DISTANCE AND DISPLACEMENT
Saturday 28 October 2006, at 4pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

LET THERE BE WHISTLEBLOWERS
Ken Jacobs, USA, 2005, video, b/w, sound, 18 min
A train passes through a tunnel and hurtles on to a station. Time and space is toyed with, things enter an impossible state of on-going movement while going nowhere. The actual tunnel experience sets off a metaphysical one. Composed to the first part of ‘Drumming’ by Steve Reich. (Ken Jacobs)

UNIFINISHED PASSAGES
Brett Kashmere, Canada, 2005, video, b/w, sound, 17 min
This five-part film cycle emphasizes instants, rather than developing situations. Designed using indeterminate loop forms, and organized around themes of dislocation, transition, settlement, modernity and transportation, Unfinished Passages traces my great-grandfather’s journey from London, England to Golden Plains, Saskatchewan at the turn of the 20th century. Using the shadow play of light and darkness as a metaphor for human memory, Unfinished Passages reframes his forced immigration , orphan experience through the developing lens of the cinema. In bringing to light this aspect of my family history I draw upon the language of early cinema, beginning with the straightforward visual simplicity of Lumière demonstration pieces such as Boat Leaving the Harbour (1896) and The Arrival of a Train at the Station (1895), and Birt Acre’s Rough Sea at Dover (1895). The second part, inspired by Georges Méliès, follows the pattern of a dream and, as in a dream its real meaning is displaced and dispersed through associative connections. Part three forms a transitional pivot, seizing on the romanticized image of a moving train as an emblem for cinematic and technological progress. In part four the film proceeds to a more constructive, layered assembly based on the theory and practice of Dziga Vertov. Part five draws on the individual self-expression and open-ended conclusion of Francois Truffaut’s 400 Blows (1959). The reconstruction of my great-grandfather’s passage from Europe to Canada is, at the same time, expressed as a coterminous movement through film history. (Brett Kashmere)
www.brettkashmere.com

THIS IS MY LAND
Ben Rivers, UK, 2006, 16mm, b/w, sound, 14 min
A portrait of Jake Williams, who has lived in the middle of Clashindarroch Forest, Aberdeenshire, for over twenty years. Jake always has a hundred jobs on at any one time, fragmenting them into a system that he says eventually gets them all done some day; an expert mandolin player; a committed permaculturist who never throws anything away in the conventional sense, and has compost heaps going back many, many years. He has a different sense of time to most people in the 21st Century, which is explicitly expressed in his idea for creating hedges by putting up bird feeders. It struck me straight away that there were parallels between our ways of working – I have tried to be as self-reliant as possible and apart from the idea of filmmaking as an industry – Jake’s life and garden are much the same – he can sustain himself from what he grows and so needs little from others. To Jake this isn’t about nostalgia for some treasured pre-electric past, but more, a very real future. (Ben Rivers)

THE OTHER SIDE
Bill Brown, USA, 2006, 16mm, colour, sound, 43 min
Rooted in the true sense of ‘independent’ in voice and image, The Other Side is a personal essay documentary imbued with magical landscapes and searing observations softly spoken during the director’s cinematic trek along the United States-Mexican border. Throughout the 2,000-mile journey, Texas-based filmmaker Bill Brown considers the border as an historical and political geography of aspiration, insecurity, and transition. He talks to undocumented immigrants who have risked their lives to cross the border and to border activists whose politics have put them at odds with the guardians of homeland security. A native Texan who has made several documentary shorts, Brown is a sublime, poetic master of wide-open, in-between spaces, of desert and deserted vistas. The Other Side is a rare chance to discover one of America’s leading new cinematic voices. (Film Society of Lincoln Center)
To describe myself as documentary filmmaker is to own up to a troubled profession, what with its unfortunate aspiring to Truth and Objectivity. I’ve tried to cope with this by personalizing my films, insinuating my own voice and disavowing any pose of authority or conclusiveness. More than that, I’m interested in moving the documentary toward something like a metaphysics of fact, where fact materializes for a moment, only to dissolve into daydreams and melancholy and goose bumps.
I find myself drawn again and again to the same spaces: those wide open in-between spaces; landscapes of abandoned things; border zones and landscapes of transition, whether on the far edges of Las Vegas suburban sprawl, or along the fence line of abandoned missile silos in North Dakota. I’m drawn to the drama of transits and transitions played out on landscapes like these. I find myself drawn to the uncanny, too: UFOs and crop circles and ghost stories. The uncanny short-circuits the conclusiveness of our daily lives, which is something I like about it. I’m not sure if the uncanny has some special access to truth, but the uncanny and the true both are spooky. Both haunt us, hovering close by but just out of reach. (Bill Brown)

