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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READING BETWEEN THE LINES
Saturday 23 October 2010, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

THE INDIAN BOUNDARY LINE
Thomas Comerford, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 42 min
Over the last eight years, Chicago musician and filmmaker Thomas Comerford has been at work on a series of quietly-observed films that contemplate the entwined social, political, and environmental histories of Chicago (Figures in the Landscape, 2002; Land Marked / Marquette, 2005). The Indian Boundary Line follows a road in Chicago, Rogers Avenue, that traces the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis boundary between the United States and ‘Indian Territory’. In doing so, it examines the collision between the vernacular landscape, with its storefronts, short-cut footpaths and picnic tables, and the symbolic one, replete with historical markers, statues, and fences. Through its observations and audio-visual juxtapositions, The Indian Boundary Line meditates on a span of land in Chicago about 12 miles long, but suggests how this land and its history are an index for the shifting inhabitants, relationships, boundaries and ideas of landscape – as well as the consequences – which have accompanied the transformation of the New World.
www.thomascomerford.net

FLAG MOUNTAIN
John Smith, UK, 2010, video, colour, sound, 8 min
In Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus, a display of nationalism is taken to its logical conclusion. Moving between macro and micro perspectives, Flag Mountain sets dramatic spectacle against everyday life as the inhabitants of both sides of the city go about their daily business. (John Smith)
www.johnsmithfilms.com

WHY COLONEL BUNNY WAS KILLED
Miranda Pennell, UK, 2010, video, b/w, sound, 27 min
Triggered by the writings of a medical missionary on the Afghan borderlands, a distant relative of the filmmaker, the film is constructed from still photographs of colonial life on the North West frontier of British India at the turn of the 20th century. Searching for clues to the realities behind images framed during a time of colonial conflict, the film plays sound against image to find contemporary parallels in Western portrayals of a distant place and people. (Miranda Pennell)
www.mirandapennell.com

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SUBLIME PASSAGES
Saturday 23 October 2010, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

SHUTTER
Alexi Manis, Canada, 2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 8 min
Shutter tracks the rising sun, the lengthening shadows and the darkening day of a total solar eclipse. Shutter is a formal exploration of the phenomenon of the sun eclipsing objects in the natural world. Inspired by footage of friend and amateur astronomer Andreas Gada’s 16mm recording of the 1980 total solar eclipse, this work captures the beauty, complexity and terror of the shifting light that precedes and accompanies an eclipse. Shadow, focal variance and illumination of earth-bound nature conspire along the course to the incomparable moment of totality. (Alexi Manis)

DRIFTER
Timoleon Wilkins, USA 1996-2010, 16mm, colour, silent, 24 min
Drifter is the title; it’s essentially a collection (memoir) of footage dating back from 1996 to the present. The title, the theme, is drifting; mentally / physically. People who’ve drifted into and out of my life, and the visual themes (clouds, snow, highways, trains, oceans) that (finally) tie all my various Bolex-Kodachrome escapades together. Soft movement across the screen. My own wanderlust is in there as well. (Timoleon Wilkins)

SHRIMP BOAT LOG
David Gatten, USA, 2010, 16mm, b/w & colour, silent, 6 min
Shrimp Boat Log, the first reel of the ongoing Continuous Quantities series, contains 300 shots, 29 frames each, alternating between a notebook listing the names of shrimp boats that frequent the mouth of the Edisto River and images of these same boats. I started keeping track of these boats in 1994 when I first began visiting Seabrook Island, South Carolina, for family vacations. I’ve returned to this spot many times since, making a series of underwater, cameraless films there (the What the Water Said series), and always continuing to watch for the shrimp boats. I filmed these images during the summer and fall of 2006 and cut them – using Leonardo’s Notebooks as guide – over the next several years. (David Gatten)
www.davidgattenfilm.com

