Essential Frame 1: Early History

Date: 3 June 2003 | Season: Essential Frame

THE ESSENTIAL FRAME: EARLY HISTORY
3 June—8 July 2003
The Essential Frame UK Tour: Programme 1

The origins of the movement, which rapidly matured into an authoritative investigation of the material of film and the formal aspects of its physical and intellectual application.

Peter Kubelka, Unsere Afrikareise, 1966, 13 min
Peter Kubelka, Schwechater, 1958, 2 x 1 min

Ernst Schmidt Jr., Filmreste, 1966, 10 min
Kurt Kren, 20/68 Schatzi, 1968, 3 min
Kurt Kren, 13/67 Sinus ß, 1967, 6 min
Hans Scheugl, Hernals, 1967, 11 min
Marc Adrian, Text 1, 1963, 3 min
Moucle Blackout, Die Geburt der Venus, 1970-72, 5 min
Valie Export, Mann & Frau & Animal, 1970-73, 8 min
Valie Export, Syntagma, 1984, 18 min

PROGRAMME NOTES


Hollywood Be Thy Name

Date: 14 June 2003 | Season: California Sound/California Image

HOLLYWOOD BE THY NAME
Saturday 14 June 2003, at 7pm
London Barbican Screen

Four of the avant-garde’s most momentous flirtations with the glamorous world of The Movies. The dark shadow of Tinseltown looms large on the horizon.

Robert Florey & Slavko Vorkapich, The Life and Death of 9413 – A Hollywood Extra, 1927, b/w, silent, 15 min
George Kuchar, I, An Actress, 1978, b/w, sound, 10 min
Andy Warhol, Hedy (The Shoplifter), 1966, b/w, sound, 66 min
Kenneth Anger, Puce Moment, 1949/70, colour, sound, 7 min

PROGRAMME NOTES

The Films of Christopher Maclaine

Date: 30 September 2003 | Season: Christopher Maclaine

THE FILMS OF CHRISTOPHER MACLAINE
Tuesday 30 September 2003, at 7pm
London The Other Cinema

Jazz, dope and rebellion – four films from the hipster subculture of San Francisco, all made by obscure and elusive poet Christopher Maclaine. His masterpiece The End (1953), salvaged in the 60s by Stan Brakhage and revered by many since, is a remarkably apocalyptic post-war saga of impending doom: the last day on earth for six of ‘our friends’ living in the shadow of the A-bomb. These new prints of Maclaine’s complete films also feature alchemical incantation (The Man Who Invented Gold), existential despondence (Beat) and highland flings (Scotch Hop).

Christopher Maclaine, The End, 1953, colour, sound, 35 min
Christopher Maclaine, Beat, 1958, colour, sound, 6 min
Christopher Maclaine, The Man Who Invented Gold, 1957, colour, sound, 14 min
Christopher Maclaine, Scotch Hop, 1959, colour, sound, 6 min

PROGRAMME NOTES

Wojciech Bruszewski: Film / Video / Phenomena

Date: 10 October 2003 | Season: Evolution 2003

WOJCIECH BRUSZEWSKI: FILM / VIDEO / PHENOMENA
Friday 10 October 2003, at 4pm
Leeds Evolution 03 at the Leeds College of Music

Wojciech Bruszewski is one of Poland’s foremost media artists, active in the fields of theory and practice, who uses film, video, photography, computers and language to create audio-visual works and installations that frequently examine the phenomena of sight and perception.

Bruszewski was a student at the National Film Academy in Lodz, a city with a strong avant-garde history (particularly in Constructivism), and home to the only Polish museum of modern art. Here, he connected with other radical artists and, with Józef Robakowski, Zbigniew Rybczynski and Ryszard Wasko, formed the Workshop of Film Form, which conducted multimedia experiments throughout the early 1970s.

Bruszewski’s film and video works are effectively analytical investigations into the specific properties of each medium. His best-known film work is YYAA, in which changes in light exposure direct the soundtrack that is created by editing together a 3-minute long primal scream. Other works, like Tea-Spoon and Match-Box, also challenge the viewer by manipulating our expectations of synchronous sound and image. Much of Bruszewski’s early work in video examines the immediate relationship between camera, monitor and viewer made possible by instant playback or live feed technology.

