BEN RIVERS AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

AH LIBERTY!
Ben Rivers, UK, 2008, 16mm-on-video, b/w, sound, 19 min
A family’s place in the wilderness, outside of time; free-range animals and children, junk and nature, all within the most sublime landscape. The work aims at an idea of freedom, which is reflected in the hand-processed Scope format, but is undercut with a sense of foreboding. There’s no particular story; beginning, middle or end, just fragments of lives lived, rituals performed. (Ben Rivers)

SINGING BISCUITS
Luther Price, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 4 min
Not a gospel vamp not quite ostinato catatonia but a lost and found of looks that sound and return to look again, a choral interlude from the continuing Biscuits/Biscotts series. (Mark McElhatten, New York Film Festival Views from the Avant-Garde)

RECORDANDO EL AYER
Alexandra Cuesta, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min
Memory and identity are observed through textures of everyday life in a portrait of Jackson Heights, home to a large Latin American immigrant population. Images of streets, people, and daily rituals render the passing of time in a neighbourhood that becomes a mirror not just of another place, but also of the past. The landscape visually reflects the space as a creation of a new home while revealing displacement within the new condition. The meaning of home is explored and build upon collective reflection. (Alexandra Cuesta)

ASTIKA
Ben Rivers, UK-Denmark, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 8 min
A portrait of Astika, who lives on an island in Denmark. He has lived in a run down farmhouse for 15 years and his project has been to let the land around him grow unchecked, but now he has been forced to move out by people who prefer more pristine neighbours. (Ben Rivers)

A WORLD RATTLED OF HABIT
Ben Rivers, UK, 2008, 16mm-on-video, colour, sound, 10 min
A day trip to Suffolk, to see my friend Ben and his dad Oleg. (Ben Rivers)

ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES
Ben Rivers, UK, 2008, 16mm, colour, sound, 17 min
The film is a portrait of ‘S’, a 70 year old man living in a remote part of Scotland, who has been obsessed with ‘trying to really understand’ Darwin’s book for many years. Alongside this passion, there has been constant work on small inventions for making his life easier. His house is miles down a dirt track and has a grass roof. This film will investigate someone profoundly interested in human beings, but who has decided to live separately from the majority of them. (Ben Rivers)

‘Ah Liberty!’ is being projected on film in the exhibition ‘Wild Shapes’ at Cell Project Space, 258 Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2 9DA, until 16th November. www.cell.org.uk

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STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH
Sunday 2 November 2008, 2pm-10pm
London Chisenhale Gallery

STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1957-59/2004, video, b/w & colour, sound, 400 min

Star Spangled To Death is an epic film costing hundreds of dollars! An antic collage combining found-films with my own more-or-less staged filming (I once said directing Jack and Jerry was like directing the wind). It is a social-critique picturing a stolen and dangerously sold-out America, allowing examples of popular culture to self-indict. Race and religion and monopolisation of wealth and the purposeful dumbing down of citizens and addiction to war become props for clowning. In whimsy we trusted. A handful of artists costumed and performing unconvincingly appeal to audience imagination and understanding to complete the picture. Jack Smith’s pre-Flaming Creatures performance is a cine-visitation of the divine (the movie has raggedly cosmic pretensions). His character, The Spirit Not Of Life But Of Living, celebrates Suffering, personified by poor rattled fierce Jerry Sims, as an inextricable essence of living.

I was 24 when I began the film, Jack 25. Jerry in his mid-thirties seemed middle-aged to us. Jack later said, I think appreciatively, I taught him to hate America. We met 1954 and got to hanging around, broke most of the time, walking the streets “shadow starved” (Jack’s expression) for movies a mind could fix on. Max Ophuls’ Sins Of Lola Montez, even in its producer-reassembled state, stood out in its love of the art, in showing what a camera could still do. Hollywood with some few exceptions had gone numb, frantic and numb in this time of fascist ascendance and cultural impoverishment. The enemy had been switched from Right to Left at the end of World War II and the owners had returned with a vengeance. Their message was simple: “Shut up and do what you’re told.” War had done the trick of loosening industry from its Depression fix and war would now be America’s raison d’être. War would serve to rid the country of excess wealth, lest more equitable distribution shake its class structure. In light of how much bullshit it takes to win a war, consider the bullshit it takes to sell ongoing war-to-war-to-war; we were inundated. Only the Abstract-Expressionist painters had been left to proclaim the old radical hopes (because the liberties they took were abstract). The Sixties were nowhere in sight.

