was also a co-founder of International Times and the Amsterdam based sexual freedom newspaper SUCK! All scenes feed into eachother.
The naĂŻvetĂ© and optimism of this underground explosion didnât last for long. In the US, Woodstock failed to live up to its promise and Altamont turned the hippie dream into a homicidal nightmare. England had Phun City and the Isle of Wight Festivals: No fatalities, but they were disastrously organised and showed that the idealistic hopes of the sixties generation were unsustainable without some form of structure to balance the spontaneity. As the âwhite heat of technologyâ cooled down, unemployment set in and, during the seventies, glitter was liberally applied to cover the cracks in the youth culture.
SWINGEING LONDON 1: Sat 14 Apr & Tue 17 Apr 2007
SWINGEING LONDON 2: Sun 15 Apr & Wed 18 Apr 2007
SWINGEING LONDON 3: Sun 15 Apr & Thur 19 Apr 2007
SWINGEING LONDON 4: Fri 13 Apr & Mon 16 Apr 2007
SWINGEING LONDON is curated by Mark Webber.
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Date: 14 April 2007 | Season: Swingeing London
SWINGEING LONDON: 1
Saturday 14 April 2007, at 9:30pm
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 distributor Antony Balch and âNaked Lunchâ author William Burroughs, and features appearances by their associates Ian Sommerville, Brion Gysin and Alexander Trocchi. Envisioned as a cinematic realisation of Burroughsâ 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 Portmanâs dance sequence), and the film includes footage of the prototype Dreamachine, designed by Gysin to stimulate the brainâs 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.
âSociety 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 âŠâ (Tony Rayns, Cinema Rising, 1972)
HEADS
Peter Gidal, UK, 1969, 16mm, b/w, silent, 35 min
One of the major filmmakers and theorists of the 1970s, Gidal moved from New York to London in 1968, and his association with Andy Warholâs Factory brought an air of authenticity to the LFMC. His cool, oppositional stance refuted narrative and representation, denying illusion and manipulation though visual codes, and his films moved towards a persistent denial of the photographic image. Heads is a silent series of tight, claustrophobically cropped portraits of artists, filmmakers, musicians and cultural activists. Some are London residents, others were just passing through. Charlie Watts, Bill West, Jane, John Blake, Linda Thorson, Marsha Hunt, Steve Dwoskin, Thelonious Monk, Peter Townsend, David Hockney, Marianne Faithful, Carol Garney-Lawson, David Gale, Richard Hamilton, Dieter Meier, Rufus Collins, Leslie Smith, Anita Pallenburgh, Claes Oldenburgh, Francis Bacon, Adrian Munsey, Carolee Schneeman, Andrew Garnett-Lawson, Jim Dine, Vivian, Prenai, Winston, Gregory Markopoulos, Rosie, Patrick Procktor and Francis Vaughan.
âClinical subjectivity, a construct, a consciously, precisely set-up situation. 31 peopleâs faces: tight closeup (10:1 zoom lens head on stare). Movement happens against the strict construct. The realness is within the framework as set up and defined, a non-illusory use of film structure and film situation.â (Peter Gidal, 1970)
RICHARD HAMILTON
James Scott, UK, 1969, 16mm, colour, sound, 25 min
Richard Hamilton was a new kind of documentary on the arts, made by filmmaker James Scott in complete collaboration with Hamilton himself. Devoid of authoritative voiceover, the film presents samples of the artistâs work alongside reference materials, found footage, scenes from Hollywood features and news reports of the Jagger/Richards/Fraser drugs trial. Bing Crosby, Marilyn Monroe and Patricia Knight (in Sirk and Fullerâs long forgotten Shockproof) also put in appearances as the film traces the inspiration behind some of Hamiltonâs signature paintings.
âWe have to start with a rather peculiar premise â that I donât like art filmsâ, says Richard Hamilton at the beginning of this one. Images from the mass media have provided the inspiration for many of his paintings and Scottâs film presents some of this source material and shows how the artist has treated it. Despite its brevity, this brilliant and informative film â as much an extension of Hamiltonâs work as a comment on it â is itself constructed as an epic viewing session, with an intermission advertising ice cream and Coca-Cola, a trailer for Desert Hawk with Yvonne De Carlo and, as an entirely appropriate pop art ending, Mr. Universe and Miss World striding off into a golden sky lit by the first rays of dawn.â (Konstantin Bazarov, Monthly Film Bulletin, 1971)
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 a dinner party at which he invited friends to chew pages from Clement Greenbergâs book âArt and Cultureâ, 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 âEssence of Greenbergâ 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.