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SHINE ON
Sunday 29 October 2006, at 9pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

SAME DAY NICE BISCOTTS
Luther Price, USA, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 min
A mournful dissolving jewel set in bruised magenta sends out votive glints of dying light. A lone bird chirps and branches cover our eyes. Working from a stack of abandoned multiple film prints (nearly identical and close to thirteen in number), Luther Price makes reiterative loops that underline futility, echo hope, and mark every camera movement with the vain promise of fresh outcome and inevitable predestination. (Mark McElhatten)

KRYPTON IS DOOMED
Ken Jacobs, USA, 2005, video, colour, sound, 34 min
In his 5th floor walk-up on the Lower East Side, Jack Smith was determined to complete the beautification of his kitchen cabinet. AIDS was pressing. His friends pitched in, accepting slave status. Jack demanded this and Jack demanded that but because he wanted it perfect (as he had wanted his films to be perfect), and because perfection proved elusive, the remodeling finally had to be abandoned. Each friend going his or her own sad way. We are living under the imminent threat of GODS. The Republican ploy of allying with the religious right for votes is proving shortsighted (grasping individuals tend to be shortsighted) and, as in Iraq, our own religious crazies are now avid for fulfillment. Of prophecy. You’ve got to hand it to those who resist, for the sake of the grass and the animals and the children, and for the preservation of the occasional work of art among the Fabergé eggs, and who knows but that they will succeed against all odds and swerve their respective societies away from sure doom. We like to think so, and it’s easy to, after a lot of movies and the fact that all the living are beneficiaries of the ones who made it through – through normal attrition, that is, all those Papas and especially Mamas that did succeed in sending forward their young. In the late 1930s two Jewish teenagers came up with the story of a couple that sent their infant child on a lone trip of escape through space from an exploding planet. We all know the story: the boy would survive on Earth but would have to keep his identity secret. Were Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel dreaming out loud? Was Krypton the Old World heading into WWII and was the child escaping the fate of the Jews of Europe? The Jews then, all of us now. Jack’s friends failed to convince him to make a will. ”Why bother?” he asked. ”To protect your work in the future.” ”The future?” Jack replied, “The future will be worse.” (Ken Jacobs)

THE COUNTER GIRL TRILOGY
Courtney Hoskins, USA, 2006, 16mm, colour, silent, 6 min
To make ends meet, I took a job as a makeup counter salesperson. At first, I found this employment to be very satisfying. I was able to smell perfumes all day and ‘paint’ faces with makeup. After all, the human face is a fascinating canvass. The most subtle change can have dramatic effects (for example, it is amazing what a small touch of purple on the eyelids can do for green eyes) ! One day, that bottle of perfume came crashing down on the tile floor. The stench of reality woke me from my drugged state. I was required to go through several training seminars given by the cosmetics corporate giant. Nestled comfortably in the Rocky Mountains, I sat in horror as the ‘rep’ went over our ‘job duties’. My job went from ‘makeup artist’ to ‘scam artist’ right before my eyes! I learned that the average woman in Western society uses twenty cosmetics products each morning. I learned that this ‘average woman’ will also spend money she doesn’t have on cosmetics before spending it on anything else. Most disturbingly, I learned how to manipulate women by playing off of their insecurities. It’s no wonder these companies are so powerful. I couldn’t immediately quit my job, so I tried to make the best of it. One day, I happened upon three amazing shades of lip gloss that were hidden away in a drawer. Although they were for sale, they were not on the display wall. These particular lip glosses contain cholesterol, which in 1888, Fredrich Reinitzer discovered could be manipulated to exist as a new state of matter. He soon coined the word ‘liquid crystal’. I had been trying to purchase liquid crystal materials for my films for some time. I had only managed to find one or two different types. Because the materials are used in computer screens (and, as I learned, lip gloss), they are kept under wraps. I would never have guessed that such incredible materials would have fallen into my lap while working one of the worst jobs I have ever had. (Courtney Hoskins)

