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 – of grafitti’d marble streets and wheat-pasted city walls – 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 ‘Kicking and Screaming’ 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. Thirlwell’s 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 what’s 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 ‘Derin Devlet’, meaning ‘state within the state’. 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 – 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 – 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 ‘riotonaut’, 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 ‘Deep State’, 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 Miéville. 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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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 Dorsky’s 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. (Andréa 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 – this is happening, characters getting out of a car and walking down the street, or someone sitting at a window looking – 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 wouldn’t be a daisy chain back to the previous image, so it wouldn’t 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 it’s 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 heart’s 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 ‘Love’s Labour Lost’, 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: ‘The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way – we this way.’Words 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 I’m 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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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 Reinke’s 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 man’s perverse folk tales they make their way to the town square and see a local staging of a comic masterpiece from ancient Greece; Aristophanes’ Birds. The film’s mysterious intertwining of disparate cultural forms serves as an ode to the potentials of cultural creolization. (Gabriel Abrantes)
mutualrespectproductions.blogspot.co.uk

PONCE DE LEÓN
Ben Russell & Jim Drain, USA, 2012, video, colour, sound, 26 min
‘I could do wonders if I didn’t have a body. But the body grabs me, it slows me, it enslaves me.’
Our Ponce de León discovered the fountain of youth and drank of immortality in the waning moments of his life. In an instant, he became old forever – 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 León is an immortal for whom time poses the greatest dilemma – 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 León, 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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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 ‘little things’. 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 LARSON’S BOY
Kevin Jerome Everson, USA, 2012, video, b/w, sound, 11 min
Rita Larson’s 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 Everson’s parents (the Tombigbee is the river the runs though the city). The actor Nathaniel Taylor, raised in Columbus, portrayed Rollo Larson – Rita Larson’s boy. (Kevin Everson)

TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE
Erin Espelie, USA, 2012, video, colour, sound, 4 min
When nature writes the screenplays, she doesn’t 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 artist’s 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 ‘out’ 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 ‘at’, Within lives in a state that seems to resist perspectival definition, hovering somewhere between what is ‘out there’ 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 ‘exploded Petrarchan sonnet.’ Lines by Jorie Graham in ‘Of Forced Sightes and Trusty Ferefulness’, 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 Museum’s Darwin Centre on Monday 22 October 2012, at 2:30pm.

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FLY INTO THE MYSTERY
Sunday 21 October 2012, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3

A LAX RIDDLE UNIT
Laida Lertxundi, Spain-USA, 2011, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 min
A Lax Riddle Unit shows a series of gentle transformations. Each of the film’s turns reveals a surprise: a woman suddenly appearing in bed, and, from behind an album cover, her shy smile. With the film’s elements of Los Angeles landscape, houseplants, and James Carr’s plaintive ‘Love Attack’, continually rearranged like the letters of the title, which is an anagram for Lertxundi’s own name, there is the sense of kaleidoscopic rotation, breathtaking views made with the slightest of movements: changing light, cuts, and slowly revolving camera pans. (Genevieve Yue)

AGATHA
Beatrice Gibson, UK, 2012, video, colour, sound, 14 min
The side of the frame flares out so you know it’s a dream. It becomes apparent that, although similar, there are profound differences between this planet and our own. The most startling is the lack of verbal language. The narrator, our guide to this world, tells us how communication happens, based on interactions with Gladys and Agatha, two beings that confound as they draw the observer in. The names are created for our benefit, and one must wonder if any observations can be trusted, are they all too written, too read from dialogue that isn’t there? What may be certain is the loosening that happens with regard to interpretation. If words cease to have importance then how can the experiences on this planet be readily expressed? Instead of syntax and meaning we are left with rhythm and colour. Based on a dream had by the radical British composer Cornelius Cardew. (Images Festival)
www.dliub.org

WELL THEN THERE NOW
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2011, video, colour, sound, 11 min
An unfaithful interpretation of John Zorn’s early 80’s film script ‘A Treatment For A Film in 15 Scenes’. I consider Well Then There Now a ‘list’ film since Zorn’s text is really a shot list. An exploration of the singularity of the image but, a playful one. Script and Music by John Zorn; Additional Text Lifts from Philippe Soupalt and Alain Robbe Grillet; Voiceover by Slater Klahr.
(Lewis Klahr)

THE PLANT
Mary Helena Clark, USA, 2012, video, colour, sound, 8 min
A film filled with clues and stray transmissions built on the bad geometry of point-of-view shots. (Mary Helena Clark)

ARBOR
Janie Geiser, USA, 2012, video, b/w, sound, 7 min
From a set of photographs found in a thrift store, Geiser creates a liminal space between representation and abstraction, figure and landscape, fiction and memory. Arbor suggests the fragility and ephemerality of memory and its artifacts through subtle manipulations of the photographs: reframings, layerings, inversions, and through the introduction of three dimensional elements, including flowers and thread. The photographs’ subjects are elusive; they rarely engage the camera; they are glimpsed, rather than seen. They look elsewhere, and wait for something inevitable. Gathering on a hillside, lounging on the grass beyond now-lost trees, the inhabitants of Arbor cycle through their one remembered afternoon, gradually succumbing to time or dissolving into landscape, reserving for themselves what we can’t know – and becoming shadows in their own stories. (Janie Geiser)
www.janiegeiser.com

THE TIGER’S MIND
Beatrice Gibson, UK, 2012, video, colour, sound, 22 min
The Tiger’s Mind is an abstract crime thriller set against the backdrop of a brutalist villa. Six characters, The Tiger, The Mind, The Tree, Wind, The Circle and a girl called Amy (the set, the music, the sounds, the special effects, the narrator and the author respectively) battle one another for control of the film as it unfolds on screen. The film explores the relationships between these characters as they emerge and unfold: grappling, wrestling, and dreaming with one another. The Tiger’s Mind is based on an experimental narrative score of the same name, written in 1967 by the radical British composer Cornelius Cardew. Departing from the character-based and improvisatory nature of the score and working with a fixed group of artists for over a year-long period (Alex Waterman as the Tree, Jesse Ash as the Wind, John Tilbury as the Mind, Celine Condorelli as the Tiger, Will Holder as Amy and Beatrice Gibson as the Circle) the film deployed the score as a production structure inviting the participants to develop its varying components: soundtrack, set, special effects, music and text. The resulting piece presents a portrait of its own making in fictional form, extending narrative and character to the production process itself. Tiger’s sets, Mind’s music, Wind’s effects, Tree’s foley, Amy’s narration and Circle’s authorship all knock up against each other in a battle for primacy. (Beatrice Gibson)
www.dliub.org

Laida Lertxundi will screen her work alongside films by Morgan Fisher, Hollis Frampton
and Bruce Baillie at the ICA Artists’ Film Club on Tuesday 23 October 2012, at 7pm.

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