Also screening: Tuesday 17 April 2007, at 8:30pm
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Date: 15 April 2007 | Season: Swingeing London
SWINGEING LONDON: 2
Sunday 15 April 2007, at 5pm
Filmhuis Den Haag
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 Englandâs 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 âHoppyâ Hopkins, who received nine months in prison for possession of a small quantity of pot.
WHOLLY COMMUNION
Peter Whitehead, UK, 1965, 16mm, b/w, sound, 33 min
The International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall is regarded as the defining moment that inaugurated Londonâs sixties adventure. Peter Whiteheadâs crisply shot, b/w film, only a half hour long, is remarkably comprehensive in documenting key performances of the evening, and captures the tangible sense of expectation that must have permeated the atmosphere within the cavernous concert hall. Wholly Communion not only encapsulates this seminal moment in which the underground went public, but remains one of the few records of a whole generation of poets performing in their prime.
âThe event began with Allen Ginsberg chanting and playing finger cymbals, performing a Hindu mantra which was described by The Times newspaper, as a âheavily amplified incomprehensible song to the accompaniment of a bell-like instrumentâ. Alexander Trocchi compered the evening, which consisted of four hours worth of readings and performances by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Harry Fainlight, Adrian Mitchell, Michael Horovitz, Ernst Jandl, Christopher Logue, John Esam, Pete Brown, Anselm Hollo, George Macbeth, Simon Vinkenoog, Paulo Leonni, Daniel Richter, Spike Hawkins, and Tom McGrath, as well as the playing of tapes of, and by, William Burroughs. Poets who, although radically different in style, âshowed their hatred of the narrow mind and heart, and joined in celebration of God-as-total-consciousness.â Despite being organized in a matter of days, a press conference announcing the event the previous week guaranteed an estimated audience of 7000 inside the venue, who had been invited to: âCome in fancy dress,â âCome with flowers,â and âCome.ââ (Jack Sargeant)
ANATOMY OF VIOLENCE
Peter Davis, UK, 1967, 16mm, b/w, sound, 30 min (shown on video)
The symposium on the Dialectics of Liberation and the Demystification of Violence, organised by R.D. Laing, experimental psychologist and author of âThe Divided Selfâ, was structured like an academic conference with invited speakers, panel discussions and open meetings. Over 15 days at the Camden Roundhouse it covered subjects such as Black Power, Vietnam, personal liberty and the freedom of speech. Key lectures were released by the Institute of Phenomenological Studies on a series of 23 LP records. Anatomy of Violence features proclamations by Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Marcuse, Stokely Carmichael and Emmett Grogan, and a discussion group including Carolee Schneeman and auto-destructive artist Gustav Metzger. Filmmaker Peter Davis later won an Academy Award for Hearts and Minds, his 1974 documentary on the Vietnam War.
REIGN OF THE VAMPIRE
Malcolm Le Grice, UK, 1970, 16mm b/w, sound, 15 min
Le Griceâs 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 governmentâs intelligence agency in countercultural activities. It was the last of a group of works shown together under the collective title âHow to Screw the CIA, or How to Screw the CIA ?â
âThis 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.â (Malcolm Le Grice)
Also Screening: Wednesday 18 April 2007, at 8:30pm
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Date: 25 April 2007 | Season: Swingeing London
SWINGEING LONDON: THE SIXTIES UNDERGROUND
A Touring Programme from Filmhuis Den Haag
Wednesday 25 April 2007, Utrecht ‘t Hoogt
Sunday 29 April 2007, Rotterdam Lantaren/Venster
Tuesday 8âWednesday 9 May 2007, Amsterdam Filmmuseum
Monday 14 May 2007, Arnhem Filmhuis
Soon after the Beatles first shook England out of the Dark Ages, it seemed like âSwinging Londonâ was the place to be. The cultural Renaissance that had begun in the late 1950s, with the Free Cinema movement and British Pop Art, exploded across the nation and for a few years it seemed that anything was possible. Under the surface of the mainstream, an underground counterculture challenged the conventions of music, literature, art and filmmaking.
This programme shows how the influence of American Beat culture prompted British experimentation with media, ranging from the appearance of William Burroughs in Towers Open Fire to an unseen psychedelic happening inside the BBC TV studios. The films date from a time when artists created a new language of looking, and include music by Soft Machine, the Beatles and the Troggs.