BLAH BLAH BLAH
Dietmar Brehm, Austria, 2006, 16mm, colour, sound, 13 min
An essay on restlessness: Blah Blah Blah (based on a song by Iggy Pop: Dietmar Brehm “never really liked it”, but likes it for that very reason) contains a large number of various kinds of shots in a montage which alternates between contemplative scenes and rapid cascades of images. Brehm uses sounds of rain and thunder, with which he is quite familiar, on the soundtrack. In addition a beat measures the rhythm, and its regularity is what makes the Blah Blah Blah project ‘measurable’. Dietmar Brehm has devoted himself to filming his own footage at a higher speed. He uses images typical of a still life (whisky bottles, ashtrays, etc.) and refracts them ironically (a chair stands on two legs), combines them with footage used in earlier works, and arranges them in a row like fragmentary thoughts. The result is a consciousness film par excellence. In Blah Blah Blah Brehm examines his own film oeuvre, not for the purpose of seeing what he has achieved, but in the interests of casually increasing its intensity. Instead of intruding into the images, he merely touches upon them lightly this time. All hope for calm, such as with a shot of a statue in a park, is disappointed because, in Blah Blah Blah, Brehm has applied the principle of the mental foray to his own film, which he shoots with his camera, speeds up, turns around, and makes absorb itself: Blah Blah Blah becomes ‘Blah Blah Blah’. Only those viewers who share the restlessness will recognize the inversion. (Bert Rebhandl)

SURFACING
Barbara Sternberg, Canada, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…”
(William Wordsworth)
Our busy comings and goings, on the move, working at life, are pictured through layers of images and scratched emulsion. Movement through various planes struggles towards emergence. (Barbara Sternberg)
“The process of transformation [from caterpillar to butterfly] consists mostly of decay and then of this crisis, when emergence from what came before must be total and abrupt.” (Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
www.barbarasternberg.com

AND WE ALL SHINE ON
Michael Robinson, USA, 2006, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min
An ill wind is transmitting through the lonely night, its signals spreading myth and deception along its murky path. Conjuring a vision of a post-apocalyptic paradise, this unworldly broadcast reveals its hidden demons via layered landscapes and karaoke, singing the dangers of mediated spirituality. (Michael Robinson)
www.poisonberries.net

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LUIS RECODER + SANDRA GIBSON
Monday 30 October 2006, at 7:30pm
London ICA Theatre

UNTITLED
Luis Recoder, Sandra Gibson & Daniel Menche, USA, 2006, 2 x 16mm, colour, sound, variable duration

Luis Recoder + Sandra Gibson are two filmmakers who create films and performed film installations of gracefully shifting abstractions, flickering geometry and real, honest beauty. Looped film, created without the use of a camera, is gently coaxed by hand into investigations of pure colour with the aid of water, glass and mist. The piece has been developed with Daniel Menche, a US experimental musician whose approach to sound shares startling similarities to Luis and Sandra’s approach to light and film; pure sound is born of and mediated by the body and its interaction with objects. Menche sources sound live from his heart, lungs or larynx or from contact with natural elements, a stone on glass, wind or water. (www.courtisane.be)

