Date: 22 October 2011 | Season: London Film Festival 2011 | Tags: London Film Festival
SLEEPLESS NIGHTS STORIES
Saturday 22 October 2011, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
Jonas Mekas, Sleepless Nights Stories, USA, 2011, 114 min
Jonas Mekasâ opening confession that he suffers from insomnia will come as no surprise to anyone aware of his singular contribution to cinema. Over 50 years he has established and promoted a viable culture for truly independent and avant-garde filmmaking, and his recent acceptance by the art world has brought a long overdue wave of attention and success. Sleepless Nights Stories is the latest in the series of long-form diary films that Mekas has been making since his arrival in the USA in 1949. Eating, drinking, singing and dancing with friends, the tireless octogenarian is full of life and wonder, casually weaving together contemporary folk tales collected during travels across the globe. Marina Abramovic fantasizes about domesticity, Lee Stringer recounts an episode from his crack-addicted past, and the protagonist toasts the âworking class voiceâ of Amy Winehouse. Marina Abramovic, Björk, Harmony Korine and Patti Smith also appear. Treating significant and inconsequential moments with equal import, Mekasâ modern day saga presents the first episodes from his ambitious â1001 Nightsâ project. (Mark Webber)
Also Screening: Tuesday 18 October 2011, at 9pm, VUE3
& Thursday 20 October 2011, at 7pm, BFI Studio
PROGRAMME NOTES
SLEEPLESS NIGHTS STORIES
Saturday 22 October 2011, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
SLEEPLESS NIGHTS STORIES
Jonas Mekas, USA, 2011, video, colour, sound, 114 min
For two hours we stroll with Jonas Mekas through New York nights, through apartments, studios, backstage rooms, galleries, bars and clubs. We meet old acquaintances like Ken and Flo Jacobs, Yoko Ono, Patti Smith, Carolee Schneemann, Marina Abramovi?, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pip Chodorov, friends, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, and we also make many new acquaintances. The father of the diary film begins a film with the words âI canât sleepâ. Who hasnât been in this situation? Sleepy and yet wide awake at the same time, you find yourself in the world of those exhausted from the dayâs exertions; the drunk, the relaxed, the dancing, the brooding, the mourning, the pensive, the partiers. In this film Mekas dives into a time vacuum ⊠and it becomes increasingly unclear whether we really did get up and go out, whether what weâre seeing are remnants of the day that weâre remembering, or remnants of films by one of the greatest avant-garde filmmakers whose life wrote film history. (Berlinale)
This film originated from my readings of the One Thousand and One Nights. But unlike the Arabian tales, my stories are all from real life, though at times they too wander into somewhere else, beyond the everyday routine reality. There are some twenty-five different stories in my movie. Their protagonists are all my good friends and I myself am an inseparable part of the stories. The storyteller of the Arabian Nights was also part of his or her tales. Some of the people in the movie youâll recognize, some not. The fact that some of them youâll recognize has no bearing on the stories: after all, we all recognize John Wayne or Annette Bening, but in their stories they are no longer the people we know. The subjects of the stories cover a wide range of emotions, geographies, personal anxieties, anecdotes. These are not very big stories, not for the Big Screen: these are all personal big stories ⊠And yes, youâll also find some provocations ⊠But thatâs me, one âmeâ of many. The very question âWhat is a story?â is a provocative question. (Jonas Mekas)
www.jonasmekasfilms.com
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Date: 2 November 2011 | Season: Plenty | Tags: Peter Kubelka
PLENTY 12: DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT
Tuesday 2 November 2011, at 7pm
London E:vent Gallery
The screening series PLENTY proposes a new way of looking at artistsâ films by showing only a single work, regardless of its duration. Each film is given the freedom to unfold on its own terms, and the viewer is given the time and space to consider it.
DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT (POETRY AND TRUTH)
Peter Kubelka, Austria, 2003, 16mm, colour, silent, 13 min
In cinema, as in anthropological study, the ready-made reveal ssome of the fundamental poetry and truth of our lives. Peter Kubelka unearthed sequences of discarded takes from advertising films and presents them, almost untouched, as documents that unwittingly offer valuable and humorous insights into the human condition.