Antony Balch & William Burroughs, Towers Open Fire, UK, 1963, 16 min
Michael Nyman, Love Love Love, UK, 1967, 5 min
Boyle Family, Poem for Hoppy, UK, 1967, 4 min
John Hopkins / TVX, Videospace Reel, UK, 1970, 15 min
Stephen Dwoskin, Naissant, UK, 1964-67, 14 min
John Latham, Talk Mr Bard, UK, 1968, 7 min
Simon Hartog, Soul in a White Room, UK, 1968, 3 min
Malcolm Le Grice, Reign of the Vampire, UK, 1970, 15 min
SWINGEING LONDON is curated by Mark Webber and takes its title from Richard Hamiltonâs series of prints depicting Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser on their way to court, where they were convicted for the possession of illegal substances.
PROGRAMME NOTES
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 âNaked Lunchâ author William Burroughs, and features appearances by their associates Ian Sommerville, Brion Gysin and Alexander Trocchi. Envisioned as a cinematic realisation of Burroughsâ 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 Portmanâs dance sequence), and the film includes footage of the prototype Dreamachine, designed by Gysin to stimulate the brainâs 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.
âSociety 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 âŠâ (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 Englandâs 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 âHoppyâ 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 Hopkinsâ conviction for marijuana possession.
âMark 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.â (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 âvisualisationâ made for the BBC to accompany the track âScotlandâ 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
Dwoskinâs 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.
âObjective 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 oneâs thoughts. Time and her inner thoughts are found out only by spending time with her in the film.â (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 Greenbergâs book âArt and Cultureâ, 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 âEssence of Greenbergâ 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 Griceâs 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 governmentâs intelligence agency in countercultural activities. It was the last of a group of works shown together under the collective title âHow to Screw the CIA, or How to Screw the CIA ?â
âThis 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.â (Malcolm Le Grice)
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Date: 23 May 2007 | Season: Shoot Shoot Shoot 2006 | Tags: Shoot Shoot Shoot
SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT: EXPANDED CINEMA
Wednesday 23 May 2007, at 7PM
Wrexham Arts Centre
Beginning in the 1960s, artists at the London Film-Makersâ Co-operative experimented with multiple projection, live performance and film environments. In liberating cinema from traditional theatrical presentation, they broke down the barrier between screen and audience, and extended the creative act to the moment of exhibition. âShoot Shoot Shootâ presents historic works of Expanded Cinema, for which each screening is a unique, collective experience, in stark contrast to contemporary video installations. In Line Describing a Cone, a film projected through smoke, light becomes an apparently solid, sculptural presence, whilst other works for multiple projection create dynamic relationships between images and sounds.
Malcolm Le Grice, Castle Two, 1968, b/w, sound, 32 min (2 screens)
Sally Potter, Play, 1971, b/w & colour, silent, 7 min (2 screens)
William Raban, Diagonal, 1973, colour, sound, 6 min (3 screens)
Gill Eatherley, Hand Grenade, 1971, colour, sound, 8 min (3 screens)
Lis Rhodes, Light Music, 1975-77, b/w, sound, 20 min (2 screens)
Anthony McCall, Line Describing A Cone, 1973, b/w, silent, 30 min. (1 screen, smoke)
Curated by Mark Webber. Presented in association with LUX.
PROGRAMME NOTES
SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT: EXPANDED CINEMA
Wednesday 23 May 2007, at 7PM
Wrexham Arts Centre
EXPANDED CINEMA at the LONDON FILM-MAKERSâ 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-Makersâ 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-opâs 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.” âMalcolm 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.” âJohn 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.” âScott 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⊔ âSally 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.” âWilliam 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.” âWilliam 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.” âGill 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.” âGill 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.” âWilliam 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.” âLis 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.” âAnthony McCall, interview with Mark Webber, 2001
“One important strategy of expanded cinema radically alters the spatial discreteness of the audience vis-Ă -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.” âDeke Dusinberre, “On Expanding Cinema”, Studio International, November/December 1975
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Date: 26 May 2007 | Season: Evolution 2007 | Tags: Aldo Tambellini, Evolution
ALDO TAMBELLINI: ELECTROMEDIA & THE BLACK FILM SERIES
Saturday 26 May 2007, at 3pm
Leeds Opera North Linacre Studio
As a key figure of the 1960s Lower East Side arts scene, Aldo Tambellini used a variety of media for social and political communication. In the age of McLuhan and Fuller, Tambellini manipulated new technology in an exploration of the âpsychological re-orientation of man in the space age.â He presented immersive, multi-media environments and, having made his first experimental video as early as 1966, participated in early collaborations between artists and broadcast television.