The hand absorbs the light. Obscures, darkens. An opaque appearance in the field of light ‘materialises’ the light. Discloses its light-ness. For light itself is not enough to show this. For light to show this it must be obscured, covered-over, withheld. It must be stopped, stopped-up, stopped-down, in order to achieve the point of clearest resolution. It is only then that the light, absorbed by the hand, returns the gesture as if reaching out to greet the latter. The cut-out dark figure in the field of light throws into relief the dialectic: light-and-shadow. Shadow points to light, and not the other way around. The one holds the key to the other and are by no means self-contained containers of metaphysical essences. If the hand in the light is a sign that the mind perceives the light, it is not the purity of light itself that issues forth this knowledge but the cut-out figure of an opacity articulating its powers of resolution. (Recoder + Gibson)

Luis Recoder + Sandra Gibson have shown their collaborative film performances and installations at many film festivals, museums, galleries and alternative venues since, 2001. Their work touches upon the material-physical properties of the film medium – its sculptural, painterly and tactile potential. In addressing the materials and processes of their medium via performance and installation, Gibson and Recoder play with and against the illusory currents of cinema. (Waves Festival)

Thanks to the ICA, Vivienne Gaskin, Emma Quinn, Lee Curran and Danni Colgan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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THE NATURE OF OUR LOOKING
Friday 9 November 2007, at 8:40pm
London BFI Southbank NFT2

LOOKING AT THE SEA
Peter Hutton, USA, 2001, 16mm, b/w, silent, 15 min
Most people go to films to get some kind of hit, come kind of overwhelming experience, whether it’s like an amusement park ride or an ideological, informational hit that gives you a critical insight into an issue or an idea. But for those few people who feel they need a reprieve occasionally, who want to cleanse the palate a bit, whether for spiritual or physiological regions, these films seem to be somewhat effective. (Peter Hutton, interviewed by Scott MacDonald in “A Critical Cinema 3”)

WHAT THE WATER SAID NOS 4-6
David Gatten, USA, 2006, 16mm, colour, sound, 17 min
What the water said is literally inscribed on the strips of unexposed celluloid that Gatten cast into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina. Encased in crab traps, the fragmented filmstrips harbour mystical messages from the underwater world, a source of seemingly never-ending fascination. The sea, its salt, sand and rocks, and its gnawing creatures have created the film’s inimitable textured patterns and sounds, while passages from Western literature’s greatest sea odysseys – from “The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” to “Moby Dick” – remind us of the sea’s singular place in our imagination. (Toronto International Film Festival)
www.davidgattenfilm.com

LAKE (NOCTURNE)
Lucy Reynolds, UK, 2007, 16mm, b/w, silent, 12 min
Lake (nocturne) is a study of the interplay of artificial light with the changing patterns and movements in nature, exploring the illuminations and obfuscations that occur in landscape after dark. The shadowy forms of landscaped lake and parkland also resonate with past narratives of the pleasure garden, recalling the original meaning of nocturne as a term for music composed to be performed at night-time, as accompaniment to the illuminated tableaux, spectacles and fétes of grand gardens, evoking a lost domain. (Lucy Reynolds)

REDSHIFT
Emily Richardson, UK, 2001, 16mm, colour, sound, 4 min
In astronomical terminology ‘redshift’ is a term used in calculating the distance of stars from the earth, hence determining their age. Redshift attempts to show the huge geometry of the night sky and give an altered perspective of the landscape, using long exposures, fixed camera positions, long shots and time-lapse animation techniques to reveal aspects of the night that are invisible to the naked eye. It takes these formal concerns into an emotional realm and uses the figurative to express philosophical ideas about our relationship to the world. The film has a gentle intensity to it, and is composed of changes of light across the sea, sky and mountains. It shows movement where there is apparent stillness, whether in the formation of weather patterns, movement of stars, the illumination of a building by passing car headlights or boats darting back and forth across the sea’s horizon. The sound has been composed for the film by Benedict Drew, taking field recordings of the aurora borealis as a starting point, and using purely computer generated sound to create a soundtrack that reflects the unheard elements present in the Earth’s atmosphere. (LUX)
www.emilyrichardson.org.uk

