THE ILLUSION OF MOVEMENT
Sunday 2 November 2003, at 4pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

WORST CASE SCENARIO
John Smith, UK, 2003, video, colour, sound, 18 min
For his latest work, Worst Case Scenario, Smith took four thousand still photographs of daily life on a Viennese street corner. The film re-orders and manipulates a selection of these images, and as it progresses the static world slowly and subtly comes to life. As Sigmund Freud casts his long shadow across the city, an increasingly improbable chain of events and relationships starts to emerge. —Open Eye Gallery

LIKE ALL BAD MEN HE LOOKS ATTRACTIVE
Michele Smith, USA, 2003, video, colour, silent, 23 min
THEY SAY
Michele Smith, USA, 2003, video, colour, silent, 49 min
This new work consists of one film split into two parts. Two parts which can be seen in either order, or separately if one so chooses.

In Like All Bad Men He Looks Attractive the mixed mediums are woven together on Mini DV. The materials are one reel of 35mm film and two reels of 16mm film. Inset into the 35mm film are plastic shopping bags, translucent plastic folders and plates, Mylar drafts used as blueprints for bridge construction, Viewmaster slides, paparazzi slides found at a tourist memorabilia shop on Hollywood Boulevard (including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Charlton Heston and George Peppard with a big white rabbit), slides purchased in the gift shops at the Getty Museum and at Hearst Castle, “sign here” tabs from my accountant, the wings of a dying butterfly that I tried to rescue from the hot pavement of a grocery store parking lot, Hollywood movie trailers, 8mm home movies and stag films, 16mm footage (including an episode of Green Acres), Viewmaster stills from 1970s TV shows, etc. Some things were not inset into the reel but recorded in the same manner and later cut in digitally. Panels, or film ‘carpets’: large mats made of 16mm film. Old magic lantern slides. The base film the elements are physically cut into is a workprint of raw footage of an unknown actor with a bandaged finger standing in front of the camera. He occasionally raises an envelope and reacts to a clapboard. I received this reel of film from a friend who’s a bit of a packrat (like myself). Before I met him, his house had burned down and this reel was one of the few items which survived. The decayed parts are where the emulsion melted from the heat.

The digital transfer was hand shot frame by frame against a crafter’s lightboard with a 25 watt candelabra bulb because the plastic folders and other elements inset into the 35mm would not go through the telecine transfer machine. I decided not to set an exact frameline and moved the filmstrip casually past the camera. This process added a feeling of the material celluloid form bending and moving as fast stills in time, with light reflecting through and glaring against it. I shot each frame as a still – which then had to be loaded into the Mac and sped up. It’s approximately equal to 10 frames per second, film speed. I alter this rhythm at different points in the film. There is also a cheesy faux-shutter effect for the still shots which was built into the camera I used – it becomes a chaotic and erratic half-flicker when sped up.

Intercut into this are found VHS tapes I bought with my grandmother at the local Greek deli and produce shop. They were getting rid of their rental videos and for some reason I must have looked like someone who would buy the entire shopping cart full because the shopkeeper made a deal and offered all of them to me. I used footage from four of these films in sections during both films. While watching these tapes I decided this material would be an interesting element to add to my film. Much of it is cut at an interval of three digital frames (which is about 30 frames per second) after every 12 frames of transferred film. A friend did this while I sat by and watched and told him where to split the images because I was at that point not too keen on editing digitally and did not know how it would turn out. Regarding Penelope’s Wake was pure in its filmic structure. The only digital editing done to that film was to clean up between reel changes and breaks in the film during transfer. By the end of the digital interweaving edits in the new films, I jumped in and did it myself and reworked some rhythm structures. As the work progressed, I became quite pleased with the possibilities and interactions of this new set of elements, and with the subtle contrasts and interactions of different mediums, times, and textures.

They Say consists of two reels of heavily edited (frame by frame) and overlaid 16mm film. It was then intercut with the grainy and scratchy melodrama rental tapes. I used a few 16mm found footage source reels as the main focus to play with narrative structure in a way related to but different than in my first work. I used a lot of footage from one narrative short film about a boy and a wild horse. When nearing the end I tired of editing it and decided to put it out into my garden and then dumped a few litter boxes on top. Contents: wood pellets and bunny poop. I forgot how long I left it outside … it rained a few times. Perhaps a week. It was later washed with laundry detergent and hot water.