His dynamic Black Film Series (1965-69) extends from total abstraction to footage of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the Vietnam War, and black teenagers in Coney Island. Tambellini worked directly on the film strip with chemicals, paint and ink, scratching, scraping, and intercutting material from industrial films, newsreels and TV. Abrasive, provocative and turbulent, the series is a rapid-fire response to the beginning of the information age and a world in flux. âBlack to me is like a beginning ⊠Black is within totality, the oneness of all. Black is the expansion of consciousness in all directions.â
âElectromedia was the fusion of the various art and media â breaking media away from itâs âtraditional media roleâ â bringing it into the area of modern art â bringing the others arts â poetry â sounds â painting â kinetic sculpture â into a time/space reorientation toward media â transforming both the arts and the media âŠâ (Aldo Tambellini)
Aldo Tambellini will be present to introduce and discuss his early work in film and video.
Programme curated by Mark Webber for Evolution 2007. Programme repeated at Lucca Film Festival 30 September 2007.
PROGRAMME NOTES
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 âno longer sufficient for the creative individual to remain in isolation,â 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 âpsychological re-orientation of man in the space age.â
His first âelectromedia eventâ BLACK (1965) fused painting, music, poetry and dance with projected âlumigramsâ (hand-painted glass slides) in an immersive environment. The idea of âblackâ as a spatial and psychological concept dominated Tambelliniâs work for many years. âBlack to me is like a beginning ⊠Black is within totality, the oneness of all. Black is the expansion of consciousness in all directions.â
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 â spontaneously improvised from test signals whilst the first tape was being duplicated â 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 âTV as a Creative Mediumâ.
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 âdissolve the boundaries between media, the arts and life.â 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
âTambellini is one of the pioneers of lntermedia. His Black series in film and intermedia is obsessed with Black. His Black is like a âblind spotâ â 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.â 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
âAn internal probing of the violence and mystery of the American psyche seen through the eye of a black man and the Russian revolution.â (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 âXâ 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 Tambelliniâs tongue?in?cheek âsolutionâ to the race problem. (Grove Press Film Catalog)
BLACK TV
Aldo Tambellini, 1968, 16mm, b/w, sound, 10 min
The film is an artistâs 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 Kennedyâs assassination, murder, infanticide, prize fights, police brutality at Chicago, and the war in Vietnam are out?of?focus impressions of faces and events.â (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
âIn 1969 [Tambellini] was one of six artists participating in the PBL programme âThe Medium Is the Mediumâ 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 manâs 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 Tambelliniâs and the blacksâ, communicated through the space/time manipulations of the medium.â (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 Tambelliniâs 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 Tambelliniâs wordless, vocal improvisation. In 1973, Tambellini added colour and further manipulated the original material using the Paik-Abe Synthesiser at WNETâs artistsâ television lab in New York.
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Date: 18 September 2007 | Season: ZXZW 2007
CINEMA FOR THE EYES AND EARS
ZXZW Festival at Tilburg FilmFoyer
Tuesday 18 September 2007, at 9pm
The potential for combining image and sound has been explored since the invention of cinema. This primer of classic works of the international avant-garde demonstrates some of the possibilities specific to the film medium, from the flickering frames of Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits and John Latham to the intricate optics of Daina Krumins, Malcolm Le Grice, and others. Featuring soundtracks by Brian Eno, Rhys Chatham, John Cale and Terry Riley. All films will be shown on 16mm.
Peter Kubelka, Arnulf Rainer, Austria, 1958, 8 min
Wojciech Bruszewski, YYAA, Poland, 1973, 5 min
John Latham, Speak, UK, 1968-69, 11 min
Malcolm Le Grice, Berlin Horse, UK, 1970, 8 min
Daina Krumins, The Divine Miracle, USA, 1973, 5 min
Paul Sharits, Axiomatic Granularity, USA, 1972-73, 20 min
Lis Rhodes, Dresden Dynamo, UK, 1974, 5 min
Tony & Beverly Conrad, Straight and Narow, USA, 1970, 11 min
The programme also screened in The Wire 25 season at London Roxy Bar and Screen on Tuesday 30 October 2007, at 8pm.