BLUE MANTLE
Rebecca Meyers, USA, 2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 35 min
blue mantle was shot along the Massachusetts coast, on Cape Cod and Cape Ann and around the South Shore. Images include paintings by Winslow Homer and illustrations from Harper’s Weekly accounts of disasters and rescues at sea. The main musical sources are Debussy’s ‘La mer’, Wagner’s ‘The Flying Dutchman’ and ‘Lowlands,’ a sea shanty. Texts range from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Thoreau to Melville to various other 19th-century (and earlier) writings. The only cinematic representations supplementing my own footage are Edison’s 1900 A Storm at Sea and a model-size Eidophusikon (a pre-cinematic 18th-century theatrical spectacle described in its day as ‘moving pictures, representing phenomena of nature’). The 40 miles of sea between Chatham and Provincetown came to be called an ocean graveyard due to the thousands of wrecks that occurred there during a time when sea-going vessels were the primary means for ‘bringing man nearer unto man’ (Longfellow). Today, among the not-invisible memorials and markers in Gloucester and along the cape of maritime histories, one can also find the remains of The Frances, a ship sunk in a December gale in 1872 and still visible at low tide at a popular Truro beach (most people walking by assume it is some kind of strange rock formation). US Life Saving Service men dragged the boat from the bay across the Cape to the outer beach and rescued all aboard. The captain died several days later from the effects of exposure and is buried in Truro. There are hundreds of stories like this one and many more with much more tragic outcomes. Cape Cod was also the site of two major developments in transatlantic communication: the termination point of ‘le Direct’, a 3200-mile submarine telegraph cable laid between France and Massachusetts in 1869, and the location of the first US wireless transmitting station established by inventor Guglielmo Marconi at the turn of the 20th century. Such historic moments of human progress striving to overcome nature’s vastness stir the imagination. (Rebecca Meyers)

TRAVELLING FIELDS
Inger Lise Hansen, Norway, 2009, 35mm, colour, sound, 9 min
Shot in Northern Russia, Travelling Fields is the third film in Inger Lise Hansen’s inverted perspective trilogy, following Proximity (2006) and Parallax (2009). The films focus on a particular phenomenon occurring through a change of perspective and animated camera movements, as a way of redefining a place and its geography. In these films sections of the landscape are documented by moving the camera one frame at the time, along a track. As each of the earlier films focus on one particular location, Travelling Fields offers a more complex viewing as it moves between different topographies and locations in the Kola Peninsula.

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EVERY TIME I SEE YOUR PICTURE I CRY
Saturday 23 October 2010, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

EVERY TIME I SEE YOUR PICTURE I CRY
Daniel Barrow, Canada, 2008, live performance, 60 min
Awarded the 2008 Images Prize at its premiere, Daniel Barrow’s ‘manual animation’ combines overhead projection with video, music, and live narration to tell the story of a garbage man with a vision to create an independent phone book chronicling the lives of each person in his city. In the late hours of the night, he sifts through garbage, collecting personal information and then traces pictures of each citizen through the windows of their homes as they sleep. What he doesn’t yet realize is that a deranged killer is trailing him, murdering each citizen he includes in his book, thus rendering his cataloguing efforts obsolete. The garbage man is a failed artist who fears becoming subject to the grip of something overwhelming. This animation traces his attempts to slow down and creatively reflect, in a process of coming to terms with his own self-loathing and fear.
www.danielbarrow.com

Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry. Yeah, that title makes me a little nauseated, too. And I would be lying if I said that wasn’t one of the many feelings that came to the surface in the midst of Daniel Barrow‘s show last night; funny, though, how nausea can feel so satisfying when paired with a helluva lot of other emotions. Barrow’s tour de force is notable in the way it combines many things: live narration, video, music, drawings and an overhead projector. Yes, a real, live overhead projector, unseen since your eighth grade biology class, on which Barrow layers and manipulates multiple transparencies. It is not the mere novelty of the tool that makes Barrow’s work worth it, but rather his complete and utter mastery of a machine more commonly considered a bygone clunker than a medium for high art. During a Q&A after the performance, he described a nun-cum-professor at his art school who had been giving the same, refined lectures for nigh on 50 years, conducted via slide and overhead projectors. Barrow was inspired to riff on her method as a parody, but soon found that the medium sincerely appealed to the ‘control freak’ and isolationist in him (‘I don’t like to work with crews, or other people, really,’ he admitted). The projector is the vehicle for Barrow’s harrowing, dreamscape-like tale of an erstwhile garbage man, art school dropout and social outcast. He spends his nights picking through residents’ detritus and peeking through their windows; he’s inspired, in his own earnest and perverse way, to create a special kind of phone book based on these findings. Each citizen will get a page of info and illustration; it’s an ‘art project for everyone,’ our garbage man intones. For reasons that remain hazy but may include childhood trauma and psychic revenge, it is slowly revealed that a serial killer stalks our stalker, the malicious and psychotic foil to his harmless voyeurism. But by the time this oddball is thrown into the mix, the audience is too thoroughly entrenchedin Barrow’s elegant, elegiac projector world to put up any sort of fight. Every Time I See Your Picture has a plot, but it is cushioned and obscured by the very narration around it, which is at once a diary entry, a cautionary tale and a philosophical tangent. A lot of it makes very little sense; some, in that illogical way personal confessions have, makes a frightening amount. Above all, though, this performance is ultimately enjoyed in the craft of the man and his machine. If the animation potential of an overhead projector has never entered your brain, see this and prepare for revelation. Barrow is fluid and holds perfect time; his narration matches the sweeping movements of transparencies placed and replaced, and the original score by Amy Linton buoys you up and into the garbage man’s musty-sherbet-toned world. I sat three rows behind Barrow (whose projection outpost is ensconced in the middle of the auditorium), and can heartily recommend this position. You watch the master make the product. It is a bizarre live experience, unlike any I’ve seen, unlikely to be forgotten any time soon. (Caitlin McCarthy, Willamette Week)