âPeter Kubelka is the world’s greatest filmmaker â which is to say, simply: see his films! ⊠by all means/above all else ⊠et cetera.â (Stan Brakhage)
Peter Kubelka (born 1933) is an artist, anthropologist, cook and teacher. Active as a filmmaker over five decades, his total output amounts to some sixty-two minutes of screen time in which he explores the essential qualities of cinema.
PLENTY, a free monthly screening series selected by Mark Webber, forms part of the âBrief Habitsâ programme curated by Shama Khanna.
Date: 10 October 2012 | Season: London Film Festival 2012 | Tags: London Film Festival, Peter Kubelka
MONUMENT FILM INSTALLATION
Wednesday 10 â Sunday 21 October 2012
London BFI Southbank Atrium
Peter Kubelka, Monument Film, Austria, 2012, film installation
Kubelka first presented film as a three dimensional sculptural object in 1958. As an integral part of his new work Monument Film, the celluloid filmstrips of Arnulf Rainer (1960) and Antiphon (2012) will be exhibited on the walls of the Atrium at BFI Southbank, making manifest the relationship between space, time, and the physical material which runs through the projector.
Admission Free. Open from 12pm to 9pm daily.
Date: 11 October 2012 | Season: London Film Festival 2012 | Tags: London Film Festival
OCCUPY THE CINEMA
Thursday 11 October 2012, at 8pm
London ICA Cinema 1
Ben Russell & Guillaume Cailleau, Austerity Measures, Greece, 2012, 9 min
Athens at crisis point: a colour-separation portrait of the Exarchia neighbourhood during the anti-austerity protests.
Ken Jacobs, Seeking the Monkey King, USA, 2011, 40 min
Amid the hypnotic, flickering motion of a metallic terrain, vitriolic onscreen texts rail against American culpability, from the Revolution to Iraq to the present administration. Each statement casts an arrow, and J.G. Thirlwellâs monstrously cinematic score drives them home.
Brad Butler & Karen Mirza, Deep State, UK, 2012, 44 min
âAn audacious, semi-fantastical secret history of the counterforces of popular protest and clandestine control, this struggle is told through archive material, contemporary footage and future speculation.â
A direct development of the filmmakersâ visit to Cairo prior to the Tahrir Square uprising, Deep State was commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella, and made in collaboration with author China MiĂ©ville.
PROGRAMME NOTES
OCCUPY THE CINEMA
Thursday 11 October 2012, at 8pm
London ICA Cinema 1
AUSTERITY MEASURES
Ben Russell & Guillaume Cailleau, Greece, 2012, 16mm, colour, silent, 9 min
A colour-separation portrait of the Exarchia neighbourhood of Athens, Greece, made during the Anti-Austerity protests in late 2011. In a place thick with stray cats and scooters, cops and Molotovs, ancient myths and new ruins; where fists are raised like so many columns in the Parthenon, this is a film of surfaces â of grafittiâd marble streets and wheat-pasted city walls â hand-processed in red, green, and blue. Made as part of a hand-processing workshop at LabA in Athens. (Ben Russell)
www.dimeshow.com
SEEKING THE MONKEY KING
Ken Jacobs, USA, 2011, HD video, colour, sound, 40 min
The film could have well been called âKicking and Screamingâ but that only describes me in the process of making it, questioning its taste. Once the message kicked in it overrode all objection. The piece demanded J.G. Thirlwellâs music, normally way too overtly expressive for me as most of my stuff comes out of painting and is also to be absorbed in silence. Who will even notice visual innovation now, or whatâs happening with time? Determining a place between two and three dimensions, pushing time to take on substance, is what I do. Seeking the Monkey King is a reversion to my mid-twenties and that sense of horror that drove the making of Star Spangled to Death. (Ken Jacobs)
DEEP STATE
Brad Butler & Karen Mirza, UK, 2012, HD video, colour, sound, 44 min
The film takes its title from the Turkish term âDerin Devletâ, meaning âstate within the stateâ. Although its existence is impossible to verify, this shadowy nexus of special interests and covert relationships is the place where real power is said to reside, and where fundamental decisions are made â decisions that often run counter to the outward impression of democracy. Amorphous and unseen, the influence of this deep state is glimpsed at regular points throughout the film â most clearly surfacing in its reflexive responses to popular protest, and in legislated acts of violence and containment, but also rumbling and reverberating, deeper down, in an eternally recurring call-and-response between rhetorical positions and counter-languages, in which a raised fist, a thrown rock, a crowd surge, an occupation, provoke a corresponding reaction in the form of a police charge, a baton attack, a pepper spray, assassinations. A powerful