PROGRAMME NOTES
CINEMA FOR THE EYES AND EARS
ZXZW Festival at Tilburg FilmFoyer
Tuesday 18 September 2007, at 9pm
ARNULF RAINER
Peter Kubelka, Austria, 1958, 35mm, b/w, sound, 8 min
âHe has even created a film whose images can no more be âturned offâ by the closing of eyes than can the soundtrack thereof it (for it is composed entirely of white frames rhythming thru black inter-spaces and of such an intensity as to create its pattern straight thru closed eyelids) so that the whole âmixâ of the audio-visual experience is clearly âin the headâ, so to speak: and if one looks at it openly, one can see ones own eye cells as if projected onto the screen and can watch oneâs optic physiology activated by the soundtrack in what is, surely, the most basic Dance of Life of all (for the sounds of the film do resemble and, thus, prompt the inner earâs hearing of its own pulse output at intake of sound).â (Stan Brakhage)
YYAA
Wojciech Bruszewski, Poland, 1973, 35mm, colour, sound, 5 min
âThe author of the film (appearing on the screen) is shouting âYAAAHâŠâ The light comes from four sources being switched at random (this takes between 1 and 8 seconds) by an electronic device. In any moment, only one of the four lamps casts light on the filmmaker. Each light-change is accompanied by a different voice modulation of the authorâs voice. The film technique makes it possible for the author to exhale for several minutes. The alternating close-ups and half-close-ups are totally unjustified.â (Wojciech Bruszewski)
SPEAK
John Latham, UK, 1968-69, 16mm, colour, sound, 11 min
âSpeak is his second attack on the cinema. Not since Len Lyeâs films in the thirties has England produced such a brilliant example of animated abstraction. Speak burns its way directly into the brain. It is one of the few films about which it can truly be said, âit will live in your mindâ.â (Ray Durgnat)
BERLIN HORSE
Malcolm Le Grice, UK, 1970, 16mm, colour, sound, 8 min
âBerlin Horse is a synthesis of a number of works which explore the transformation of the image by re-filming from the screen and by complex printing techniques. There are two original sequences: a piece of early newsreel and a section of 8mm film shot in Berlin â a village in Northern Germany. The 8mm material is re-filmed in various ways from the screen onto 16mm and that in turn used for permutative superimposition and color treatment in the printer. The music is composed for the film by Brian Eno and like elements of the image, explores off-setting loops with each other so that their phases shift.â (Malcolm Le Grice)
THE DIVINE MIRACLE
Daina Krumins, USA, 1973, 16mm, colour, sound, 5 min
âAn intriguing composite of what looks like animation and pageant-like live action is The Divine Miracle, which treads a delicate line between reverence and spoof as it briefly portrays the agony, death and ascension of Christ in the vividly coloured and heavily outlined style of Catholic devotional postcards, while tiny angels (consisting only of heads and wings) circle like slow mosquitoes about the central figure. Ms. Krumins tells me that no animation is involved, that the entire action was filmed in a studio, and that Christ, the angels and the background were combined in the printing. She also says it took her two years to produce it.â (Edgar Daniels)
AXIOMATIC GRANULARITY
Paul Sharits, USA, 1972-73, 16mm, colour, sound, 20 min
âIn Spring 1972 a series of analyses of colour emulsion âgrainâ imagery was undertaken (the word âimagery: is significant because only representations of light sensitive crystals, or âgrainâ, remain on a developed roll of colour film). The investigation is preliminary to the shooting of Section 1 of âRe: Re: Projectionâ, Variable Emulsion Density, wherein attempts to construct convincing lap dissolves of solid colour fields with straight fine grain Ektachrome ECO proved unsatisfactory. It was thought that more âgrainyâ colour field interactions might adequately prevent the undesirable smoothness of hue mixture resulting from ECO superimposition. A discreteness of individual hues, during superimposition, is necessary; then, a switch to Ektachrome EF, pushed extra stops in development, seemed somewhat reasonable. Still, unexpected (colour blurring) problems arose and it was clear that a âblow upâ of the situation was called for; a set of primary principles was needed and, particle by particle, Axiomatic Granularity seemed to formulate itself. Its âstructureâ lacks normative âexpressive intentionalityâ.â (Paul Sharits)
DRESDEN DYNAMO
Lis Rhodes, UK, 1974, 16mm, colour, sound, 5 min
âThe result of experiments with the application of Letraset and Letratone onto clear film. It is essentially about how graphic images create their own sound by extending into that area of film which is âreadâ by optical sound equipment. The final print has been achieved through three separate, consecutive printings from the original material, on a contact printer. Colour was added with filters on the final run. The film is not a sequential piece. It does not develop crescendos. It creates the illusion of spatial depth from essentially flat, graphic, raw material.â (Tim Bruce)
STRAIGHT AND NARROW
Tony & Beverly Conrad, USA, 1970, 16mm, b/w, sound, 11 min
âAn extension of the flicker film phenomenon, Straight and Narrow is a study in subjective colour and visual rhythm. Although it is printed on black and white film, the hypnotic pacing of the images will cause viewers to experience a programmed gamut of hallucinatory colour effects. Straight And Narrow uses the flicker phenomenon not as an end in itself, but as an effectuator of other related phenomena. In this film the colours which are so illusory in The Flicker are visible and under the programmed control of the filmmaker. Also, by using images which alternate in a vibrating flickering schedule, a new impression of motion and texture is created.â (Film-Makersâ Cooperative catalogue)
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Date: 27 October 2007 | Season: London Film Festival 2007 | Tags: London Film Festival
THE âIâ AND THE âWEâ
Saturday 27 October 2007, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
Su Friedrich, Seeing Red, USA, 2005, 27 min
A video confessional in which the artist expresses her frustration with the onset of middle age, frankly declaring personal anxieties. Interspersed with observational vignettes edited to Bachâs Goldberg Variations (played by Glenn Gould), Seeing Red is ultimately less an admission of crisis than a roar of defiance.
