Date: 17 November 2002 | Season: London Film Festival 2002 | Tags: London Film Festival, Robert Beavers
ROBERT BEAVERS
Sunday 17 November 2002, at 4:15pm
London National Film Theatre NFT1
SPECIAL PRESENTATION: ROBERT BEAVERS
Introduced by the filmmaker
Robert Beavers has created a body of work that aspires to impart ‘the serenity of a thought without words’. His careful choice of the site or locations for filming often displays a deep understanding of Greek landscape, culture and history or draws upon sources from the history of architecture. The physical actions or gestures of the filmmaker (or his human subject), the use of metaphorical imagery and the intricate arrangement of the soundtrack, fuse into a consummate film experience. In revising several of his earlier films by tightly editing the image and creating new soundtracks, Beavers has produced distilled works that are precisely balanced and meticulously composed. The correspondences of the images, shot over an extended time period and in diverse locations, are cut together to an invisible rhythm, intuitively measured against each other. The presence of the filmmaker, though not always visually evident, is felt through every composition, gesture and edit. There are few traces of narrative, rather each montage of image and sound conveys a feeling or thought in an innate and tacit manner. The films demand an openness and concentration, but despite their apparent formal rigour they retain an inherent humanity, communicated in the moment of projection. This single screening is an extremely rare opportunity to see works by a remarkable filmmaker who has not been shown in England for over 30 years. (Mark Webber)
Robert Beavers, Sotiros, 1977-96, 25 min
Robert Beavers, Amor, 1980, 15 min
Robert Beavers, The Hedge Theater, 2002, 19 min
Robert Beavers, The Ground, 2001, 20 min
“Beavers’ personal films occupy a noble place within the history of avant-garde film, positioned at the intersection of structural and lyrical film-making traditions. Exuding a sense of joy for the filmic medium, they seem to embody the ideals of the high Renaissance in their fascination with perception (both visual and aural), psychology, literature, the natural world, architectural construction, musical phrasing and aesthetic beauty. Perhaps this work’s greatest achievement is that it appears continually fresh, as timeless art should, both to the newcomer and to the fortunate viewer able to savour the richness of these films time and time again.” (Susan Oxtoby, Cinematheque Ontario / Toronto International Film Festival 1999)
“Robert Beavers has been making films since the late 1960s, yet screenings of his work are rare, and are always stringently supervised by the artist. Beavers’ meticulously composed films are influenced by the structural tradition of the Greek-American avant-garde filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos, his teacher and long-term partner. However, they stem from a more visceral, lyrical source. Each of his films is conceptually complex, carefully crafted and concise.” (Chrissie Iles, Whitney Museum of American Art / Whitney Biennale 2002)
PROGRAMME NOTES
ROBERT BEAVERS
Sunday 17 November 2002, at 4:15pm
London BFI Southbank NFT1
SOTIROS
Robert Beavers, USA-Greece-Switzerland, 1977-96, 35mm, colour, sound, 25 min
In Sotiros, there is an unspoken dialogue and a seen dialogue. The first is held between the intertitles and the images; the second is moved by the tripod and the emotions of the filmmakers. Both dialogues are interwoven with the sunlight’s movement as it circles the room, touching each wall and corner, detached and intimate.
AMOR
Robert Beavers, USA-Italy-Switzerland, 1980, 35mm, colour, sound, 15 min
The recurring sounds of cutting cloth, hands clapping, hammering, and tapping underline the associations of the montage of short camera movements, which bring together the making of a suit, the restoration of a building, and details of a figure making a series of hand movements and gestures.
THE HEDGE THEATER
Robert Beavers, USA-Italy-Switzerland, 2002, 35mm, colour, sound, 19 min
With this newly completed film, shot in Rome and at the Naturtheatre in Salzburg, Beavers has completed the 18 film cycle, “My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure”.
THE GROUND
Robert Beavers, USA-Greece-Switzerland, 2001, 35mm, colour, sound, 20 min
‘What lives in the space between the stones, in the space cupped between my hand and my chest? … With each swing of the hammer I cut into the image, and the sound rises from the chisel. A rhythm, marked by repetition and animated by variation; strokes, of hammer and of fist, resounding in dialogue.’