OBSERVANDO EL CIELO
Jeanne Liotta, USA, 2007, 16mm, b/w & colour, sound, 17 min
I refer to my films of the night sky as “16mm celestial field recordings” to reinforce their non-fiction status … This work is not metaphor but document. Even that light which travelled so far and so long to reach us makes its mark directly upon the emulsion … The subject of my work is perception itself, though it is variously manifested through attention to landscape, pure abstraction, the body in space, cinema itself, or, in Observando El Cielo, with systems such as Science. This extends into the found film and historical/educational footage, as testimonials to the limits of our understanding at any given time. The world itself is something we find, over and over again, and interpret it each time in a different way. (Jeanne Liotta)
www.jeanneliotta.net

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

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THE NATURE OF SYSTEMS
Saturday 10 November 2007, at 8:40pm
London BFI Southbank NFT2

STREAM LINE (DOCUMENTATION)
Chris Meigh-Andrews, UK, 1991, video, colour, sound, 6 min
I was particularly interested in issues relating to the relationship between technology and nature, and with notions of the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ and to the idea of bringing aspects of landscape into a gallery space. I had conceived of the piece as one that would cross an entire gallery floor, encouraging visitors to cross the space, following the motion across the monitors. The bridge seemed an apt device, as it had both metaphorical and practical dimensions; it would serve as a viewing platform, provide a way of crossing the room and reinforce the landscape concept. (Chris Meigh-Andrews)
www.meigh-andrews.com

BIT-SCAPES 135.1_08
Davide Quagliola & Chiara Horn, UK, 2006, video, colour, sound, 3 min
Shot on location in Western Australia, Bit-Scapes explores digital reproduction and manipulation. Through the combination of natural landscape footage and computer-generated graphics, BitScapes investigates the ambiguity of photo-realism in the digital realm as location material processed with custom software creates a series of images that reinterpret the organic landscape structures. The result is a series of audiovisual compositions where natural elements seem to coexist harmoniously with the artificial in the creation of a new ‘digital biosphere’. (Davide Quagliola & Chiara Horn)
www.quayola.com

THE SOUND OF MICROCLIMATES
Semiconductor, UK, 2004, video, colour, sound, 8 min
The Sound of Microclimates reveals the sights and sounds of a series of unusual weather patterns in the Paris of today. Here, architecture has become interwoven with the natural processes of the geographical landscape. Set within the un-noticed moments in time, extreme microclimates are presented as the future in city accessories, revealing the unseen urban terrains of tomorrow. They exist as a series of weather observations that animate the evolution of the inanimate urban condition. (Semiconductor)
www.semiconductorfilms.com

SUBURBS OF THE VOID
Thomas Köner, Germany-Finland, 2004, video, colour, sound, 14 min
Köner used 2000 photographs for Suburbs of the Void. The visual material belongs to a traffic security camera. It transfers the pictures via the Internet, where Köner collected them and arranged them into a video. The town is situated in Northern Finland near the polar circle. Permafrost and darkness dominate the sight most time of the day. For Köner, the permanent cold is connected with a general slowing down leading to a sharpened attention. The soundtrack supports this aspect. Sometimes one can hear slight noises of playing children in the background. In front of the complete emptiness, these sounds must occur like memories, telescoping from the distance into the picture. (Holger Birkholz)
www.koener.de

TRAIN NO.8
Daniel Crooks, Australia, 2005, video, colour, sound, 6 min
In Train No. 8, Daniel Crooks uses his signature ‘timeslice’ technique to offer an unexpected ride through a London urban landscape. In his experiments, Crooks divides digital footage into segments of time; when reconstructed the segments offer a distorted version of reality where time, space and motion appear on the same plane. (FACT)
www.dlab.com.au