The artist will be present to discuss the theories behind his works and screen examples of his pioneering films, videos and documentation of installations, plus the film performance Points.

Wojciech Brusezewski was born in 1947 in Wroclaw, Poland. Lives and works in Lodz, Poland. A practising artist and theorist since 1967. Founder of the WARSZTAT Group of avant-garde filmmakers 1970-76, made the first Polish art videotape in 1972. Exhibited at Documenta 6 & 8, Hayward Gallery, Centre Pompidou, Kölnischer Kunstverein Sydney Biennial, awarded DAAD residency in 1980. Associate Professor at Art Academy, Poznan and Nicholas Copernicus University, Torun.


The Future is Not What it Used to Be

Date: 15 October 2003 | Season: Miscellaneous

THE FUTURE IS NOT WHAT IT USED TO BE
15 October—22 November 2003
UK Tour

Three films by Mika Taanila, including his new documentary on the pioneering Finnish electronic music and cybernetic artist Erkki Kurenniemi, who began to build computer instruments in the 1960s. More recently, he has become manically preoccupied with achieving immortality by documenting his every thought and movement. Also screening: Futuro, about the flying-saucer shaped plastic house created by visionary architect Matti Suuronen, and A Physical Ring, a kinetic found-footage film with music by Mika Vainio of Pan Sonic.

Mika Taanila, Futuro: A New Stance for Tomorrow, Finland, 1998, 30 min
Mika Taanila, A Physical Ring, Finland, 2002, 4 min
Mika Taanila, The Future is Not What it Used to Be, Finland, 2002, 52 min

Mika Taanila will introduce the screening and answer audience questions on 16 October. Advance booking is recommended. Presented by LUX in association with The Finnish Institute and The Wire.

Wednesday 15 October 2003 (UK Premiere)
SHEFFIELD International Documentary Film Festival

Thursday 16 October 2003 [repeated Tuesday 28 October 2003]
LONDON The Other Cinema

Saturday 18 October 2003
GLASGOW CCA

Sunday 19 October 2003
BRIGHTON Cinematheque

Wednesday 22 October 2003
DUBLIN Electronic Arts Festival

Tuesday 28 October 2003
CANTERBURY Kent Institute of Art & Design

Thursday 6 November 2003
NEWCASTLE Cineside

Saturday 22 November 2003
BIRMINGHAM MAC

Mika Taanila (born 1965) has studied cultural anthropology at Helsinki University and graduated from Lahti Institute of Design, video department in 1992. Lives and works in Helsinki as free film director and video teacher at Academy of Fine Arts. Producer of new media arts in the Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture in Finland. Mika is a member of Team Avanto, organisers of Helsinki’s Avanto Festival of electronic arts and media.

PROGRAMME NOTES

Jonas at the Ocean

Date: 2 November 2003 | Season: London Film Festival 2003 | Tags:

JONAS AT THE OCEAN
Sunday 2 November 2003, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

‘Jonas Mekas and his friends of free film, art and music.
A documentarypsychomusicfilm by Peter Sempel’

Peter Sempel, Jonas at the Ocean, Germany, 2002, 93 min
Together with his brother Adolphas, Jonas Mekas left Lithuania during World War II and eventually travelled to America as a ‘displaced person’. After settling in New York, he soon purchased a movie camera and began documenting the lives of Lithuanian immigrants. Within a few years, he was to become a central figure in the movement toward the recognition of film as art.  The brothers’ arrival in New York (1949) is the film’s point of departure, and readings from ‘I Had Nowhere to Go’, Jonas’ autobiography of the period, appear throughout. Sempel loosely traces Mekas’ post-war life, as told through his interactions with other members of the arts community. There are visits with Robert Frank, Merce Cunningham and Nam June Paik, and with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela in their ‘Dream House’. Allen Ginsberg tells the story of Pull My Daisy and the birth of beat cinema, while Phillip Glass speaks of Jonas’ independent sprit and the beginnings of the downtown arts scene in the 60s. Sempel borrows liberally from Mekas’ own films, while offering us glimpses of a life which we are more often used to seeing from his own point of view looking out.