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Date: 17 November 2002 | Season: London Film Festival 2002 | Tags: London Film Festival
ON REFLECTION
Sunday 17 November 2002, at 4:15pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
ON REFLECTION
Eve Heller, Her Glacial Speed, USA, 2001, 5 min
The world as seen in a teardrop of milk. ‘I set out to make a film about how unwitting constellations of meaning rise to a surface of understanding at a pace outside of worldly time.’
Leighton Pierce, 37th & Lex, USA, 2002, 4 min
‘A brief impression triggers an emotion echoing with memories of the past and anticipations of the future. This quiet communication, a composition of image, sound, and text, reflects that feeling and invites its continuation.’
Phillip Hoffman, What These Ashes Wanted, Canada, 2001, 56 min
A personal reflection on mortality, told through shared and private experiences.
‘What These Ashes Wanted places flesh on the poet Ann Carson’s words, ‘Death lines every moment of ordinary time’. With this work Hoffman resides in an acutely intimate time, a daily practise of loss lived precariously between the terror of psychic disintegration and the provisional solace taken through public rituals of mourning … Not a story of surviving death, but rather, of living death through a heightening of the quotidian moments of every day experience.’ (Toronto Images Festival, 2001)
Masha Godavannya, The First Round Dance, Russia-USA, 2001, 3 min
A fleeting look at neighbourhood children spending their time in the spring sunshine, film-strip hand tinted with iodine.
Repeat Screening: Tuesday 19 November 2002, at 2pm, London NFT3.
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Date: 26 October 2003 | Season: London Film Festival 2003 | Tags: London Film Festival
THE TIMES BFI 47th LONDON FILM FESTIVAL
22 October – 6 November 2003
London National Film Theatre
This year, the majority of the avant-garde programmes will be focused around the weekend of 1 & 2 November. The Experimenta “Avant-Garde Weekend” is a unique opportunity to survey some of the most vital films and videos made around the world in recent years, and our only annual chance to do so on such a scale in England. All the mixed programmes plus selected features will be shown over the two-day period, and several of the filmmakers will be present to discuss their work. This concentrated period of screenings will hopefully encourage the film/video community to gather together.
Three mixed programmes of new international short films feature works by Louise Bourque, Nathaniel Dorsky, Lewis Klahr, Guy Sherwin and Phil Solomon, “Video Visions” showcases recent tapes by artists including George Kuchar, Jeroen Offerman and Michaela Schwentner, and a new video by John Smith plays with two stunning collage works by Michele Smith (no relation), who is showing in the UK for the first time (as are many others). There are also documentaries on Jonas Mekas and Amos Vogel, two pioneering promoters of artists’ filmmaking.
The weekend before that, on Sunday 26 October legendary New York filmmaker Ken Jacobs returns to the LFF with his recently completed 6-hour video “Star Spangled To Death”, which has been a work-in-progress since 1957. Distinguished Professor Jacobs will also present a lecture on “failure” the day after the screening. The Experimenta section of the festival also includes new feature length works by Mike Hoolboom, Guy Maddin, Pat O’Neill, Wang Bing and much more.
Date: 26 October 2003 | Season: London Film Festival 2003 | Tags: London Film Festival
STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH
Sunday 26 October 2003, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
‘Despair is collaboration with the enemy.’ (Ken Jacobs)
Ken Jacobs, Star Spangled To Death, USA, 1957-2003, 375 min`
The Spirit Not Of Life But Of Living (Jack Smith) floats and stumbles through the world, delighting in action for its own sake. Suffering (Jerry Sims) upsets the cosmic balance by finding happiness in the consolation of his dolls. To restore order, the dolls are seized by The Two Evils, only to be returned by Misplaced Charity, plunging screen and viewers into Limbo.
The realisation of Star Spangled To Death as a 6-hour long video concludes a work begun by filmmaker Ken Jacobs almost a half century ago. In this final version, which closely follows the original plans, long passages from public information films, cartoons, documentaries and musicals (often shown in their entirety) are interspersed by (and in tension with) Jacobs’ own footage, which was shot mostly in late-50s New York and testifies to the birth of a new cinema: liberated and spontaneous, absurd yet real, with zest and meaning. Those were different times and the participants then young and innocent (many have since died). But change a few names and faces, and the subject matter becomes remarkably Present. Touching upon politics, war, race, religion and science, it is not a curio or period piece, but an ongoing commentary on the country that made it possible. An indictment, or at the least a parable, of the USA in the modern world: a juggernaut careening to certain destruction.