Then one day on the set (the rear courtyard of the W. 75 St. brownstone where I was janitor) Jack pushed a copy of ‘On The Road’ into my hands, saying, “It’s about us.” I’d been reading Paul Bowles and H.P. Lovecraft and a smuggled in copy of ‘Lolita’ and the drop in writing level was too steep. “You’ll be able to stay with it on your sixth attempt”, Jack said, which proved to be true. It caught some things right, quirky ephemerals that hadn’t registered as events. Of course it helped stir a social revolution (disowned by Kerouac) and maybe Star Spangled To Death would’ve participated in that great humanist eruption if I had completed it and got it out in its proper time. Over six hours then, there was no way I could pay final sound-joining and printing lab costs. I screened camera originals a few times to records and spoken commentary but money didn’t happen and, pissed, in 1963 I put it aside to continue with affordable works (like near cost-free shadowplay). Its moment, I felt, had passed. Its invention, the very look of it, its texture was to a degree no longer unique. My pride was wounded. People were treating me as if I was normal. I got a measure of Jack’s fame when I heard a girl address her dog as Flaming Creature, but he chose – at a time when patrons were available to him – not to help. Like maybe his movie might be seen as coming from somewhere. I let it go and had another life, better I’m sure than the one that would’ve resulted from the release then of Star Spangled To Death.

I recall thinking when Kennedy took office there was less urgency to get it out. He looked like he had a sex life, had little kids that he surely wanted to raise above-ground, and indeed he did interfere with the Eisenhower plan to return Cuba to The Mob, costing him his life.

Video makes its present release possible. Yeah, yeah, it ain’t film, and I’d already begun my quest with it into the actuality of film rather than film as transparency. Rising from my own abstract-expressionist mindset. Let me be. I so appreciate what video permits (although the work, with one sinful exception, the reprise of ‘Are You Havin’ Any Fun?’, does not take off into electron free-play but stays respectful of film limits), and I appreciate the possibility of cheap DVD distribution. And if anyone has the passion and money and patience the video can guide final assembly of the film. At age 70 I have to attend to other cine-demands, like leaving something lasting of what Flo and I did in live performance with The Nervous System and Nervous Magic Lantern.

“Something lasting”? Habit of thought. I wonder if our masters (the hallowed image of The White House insists, to the subconscious, that The Old Plantation prevails) figure, in rationalising a way to live with their crimes, that “natural death” is often no less painful than an accelerated conclusion, so what the hell, the little fuckers will replenish their numbers soon enough. From where they are we all look alike, excepting those of us that stand up. I don’t feel hopeful when Bush lies are exposed, implausible to begin with; followers elect to believe, and hold on to beliefs doggedly. Followers expect leaders to lie and believing an obvious lie is how they demonstrate their faith. Lying mostly offends professors and not all of them by a long shot. No, I think we’re due to be interrupted, that history is about to come down through the roof on us this time. Sorry, truly, but I believe my film-title. Perhaps that it arose to mind almost a half-century ago and so many of us are still here, in sight of scientific breakthroughs galore, is reason for confidence in ongoing life. We certainly can resist the bastards! They are taking our lives, what more can we lose? Jack fumbled the making of his last film but how meaningful a title is No President.

Here, explaining, you get gravity. The movie achieves levity.