Elodie Pong, Je Suis Une Bombe, Switzerland, 2006, 7 min
Unprecedented and absolute: The image of a young woman âsimultaneously strong and vulnerable, a potential powder keg.â
Jay Rosenblatt, I Just Wanted to Be Somebody, USA, 2006, 10 min
American pop singer Anita Bryant, the face of Florida orange juice, led a political crusade against the âevil forcesâ of homosexuality in the 1970s. Local success was short lived, and a national boycott of Florida oranges was the first sign of her loss of public approval.
Steve Reinke, Regarding the Pain of Susan Sontag (Notes on Camp), Canada, 2006, 4 min
A journey from schoolyard to graveyard, with author Susan Sontag as philosophical guide.
Mara Mattuschka & Chris Haring, Part Time Heroes, Austria, 2007, 33 min
Mattuschkaâs second adaptation of a piece by Viennaâs ingenious Liquid Loft (following Legal Errorist in 2004) exposes a trio of fractured characters. In the lonely hearts hotel of an unfamiliar zone, the amorphous heroes erratically construct and reveal their unconventional personas
PROGRAMME NOTES
THE âIâ AND THE âWEâ
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 Gouldâs rendition of Bachâs âGoldberg Variationsâ. At times, red bits of the world dance ecstatically to Gouldâs 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 âcontrol freakâ 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 â 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 âSupernovaâ 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 âJe suis une bombeâ, 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 â 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
âI believe, more than ever before, that there are evil forces round about us. Maybe even disguised as something good.â 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. âIn Florida, you won the battle, but lost the war. You gave a face to fear and ignoranceâ 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. Sontagâs work often questions photographyâs 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 âtired indexicality of photographâ, Regarding the Pain of Susan Sontag (Notes on Camp), shows images that evoke a contemporary emotional ground zero, combined with Reinkeâs 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 fameâs elevator goes up and down, the egoâs 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 â since she constantly undress yet is never naked â 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 â a show master, so to speak, a running gag, a lascivious âcursorâ in a boiler suit â 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: âHow do I become timeless?â that releases this outcry for fame in a hopeless but unique vitality. (Katherina Zakravsky)
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Date: 27 October 2007 | Season: London Film Festival 2007 | Tags: London Film Festival
PAST IMPERFECT
Saturday 27 October 2007, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
Christina Battle, Hysteria, Canada, 2006, 4 min
Through the manipulation of drawings of the Salem witch trials, using techniques which include peeling layers of emulsion from the filmstrip, oblique parallels are drawn with modern day hysteria.
Soon-Mi Yoo, Dangerous Supplement, USA-Korea, 2006, 14 min
âIs it possible to see the landscape of the past even though it was first seen by the otherâs murderous gaze?â Dangerous Supplement poetically appropriates footage shot by US military to explore the secrets of the mountain, and the legacy of the Korean War.
Jayne Parker, Catalogue of Birds: Book 3, UK, 2006, 16 min
Following World War II, Messiaenâs fascination with birdsong inspired many compositions, and dominates the monumental âCatalogue dâOiseauxâ of 1959. Jayne Parker has created a visual interpretation of the third movement â The Tawny Owl and The Woodlark â which evokes the habitat and symbolism of these nocturnal birds.
Bruce Conner, His Eye on the Sparrow, USA, 2006, 4 min
The power of music transports the founders of the Soul Stirrers gospel quartet back in time to the Depression Era. A poignant refrain by a master of found footage.
David Dempewolf, Marguerite Duras / Alan Resnais (0.65, 0.85, 1.0 FPS), USA, 2007, 19 min
The opening act of Hiroshima, Mon Amor has been condensed and structured, with urgent repetition, to reconstitute the dialogue between Durasâ text and Resnaisâ vision. Words assume priority as potent images are crudely masked, emphasising details and inviting fresh analysis of this powerful sequence.
Christoph Draeger, Helenés (Apparition of Freedom), Switzerland, 2005, 18 min
HelenĂ©s combines two examples of propaganda from East and West. A bleak Hungarian instructional film on nuclear attack is presented in its entirely, strategically subtitled with text from George Bushâs inauguration speech (an idiosyncratic interpretation of the concept of freedom).