Richard Nixon’s incredible 1952 tv disclosure butts up against a documentary on the emotional responses of mother-deprived lab monkeys, song and dance routines and ‘educational’ dramas for young black adults. Star Spangled To Death is a Saturday morning picture show of a movie, its length ‘a perverse reach for the intolerable’. It will make you laugh, it will make you cry. ‘Are ya havin’ any fun?’ —Mark Webber
Star Spangled to Death will be shown in two parts with 60-minute intermission.
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Date: 27 October 2003 | Season: London Film Festival 2003 | Tags: London Film Festival
KEN JACOBS MASTERCLASS
Monday 27 October 2003, at 6:30pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
BENEATH CONSIDERATION: A LECTURE ON FAILURE
Ken Jacobs has been one of the key figures of artist filmmaking of the past five decades. As a contemporary of Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, he was at the forefront of the New America Cinema movement that defined ‘avant-garde film’ in the 50s and 60s. Jacobs taught as Professor of Cinema at SUNY Binghampton for over 30 years, where his last course before retirement was on the subject of ‘Stupidity’. At the LFF in, 2000, he presented two sold out ‘Nervous System’ projection performances and this year he returns to London with his 6-hour video Star Spangled To Death.
In this masterclass on ‘failure’ he will argue that in achieving socially set objectives, we rule out the possibility of unimaginable discoveries. Much of what passes for success can lead to predictability, conceit and the curse of celebrity, while there can be many triumphs as a result of ineptitude and confusion. Incredible things can happen by following the ‘wrong turn into adventure’. The illustrated talk will include screenings and references to the work of filmmakers including Erich von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin and Oscar Micheaux.
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Date: 31 October 2003 | Season: London Film Festival 2003 | Tags: London Film Festival
THE DECAY OF FICTION
Friday 31 October 2003, at 11:30pm
London National Film Theatre NFT1
Pat O’Neill, The Decay of Fiction, USA, 2002, 74 min
Pat O’Neill describes The Decay of Fiction as an intersection of fact and hallucination in an abandoned luxury hotel. The hotel in question is The Ambassador in Hollywood, once the grand playground of politicians and movie stars, now shabby and awaiting demolition. Against this decaying glamour, O’Neill reconstructs and reconfigures a noir-tinged narrative, in which stories slip between fact and fiction, memory and urban myth. A tall, elegant blonde stands on the terrace of her bungalow, smoking and watching the sunrise. A group of sinister men arrive and ask for Jack. Guests come and go, and so do the cops… Renowned for his brilliant and unique compositional processes using optical printing to articulate different layers in the film frame, O’Neill draws on over three decades of experimentation to compose this sensuous exploration of the boundaries of believability. (Sandra Hebron)
Screening with
Janie Geiser, Ultima Thule, USA, 2002, 10 min
An animated journey into uncharted territory. ‘A small silver plane navigates an ultramarine storm, flying over cloud-covered hills; an unlikely ferry to Ultima Thule: the farthest point, the limit of any journey.’
PROGRAMME NOTES
THE DECAY OF FICTION
Friday 31 October 2003, at 11:30pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
ULTIMA THULE
Janie Geiser, USA, 2002, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
A small silver plane navigates an ultramarine storm, flying over cloud-covered hills, an unlikely ferry to Ultima Thule: the farthest point, the limit of any journey. The seduction of immersion in blue is too strong to avoid, the land fills with water, time loses its line. This film grew out of my strong attraction to a certain blue that I found in an animated film sequence. I wanted to place images in that blue rain, and an aeroplane made its way in. I followed the plane through the night storm to this unknown destination. (Janie Geiser)
THE DECAY OF FICTION
Pat O’Neill, USA, 2002, 35mm, colour, sound, 74 min
The Decay of Fiction is an intersection of fact and hallucination in an abandoned luxury hotel. The hotel is in Hollywood. The walls of the Ambassador are cracked and peeling, the lawns are brown, and mushrooms grow in the damp carpets of the Cocoanut Grove. The pool is empty, and the ballroom where Bobby Kennedy died is shuttered and locked. A tall, elegant blonde stands transparently on the terrace of her bungalow, smoking and watching the sunrise. Voices and tinkles waft across the lawn. A contingent of vaguely sinister men arrive and ask for Jack. Jack is expecting trouble, but not this kind of trouble. Louise, a guest, replays a nightmare in which she drowns Pauline so that she can marry Dean. The sun sets and rises again. Two detectives seem to turn up everywhere, searching for Communist literature and telling one another pointless stories of underworld intrigue. In the kitchens and behind the scenes the daily routine continues, individuality melts, and workers fuse with their jobs. Winter passes, and then another summer, and finally it is Halloween, and there is a costume ball which claims the life of Rhonda the evasive soprano. And then the building comes down in a clatter of Spanish tiles and concrete, and fact has finally become fiction, once again.