I want my films to be open. The viewer creates the version of the film they will see by the way in which they view it. This is on a narrative , symbolic , metaphorical level as well as on a visual and structural level. The rapid intercutting and weaving of strands of different footage and elements creates a time space where one must mix what they are seeing for themselves. There is no one way to perceive the links of still images into an illusion of movement. One can, with a readjusting of their viewing, change their experience of the work throughout. —Michele Smith

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LUX SALON: WERNER VON MUTZENBECHER: EVERYDAY ACTIONS / ORDINARY OBJECTS
Friday 14 November 2003, at 7:30pm
London LUX

FILMMAKERS CREDO (Werner Von Mutzenbecher, 2003)

film is a motion-picture
film is emotion
film is approachable to everybody
film is a language with laws to respect
experimental film can be compared to music, to poetry
film-pictures reach the consciousness and the subconscious
film is psychology
film is the most complex medium: time, movement and space are connected
film is memory
film is a document of time, places and persons
film is rhythm, is speed, but can also be slow and quiet
film is animation
film occupies the eyes, feeds the fantasy
film can be more real than reality
film is between reality and dream
film can manipulate the truth, film can be dangerous
film can be realised almost alone like a painting
imagination and innovation can be forced by a low budget
film-pictures can transport ideas and sentiments without words
silence can be like a sound
sound can influence the character of the images, can change the atmosphere
self-made film-pictures can be perceived as found footage
filmmaker, camera and projection make a fruitful triangle together
film open doors
film let feel the relativity of positions
film produces film
film constructs a new reality
film-projection is a moving painting of lights and shadows
film is an illusion
film is fugitive like life-time
film is a travel in space and time
film is a constant metamorphosis of images taken from reality
film explore the secrets of visible an invisible things
film is a mystery

About ten years after the beginning of my painting career I realised my first film and I also began to write. Since these days, I continue painting, filmmaking and writing with more or less intensity. To be able to speak different languages opened to me a larger spectrum of expression. I like the complexity and the possibilities inside the film and I am still curious to see what I can do by myself with a camera.

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

Since 1969, when they had their first access to primitive video equipment, the Vasulkas have conducted a dynamic exploration of the electro-magnetic image. Woody was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and trained as an engineer and filmmaker, Steina was born in Iceland in 1940 and became a professional musician. They married in 1964 and immigrated to America the following year. After seeing the ground-breaking TV as a Creative Medium exhibition at the Howard Wise Gallery in 1969, they devoted their activity to video, first documenting New York cultural events including jazz and rock concerts and underground performances using a Sony Portapak camera. Soon after, they began to experiment with using VCS3 and Buchla audio synthesisers to alter the electronic video signal, making their first image-processed tapes.

In 1971, together with Andy Mannick, the Vasulkas co-founded The Electronic Kitchen, an electronic laboratory for experimentation with sounds and images. The Kitchen soon became one of the artistic centres of New York, presenting screenings, performances and concerts ranging from the new music of La Monte Young to the new wave of Talking Heads, and it continues today as one of the city’s most prestigious multi-media art spaces.

Throughout the 1970s, the Vasulkas continued their tireless investigations into the phenomenology of video, with each tape produced being effectively a by-product of the dialogue between them and their machines. Steina and Woody did not create their images from video synthesisers; their unique approach involved the processing of previously recorded material through a series of modular units, frequently using the input of a separate electronic signal to control the effects.

Working in collaboration with creative engineers including George Brown, Bill Etra and Eric Siegel, they developed a new range of tools and devices with which they can further investigate the image. Their arsenal of analogue equipment contains the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor, Dual Colorizer, Multikeyer, Programmer, Horizontal Drift Variable Clock and the Field Flip/Flop Switcher. Much of their work explores and exploits the similarity of the sound and image signals, producing a mesmerising range of synaesthetic video before the onset of the digital age.

In 1973, the Vasulkas moved to Buffalo to teach at the Media/Study Center, where they become part of a faculty including filmmakers and theorists Tony Conrad, Hollis Frampton and Paul Sharits. The pair also began to work individually during this time. Steina embarked on the Machine Vision series, developing mechanical systems to control the camera, distancing it from the human viewpoint. Woody began to explore the digital realm, custom-designing the Digital Image Articulator. Both subsequently worked on interactive projects and large-scale installations, adding a sculptural or monumental element to their practice.

As pioneers of video art, Steina and Woody Vasulka stand alongside Nam June Paik, Peter Campus and Joan Jonas, with the Kitchen and their own studio as much a point of focus as the early activist groups Video Free America, Raindance and Guerilla Television and the innovative American television laboratories of NCET, WNET and WGBH. This weekend of events is the first opportunity in decades to see a substantial collection of the Vasulka’s early works in the UK, and a rare chance to hear the exuberant and vivacious duo discuss their work from a practical, rather than theoretical, point of view.