Is this video the real thing? In the winter of 1959 editing facilities were two nails in a wall holding two film reels and an enlarging glass and in 2003 a G4 with Final Cut Pro. Better to figure the entirety as another entry in my found-film oeuvre. I did drop some found-films from the original collage, including all biographic elements (like my maybe-father’s third-wedding home-movies), replacing with items more on track with central concerns of the work. Stuff gathered over the years with SSTD in mind, only some that could be squeezed into its ultimate realisation. The Follies entered sometime in the Sixties, the Micheaux entered my life with a bang in 1968 (Ten Minutes To Live being up there with the greatest; the DVD of SSTD should by rights be a double-feature with Ten Minutes To Live seeing as the titles go so well together) but only infiltrated SSTD during this latest editing. Ronald Reagan and the twerp presiding now, how ignore them? Perhaps with precisely the same pitch of outrage as my younger self I would not have made any concessions to audience capacity, only added things. There’s friends, I know, that will be glum over what they will perceive as signs of an orderly mind. My head, inside, isn’t all that different from what it was, I didn’t become someone else, but I did get the work together and in a profound way that’s the problem. It was supposed to lie in a jumbled heap, errant energies going nowhere, the talented viewer inferring form. A Frankenstein that fizzled but twitching and still dangerous to approach. Thoroughly star spangled but still kicking. —Ken Jacobs

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Winged Dialogue, 1967/2000, and Plan of Brussels, 1968/2000, 35mm, colour, sound, 21 min
Early Monthly Segments, 1968-70/2002, 35mm, colour, silent, 33 min
The Count of Days, 1969/2001, 16mm, colour, sound, 21 min
Palinode, 1970/2001, 16mm, colour, sound, 21 min
Diminished Frame, 1970/2001, 16mm, black-and-white and colour, sound, 24 min
Still Light, 1970/2001, 16mm, colour, sound, 25 min
From the Notebook of …, 1971/1998, 35mm, colour, sound, 48 min
The Painting, 1972/1999, 16mm, colour, sound, 13 min
Work done, 1972/1999, 35mm, colour, sound, 22 min
Ruskin, 1975/1997, 35mm, black-and-white and colour, sound, 45 min
Sotiros, 1976-78/1996, 35mm, colour, sound, 25 min
AMOR, 1980, 35mm, colour, sound, 15 min
Efpsychi, 1983/1996, 35mm, colour, sound, 20 min
Wingseed, 1985, 35mm, colour, sound, 15 min
The Hedge Theater, 1986-90/2002, 35mm, colour, sound, 19 min
The Stoas, 1991-97, 35mm, colour, sound, 22 min
The Ground, 1993-2001, 35mm, colour, sound, 20 min
Pitcher of Colored Light, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 24 min

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ROBERT BEAVERS STUDY DAY: Voice, Interval & Place
Saturday 15 November 2008, from 1-6pm
Norwich Aurora Festival

Filmmakers to be presented: Ute Aurand, Bruce Baillie, Robert Beavers, Francois Boué, Helga Fanderl, Gregory J. Markopoulos, Jeannette Muñoz.

Films to be shown and discussed include:

THE STOAS
Robert Beavers, 1991-97, 16mm, colour, sound, 22 min
“I sought in these small industrial arcades the spaces which can be seen first from one side and then from the other, a shape of emptiness, then the divinity of the river – this deep sense of appearance – and finally the grasping of the grape.” (Robert Beavers)

BLISS
Gregory J. Markopoulos, 1967, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 min
  and
ENIAIOS IV, Reel 2 (Nefeli Photos)
Gregory J. Markopulos, 1967/91, 16mm, colour, sound, 30 min
Bliss is a kaleidoscopic study of the interior of a small, Byzantine church on the Island of Hydra. This will be rare opportunity to view and compare the original version, edited spontaneously in camera over the two days it was shot, and the revised and extended treatment of the same footage, in which the images are isolated by measures of black frames.

MARIA UN DIE WELT
Ute Aurand, 1995, 16mm, black and white, sound, 15 min
The filmmaker Maria Lang moved to the countryside to take care of her elderly mother. Maria und die Welt (Maria and the World), by her friend Ute Aurand, is a portrait of that relationship and its setting.