PROGRAMME NOTES
PAST IMPERFECT
Saturday 27 October 2007, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
HYSTERIA
Christina Battle, Canada, 2006, 35mm, colour, sound, 4 min
Like nostalgia (april 2001 to present), this film is made up entirely of drawings. They show a house from the past century, the cartoonish figure of a man, a womanâs uplifted face praying, and then another. They are lent movement through the act of hand processing, a hail of scratches and blemishes course through the picture, reminding us that we are watching a loop of emulsion unspool. The image turns briefly and occasionally from positive to negative, the likely result of âflashingâ the film in the development process, quickly exposing it to light âprematurelyâ. This technique emphasizes the dual nature of the chemical image. Typically negatives are printed to create a positive for viewing. By showing us both at the same time, the artist remarks upon the usually hidden âdualâ nature of the picture â and it is hardly a coincidence that these technical namings (negative versus positive) carry distinct moral implications. A Puritan woman points at another in a gesture of accusation while a crowd looks on, an arm points at a woman praying in front of a tribunal. Near the two-minute mark the cartoonish figure of a man returns, this time emulsion lifted, flickering and shaking in an agitated dance. Dark figures in distress slide through the frame, there is a hanging, and then the emulsion lift frenzy is over. The silhouette of a hanged woman stands clear, a reminder of witch hunts past and present, the easy seduction of surfaces, and the migrations of names to these surfaces. Kike, polack, fairy, nigger, witch. (Mike Hoolboom)
DANGEROUS SUPPLEMENT
Soon-Mi Yoo, USA-Korea, 2006, video, colour, sound, 14 min
Most of the archival footage in Dangerous Supplement comes from US military footage under the titles Supplement to âThis is Koreaâ, Korea Gun Camera and Native Life, shot during the Korean War. Dangerous Supplement originated from these questions: Is it possible to see the landscape of the past even though it was first seen by the otherâs murderous gaze? Did the mountains and waters manage to escape it? Is there a space in-between? Dangerous Supplement is an incomplete index for memory, a substitute for a vision that is yet to exist. (Soon-Mi Yoo)
CATALOGUE OF BIRDS: BOOK 3
Jayne Parker, UK, 2006, video, b/w, sound, 16 min
Catalogue of Birds: Book 3, âThe tawny owl and the woodlarkâ, is an interpretation of Olivier Messiaenâs music for piano, played by Katherina Wolpe. The imagery and music evoke the habitat and song of these nocturnal birds. Filmed in black and white, symbolic of the cycle of life and death, the owl is a harbinger of transformation, mediating between two worlds â the seen and unseen, the physical and spiritual. From the terror of night, the forest opens to grassland and we hear in the music, the transcendent song of the lark. (Jayne Parker)
HIS EYE ON THE SPARROW
Bruce Conner, USA, 2006, video, colour, sound, 4 min
Why should my heart be discouraged, why should the shadows come?
Why should my heart be lonely and long for heaven and home?
In the 1930s jubilee gospel singing underwent a metamorphosis when Roy Crain joined up with R.H. Harris and developed a new style of vocal arrangement with The Soul Stirrers. (Later members included Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls) The Soul Stirrers introduced a more complex kind of vocal presentation employing the innovations of falsetto and swing lead tradeoffs with guitar accompaniment and complex background singing with reiterated words or delayed echoing responses. Bruce Conner began working on By and By, a documentary about The Soul Stirrers several decades ago, shooting their reunion concert with four cameras and accumulating interview material. Conner was poised to finish the piece in the mid-1980s but the project was abandoned for a variety of financial and personal reasons. From the ashes of this project arises a new collage film miniature ⊠thimble sized epiphany of conflicted history. In the past Conner created masterful pairings of sound and image with the music of Dylan, Ray Charles, Devo, Byrne and Eno, Respighi, Sibelius, Riley, Gleeson and others. His Eye on the Sparrow takes its name from a classic gospel song written by Lettuce Guest. The Soul Stirrers cut their version in Chicago on October 10, 1946, and it is this recording that is heard on the track. Carefree and complex the song moves in tandem with a set of found images that seem utterly transparent yet are evocative of other mysteries just out of reach. (Mark McElhatten)
MARGUERITE DURAS / ALAIN RESNAIS (0.65, 0.85, 1.0 FPS)
David Dempewolf, USA, 2007, video, b/w, sound, 19 min
Hiroshima mon amour (1959) is utilized as the central narrative that has been dissected into thematically ordered motifs. Marguerite Duras / Alain Resnais (0.65, 0.85, 1.0 fps) is set within the documentary opening of the film. The cinematic flow of the original has been drained and strung together in a series of still sequences. These sequences are determined by the frames per second export rates of 0.65, 0.85, and 1.0. The differences between frame rates in the video mean to invoke an awareness of the accumulation of synchronous and agonistic narratives over time, where the original historical event is a breech of interpretive models, and the temporal present is an unfixed state of intertextual stratifications. Each frame is marked with a number to track variations of the exported stills. The stills that correspond to the spoken dialogue are synchronous with the audio, and the stills that are without dialogue are shown for a single second. By isolating the enunciation of the script, Durasâ text as opposed to Resnaisâ editing â becomes the temporal ordering format for the video. (David Dempewolf)