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VASULKA VIDEO: LECTURE
Sunday 7 March 2004, at 3pm
London Candid Arts Trust

WOODY VASULKA

Since the mid-1970s, Woody Vasulka’s work has focused on a rich articulation of the syntactical potential of electronic imaging. After producing a pioneering body of tapes in collaboration with Steina in the early 1970s, he has since undertaken a sophisticated exploration of the narrative and metaphorical meaning of technological images. Vasulka’s development of an expressive image-language has evolved from a rigorous deconstruction of the materiality of the electronic signal, through experiments with new technologies of digital manipulation, to the application of these imaging codes to narrative strategies.

The culmination of this investigation, Art of Memory (1987), is one of the major works in video. In this lushly textured, haunting essay, Vasulka applies a highly evolved imaging grammar to a metaphorical discourse of collective memory, history, and the meaning of recorded images – envisioned as a spectacular memory-theatre inscribed upon the landscape of the American Southwest.

In his early investigations of the vocabulary of such devices as the Digital Image Articulator, Vasulka emphasised the dialogue between artist and machine, as manifested in real-time creativity and process-oriented experimentation. Through digital manipulation, he continues to explore the malleability and objectification of the electronic image as a means of rendering a complex inventory of rhetorical devices. With the fantastical ‘electronic opera’ The Commission (1983), Vasulka began to apply these codes to the development of narrative and metaphorical strategies, an inquiry that has dominated his later work.

Woody Vasulka was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1937. He studied at the School of Industrial Engineering in Brno and the Academy of Performing Arts Faculty of Film and Television in Prague. With Steina, he has won numerous awards and grants; their collaborative works have been exhibited internationally. His individual works have been shown in numerous exhibitions, at festivals and institutions including the International Center of Photography, New York; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, New York. Woody Vasulka lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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FILMS OF PLACE
Sat 17 April 2004, at 6.20pm
London National Film Theatre NFT2

MING GREEN
Gregory Markopoulos, USA, 1966, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min

GAMMELION
Gregory Markopoulos, Italy, 1968, 16mm, colour, sound, 54 min

SORROWS
Gregory Markopoulos, Switzerland, 1969, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 min

The work of Gregory Markopoulos occupies a unique position in the history of film. He is widely regarded as one of the masters of the cinematic art, yet since he departed the United States in 1967 his films were almost impossible to see. As a result of his need for total control over the presentation of his vision, he increasingly withdrew himself and his films from the film community he had been so actively involved in up to that point.

In recent years the films of Markopoulos have been gradually reintroduced to the viewing public and have been honoured at major museums and festivals, including retrospectives at the American Centre (Paris 1995), The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York 1996), Pacific Film Archive (San Francisco 1997) The Film Society of Lincoln Centre (New York 2003) and Harvard Film Archive (2003). In May 2003, Robert Beavers and Simon Field presented a screening of Markopoulos films at the Goethe Institute, Athens, to an audience exceeding 350 people, and in June 2004, Temenos Inc. will resume the summer screening programme at the outdoor site in Lyssaraia.

This National Film Theatre season is the first time that so many of the films of Markopoulos have been shown in England on such a scale. Since he withdrew his films from exhibition in the early 1970s, they have been virtually impossible to see in the UK. This high-profile event will also act as a precursor to the resumption of outdoor Temenos projections at a remote site near Arcadia in the Peloponnese in June 2004, where restored films from the epic Eniaios cycle will be presented in public the first time. For three consecutive nights, screenings will take place from 10pm to 4am in the place chosen by Markopoulos as the ideal site for a spectator’s quest, in which his films may elevate the spectators’ sense of time while emotionally and physically connecting them to the mythic themes and locations.