BIT-SCAPES 135.2_03
Davide Quagliola & Chiara Horn, UK, 2006, video, colour, sound, 3 min
See above

UNTITLED
Rachel Reupke, UK, 2006, video, colour, silent, 2 x 90 sec
Rachel Reupke bounces the background and foreground in her videos, propelling the viewer into different dimensions within the same space. The shots appear to have been recorded using a remote automated camera and are presented as brief clips, extracted from perhaps days of footage. Viewing these simple panoramas becomes an increasing complex experience as changes in atmospheric conditions affect the camera, the auto focus shifts and the weather closes in. (Danielle Arnaud Gallery)

VOILIERS ET COQUELICOTS
Rose Lowder, France, 2002, 16mm, colour, silent, 3 min
Little is necessary for everything to appear differently. The date, the hour, the weather, the space’s layout, one’s glance or presence of mind … can make everything change. The boats sail out of the Vieux port in Marseilles to be amongst the poppy fields. (Rose Lowder)

BIT-SCAPES 135.7_13
Davide Quagliola & Chiara Horn, UK, 2006, video, colour, sound, 3 min
See above

AS WE ALL KNOW
Alix Poscharsky, UK-Germany, 2006, 16mm, colour, sound, 8 min
This film is a six-hour time-lapse sun track, shot around sunset. With the sun locked in the middle, the earth appears to be moving from left to right across the frame (or around the sun). Referencing science fiction, this film is about the discrepancy between a scientific world-view and everyday life. As we all know, the earth is moving round the sun, but the sun appears to be moving round the earth. (Alix Poscharsky)
www.elusivetuesday.com

The following works are showing in the BFI Foyer

GLENLANDIA (excerpt)
Susan Collins, UK, 2005-07, online, colour, silent, 2 years
Glenlandia is intended to be viewed full screen and updated live to your computer in real time. Now offline, this version is compiled from the archive of images providing continuous documentation to give an impression of how the work appeared live. From September 2005 to September 2007 a webcam transmitted images of Loch Faskally, Perthshire, Scotland from the FRS Research laboratory, Faskally. The webcam harvested images pixel by pixel, second by second, day by day over the course of the two years. Each image was collected from top to bottom and left to right in horizontal bands continuously, marking visible fluctuations in light and movement throughout the day and being archived at two-hour intervals. Although this appears to be a quintessentially natural Scottish landscape, Loch Faskally is in fact man made. It was created behind the hydro dam at Pitlochry which was built in 1947-50 as part of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board’s Tummel/Garry Power Scheme. (Susan Collins)
www.susan-collins.net

TREE STUDIES
Chris Welsby, Canada, 2006, 3 channel video installation, colour, sound, continuous
Documentation of a three-screen, weather-driven installation made for the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, 2006. Combining the speed and versatility of modern technology with the strength and spiritual significance of the tree, this installation suggests an environmental model where technology can work collaboratively with natural forces. The installation uses modern high speed communication systems combined with customized software and computer technologies to harness the energy produced by the rotation and tilt of the planet and transformed that energy into an open, self regulating and interconnected system. The system monitors weather data from three different continents and uses this real-time information to edit three files of pre-recorded movie footage of a tree seen against the background of a stormy winter sky. The combinations of imagery and sound generated in real time is unique at any given moment and is part of a continuously evolving process fuelled by the operating system’s interaction with the planetary weather system. In the sciences, this generation of image and sound is often described as an “emergent” property, a term used to describe self-organization in all living systems and on a planetary scale this is recognized as the dynamic origin of biological life, cognition and evolution. Drawing on the ancient concept of the earth as a living system, combining the traditional Eastern concept of Yin and Yang and systems theory from contemporary science the work suggests a new post Romantic form of landscape art with relevance to the issues of our own times. (Chris Welsby)
www.sfu.ca/~welsby

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