PROGRAMME NOTES

Film as a Subversive Art

Date: 2 November 2003 | Season: London Film Festival 2003 | Tags:

FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART
Sunday 2 November 2003, at 7pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

Paul Cronin, Film as a Subversive Art: Amos Vogel and Cinema 16, UK, 2003, 56 min
Speaking recently about the myriad dangers facing humanity, director-provocateur Werner Herzog cited ‘the lack of adequate imagery’ as one of the most troubling. It’s a view Amos Vogel would surely endorse. As one of America’s most important curators, historians and festival directors, his influence on artists, experimental and underground film cannot be overstated. Born in Austria in 1922 but resident in New York since 1938, Vogel created the path-breaking film society Cinema 16 in 1947, introducing a continent to previously unseen worlds of experience. 20 years on, he established the New York Film Festival and with his eye-changing book ‘Film as a Subversive Art’, penned a revolutionary analysis of the moving image. Now, in Cronin’s valuable tribute to an extraordinary man and his times, Vogel delivers a series of compelling and entertaining reflections on a life lived in the passionate belief that film has a fundamental, radical and ethical role to play in society. Required viewing for anyone who believes cinema matters. Really matters. (Gareth Evans)

followed by

Exhibitionism: Subversive Cinema and Social Change
Following the screening of Film As A Subversive Art: Amos Vogel and Cinema 16 we will be staging a panel discussion focusing on some of the key issues raised in the film.

PROGRAMME NOTES


Tribute to Stan Brakhage

Date: 15 November 2003 | Season: Miscellaneous | Tags:

A SNAIL’S TRAIL IN THE MTRIBUTE TO STAN BRAKHAGE
Saturday 15 November 2003, at 2:45pm
Bristol Watershed

A LUX event for Brief Encounters

“Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure in perception.” —Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, 1963

Widely regarded as the most original and influential independent filmmaker of his generation, Stan Brakhage was not only a consummate artist, but also a great teacher, a passionate champion of the work of others and a huge fan of mainstream movies. His death in March 2003 brought to an end an abundant flow of imagery that produced over 300 films in five decades. His films were a search for a purity of vision unhindered by conventions of seeing. This fleeting survey of his work, including both photographed and hand-painted films, begins with a portrait of the artist made for French television earlier this year.

The curator of this event, Mark Webber will introduce this screening. Mark Webber is an independent programmer of avant-garde film and video, and is Project Manager at LUX. 

Pip Chodorov, A Visit to Stan Brakhage, France, 2003, 15 min
This short documentary, commissioned by ARTE and shot in January 2003, provides an invaluable introduction to Brakhage’s work and personality.

Stan Brakhage, Autumnal, US, 1993, 5 min
In the 1990s, Brakhage concentrated mainly on hand-crafted films, usually painting directly on the filmstrip to manifest his ‘hypnagogic vision’.

Stan Brakhage, Reflections on Black, US, 1955, 12 min 
During the post-war period of avant-garde psychodrama, Brakhage developed a singular approach. Reflections on Black is the most complex of his early trance films and one of his few works with sound.

Stan Brakhage, Mothlight, US, 1963, 4 min
Moth wings and vegetation were placed between strips of clear plastic to create a sculptural film without a camera. “What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black.”

Stan Brakhage, Murder Psalm, US, 1981, 17 min 
Uncharacteristically for Brakhage this film is composed mostly of found-footage, which is assembled as comment on the monstrous nature of humanity.

Stan Brakhage, Ephemeral Solidity, US, 1993, 5 min
“One of the most elaborately edited of all the hand-painted films – a Haydnesque complexity of thematic variations on a totally visual (i.e. un-musical) theme.”

Stan Brakhage, Creation, US, 1979, 16 min
A journey to Alaska inspired this allegorical vision of the formation of the Earth and the emergence of life.

Stan Brakhage, Chinese Series, US, 2003, 2 min
Made by scratching with his fingernails into black 35mm film, using spit to soften the emulsion. He continued to work on this film until his death, and gave instruction that it was then to be considered complete.