In 1964, he began work on the film which would eventually become The Illiac Passion (1967). During the period in which he was editing and securing funding for that film, he made three films edited entirely in-camera. Galaxie (1966) is a series of 33 portraits of the artistic and intellectual community of Manhattan. Through a Lens Brightly: Mark Turbyfill (1967) is a biographical portrait of the dancer and poet. Ming Green (1966) is an immaculately constructed portrait of his apartment that was shot in a single afternoon. This portrait, painted in the colour of the title, was made a few months before his departure from New York. It is dedicated to the filmmaker Stan Brakhage and was shot without a scenario and edited entirely in the camera: ‘The orchestration of colour, the controlled metrics of the flashing and superimposing images, the sureness of the composition, and the careful placement of musical excerpts make this film one of Markopoulos’ most successful achievements of in-camera editing’ (P. Adams Sitney)

After making Himself as Herself and Eros, O Basileus (both 1967) in New York, Markopoulos moved to Europe, ostensibly to raise money to finally print The Illiac Passion. While in Greece he made the architectural portrait Bliss (1967), and in Italy he shot Gammelion (1967-68), for which seven minutes of footage filmed in the 365 rooms of the Castello Roccasinibalda was extended to almost an hour using over a thousand fades.

‘Shot in available light and with only two rolls of film, Gammelion portrays Castello Roccasinibalda, a castle in Italy with which Markopoulos had long been entranced. Each ‘film phrase’ consisted of only a few frames which he later combined with hundreds of fade-ins and fade-outs, extending seven minutes of footage to 60. The soundtrack includes Rilke’s text: ‘To be Loved, is to be Consumed…’ read forward and in reverse.’ (Pacific Film Archives)

‘Gammelion takes its title from the Greek month suitable for marriage. As the screen slowly winks from dark to light and the reverse, tiny shots – sometimes just single frames – are interjected of the landscape around the castle. We gradually move closer and closer to it, view the corridors, glimpse a nude couple in the frescoes, and then move outside again. The impression of Gammelion is quite unlike that of any other Markopoulos film. It is at once terribly sparse and very rich.’ (P. Adams Sitney)

After The Illiac Passion, Markopoulos continued to work in Europe for the next two years up until Sorrows (1969). Set to music by Beethoven, this lyrical portrait moves from a chilled and misty exterior to the crystalline interior of the Swiss chateau that King Ludwig II built for Wagner.

‘It’s a film in which all of the editing is done in camera. It was very cold that day, there was a little bit of fog, but as I filmed, starting at the main entrance along the road, the fog sort of lifted. The first roll was the outside, the second the inside. By the time I got inside, the sun kept coming out – so it’s like a piece of crystal, it comes to light. I just used a motif from Beethoven’s Leonore overture, which Wagner liked very much.’ (Markopoulos interviewed by Jonas Mekas)

Through the 1970s, though he continued to shoot films (including Genius, 1970, a vision of Faust featuring David Hockney), they were rarely printed. Markopoulos was already developing plans for the Temenos, a dedicated theatre and archive that was to be constructed in his father’s home town of Lyssaraia in Greece. He severed his remaining ties with the film community in 1974, by disassociating himself from Anthology Film Archives and asking P. Adams Sitney to remove the chapter on his films from subsequent editions of the book Visionary Film. In the summer of 1980, Gregory Markopoulos and Robert Beavers held their first, free, open-air screenings on a hillside above Lyssaraia. The screenings were accompanied by publications and this tradition continued annually until 1986.

(Mark Webber)

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THE ILLIAC PASSION
Sat 17 April 2004, at 8.40pm
London National Film Theatre NFT2

BLISS
Gregory Markopoulos, Greece, 1967, 16mm, colour, silent, 6 min

THE ILLIAC PASSION
Gregory Markopoulos, USA, 1967, 16mm, colour, sound, 92 min

The work of Gregory Markopoulos occupies a unique position in the history of film. He is widely regarded as one of the masters of the cinematic art, yet since he departed the United States in 1967 his films were almost impossible to see. As a result of his need for total control over the presentation of his vision, he increasingly withdrew himself and his films from the film community he had been so actively involved in up to that point.

In recent years the films of Markopoulos have been gradually reintroduced to the viewing public and have been honoured at major museums and festivals, including retrospectives at the American Centre (Paris 1995), The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York 1996), Pacific Film Archive (San Francisco 1997) The Film Society of Lincoln Centre (New York 2003) and Harvard Film Archive (2003). In May 2003, Robert Beavers and Simon Field presented a screening of Markopoulos films at the Goethe Institute, Athens, to an audience exceeding 350 people, and in June 2004, Temenos Inc. will resume the summer screening programme at the outdoor site in Lyssaraia.

This National Film Theatre season is the first time that so many of the films of Markopoulos have been shown in England on such a scale. Since he withdrew his films from exhibition in the early 1970s, they have been virtually impossible to see in the UK. This high-profile event will also act as a precursor to the resumption of outdoor Temenos projections at a remote site near Arcadia in the Peloponnese in June 2004, where restored films from the epic Eniaios cycle will be presented in public the first time. For three consecutive nights, screenings will take place from 10pm to 4am in the place chosen by Markopoulos as the ideal site for a spectator’s quest, in which his films may elevate the spectators’ sense of time while emotionally and physically connecting them to the mythic themes and locations.