VALENTIN DE LAS SIERRAS
Bruce Baillie, 1967, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
“Skin, eyes, knees, horses, hair, sun, earth. Old song of Mexican revolutionary hero, Valentin, Sung by blind Jose Santollo Nasido en Santa Crus de la Soledad.” (Bruce Baillie)

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HOLLIS FRAMPTION: HAPAX LEGOMENA
Saturday 24 October 2009, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

Hapax legomena are, literally, ‘things said once’. The Greek scholarly jargon refers to those words
that occur only a single time in the entire oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature. The title brackets a cycle of seven films, which make up a single work composed of detachable parts, each of which may be seen separately for its own qualities. The work is an oblique autobiography, seen in stereoscopic focus with the phylogeny of film art as I have had to recapitulate it during my own fitful development as a filmmaker. Hapax Legomena incorporates what I could learn along the way of making it, and includes my own false starts and blind alleys … what T.E. Hulme once called ‘the cold walks, and the lines that lead nowhere’. Such ‘double-vision’ – that is, the superimposition of a personal myth of the history of one’s art upon a factual account of one’s own persona – certainly does not originate with me. At least, I believe I see ample precedent in the last two books of James Joyce. (Hollis Frampton)

(NOSTALGIA)
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1971, 16mm, b/w, sound, 36 min
The narrative art of most young men is autobiographical. Since I have had little narrative experience, it seemed reasonable to accept biography as a convention, rather, however little information was available to me. My subject, hoping abjectly to be taken for a man of his time, had practiced rigorous self-effacement for a decade or more. So I was forced into examining his leavings and middens, like an archaeologist sifting for ostracizing pot shards. Since he had once been myself, I knew exactly where to look. Random debts and documents aside, he had left behind some thousands of still photographs made during his apprenticeship to the art I expound. Because my results were to be made public, I chose a mere dozen of these specimens to examine, leaving the rest for later investigators who would be doubly fortunate: first in their sentiment for their antagonist, and again in their intimacy with his work. (HF)

POETIC JUSTICE
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1972, 16mm, b/w, silent, 31 min
In Poetic Justice, Frampton presents us with a ‘scenario’ of extreme complexity in which the themes of sexuality, infidelity, voyeurism are ‘projected’ in narrative sequence entirely through the voice telling the tale – again it is the first person singular speaking, however, in the present tense and addressing the characters as ‘you’, ‘your lover’, and referring to an ‘I’. We see, on screen, only the physical aspect of a script, papers resting on a table … and the projection is that of a film as consonant with the projection of the mind. (Annette Michelson)

CRITICAL MASS
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1971, 16mm, b/w, sound, 16 min
As a work of art I think Critical Mass is quite universal and deals with all quarrels (those between men and women, or men and men, or women and women, or children, or war.) It is war! … It is one of the most delicate and clear statements of inter-human relationships and the difficulties of them that I have ever seen. It is very funny, and rather obviously so. It is a magic film in that you can enjoy it, with greater and greater appreciation, each time you look at it. Most aesthetic experiences are not enjoyable on the surface. You have to look at them a number of times before you are able to fully enjoy them, but this one stands up at once, and again and again, and is amazingly clear. (Stan Brakhage)

TRAVELLING MATTE
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1971, 16mm, b/w, silent, 34 min
One aspect of the film seems quite clear. Frampton is creating a metaphor for the artist, whose hand frames or moulds the world available to his perceptions according to the components of his vision and the limitations of his medium. Other aspects of this metaphor are suggested by Frampton’s inclusion of this revealing comment by Stan Brakhage in the Filmmakers’ Co-operative Catalogue: ‘This film metaphors an entire human life: birth, sex, death – the framing device is the fingers and palm of the maker’s hand, wherein others only attempt to read the future.’ While the events one sees through the opening in Frampton’s hand are generally fleeting and unspecific, it is possible that Brakhage’s description relates to the events we see through the hand: that the artist’s life begins when his medium begins to function, that he wanders through the world like a character out of Samuel Beckett, seeing various things, moving uphill for long periods until he attains, at least momentarily, a fuller vision (in one instance the hand comes away from the lens for a second), then moving back downhill until ‘his batteries run down’ and all sensation ceases. (Scott MacDonald)

ORDINARY MATTER
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1972, 16mm, b/w, sound-on-cd, 36 min
I suppose I think of it as a kind of acceleration from Travelling Matte, the eye is groping and feeling its way and staggering, and so forth. And in Ordinary Matter the need somehow to worry about those words and still photographs, and so forth, is behind. Ordinary Matter is for me a kind of ecstatic, headlong dive. (And it goes through nature, architecture, high peaks of contemporary civilization, and through the oldest monuments that we have – the scope of it in time and space is so wide …) and finally the eye that was trying to see out, through the little hole – through the fist, in Travelling Matte opens up and does, to an extent, really see out, or I feel it does, and ends with something that is a very old image in my eye, of running through corn fields as a child, with the leaves slapping me in the face, and the sun hitting me, and so forth … (HF interviewed by Jonas Mekas)