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PEOPLE GOING NOWHERE
Sunday 24 October 2010, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

DE MOUVEMENT
Richard Kerr, Canada, 2009, 35mm, b/w, sound, 7 min
As an extension of his Industrie / Industry project, Richard Kerr furthers his appropriation of feature film trailers, formally reconstructing their cinematic language. Monochromatic French film trailers from a bygone era provide the source material, and here the actions of the actors are secondary to the physical movement of celluloid.
A brilliant formalist montage of wipes creates an awareness of film motion and rhythm. (Andréa Picard)

MAY TOMORROW SHINE THE BRIGHTEST OF ALL YOUR MANY DAYS AS IT WILL BE YOUR LAST
Ben Rivers & Paul Harnden, UK, 2009, 16mm, b/w, sound, 13 min
Somewhere in the backwoods at the turn of I’m not sure which century, a crack unit of female Japanese soldiers track a group of lost, ancient desperadoes. They dig holes, they read, their leader channels the ghost of Italian sound poets (as yet unborn?), all the while moving onward … but who is searching for who and why? Hand-processed with a soundtrack cobbled together from Dictaphone recordings, old 78s,
hiss and scratches and whines. (Ben Rivers)
www.benrivers.com

BRUNE RENAULT
Neil Beloufa, France, 2009, video, colour, sound, 17 min
Brune Renault is a kind of looped fiction that happens in a car sliced in four parts resting on small wheels; basically a sculpture. Since we can open the car, we can make impossible camera shots, moving in and out of the object. The goal of the piece was to have this car cut in four parts to give the illusion of movement, which is a paradox. I wanted the sculpture to mutate into a functional object (real car), once viewers were starting to follow and ‘suspend disbelief’ for the fiction. And then, to lose the fiction and utilise video’s function to mutate into a document about the usual contemporary art sculpture. The impossible camera shots showing the cuts of the cars had to be the disturbing element that betray the fiction, but then again the power of fiction is hard to break down. (Neil Beloufa)

VOT
Victor Alimpiev, Russia, 2010, video, colour, sound, 5 min
Alimpiev’s videos focus directly on his characters while avoiding specific narrative – close-ups reveal intimate details and personal expressions; moments of awkwardness or tension becoming magnified. Repeated gestures, passing through the group as one, are imbued with new, fugitive meaning. Meticulously staged, the videos trace the simplest of movements heightened to form a collective ritual. Group identity is further emphasised not only by carefully controlled actions and sound, but also through a uniformity of pale tones and muted colours. (Ikon Gallery, Birmingham)

KINDLESS VILLAIN
Janie Geiser, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 4 min
In Kindless Villain, two boys wander through a stone fortress, while battles wage in the waters beyond. Seemingly alone in their island world, they succumb to fatigue and to boys’ games of power. Scratched phrases from an ancient recording of Hamlet surface, including a sad cry for vengeance. War is a child’s game, played quietly in this forgotten world. (Janie Geiser)
www.janiegeiser.com