I scribbled the words “The Decay of Fiction” on the back of a notebook almost forty years ago, tore it off and framed it fifteen years later, and have wanted ever since to make a film to fit its ready-made description. To me it refers to the common condition of stories partly remembered, films partly seen, texts at the margins of memory, disappearing like a book left outside on the ground to decompose back into the earth.
The film takes place in a building about to be destroyed, whose walls contain (by dint of association) a huge burden of memory: cultural and personal, conscious and unconscious. To make the film was to trap a few of its characters and some of their dialog, casting them together within the confines of the site. The structure and its stories are decaying together, and each seems to be a metaphor for the other.
I am interested in exploring the boundaries of believability. The narrative tradition insists that, no matter how fantastic the story, its surface must be seamless. By contrast, I call attention to the artifice, all the staged aspects, and allow the well-worn stories to slip over and through one another. The film’s intention could be described as wanting to take stories off the screen and into the imagination. I like to work within the gaps between reality and story, to look at what is going on around the story, its context, and to make that a part of my conversation with the audience.
—Pat O’Neill
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Date: 1 November 2003 | Season: London Film Festival 2003 | Tags: London Film Festival
VIDEO VISIONS
Saturday 1 November 2003, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
Ezra Eeman, Look at me standing here, Belgium, 2001, 8 min
An apparently mundane view of a pedestrian area … what is happening? Image seamlessly sticks and cuts, sound drifts from super-realism to atmospheric score. Time suspends as the sense of alienation and displacement distends. The centre of the city is a lonely place.
Pierre-Yves Cruaud, Le Silence est en Marche, France, 2001, 4 min
A horizontal arrangement of bands of light slowly gives way to emerging human forms, seen from above, passing through the frame. Though digital manipulation, a situation is suggested, but never seen. Sound is a sonic crackle and pulse.
Michaela Schwentner, Jet, Austria, 2003, 6 min
Dynamic recycling of treated and degraded video, structured to a track by electronic sound artists Radian.
Keiichi Tanaami, WHY Re-Mix, 2002, Japan, 2002, 10 min
Footage of a boxing match is reduced to printed still images and its constituent dots are enlarged and contrasted into an optical moiré. Assault not insult. A blitz of sound and image by Japanese animator, graphic designer Tanaami, based on his 1975 film Why.
Steve Reinke, Anal Masturbation & Object Loss, USA, 2002, 6 min
Reinke protests the ubiquity of theory and conjecture, while proposing a new art school where nothing is produced except discourse. To protect the students from undue influence, the pages of the library books must be glued together.
George Kuchar, Forbidden Fruits, USA, 2002, 15 min
George’s video diaries continue, slipping between reverie and reality, with a visit to the SF Art Institute, dinner in Chinatown and a lush daydream of sprouting seduction. Sap rises and spring swings when a tour of a friend’s garden detours into flights of floral fantasy.
Peter Rose, The Geosophist’s Tears, USA, 2002, 8 min
Travelling shots from a cross-country road trip are tiled and matted to propose impossible vistas.
Gerhard Geiger, Franz und Klara, Germany, 2003, 4 min
Geiger seeks an equivalent, format-specific editing style for digital video, to those techniques he has used for concentrated 16mm filmmaking.
Wago Kreider, Marvelous Creatures, USA, 2003, 3 min
Gaudily lit waxworks of Hollywood icons and the animals of a diorama, rapidly intercut with their subjects’ natural environments – classic movies and the zoo.
Jeroen Offerman, The Stairway at St. Paul’s, Netherlands-UK, 2002, 9 min
Inspired by rumours of satanic messages hidden in rock records, Offerman memorised and performed the vocal track of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in its entirety, backwards. A continuous shot taped outside St. Paul’s Cathedral and then reversed to present the classic song in a skewed, but legitimate, new way. Sincere, admirable, and very, very funny.