Oskar Fischinger: Music and Motion

Date: 5 December 2003 | Season: Oskar Fischinger

OSKAR FISCHINGER: MUSIC AND MOTION
5—9 December 2003
London Goethe-Institut

A TRIBUTE TO THE PIONEER OF ANIMATION, ABSTRACT CINEMA & VISUAL MUSIC

“Decades before computer graphics, before music videos, even before Fantasia, there were the abstract animated films of Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967). He was cinema’s Kandinsky, an animator who, beginning in the 1920s in Germany, created exquisite ‘visual music’ using geometric patterns and shapes choreographed tightly to classical music and jazz.” (John Canemaker, New York Times)

Oskar Fischinger is one of the masters of animated film and an influential pioneer of abstract cinema. Though fiercely independent and resolute, Fischinger spent periods under contract to major studios including Paramount, MGM, and Orson Welles’ Mercury Productions. During his brief tenure at Disney, he had some early involvement with Fantasia, which diluted, but popularised, many of his theories about the confluence of music and visual movement.

Born in Gelnhausen, near Frankfurt, in 1900, Fischinger trained as an engineer and, becoming interested in the newly emerging avant-garde cinema, invented a wax-slicing animation machine for creating and photographing abstract imagery. Moving to Munich and later Berlin in the 1920s, he began to make his own experimental films, participated in ‘light shows’ with composer Alexander László and did special effects for Fritz Lang’s Frau im Mond. His early, hand-drawn Studies, in which abstract or graphic shapes oscillate and transform, closely synchronised to gramophone records, were among the first examples of ‘absolute cinema’. The 1930s were successful years with public and artistic acclaim, frequent screenings and advertising commissions, leading to an invitation to Hollywood from Paramount Studios. Working with photography, silhouettes, liquids, oil painting, models and charcoal drawings, Fischinger achieved a synthesis of sound and vision, anticipating what later became the music video.

During his years in America, his unique and colourful ‘visual music’ developed through more complex techniques and innovations, and Oskar received the recognition of his peers and support from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. In later years he turned to painting as film became more expensive and problematic to produce. Fischinger died of a heart attack in Los Angeles, 1967, after which his artistic legacy was secured and promoted by the tireless work of his devoted widow Elfriede and scholar Dr. William Moritz, whose definitive biography of Oskar will be launched at this event.

Special Event – Book launch “Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger”
Saturday 6 December 2003, at 6pm
Free drinks reception courtesy of John Libbey Publishers to celebrate the publication of Dr William Moritz’ long awaited, definitive biography of Oskar Fischinger. This book, and video tapes of Fischinger’s work released by Re:Voir, will be available for sale over the weekend.

The two programmes of films by Oskar Fischinger will also be screened at Dundee Contemporary Arts and Glasgow Film Theatre.

Please Note: This programme now travels under the title “Optical Poetry: Oskar Fischinger Retrospective” and is distributed by the Center for Visual Music.

Photograph of Oskar Fischinger © Center for Visual Music, all rights reserved.


Vasulka Video: Pioneers of Electronic Art

Date: 5 March 2004 | Season: Vasulka Video

VASULKA VIDEO: PIONEERS OF ELECTRONIC ART
5—7 March 2004
London Candid Arts Trust & University of Westminster

Steina and Woody Vasulka began to use the medium of video as early as 1969, first documenting jazz performances, rock concerts and the underground activities of ‘illegitimate culture’. Exploiting the relationship between the electronic signals for both sound and image, they started a didactic exploration of the limitless possibilities of video processing using a range of newly crafted technological tools. Each tape produced was a by-product of the dialogue between the Vasulkas and their machines, as they systematically analysed and deconstructed the fundamental materiality of video through spatial, temporal and sound/image manipulation. The Vasulkas are the creative pathfinders of the electro-magnetic spectrum, whose works – infused with the fizz and crunch of the analogue age – are as mesmerising and astounding today as in their original moment of discovery.

Steina and Woody Vasulka will present three unique events during the weekend, which includes a continuous one-day gallery projection of key works.

STEINA & WOODY VASULKA: PIONEERS OF ELECTRONIC ART