undertow in the ongoing tide of history, this push and pull of competing forces is deftly illuminated in a vivid montage of newly filmed and archive footage. Collided together, past, present and future trace a continuum in which the same repetitive patterns are played out. Against a backdrop of momentous, historically resonant demonstrations, an eternal rioter, or âriotonautâ, is picked out, as if by a searchlight, ever-present at each and every flashpoint. On a moonscape, confronted with a picket that becomes a riot, an ur-dictator, the personification of the âDeep Stateâ, blurts stupefying, hot-air abstractions of neo-liberalism. Deep State is a film by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler that has been scripted in collaboration with author China MiĂ©ville. Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella. Funded by Arts Council England and London Councils. (Karen Mirza & Brad Butler)
www.mirza-butler.net
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Date: 13 October 2012 | Season: London Film Festival 2012 | Tags: London Film Festival, Peter Kubelka
FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA
Saturday 13 October 2012, at 1pm
London ICA Cinema 1
Martina KudlĂĄcek, Fragments of Kubelka, Austria, 2012, 232 min
In this extended portrait, Peter Kubelka speaks at length about his life, work and interests, drawing on a vast range of knowledge and experience. Active as a filmmaker since the 1950s, Kubelkaâs acclaimed cinematic works are only one aspect of his dynamic personality. In his legendary public lectures, he holds forth on a variety of disciplines including film, music, archaeology and cooking. He has also played an important institutional role in establishing the Austrian Film Museum, and as co-founder of Anthology Film Archives, for whom he designed an ideal viewing theatre known as the Invisible Cinema. Martina KudlĂĄcek (known for previous documentaries on Maya Deren and Marie Menken) immersed herself in Kubelkaâs world for several years, researching historical footage, recording lectures, and perhaps most importantly, filming him at home surrounded by his eclectic collection of anthropological objects. In these precious sequences, Fragments of Kubelka provides extraordinary insight in conveying his philosophy on life and art.
PROGRAMME NOTES
FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA
Saturday 13 October 2012, at 1pm
London ICA Cinema 1
FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA
Martina KudlĂĄcek, Austria, 2012, HD video, colour, sound, 232 min
Fragments of Kubelka is an epic documentary subtly introduces the complex worldview of iconic filmmaker and theoretician Peter Kubelka (born 1934, Vienna). While Kubelkaâs radical and pioneering body of films is a highly condensed work of about an hour, focusing on the essence of cinema, his legendary lectures often unfold over many hours. These lectures on âwhat is cinemaâ and âcooking as an art formâ are frequently illuminated by presentation of archaeological artefacts from Kubelkaâs eclectic collection. He considers his ongoing collecting to be an expanded film practice which explores the evolution of humanity. Martina KudlĂĄcek has carefully woven an open-ended portrait which goes beyond the biographical to reveal fresh insights into the phenomenon of film.
The filmmaker Jonas Mekas has written: âKubelka’s cinema is like a piece of crystal, or some other object of nature: It doesnÂŽt look like it was produced by man; one could easily conceive that it was picked up from among the organic treasures of nature.â
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Date: 19 October 2012 | Season: London Film Festival 2012 | Tags: London Film Festival
ON VENOM AND ETERNITY
Friday 19 October 2012, at 6:30pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
Isidore Isou, TraitĂ© de bave et dâĂ©ternitĂ©, France, 1951, 120 min (new print)
The first and only film by the founder of the French Lettrist movement begins with a warning: âDear spectators, you are about to see a discrepant film. No refunds will be given.â Advocating for the rupture of language and photography, Isou expects the spectator to âleave the cinema blind, his ears crushed, both torn asunder by the disjunction of word and imageâ. At the 1951 Cannes Festival, where TraitĂ© received its first pubic screening, it won the admiration of Guy Debord and Jean Cocteau, who wondered if it would take 50 years before its radical aesthetics could be understood. The Lettrists believed the development of cinema had been stalled by the domination of the studio system. In order for a new cinema to emerge, it had first to be destroyed â symbolically and physically â by bleaching and scratching the images, and by replacing soundtracks with abrasive concrete poetry and enraged tirades.