COMING ATTRACTIONS
Peter Tscherkassky, Austria, 2010, 35mm, b/w, sound, 24 min
Coming Attractions and the construction of its images are woven around the idea that there is a deep, underlying relationship between early cinema and avant-garde film. Tom Gunning was among the first to describe and investigate this notion in a systematic and methodical manner in his well known and often quoted essay: ‘An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film’ (in: John L. Fell [ed.], ‘Film Before Griffith’, Berkeley 1983). Coming Attractions additionally addresses Gunning’s concept of a ‘Cinema of Attractions’. This term is used to describe a completely different relation between actor, camera and audience to be found in early cinema in general, as compared to the ‘modern cinema’ which developed after 1910, gradually leading to the narrative technique of D.W. Griffith. The notion of a ‘Cinema of Attractions’ touches upon the exhibitionistic character of early film, the undaunted show and tell of its creative possibilities, and its direct addressing of the audience. At some point it occurred to me that another residue of the cinema of attractions lies within the genre of advertising: here we also often encounter a uniquely direct relation between actor, camera and audience. The impetus for Coming Attractions was to bring the three together: commercials, early cinema, and avant-garde film. (Peter Tscherkassky)

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TWO YEARS AT SEA
Friday 21 October 2011, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT1

TWO YEARS AT SEA
Ben Rivers, UK, 2011, 35mm, b/w, sound, 88 min
Ben Rivers’ feature Two Years at Sea follows Jake Williams (also the subject of one of Rivers’ earlier short films) over the course of two years; a man living in complete isolation in a tumbledown home nestled amidst a magnificent forest, a self-imposed solitary exile from society and modernity. Free from dialogue or interaction with his subject, Rivers’ film makes no attempt to psychologise his subject’s Walden-esque existence, instead documenting over a series of long, often static shots the minutiae of Jake’s self-sufficient relationship to his environment.

Close-ups of weathered photographs offer glimpses of a former life equally in thrall to nature; one spent with friends or family members, now simply ghosts adrift in memory. We watch Jake wake and shower, fetch water and firewood, and in an extraordinary single shot build a raft from an inflatable mattress, taking to the water to fish. His existence is one seeming to grow out of as much as disappear into his surroundings, the ramshackle remnants of modern life which fill his home reconstituted to new purpose, the house itself slowly fusing itself to the landscape. Jake too, as in certain shots reflections of foliage in the windows of his campervan create an impression of the landscape enveloping him, consuming him as he rests.

This symbiosis of the organic and mechanical is beautifully captured by Rivers’ monochrome photography; shooting on reclaimed 16mm Bolex cameras, the shifting textures of the images have a makeshift feel, as though the camera were put together by Jake from parts found in one of his many junk-filled cupboards, the pops and crackles of his bonfire at the end mirrored by those of the celluloid, the flares and white-outs adding to the very fabric of the photographed scenery; the film itself acting on what its capturing.

The serenity of Jake’s gaze in the breathtaking final shot speaks more than an hour of interview footage could, it’s a privilege to be able spend ninety minutes in the company of such an extraordinary individual, one with seemingly no need for human interaction of any kind and it’s a measure of Rivers’ respectful directorial stance that his/our presence never feels intrusive. Much as when the camera looks out from the window of Jake’s observation-tower creation, over the silent, snow-capped forest, one can begin to understand his reason for being there; when it takes in Jake, gazing through the same window, one can equally understand Rivers’ reason too.

(Mathew Thrift, www.cinephile-uk.com)

I made a shorter film about Jake called This is My Land five years ago, and as time has passed and other films have been made, I have had a continual feeling that I should go back. The first film was based solely on observation; standing back and watching Jake go about his business in the forest. I wanted Two Years at Sea to move beyond this, so Jake and I worked on scenes that either re-enacted parts of his daily doings, or were fictions not far from his life. The film embraces the slower perception of time, following rhythms that Jake and his environment have, shot over the course of a year in all the seasons. Two Years at Sea has at its core the relationship between a person and the place they have chosen to live out their life, and the deep connection there is between them. Originally the film was going to be shot in colour, then Kodak announced they were discontinuing my favourite black and white film stock, which prompted me to buy as much as I could and make one of the last films with Kodak Plus-X. The film was hand developed in my kitchen. www.benrivers.com

(Ben Rivers)

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ALTERED STATES
Saturday 22 October 2011, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