REMOTE CONTROL
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1972, 16mm, b/w & colour, sound, 29 min
A ‘baroque’ summary of film’s historic internal conflicts, chiefly those between narrative and metric/plastic montage; and between illusionist and graphic space. It incorporates three apposite ‘found’ narratives, condenses five ways of making, and includes a ‘surprise’ out of Haydn (or S.M. Eisenstein’s Ivan, Part II). (HF)

SPECIAL EFFECTS
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1972, 16mm, b/w, sound, 11 min
The frame itself, which divides what is present to consciousness from what is absolutely elsewhere, is tempered here by the breath, tremor, heartbeat of the perceiver. People this given space, if you will, with images of your own devising. The soundtrack was generated on a Buchla synthesizer at the University of Pittsburgh, through the kind intercession of Victor Grauer. (HF)

Download Programme Notes PDF

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HUMAN NATURE
Saturday 24 October 2009, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

PASSAGE BRIARE
Friedl vom Gröller, Austria, 2009, 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 min
A woman, a man, a smile. They sit in the sun, and what links them is the film’s real surprise: a matter-of-fact gesture which is probably taboo for others. It’s up to the film itself to reveal what this gesture is. The anarchic humour of Passage Briare liberates the viewer for a brief, beautiful moment from the fear of getting old. (Maya McKechneay)

HOTEL ROCCALBA
Josef Dabernig, Austria, 2009, 35mm, b/w, sound, 10 min
Apparently over two years in the making (the artist displayed the script in a gallery exhibition in 2007, with suitably structural/conceptual directorial commentary), Hotel Roccalba is a small wonder, the sort of film that somehow manages to astonish with its precision while at the same time allowing enough basic human breathing room to permit limitless discovery. Like the best formalist efforts – Gerhard Richter paintings, Anton Webern compositions – you can naturally learn Dabernig’s film by heart because it does observe a kind of schematic organization. But it continues to unfold, with a warm, enveloping humour all the same. What really defines Hotel Roccalba is a bizarre, thrilling sense of the disorganized, random stuff of life being invisibly, imperceptibly choreographed; a God-like aspect that is gradually revealed, becoming a kind of Cubist hysteria. (Michael Sickinski)

GREGOR ALEXIS
Jana Debus, Germany, 2008, video, colour, sound, 20 min
An empty house. Beautiful, unobtrusive, rapt images of a demolished landscape. A cautious but moving documentary portrait of the director’s schizophrenic brother. (Kunstfilm Biennale, Cologne)

THE DISCOVERY
Ken Jacobs, USA, 2008, video, colour, silent, 4 min
She thought Tom was alone. Have we people been just as we are for centuries and centuries? With no essential changes beyond our slang?(Ken Jacobs)

THE PRESENTATION THEME
Jim Trainor, USA, 2008, 16mm, b/w, sound, 14 min
The Presentation Theme is based on something very specific. This is not explicit in the film itself, which is elusive on that score – although I would like the audience to have the feeling that there is something ‘real’ at the core of it. Or, to put it another way, that they would suspect, through the specificity of the references, that the filmmaker didn’t just make everything up himself. I got the idea from certain archaeology books, which describe an ancient Peruvian culture called the Moche. They existed long before the Inca, around 100 to 800 AD, then disappeared. They left a lot of pottery behind, and some of the pottery is moulded into shapes of supernatural figures, rulers, animals, narrative scenes; and other pottery is plain in shape but is covered in painting – specifically cartoonish-looking figures, again enacting mythological themes. All of the art is quite mysterious, as there is no-one to interpret it for us (and no written language, of course). The moulded pottery often has erotic themes and the painted pottery often has themes of warfare and human sacrifice. ‘The Presentation Theme’ in Moche archaeology refers to the human sacrifice narrative, in which the priests and priestesses are ultimately presented with goblets of victims’ blood. (Jim Trainor)