PROGRAMME NOTES
ON VENOM AND ETERNITY
Friday 19 October 2012, at 6:30pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
TRAITĂ DE BAVE ET DâĂTERNITĂ (ON VENOM AND ETERNITY)
Isidore Isou, France, 1951, 35mm, b/w, sound, 120 min
Isidore Isou arrived in Paris from Romania in 1945 where he founded the Letterist movement, an art and literary movement that owed inspiration to Dada and Surrealism. Letterism attempted to break down poetry into letters and syllables, and then all arts into their constituent parts, to build up new languages for each art form. Isou wrote, directed, photographed, composed the music for, and acted in TraitĂ© de bave et dâĂ©ternitĂ© (Treaty On Venom And Eternity), the first Letterist film manifesto. Isou proceeds to discuss what is wrong with the cinema and then counter it with what he thinks the cinema should consist of through âDiscrepant Cinemaâ in which the sound and the picture are purposefully unrelated and the images are manipulated or destroyed through bleaching and scratching.
Isou brought TraitĂ© de bave et dâĂ©ternitĂ© uninvited to the Cannes Film Festival (1951) where it both caused a riot and won the audience prize for the avant-garde. Isouâs ârevolt against cinemaâ is a landmark work that prefigured the Letterist and Situationist cinema to come and influenced many experimental filmmakers, including Stan Brakhage. The filmâs participants include some of the greatest names in 20th Century French arts and letters: Jean-Louis Barrault, Blaise Cendrars, Daniel GĂ©lin, Colette Marchand, AndrĂ© Maurois, and Jean Cocteau (who also designed the poster promoting the 1952 release on the Champs-Elysees). (Re:Voir)
In the above context of The LumiĂšres and MĂ©liĂšs as âthe 2 wingsâ of Film, I take Isou to be the visceral backbone, complete with electrically âscratchedâ nervous system synopting â all rhythms tending to that consciousness we know as cathexis or investment. His TraitĂ© has certainly been prime inspiration for all of my film-making, since I first saw it, and for many of the U.S. independent film-makers ⊠and I do not mean simply for (how did you put it?) the âscratch or blinking filmsâ. The verbal rethoric of TraitĂ© is at one with the aesthetic of the moving picture imagery and in its subtle weave of be-seemingly dull photography (which effectually obliterates traditional and slavishly composed photography â whether scratched-over, turned upside-down or not). TraitĂ© opened each sensibility (that will be open to it) for new feeling about film, thus for the new feelings each might have uniquely rising in each self appropo [sic] that which is intrinsically Film. I know no other works of cinema which, without intruding its own aesthetic, more frees human sensibility to dance, in the mindâs eye, with cinematic possibilities. (Letter from Stan Brakhage to FrĂ©dĂ©rique Devaux)
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Date: 20 October 2012 | Season: London Film Festival 2012 | Tags: London Film Festival
NATHANIEL DORSKY & JEROME HILER
Saturday 20 October 2012, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
While others bemoan the end of celluloid, Nathaniel Dorsky â whose work has become an annual highlight of the festival over the past decade â continues apace, more productive now than ever. His carefully considered practice has this year created works of great beauty from a period of sorrow. This screening of two new films will be complemented by rarely exhibited work by his companion Jerome Hiler.
Nathaniel Dorsky, August and After, USA, 2012, 19 min
âAfter a lifetime, two mutual friends, George Kuchar and Carla Liss, passed away during the same period of time.â (ND)
Nathaniel Dorsky, April, USA, 2012, 26 min
âFollowing a period of trauma and grief, the world around me once again declared itself in the form of one of the loveliest springs I can ever remember in San Francisco. April is intended as a companion piece for August and After, and is partly funded by a gift from Carla Liss.â (ND)
Jerome Hiler, Words of Mercury, USA, 2011, 25 min
Jerome Hiler, who shares Dorskyâs heightened sense of wonder at the world around him, builds sensuous layers of superimposition at the moment of shooting. A most private filmmaker, whose primary craft is the less transient medium of stained glass, he has until recently only shown his work as camera originals, thus limiting their public visibility. His inclusion in the latest Whitney Biennial prompted this first digital transfer.