ALTERED STATES

TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS)
Ben Russell, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 10 min
Trypps #7 (Badlands) charts, through an intimate long-take, a young woman’s LSD trip in the Badlands National Park before descending into a psychedelic, formal abstraction of the expansive desert landscape. Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell’s unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence. (Michael Green)
www.dimeshow.com

WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING
Mary Helena Clark, USA, video, colour, sound, 2010, 9 min
‘This is your life. It rides like a dream.’ (Mary Helena Clark)

SANS TITRE
Neil Beloufa, France, 2010, video, colour, sound, 15 min
A cardboard decor and photographs reconstitute a luxury Californian-type villa in Algeria. Its inhabitants, neighbours and other protagonists imagine themselves there to explain why and how the latter was occupied by terrorists in order to hide whilst, paradoxically, it is entirely in glass. They even polished it clean so as to leave no traces. This improbable and irresolvable anecdote encourages the characters to invent images of an event given media coverage without the images nor the story and thus missing the main point. (Neil Beloufa)

THE PIPS
Emily Wardill, UK, 2011, video, b/w, silent, 4 min
Emily Wardill’s films encourage imagination as an unpredictable tool to surpass rational thought. The Pips explores movement and the materiality of it, the instigation of one and the duration of the other. Shot in black and white on 16mm, then transferred to a digital projection, The Pips focuses on British gymnastics champion, Francesca Jones. The film begins with a straight depiction of Jones’ routine; the patterns created by her ribbon baton trace her movements in the air. It is a reflection of her actions, imitating her and existing because of her. Near the end of the film, the gymnast’s body becomes stretched, elongated and distorted ultimately breaking into a series of mutant parts. Her face remains unfathomed and she gives no acknowledgement to her own decay. As Jones becomes still, her actions take on their own identity; their materiality deconstructed by Wardill’s emphasis on the physical replication of movement. The body and its motions become contained in the object, revealing an inherent plasticity in the gymnast’s performance. (Ian White)

… THESE BLAZEING STARRS!
Deborah Stratman, USA, 2011, 16mm, b/w, sound, 14 min
Since comets have been recorded, they’ve augured catastrophe, messiahs, upheaval and end times. A short film about these meteoric ice-cored fireballs and their historic ties to divination that combines imagery of 15th-18th century European broadsides with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory footage. … These Blazeing Starrs! juxtaposes a modern empirical desire to probe and measure against older methods, when we translated the sky to predict human folly. These days, comets are understood as time capsules harbouring elemental information about the formation of our solar system. We smash rockets into them to read spectral signatures. In a sense, they remain oracles – it’s just the manner of divining which has changed. (Deborah Stratman)
www.pythagorasfilm.com

THESE HAMMERS DON’T HURT US
Michael Robinson, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 13 min
Looking to a future beyond death, Michael Robinson’s These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us, one of the filmmaker’s most sophisticated found footage concoctions yet, combines Michael Jackson’s Remember the Time music video with footage of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra and roughly a dozen other sources, creating for the late pop star a solemn passage into a bedazzled Egyptian afterlife tenderly ushered by his real-life confidante. (Genevieve Yue, Reverse Shot)
www.poisonberries.net

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NATHANIEL DORSKY / BEN RIVERS
Saturday 22 October 2011, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

NATHANIEL DORSKY / BEN RIVERS

PASTOURELLE
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2010, 16mm, colour, silent, 17 min
Though silent, like all Dorsky films, Aubade and Pastourelle are named for types of love songs. His editing establishes tempo, and the shots, lyrical yet specific, thread through the film like melody lines. Music owes its universality to its abstract and primal qualities, which evoke intense emotion. Dorsky’s films operate on the viewer in this manner while still relying on recognizable images. By presenting music visually, he enlarges our sense of what songs and films alike can be. In particular Dorsky is drawn to the ways in which one thing becomes a conduit for transmitting another. Window surfaces are a recurring motif: through reflection, panes of glass contain images while remaining transparent, transforming the appearances of people or street scenes. There’s a shot in Pastourelle of vertical blinds shading a window; a strand pivots on its axis, animated by a draft. It’s mundane and magical simultaneously, an inconsequential detail that contains everything that is meaningful about seeing and being. The blind and the breeze share an interconnectedness you feel in your bones. An explication can’t do it justice. The wonder lies in the fact that it simply is. (Nicole Armour, Film Comment)
www.nathanieldorsky.net