Tony Cokes & Scott Pagano, 5%, USA, 2001, 10 min
Critical commentary on the business practices of the music industry, ripping apart the illusory promises made to the consumer.
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, I Am A Boyband, Canada, 2002, 6 min
A music video for a group of cloned pop stars. Nemerofsky Ramsay splits his own personality to create the perfect boy band of four distinct and desirable youngsters. All the ingredients are there; and it makes so much sense on a commercial level. Their song of heartbreak is an Elizabethan madrigal, ‘Come Again, Sweet Love’ by composer John Dowland (1563-1626).
PROGRAMME NOTES
VIDEO VISIONS
Saturday 1 November 2003, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
LOOK AT ME STANDING HERE
Ezra Eeman, Belgium, 2001, colour, sound, 8 min
An apparently mundane view of a pedestrian area … what is happening? Image seamlessly sticks and cuts, sound drifts from super-realism to atmospheric score. Time suspends as the sense of alienation and displacement distends. The centre of the city is a lonely place. —Mark Webber
LE SILENCE EST EN MARCHE
Pierre-Yves Cruaud, France, 2001, colour, sound, 4 min
Barriers restrict the living space of more or less human apparitions. We witness the development of life forms that are already fairly regimented. —Pierre-Yves Cruaud
JET
Michaela Schwentner, Austria, 2003, colour, sound, 6 min
This video’s exhilarating dynamism results from a precisely composed interplay of colour and form which structures the viewer’s perception of it significantly. Michaela Schwentner’s work method closely resembles that of electro-acoustic sound artists Radian, who employ a variety of painterly elements that are allowed to interact, overlap or contrast. —Christa Benzer
WHY RE-MIX, 2002
Keiichi Tanaami, Japan, 2002, colour, sound, 10 min
Footage of a boxing match is reduced to printed stills, whose constituent dots are enlarged and contrasted into an optical moiré. Audio-visual barrage of sound and image by Japanese animator , graphic designer Tanaami, based on his 1975 film Why. Assault not insult. —Mark Webber
ANAL MASTURBATION & OBJECT LOSS
Steve Reinke, USA, 2002, colour, sound, 6 min
Ever on the lookout for learning opportunities, Reinke envisions an art institute where you don’t have to make anything, and with a library full of books glued together. All the information’s there – you just don’t have to bother reading it! —New York Video Festival, 2002
FORBIDDEN FRUITS
George Kuchar, USA, 2002, colour, sound, 15 min
The foliage and sprouting of urban greenery becomes the subject of this celebration to all things pollinated. The video explores hidden gardens that lie sequestered amid an array of dwellings inhabited by the not so rich and famous. Felines creep amid the blossoms as human entities enrich the soil with their leaking desires. —George Kuchar
THE GEOSOPHIST’S TEARS
Peter Rose, USA, 2002, colour, sound, 8 min
Shot during a seven-week cross-country road trip in the aftermath of September 11th, the work is operatic in ambition and offers a complex meditation on the iconography of the American landscape. Drawing on the stratagems of the early geosophists, who believed that through the operation of a mysterious instrument landscapes might be placed in an emotionally meaningful correspondence with one another, the work uses a variety of visual algorithms to propose and discover surprising structural features of the uninhabited American landscape. Sounds for the work were produced by a remarkable antique slide rule, dating from 1895, that was untouched for over forty years and whose peculiar threnody is both mournful and rhapsodic. In its fractured and phantasmagoric reworkings of the horizon, the work offers us unstable metaphors for the state of the union and a respectful homage to the traditions of painting. —Peter Rose
FRANZ UND KLARA
Gerhard Geiger, Germany, 2003, colour, sound, 4 min