PROGRAMME NOTES
NATHANIEL DORSKY & JEROME HILER
Saturday 20 October 2012, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
AUGUST AND AFTER
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2012, 16mm, colour, silent, 19 min
Nathaniel Dorskyâs August and After is dedicated to two recently departed friends, legendary filmmaker George Kuchar and actress Carla Liss. The film shows them vibrantly, resiliently alive shortly before their passing and then sets off in search of soothing beauty, yielding searing images awash in colours both belonging to and transcending our natural world. Well into the twilight years of 16mm filmmaking, Dorsky continues to present textures and hues that are indispensible to the art of cinema. We will be poorer without them. (AndrĂ©a Picard)
www.nathanieldorsky.net
APRIL
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2012, 16mm, colour, silent, 26 min
In my filmmaking I came upon the idea that if I began to arrange images in a certain way, it could transform the ego instead of confirming it. In other words, if you put two shots together to create a solid concept â this is happening, characters getting out of a car and walking down the street, or someone sitting at a window looking â you construct a series of images in such a way that you nurture ego, but then disrupt it through the montage. When you cut to the next shot, there might be a reemergence of presence, but it wouldnât be a daisy chain back to the previous image, so it wouldnât solidify the ego. There might be a way of using montage to realize the wisdom of what cinema has to offer. Cinema has great, great wisdom, and itâs very seldom used as a wisdom medium. In a sense, you can nurture the heart in a montage, going from one thing to the next in a way that touches the heartâs intelligence. You can use the energy of the cinema to transform the viewer by letting the viewer rediscover themselves at each moment in the present. (Nathaniel Dorsky interviewed by Ari Spool)
www.nathanieldorsky.net
WORDS OF MERCURY
Jerome Hiler, USA, 2011, video, colour, silent, 25 min
At the very end of âLoveâs Labour Lostâ, as the cast is frolicking around, a messenger comes in to announce a death which brings a sudden shift to the very end of the play. One of the most comical characters, now newly sober, ends the play with a quick dismissal of the audience: âThe words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way â we this way.âWords of Mercury is, if nothing else, economical. It was shot on reversal film and its layers of superimpositions were all shot in the camera. Half of the many fades in the film were made by submerging the original film in a black liquid. The film is silent. The shooting ratio is low and there are areas which are unedited since taken from the camera. I generally shoot first and ask questions later, but Iâm struck at the influences that I see in Words of Mercury because they reach back to the very first times that I saw great 16mm films in the early Sixties: Marie Menken, Gregory Markopolous, Stan Brakhage and my lifetime companion Nathaniel Dorsky. (Jerome Hiler)
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Date: 20 October 2012 | Season: London Film Festival 2012 | Tags: London Film Festival
TWO ARCHITECTURE STUDIES
Saturday 20 October 2012, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
Catalina Niculescu, Along the Lines, UK-Romania, 2011, 16 min
On a trip to her native Romania, the artistâs interest in architectural forms prompted a visual investigation into how decorative and structural motifs recur in buildings from the traditional to the modern.
Thom Andersen, ReconversĂŁo, Portugal, 2012, 65 min
Invited to film in Portugal on the occasion of the Vila do Conde festivalâs 20th anniversary, Thom Andersen chose to document building projects by Eduardo Souto de Moura, whose work combines modernist aesthetics with traces of the architectural history of his sites. Incorporating local materials with contemporary building techniques, his clean concrete lines harmonise with natural elements and traditional stone walls. Influenced in equal measure by Mies van der Rohe and minimal sculptors such as Judd and Morris, Souta de Mouraâs achievements include meticulous linear houses, the Porto subway network, and the monumental Braga Stadium, which rises out of the earth beside a mountain of imposing granite. This leisurely film features 17 such projects and culminates in a conversation between the filmmaker and the distinguished architect.