BURNING PALACE
Mara Mattuska & Chris Haring, Austria, 2009, video, colour, sound, 32 min
Austrian filmmaker Mara Mattuschka has already worked with choreographer Chris Haring several times before and has transferred the dance performances created by him and his company ‘liquid loft’ into experimental films. After Legal Errorist (2005), Part Time Heroes (2007) and Running Sushi (2008) Mattuschka committed herself to Chris Haring’s choreographic trilogy ‘Posing Project’ and made a film called Burning Palace out of the second, award-winning part ‘The Art of Seduction’. Five dancers journey through the emotions of Eros, in reality and in the imagination, in mythology and in the present day. Accompanied by strange-seeming sound collages, they stray through the labyrinthine corridors of the ‘Burning Palace’ hotel. An ecstatic, melancholy epic of the tension that ensures survival and makes the Earth move. (www.impulstanz.com)

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THE EXCEPTION AND THE RULE
Sunday 25 October 2009, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

ME BRONI BA (MY WHITE BABY)
Akosua Adoma Owusu, USA-Ghana, 2008, video, colour, sound, 22 min
From weaves to Jehri curls and dreads, the politics behind hairstyling comes from the roots of self-identification. I am always interested in representations of beauty. I wanted to use the specifics of hair as a metaphor for personal identity, culture, and language. I was also interested in showing the creativity of African women and how this creativity is applied to the body. Me Broni Ba was inspired by an event my older sister experienced when she immigrated to the States. My father told me she touched the hair of white children in her elementary class. The bold touch of the hair is what always stuck with me. Like my sister, I find it difficult to integrate successfully into both Ghanaian and American cultures, and it is often manifested in the way I style my hair. The text in the film came from an excerpt of her childhood journal, the film sort of stemmed from this. (Akosua Adoma Owusu)

MY TEARS ARE DRY
Laida Lertxundi, USA-Spain, 2009, 16mm, colour, sound, 4 min
A film in the three parts of a dialectic. Hoagy Land’s song is played and interrupted by guitar sounds, two women, a bed, an armchair, and the beautiful outside. The lyrics of the song reference the eternal sunshine of California and its promises. (Laida Lertxundi)

THE EXCEPTION AND THE RULE
Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, UK-Pakistan-India, 2009, video, colour, sound, 38 min
The Exception and the Rule, a film shot in Karachi as part of the Museum of Non Participation project, references problematic aspects of the ethnographic documentary film. How might one make a film about a foreign culture and thereby get away from one’s own inscribed images of that culture? Furthermore, is it possible to make such a film and thereby include the perspectives of those being filmed? And, finally, which film genre is able to deal with this kind of theoretical issue? The result is an extremely idiosyncratic hybrid composed of various genres that do not permeate one another but are presented consecutively, in such a manner as to be cited as methods. Genres such as the classic ethnographic film pop up along with the experimental genres of first person documentary, conceptual film and the fake. If the Museum of Non Participation is a non-museum, The Exception and the Rule is a non-documentary film. One learns as little about a foreign culture via the media as one learns about the vital artistic moment (symbolized in myth by the muses) via a museum. The film entwines images of the Other in a complex interweave of medial references and formal refractions; it insists on the moment of non-communicable experience – and thus exacts from the viewer the direct, ‘uncomfortable’ encounter with the real Other. (Marcel Schwierin)
www.mirza-butler.net

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FILM IST. A GIRL & A GUN
Sunday 25 October 2009, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

FILM IST. A GIRL & A GUN
Gustav Deutsch, Austria, 2009, 35mm, colour, sound, 97 min
During the opening sequence of Gustav Deutsch’s FILM IST. a girl & a gun, a film that received its North American premiere at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, we see violet-tinted footage of the real-life cowgirl and sharpshooter Annie Oakley demonstrating her prowess with a gun. After the opening title cards, the film opens with deep red moving images that evoke the creation of the world – shooting flames, circles of fire, smouldering lava, a large-breasted woman, bubbling ooze. Many sequences made with found footage would follow – most all from the silent cinema, but remade, tinted, and ordered in bravura of original filmmaking. Taking off from D.W. Griffith’s quote that all a film requires is a girl and a gun, Episode 13 of Deutsch’s larger project, FILM IST, grows into an elemental exploration of Eros and Thanatos, sex and death.