Geiger seeks an equivalent editing style for digital video, to those techniques he has used for 16mm film. Using the same footage shot at a family house party, he presents first the concentrated short film (twice for our assimilation) and then the more recent video version. —Mark Webber
MARVELOUS CREATURES
Wago Kreider, USA, 2003, colour, sound, 3 min
From the taxidermied bestiary of a natural history museum to the life-like waxworks that haunt our pop culture memories, the convulsive beauty of animals oscillates between plenitude and punishment, attraction and repulsion, life and death. In a series of photographic shocks that flash an image of the fixed-explosive, Marvelous Creatures signal the uncanny correlation of erotic and destructive impulses. They bear witness to a primordial trauma, a confusion between the animate and the inanimate, the biological and the mechanical, Eros and Thanatos. —Wago Kreider
THE STAIRWAY AT ST. PAUL’S
Jeroen Offerman, Netherlands-UK, 2002, colour, sound, 9 min
It’s time to dive into your record collection and find out if it was all true. But first let us watch this video. Turn up the volume and remember the first time you smoked a cigarette… —Jeroen Offerman
5%
Tony Cokes & Scott Pagano, USA, 2001, colour, sound, 10 min
5% is a ten-minute work that questions the cult of pop stardom, deconstructs music industry practices, considers the problematics of live performance, and suggests other, more anonymous working strategies. For this work I decided to collaborate closely with musician, media artist, and designer Scott Pagano who, along with Marc Pierson, currently form the core of SWIPE. Our idea of generic music came out of a belief that pop music was more about life under post-industrial commodity capital than it was about ‘love’, ‘emotion’ or ‘personal expression’. Narratives of superstardom were the grease that kept the idiotic grind looped, moving in place. The soundtrack is two recent SWIPE tracks: “mm_2” and “1cc_v2+”. —Tony Cokes
I AM A BOYBAND
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Canada, 2002, colour, sound, 6 min
What are the ingredients for a boy band? A cute tune, dance moves and of course four handsome hunks, each with their own look … A cloned boyband co-opts an Elizabethan madigral to express its heartbreak over lost love. —Benny Nerofsky Ramsay
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Date: 1 November 2003 | Season: London Film Festival 2003 | Tags: London Film Festival
LIGHT TRACES
Saturday 1 November 2003, at 4pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
Julie Murray, Untitled (Light), USA, 2002, 5 min
A night-time memorial to the World Trade Centre site and its ‘towers of light’.
Guy Sherwin, Animal Studies, UK, 1998-2003, 25 min
A series of meditations on nature and the animal kingdom, comprising both physical and metaphysical reflection. Each has the subtle, granular pulsing that makes it seem as though these could be the first rolls of film ever wrenched through a camera.
Karl Kels, Prince Hotel, Germany, 1987-2003, 8 min
A portrait of New York’s Bowery and its time-warn occupants. Though no longer solely a refuge for alcoholics and the lost, some of those characters remain, and their world is revered by Kels’ camera, displaying humour and a deep sense of camaraderie.
Jimmy Robert, Embers, UK, 2003, 7 min
Using the modest Super-8 gauge to film his immediate personal surroundings, Jimmy Robert has developed a profound personal style. Fleeting moments are combined in editing, evoking moods through the juxtaposition of images.
Nathaniel Dorsky, The Visitation, USA, 2002, 18 min
‘The Visitation is a gradual unfolding, an arrival so to speak. I felt the necessity to describe an occurrence, not one specifically of time and place, but one of revelation in one’s own psyche. The place of articulation is not so much in the realm of images as information, but in the response of the heart to the poignancy of the cuts.’