PROGRAMME NOTES
TWO ARCHITECTURE STUDIES
Saturday 20 October 2012, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
ALONG THE LINES
Catalina Niculescu, UK-Romania, 2011, HD video, colour, sound, 16 min
Following up the artistâs recent journey to Romania, Along the Lines initially started as âa study into vernacular elements of Romanian modernist architectureâ. In the final project (including a series of collages) the premise is present, recognizable, but is not made explicit. The work deliberately strays from the plan of rigorous study and develops into a visual exercise in which the assumed subjectivity of the artist becomes the mode of argument. The interference vernacular/modernist is not stated or articulated directly but built up on a set of formal associations and visual suggestions. The artistâs approach becomes calm and poetic; free from a precise mission the project embraces the accidental, the deviation, it accumulates discordant elements to produce new possibilities though vulnerable and problematic, the pleasure of the argument comes into play, it disperses from concept into the aesthetic. Comprising a set of chapters, Along the Lines retraces the visual journey of the artist to explore architecture through a meticulous focus on details and geometric shapes. Each âchapterâ is preceded by a postcard collage: one geometrical figure is cut out of a natural landscape which literally illustrates the connection idealized by modernists between architecture and natural environment, placing in this way the interest for simple forms into the simplicity of nature. Although at the end of the video you find yourself back to the same landscape, the perception changes, the view is the same, yet your experience is different this time. (Anca Rujoiu)
RECONVERSĂO
Thom Andersen, Portugal, 2012, HD video, colour, sound, 65 min
ReconversĂŁo portrays 17 buildings and projects by Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto Moura, accompanied usually by his own writings. It is a search for his architecture, without critical commentary. Only the tour guide at Braga Stadium offers generalizations, which fit that work well enough, but it may be the exception not the rule. Souto Moura has the last word: âIf there is nothing there, I invent a preexistence.â Technically, ReconversĂŁo combines the crudeness of proto-cinema with the hyperrealism of digital cinema, bringing us back to the ideals of Dziga Vertov. Shooting only one or two frames per second and animating the images, in the manner of Muybridge, produces greater resolution, although not necessarily a greater sense of reality, and brings attention to the movements of water and vegetation that generally pass unnoticed. (Thom Andersen)
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Date: 20 October 2012 | Season: London Film Festival 2012 | Tags: London Film Festival
RITES OF PASSAGE
Saturday 20 October 2012, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
Steve Reinke, Great Blood Sacrifice, USA, 2010, 4 min
âWhatever is going on on top, thereâs a precise machine at work below, and this machine is digging little grooves, and these grooves slowly join together and become the conduits by which all meaning is drained from the world.â (SR)
Hayoun Kwon, Manque de preuves, South Korea-France, 2011, 10 min
To cleanse his village of demons, the chief of a Nigerian tribe plans to sacrifice his twin sons. One escapes and flees to Europe, where his application for asylum is dismissed through lack of material proof. Using his testimony as the basis, Kwon proposes an animated depiction of his account.
Gabriel Abrantes, Birds, Portugal-Haiti, 2012, 17 min
Pagan folk myth is juxtaposed with ancient Greek comedy as three Haitian girls witness disparate forms of storytelling. An old man tells the tale of his wifeâs transformation into a goat. In a local village, an elaborately costumed theatre group performs Aristophanesâ Birds in the original Attic language.
Ben Russell & Jim Drain, Ponce de LeĂłn, USA, 2012, 26 min
âOur Ponce de LeĂłn is an immortal for whom time poses the greatest dilemma â it is a constant, a given, and his personal battle lies in trying to either arrest time entirely or to make the hands on his clock move ever faster. For Ponce de LeĂłn, time is a problem of body, and only by escaping his container can he escape time itself.â (BR)
Ben Russell, River Rites, USA-Suriname, 2011, 12 min
âTrance dance and water implosion.â A constantly moving camera passes through a complex choreography of bodies engaged in rituals of work and play along the Upper Suriname River.