THE RETURN
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2011, 16mm, colour, silent, 27 min
Nathaniel Dorsky, the subject of numerous recent international retrospectives, is producing some of the most resplendent art of our time; his film work stems as much from painting and poetry as the outside world. With The Return, his latest film shot on 16mm and projected at silent speed (18fps), Dorsky delves deep into multiple (under)worlds, sometimes uncanny and surreal, reflected and refracted through various natural and man-made obfuscations like grids, glass, water and brush. From its wintry willow branches to wafting hand gestures in a café, The Return harbours a phantasmal feel, offering a sentient, sometimes dark rumination
on the mysteries that await us. It is, in Dorsky’s words, ‘Like a memory already gone, this place of life’. (Andréa Picard, Toronto International Film Festival)
www.nathanieldorsky.net

SACK BARROW
Ben Rivers, UK, 2011, 16mm, b/w & colour, sound, 21 min
Sack Barrow extends Rivers’ engagement with the marginal and overlooked. The factory is not a state-of-the-art capital producing business, but a site of anachronistically uncompetitive endeavour. The years of production are evident and the regimented clocking in and out of workers attests to the outmoded practices here, unlike the liberal job-sharing egalitarianism that government policy and public expectation impose elsewhere. The run-down architecture, the drips and crusty build-ups of toxic chemicals, the dangling wires, wizened faces and the general pragmatic clutter of the place come close to the patina of the unkempt shacks of earlier films. Sack Barrow is a hymn in a new register to the steadily disappearing textures of the past. (Sally O’Reilly)
www.benrivers.com

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GABRIEL ABRANTES
Saturday 22 October 2011, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

LIBERDADE
Gabriel Abrantes & Benjamin Crotty, Portugal-Angola, 2011, video, colour, sound, 16 min
Shot in Luanda and the surrounding area, with non-professional actors, Liberdade is a cross-cultural post-capitalist love story. The film follows two young lovers – an Angolan boy, Liberdade, and his Chinese girlfriend, Betty – as they navigate through the complications of their burgeoning identities. Traveling across the stunning urban and natural landscapes of Angola, from the Chinese karaoke at Shanghai Bahia to the ship graveyard at Santiago beach, Liberdade and Betty struggle to forge the yet uncreated consciousness of their race. (Gabriel Abrantes)

PALÁCIOS DE PENA (PALACES OF PITY)
Gabriel Abrantes & Daniel Schmidt, Portugal, 2011, video, colour, sound, 56 min
Palácios de pena is about a culturally inherited fear in Portugal, linked to political and social oppression during the Inquisition and Fascism. It revolves around two upper-middle class adolescent Portuguese girls, juxtaposing their budding identities to a trial condemning two Moorish homosexuals to burn at the stake. Their ailing grandmother gives them an awareness of their heritage through the mechanism of desire, describing a dream where she is a judge of the Inquisition. The grandmother’s and the girls’ guilt is complicated by their relationship, that of family and love. As they love each other, so does what they represent: ignorance and the will to violently oppress. (Gabriel Abrantes)

OLYMPIA I & II
Gabriel Abrantes & Katie Widloski, Portugal-USA, 2008, video, colour, sound, 7 min
1. A female professional sex worker is visited by her homosexual adolescent brother and his two dogs. He confronts her about her line of work after having played trivial pursuit with mother on the sun deck. He wouldn’t pay a dime for her disgusting breasts.
2. A transvestite professional sex worker from a middle class Texan family waits for customers while listening to Henry Gorecki and drinking mini Diet Coca-Cola. His maid, the ‘chocolate covered strawberry’, comforts him by rubbing his ‘soft batch’ and they begin making love. (Gabriel Abrantes)

www.mutualrespectproductions.blogspot.com

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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 ‘I can’t sleep’. Who hasn’t been in this situation? Sleepy and yet wide awake at the same time, you find yourself in the world of those exhausted from the day’s 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 we’re seeing are remnants of the day that we’re 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 you’ll recognize, some not. The fact that some of them you’ll 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, you’ll also find some provocations … But that’s me, one ‘me’ of many. The very question ‘What is a story?’ is a provocative question. (Jonas Mekas)

www.jonasmekasfilms.com

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