After making Himself as Herself and Eros, O Basileus (both 1967) in New York, Markopoulos moved to Europe, ostensibly to raise money to finally print The Illiac Passion. While in Greece he made the architectural portrait Bliss (1967),shot over the course of two days using only available light to create a lyrical study of the interior of the Church of St. John on the island of Hydra.

In the autumn of 1967, Markopoulos was living in Brussels where he persuaded a consortium of businessmen to fund the completion of The Illiac Passion. The film had been shot in 1964 starring Richard Beauvais alongside a cast of well-known underground personalities including Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, Taylor Mead, Beverly Grant and Jack Smith. It was originally edited in the first half of 1965, and was then intended as a three hour long, triple projection film in which 35, 16 and 8mm frames would be superimposed on each other to demonstrate different layers of consciousness. During the printing process, Markopoulos commuted between Brussels and the lab in Boulder, Colorado. After a 30-minute section had been completed, he realised that the film would never be ready in time for the film festival at Knokke-le-Zoute, so he reconceived and re-edited the film into the 92-minute version that exists today.

(Mark Webber)

For me the inspiration for The Illiac Passion was derived from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound: from the multitude of impressions I had had from time to time of what the other two, lost plays of his trilogy, might have been like. And my own golden circle of inspiration not once ignored what I had read once as a student in a wonderful essay by Gordon Craig that the actor should appear naked upon the stage. Thus, I decided to film the protagonist shaped out of Prometheus naked. The season in New York was proper towards this endeavour, and I had no difficulty once I had cast the role in either filming the protagonist naked or in the most obvious difficulty, developing the film footage. But of the main characters in the Aeschylus, I only kept three: Prometheus, Poseidon, and Io. Prometheus was cast and in my own being thought of as Prometheus (thought he has no such name in the film proper) was portrayed by Mr Richard Beauvais. Poseidon no longer arriving in a bath tub but riding an exercycle was portrayed by Mr Andy Warhol. And Io not chased by a gadfly, but cast in a kind of subterranean aura, slowly becoming porcelain, and imbued with an Asiatic quality, portrayed by Miss Clara Hoover. Of the three members, I had to film most with Richard Beauvais. Andy Warhol’s footage was shot all in one evening, with Life magazine recording the event in colour stills; the stills have never been published. Clara Hoover’s footage was shot over a period of two or three weeks; a part of the time in below zero weather with Richard Beauvais at Lloyd’s Neck, Long Island.

If the point of inspiration for the three central characters (though in essence Beauvais is the only central character) was Aeschylus’ play, the point of inspiration for the mythic characters, if they be so called, were the Greek myths which had always brought me such jubilation: the myths of Narcissus and Echo, Icarus and Daedalus, Hyacinthus and Apollo, Venus and Adonis, Orpheus and Eyrudice, Zeus and Ganymede, and many others. Using these pointillistically, as illuminated, exotic ports of departure I allowed myself to depart, to drift, to journey amongst the emotions of the players I found during my odyssey: until finally, in the final version of The Illiac Passion, the players become but the molecules of the nude protagonist, gyrating and struggling, all in love, bound and unbound, from situation to situation in the vast sea of emotion which becomes the filmmaker’s proudest endeavour.

One more characterisation should be mentioned as a direct descendant of the two characters who bind Prometheus in the opening passages of the Greek play. The characterisation which I have in mind is that of the inimitable Mr Taylor Mead (underground poet and film personality) who portrays in composite the two characters from Aeschylus: Power and Force. Some film spectators, having seen The Illiac Passion (one dissenting that he was needed in the film!), have looked to him as a sprite, as a fire image; as a fire image because of the costume we selected together for his portrayal. None of these, however, valid as they may seem from the film spectator’s viewpoint, hold as much truth as the filmmaker’s own interpretation: that Taylor Mead is the opposite of the Muse in the film, a Demon; a Demon in the full sense of the Greek word. One has only to think of the film in order to agree to the interpretation. For always, the Demon and the Muse, so deftly portrayed by a true-to-life Muse herself, Mrs Peggy Myrray, are kept apart; apart, that is, they are never seen or superimposed in the same scene or composition together.

(Gregory Markopoulos)

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