PROGRAMME NOTES
RITES OF PASSAGE
Saturday 20 October 2012, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
GREAT BLOOD SACRIFICE
Steve Reinke, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 4 min
A walk with shaky hand held camera through the landscape of the high desert of New Mexico, down the cliffs to a water reservoir accompanied by Reinkeâs voice over. (Argos Arts)
www.myrectumisnotagrave.com
MANQUE DE PREUVES (LACK OF EVIDENCE)
Hayoun Kwon, South Korea-France, 2011, video, colour, sound, 10 min
In Nigeria, to be a twin can be a blessing or a curse. The father of O is the village chief, a witch doctor who believes in the curse of twins. One day, this witch doctor tried to kill his two sons during a ritual ceremony: O managed to escape but saw his brother being murdered. Having fled across his country, he succeeded, by chance, in leaving Nigeria and going into exile in France. In this context, he applied for asylum but his application was refused because he could not produce any proof. (Hayoun Kwon)
BIRDS
Gabriel Abrantes, Portugal-Haiti, 2012, video, colour, sound, 17 min
Three Haitian girls wander through the ripe vegetation and colonial ruins of tropical Jakmel. After listening to an old manâs perverse folk tales they make their way to the town square and see a local staging of a comic masterpiece from ancient Greece; Aristophanesâ Birds. The filmâs mysterious intertwining of disparate cultural forms serves as an ode to the potentials of cultural creolization. (Gabriel Abrantes)
mutualrespectproductions.blogspot.co.uk
PONCE DE LEĂN
Ben Russell & Jim Drain, USA, 2012, video, colour, sound, 26 min
âI could do wonders if I didnât have a body. But the body grabs me, it slows me, it enslaves me.â
Our Ponce de LeĂłn discovered the fountain of youth and drank of immortality in the waning moments of his life. In an instant, he became old forever â an 80-year old Spaniard who would continue to walk the earth for century after century after century, watching as coral foundations gave way to mangrove swamps, as swamps were drained and buildings were erected, as buildings decayed and swamps returned. Our Ponce de LeĂłn is an immortal for whom time poses the greatest dilemma â it is a constant, a given, and his personal battle lies in trying to either arrest time entirely or to make the hands on his clock move ever faster. For Ponce de LeĂłn, time is a problem of body, and only by escaping his container can he escape time itself. (Ben Russell)
www.dimeshow.com
RIVER RITES
Ben Russell, USA-Suriname, 2011, video, colour, sound, 12 min
A trance dance and water implosion, a kino-line drawn between secular possession and religious phenomena. Filmed in one shot at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of a Saramaccan animist everyday are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new trypps; embodiment is our eternal everything. (Ben Russell)
www.dimeshow.com
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Date: 21 October 2012 | Season: London Film Festival 2012 | Tags: London Film Festival
WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENS
Sunday 21 October 2012, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
Peter Miller, Ten Minutiae, Germany, 2012, 5 min
A series of brief exercises in cinematographic magic.
Shumona Goel & Shai Heredia, I am Micro, India, 2011, 15 min
âShot in an abandoned optics factory and centred on the activities of a low budget film crew, I am Micro is an experimental essay about filmmaking, the medium of film, and the spirit of making independent cinema.â (SG/SH)
Kevin Jerome Everson, Rita Larsonâs Boy, USA, 2012, 11 min
In one of a trilogy of works based on personalities from the filmmakerâs parentsâ hometown, actors audition for the role of sitcom character Rollo Larson. As they attempt to inhabit the character, subtle variations in delivery bring a hypnotic dimension to disconnected lines and repetitive actions.
Erin Espelie, True-Life Adventure, USA, 2012, 4 min
Espelie trains her camera on the myriad life forms that coexist within a small area around a mountain creek. âWhen nature writes the screenplays, she doesnât abide by crescendos.â (EE)
Nick Collins, Dark Garden, UK, 2011, 9 min
Contours of light define the flowers and plants of a winter garden, filmed against the black expanse of the night sky.
Robert Todd, Within, USA, 2012, 9 min
âA film that sustains a complex condition: keeping the inner world alive as the camera looks âoutâ upon the world.â (RT)
David Gatten, By Pain and Rhyme and Arabesques of Foraging, USA, 2012, 8 min
An âexperiment touching coloursâ inspired by 17th Century scientist Robert Boyle, bringing together exquisite images shot over a 13-year period. Its title, from a sonnet by Jorie Graham, encapsulates the process and infers its poetic consequence.
Ben Rivers, The Creation As We Saw It, UK-Vanuatu, 2012, 14 min
Unexpectedly given the opportunity to travel anywhere in the world, Ben Rivers chose Vanuatu in the South Pacific. Amidst the villages and landscapes of this remote archipelago, he sought out the creation myths and folktales of a distant culture.
Erin Espelie will give a talk and screening at The Natural History Museum on Mon 22 Oct 2012, at 2:30pm.