In 1995, as many were celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of cinema, Austrian filmmaker Gustav Deutsch began his multi-year project on the meaning of cinema, sketching out a list of quotes about the art form. Soon, the project became a meditation on the meaning of cinema itself, one that the filmmaker likens to a naturally occurring phenomenon. Like the camera obscura this architect-trained artist has built near his house in Greece, its foundations resting on a concrete foundation of a World War II era German battery, the cinema can serve as a place to contemplate a spectacle of wonders and to ponder universal themes.

FILM IST. a girl & a gun follows the structure of a five act Greek drama, using classical texts by
Sappho, Hesiod and Platon. ‘I wasn’t sure I would start with Genesis,’ the filmmaker explained to me while visiting New York for the Tribeca premiere, ‘but in the archives were these amazing volcanoes in Indonesia … exceptional footage.’ He continued, ‘I wanted to talk about the creation of the universe from the eyes of the goddess of creation, and then destruction. There’s no creation without destruction.’

After seeing images in the Imperial War Museum from the First World War, Deutsch explained, ‘It was amazing to see how millions of men were fighting in a kind of …’ and here he inserts a word from German that means self-forgetting and self-annihilation ‘… that would never have been understandable. What belief system makes them act like this? I don’t accept it. Human beings don’t learn. Therefore, film is ‘missionary’.’

Found footage filmmaking has its roots in experimental and avant-garde traditions. Joseph Cornell is often considered an important early pioneer of the art, Bruce Conner the king during his lifetime, and now Deutsch is considered the living master of this genre. His films are not just edited compilations of clips; rather, the elements become the artistic material in a painstakingly thought-out original artistic work. Much of the source images are orphan films, works that have been previously overlooked or neglected but are culturally significant. He seeks a range of materials, from science and education films to melodramas and slapstick comedies.

Four years in production, the first phase of FILM IST. a girl & a gun was to find material within the archives and to work on the 90-page script. ‘I wanted to choose long excerpts,’ he said, ‘because I thought it was very important to get into the mood and sense it. To be shocked, aroused, to talk about it.’ He started with list of ideas, sending ‘keywords’ to people in the archives. As with any filmmaker, another phase involved convincing the financial supporters to back the work.

He worked with ten archives in Europe, including a rich source in the Netherlands Filmmuseum, but he also wanted to draw upon material from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington, the source of footage for explorations into sexuality. Because of the Institute’s mandates that the material must follow the strict guidelines of the founder, including serving the purpose of science, it took Deutsch a year to convince them that his use of footage would be appropriate. Arriving in Indiana, he looked through 120 films and selected 42 for viewing, but one-fifth of them were not suitable for playing on an editing table. He helped preserve some of the fragile material for use by the archive by transferring them to other formats.

Together with his long-time partner, artist Hanna Schimek, he estimates that he viewed a total of over 2,500 films in multiple archives, some features and many short subjects, all the while taking notes and sketches. Paring down the potentially useful material to twenty-five hours of footage, he scanned and digitized the clips for his film library. Rendering the clips to black and white, Deutsch applied a range of twelve colours to the appropriate clips, each standing for different emotions. The colours also adhere to traditions in the aesthetics of silent film. He looks for images that can provide a ‘gateway’, as he calls them, to lead from one idea to the next. Each captured frame is 1.8 to 2MB, with notes to identify them. After editing for a year, they went to the archives to order films for scanning and another process of editing. He worked in a similar way with the composers for the original score. After ordering the sequence, the work was then blown up to a 35mm print.

One important theme of the work, Deutsch stressed to me in our conversation, was the search within relationships between males and females ‘for the other half’. ‘For example’, he said, ‘I can shift my behaviour from male to female. The female part is not valued enough. We need to encourage all of us to work with the female side. The limitations of the existing material within the early era of cinema restricted my ability to visually show more of the female point of view.’ In addition, he chose not to use images from the contemporary era, he explained, because most of the issues involving sex and warfare were already established with the first sexual revolution and the First World War. Like a girl and a gun, creation and destruction had already found their way into the spaces of the earliest cinema.