HELENĂS (APPARITION OF FREEDOM)
Christoph Draeger, Switzerland, 2005, video, colour, sound, 18 min
The Cold War was based on fear and deterrence. In both the East and the West, propaganda films were made to prepare people for the worst: a nuclear attack. Nowadays when we watch these films from the 1950s and 1960s, we are often struck by the naive clumsiness of the representation, usually culminating in the advice to take shelter under the stairs. However, some of these films were rather more realistic, as can be seen from the Hungarian 16mm film HelenĂ©s (âApparitionâ in Hungarian) which Christoph Draeger used as an unaltered basis for his piece. Draeger found this film among a stack of 16mm rolls in a defunct disaster training camp of the Hungarian army in 1997. The editing, soundtrack and monotonous voiceover all bring to mind Alain Resnaisâ masterpiece, the documentary Nuit et brouillard (1955). This was also impressionistic and remarkably silent, but incredibly threatening as a sad observation on the human condition. Unfortunately it applies to our times as well, possibly it is even a statement of all times. Draeger subtitled the voiceover of this film by using most of George Bushâs famous (or infamous) inauguration speech, in which, in anticipation of his military campaigns, he inflicted serious inflationary damage upon the concept of âfreedomâ by repeating it no less than 41 times. (Netherlands Media Art Institute)
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Date: 27 October 2007 | Season: London Film Festival 2007 | Tags: London Film Festival
CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN PRESERVATIONS
Saturday 27 October 2007, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
Newly preserved prints. Carolee Schneemann is a multi-media artist whose films, performances, installations and writings are a radical discourse on the body, sexuality and gender.
Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, USA, 1964-67, 29 min
Fuses is a vibrant celebration of a passionate relationship, openly portraying sexual intercourse without the objectification of pornography. To extend the tactile intimacy of lovemaking to filmmaking, Schneemann treated the filmstrips as a canvas, working by hand to paint, transform and cut the footage into a dense collage. The erotic energy of the body is transferred directly onto the film material. Recently preserved by Anthology Film Archives, this legendary work glows with a clarity unseen since its debut in the 1960s.
Carolee Schneemann, Kitchâs Last Meal, USA, 1973-76, c.60 min
The moving conclusion to the autobiographical trilogy which began with Fuses, Kitchâs Last Meal documents the routines of daily life. It was shot on the Super-8 home movie format and is projected double screen (one image above the other) as an interchangeable set of 18-minute reels. The soundtrack mixes personal reminiscences with ambient sounds of the household, and includes the original text used for Schneemannâs 1975 performance âInterior Scrollâ. Time passes, a relationship winds down and death closes in: filming and recording stopped when the elderly cat Kitch, Schneemannâs closest companion for two decades, died. Each performance of the film in its original state was a re-ordering of the visual and aural materials, arranged by the artist according to mood and environment. For the preservation print, three pairs of reels have been selected and blown up to 16mm.
PROGRAMME NOTES
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 â 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 â as one feels during lovemaking ⊠It is different from any pornographic work that youâve ever seen â thatâs why people are still looking at it! And thereâs 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, âfree in a process which liberates our intentions from our conceptionsâ. 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 â fellatio, cunnilingus, close-ups of genitals and penetrations, sexual acrobatics â yet thereâs 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. Schneemannâs 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 â 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.â (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.
KITCHâS LAST MEAL
Carolee Schneemann, USA, 1973-76, 2 x 16mm, colour, sound-on-cd, 3 x 20 min
In Kitchâs Last Meal synchronicity becomes a physical property, as with accident, as with joke â double entendre. The actual projection system is of two simultaneous Super 8 reels â 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 â 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 â 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 Kitchâs 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 â 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 â the unintended poignancy of a simple meal. By 1973, the premise of Kitchâs 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 Kitchâs Last Meal by Anthology Film Archives, New York, was supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
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