PROGRAMME NOTES
WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENS
Sunday 21 October 2012, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
TEN MINUTIAE
Peter Miller, Germany, 2012, 16mm, b/w, silent, 5 min
Minutiae are âlittle thingsâ. Here are ten. These little things comprise an exhibition exalting the cinema. (Peter Miller)
www.petermiller.info
I AM MICRO
Shumona Goel & Shai Heredia, India, 2011, 35mm, b/w, sound, 15 min
I Am Micro is an experimental film portrait of an anonymous filmmaker struggling to make films against innumerable odds. A stream of consciousness voiceover describes the film artist as a fragile, amorphous being, working in isolation, within a competitive film industry built by businessmen. The film was shot on black and white 16mm at National Instruments Limited, a now defunct factory in Calcutta which once produced cameras. I Am Micro combines lyrical tracking shots of obsolete machinery and dismembered cameras, with behind the scenes footage of an independent film production in Bombay. (Shumona Goel & Shai Heredia)
RITA LARSONâS BOY
Kevin Jerome Everson, USA, 2012, video, b/w, sound, 11 min
Rita Larsonâs Boy portrays ten actors auditioning for the role of Rollo Larson in the 1970s TV sitcom Sanford and Son (the American remake of Steptoe and Son). It is one of three films included in the Tombigbee Chronicles Number Two. The series of films is based on famous people and objects from Columbus, Mississippi, hometown of Eversonâs parents (the Tombigbee is the river the runs though the city). The actor Nathaniel Taylor, raised in Columbus, portrayed Rollo Larson â Rita Larsonâs boy. (Kevin Everson)
TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE
Erin Espelie, USA, 2012, video, colour, sound, 4 min
When nature writes the screenplays, she doesnât abide by crescendos but makes up each adventure as she goes along. A rivulet of time encased in a sliver of space reveals an abundance of life, an expression of persistence, and a vision of a world expanding beyond the limits of human attempts to contain or conclude. (Erin Espelie)
DARK GARDEN
Nick Collins, UK, 2011, 16mm, b/w, silent, 9 min
Dark Garden is a short film that captures the ghostly images of the artistâs garden in wintertime, a silent world of ghostly apparitions. Skeletal and silvery plants and their supports are conjured out of the black of the screen as a series of filmic epiphanies. (Cinecity)
WITHIN
Robert Todd, USA, 2012, 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min
Within is a film that sustains a complex condition: keeping the inner world alive as the camera looks âoutâ upon the world. The film, edited mainly in-camera, dives into an interior that drifts increasingly internally, seeking a sort of cave-like milieu that dissolves into abstraction (forms seen in the dark, lacking firm definition, confusing both scales and distances), and then employs real-time complications to bring this internally-directed way of feeling space along with us as it moves into the outside world, or is it an imagined outer world? The film is a further complication of the perspectival explorations present in my film Undergrowth: rather than looking either at a figure or what some imaginary figure might be looking âatâ, Within lives in a state that seems to resist perspectival definition, hovering somewhere between what is âout thereâ and an internally defined image space that sees along with it. The film exists in a space that is at once shallow and deep, layered and reflective, barely there and yet very much alive. It is twilight. (Robert Todd)
www.roberttoddfilms.com
BY PAIN AND RHYME AND ARABESQUES OF FORAGING
David Gatten, USA, 2012, video, colour, silent, 8 min
Fourteen years of foraging, repeated attempts at rhyming, painful process of pruning. A love letter of sorts to Robert Boyle, FRS of The Invisible College and the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, in a visual embodiment of an obscure poetic form known as an âexploded Petrarchan sonnet.â Lines by Jorie Graham in âOf Forced Sightes and Trusty Ferefulnessâ, after Sir Thomas Wyatt, informed both the impulse for the journey itself and destination I ultimately sought. (David Gatten)
www.davidgattenfilm.com
THE CREATION AS WE SAW IT
Ben Rivers, UK-Vanuatu, 2012, video, b/w, sound, 14 min
Three mythical stories from the island nation of Vanuatu, South Pacific, concerning the origin of humans, why pigs walk on all fours, and why a volcano sits where it does. (Ben Rivers)
www.benrivers.com
Erin Espelie will present a free screening and talk in the Attenborough Auditorium of the Natural History Museumâs Darwin Centre on Monday 22 October 2012, at 2:30pm.
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