(Teri Tynes)

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WHIRL OF CONFUSION
Sunday 25 October 2009, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

AND THE SUN FLOWERS
Mary Helena Clark, USA, 2008, video, colour, sound, 5 min
Henry James had his figure in the carpet; Da Vinci found faces on the wall.
Within this Baltimore wallpaper: a floral forest of hidden depth and concealment, the hues and fragrance of another era. Surface decoration holds permeable planes, inner passages. There emerges a hypnotic empyrean flower, a solar fossil, a speaking anemone, of paper, of human muscle, of unknown origin, delivering an unreasonable message of rare tranquillity. (Mark McElhatten)

SHOT FILM
Greg Pope, UK-Norway, 2009, 35mm, colour, sound, 4 min
A shotgun is aimed onto filmstrips. Images and sound are created through the destructive force and spread of the shot. Images as wound – entry and exit points. A pattern sliced and spliced, a single instant re-presented and duplicated through time. A literal interpretation unmasks the implied violence embedded in a common phrase ‘to shoot a film’. (Greg Pope)

CONTRE-JOUR
Matthias Müller & Christoph Giradet, Germany, 2009, 35mm, colour, sound, 11 min
The look with which we comprehend the world and which it casts back at us in response breaks up in Contre-jour into disquieting fragments. Blurs, flashes and stroboscope montages disintegrate reality into shadowy images that inflict pain on the eye. A spotlight precisely cuts the individual out of the darkness.
‘I wish you could see what I see’ remains a futile hope. Blind spots gape between self-perception and the perception of others. (Kristina Tieke)

FILM FOR INVISIBLE INK CASE NO. 142: ABBREVIATION FOR DEAD WINTER (DIMINISHED BY 1,794)
David Gatten, USA, 2008, 16mm, b/w, sound, 13 min
Gatten’s Film takes up Darwin to nearly fossilize his words and attempt minute rediscovery in a paper’s inky fibres. Constantly turning the focus (so it seems), Gatten lets these gossamer ink-strands ripple into view out of total blankness (an empty world), more and more, so that even when they are in focus, they’re still just an abstraction: a bunch of fibres entwined. And even, then, of course, there’s the feeling that if Gatten keeps refocusing he’ll discover entirely new strands as well; appropriate to a film whose words are from Darwin, Film feels like an archaeological dig. (David Phelps)
www.davidgattenfilm.com

WOLF’S FROTH / AMONGST OTHER THINGS
Paul Abbott, UK, 2009, video, colour, sound, 15 min

FALSE AGING
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2008, video, colour, sound, 15 min
It’s hard to believe that False Aging clocks in at under 15 minutes, given how powerfully it evokes passing decades punctuated by muffled eruptions of longing and regret. A button revolves around a clock – and the world moves with it. Klahr shares Joseph Cornell’s alchemical genius, but his collaged reveries cast deeper shadows and offer little magical protection from death and disappointment. The soundtrack draws on The Valley of the Dolls, Jefferson Airplane, and Lou Reed & John Cale’s ‘Songs for Drella’.
‘As Cale channels Warhol, recounting a nightmare involving a snowy park under the stairs and anxieties about troubles real and imagined, a blond man peers at cityscapes, a skeletal hand snatches a fortune, and no-longer-redeemable trading stamps flutter by.’ (Kristin M. Jones)

MOUNT SHASTA
Oliver Husain, Canada, 2008, 16mm, colour, sound, 8 min
Pastel-coloured institutional walls contain fabric-and-pipe-cleaner inventions of a whimsy that almost seems forced, were it not for the total belief evinced by those participating in it. In the background, a man at a cheap keyboard (again, of the sort familiar from middle-school music rooms of a certain era) warbles a story-song as half-formed handkerchief puppets fly around each other on visible wires, the puppeteers made ‘invisible’ by their white canvas beekeeper suits. Husain’s story is about a mountain trip waylaid by a fog which turns out to be the smoke from a destructive fire. In a sense, this could be a way of understanding Mount Shasta as a film. The elements that envelop this gorgeous film in mystery (is this avant-garde? a narrative short?
a children’s film?) are also the ones that threaten to unmake it at every turn, since ‘the spell’ is always already about our ability to turn away from its blatant disenchantment. (Michael Sickinski)
www.husain.de

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