PROGRAMME NOTES
LIGHT TRACES
Saturday 1 November 2003, at 4pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
UNTITLED (LIGHT)
Julie Murray, USA, 2002, colour, sound, 5 min
A moving reflection on September 11, Untitled (Light) finds beauty in minutiae, breaking down the skyward searchlights memorializing the fallen towers into a constellation of illuminated dust motes. —Onion City Film Festival, 2003
ANIMAL STUDIES
Guy Sherwin, UK 1998-2003, b/w, silent, 25 min
A variable set of perceptual studies on the inconsequential movements of animals. The films are made partly in the camera and partly in the printer, and most are derived from a single take. Fluctuations of light, geometry and time reveal what might be hidden in the photographic depths of the material. My filmic interest in animals is that they are unselfconscious, authentic, and don’t act. This is part of an ongoing series of films which developed out of the Short Film Series, and can be shown in any order or number, giving an openness of connection between images, ideas, thoughts, themes. —Guy Sherwin
PRINCE HOTEL
Karl Kels, Germany 1987-2003, b/w, silent, 8 min
In 1986 Kels received a fellowship that allowed him to study at Cooper Union in New York. During his stay there, Kels spent some six months at the Bowery in Lower Manhattan. He began hanging out with the less fortunate who eke out an existence in cheap hotels or on the street, and became friendly with many of them. In the lives of the mostly male alcoholics who survive on open camaraderie and cheap alcohol, he discovered a rich unstaged world, which he slowly started to film. Bowery / Fragment [the working title for Prince Hotel] is but a short fragment of what a final film on this subject could offer, yet it stands by itself and clearly bears the director’s marks. Against the background of a run-down Prince Hotel we see men who pass time together, deliberately portrayed by Kels’ clear eye for framing and detail, and yet whose acts and movements cannot be controlled. —Miryam Van Lier, Millennium Film Journal
EMBERS
Jimmy Robert, UK, 2003, colour, silent, 7 min
Using the modest super-8 gauge to film his immediate personal surroundings, Jimmy Robert has developed a profound personal style. Fleeting moments are combined in editing, evoking moods through the juxtaposition of images. —Mark Webber
THE VISITATION
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2002, colour, silent, 18 min
The Visitation is a gradual unfolding, an arrival so to speak. I felt the necessity to describe an occurrence, not one specifically of time and place, but one of revelation in one’s own psyche. The place of articulation is not so much in the realm of images as information, but in the response of the heart to the poignancy of the cuts. —Nathaniel Dorsky
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Date: 1 November 2003 | Season: London Film Festival 2003 | Tags: London Film Festival
ILLUMINATION
Saturday 1 November 2003, at 7pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
Rebecca Meyers, Glow in the Dark (January-June), USA, 2002, 6 min
A somnambulant chronicle of night-time luminosity, and the sounds that keep us awake in the lonely twilight.
Goh Harada, Lampenschwarz, Japan-Germany, 2001, 12 min
Tactile, imageless film created using clear film and black pigment, which has been manually rubbed into a layer of transparent silicone. In projection, it becomes a rapid and infinitely complex hypnagogic vision.
Fred Worden, If Only, USA, 2003, 7 min
Points of light burst through the darkness in a surge of abstract motion. Luminous stimulation for the subconscious.
Ichiro Sueoka, I am Lost to the World, Japan, 2003, 7 min
Re-appropriation of anonymous footage shot in Kyoto 1934; its fractured images ravaged by chemical and physical decay. ‘Film is not an immortal document; it is a vanishing existence.’
Thomas Draschan, Encounter in Space, Austria-Germany, 2003, 7 min
Science, the space race and more earthy pursuits: formal and narrative strategies applied to found footage to create a supernatural adventure.
James Otis, Common Knowledge, USA, 2002, 2 min
‘Upbeat, fast-paced, crowd-pleasing investigation of marketing and the original sin, based on a South African apple juice commercial. The sound track is an obsessively synchronised, mad marimba version of the old mission hymn, ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains’.’
Sandra Gibson, Outline, USA, 2003, 6 min
Direct cinema barrage of light and colour, in cinemascopic glory.
Louise Bourque, Jours en Fleurs, Canada, 2003, 5 min
A symphony of nature told in a shower of golden colours that reveal a microcosm of cellular structures. Film emulsion transfigured by incubation in menstrual blood.
Trish Van Huesen, Resurrection, USA, 2002, 3 min
The emergence of consciousness as beatific reawakening. A whiff of the ‘The Passion of Carl Th. Dreyer’ somehow embodied within a hand processed, scratched, painted and bleached Super-8 blow-up. Music by cyclic Icelandic wonderkind Eyvind Kang.
Lewis Klahr, Daylight Moon, USA, 2002, 14 min
Using collage animation, Klahr conjures up an evocative, hermetic world. The sense of quiet melancholy suggests a loss of innocence, both personal and collective, which is pictorially represented by the 1950s consumer boom.
PROGRAMME NOTES
ILLUMINATION
Saturday 1 November 2003, at 7pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
GLOW IN THE DARK (JANUARY-JUNE)
Rebecca Meyers, USA, 2002, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 min
Radiators clang while spheres and cypridina phosphoresce. A rubber ball held up to light becomes a snowy crystal. Looking out and up when the sun is down. Home science experiments and other attempts to see with the camera in the dark. —Rebecca Meyers
LAMPENSCHWARZ
Goh Harada, Japan-Germany, 2001, 16mm, b/w, silent, 12 min
Black surface made with black pigment meets white surface created by the projection lamp. The film Lampenschwarz was made solely by manual work only using black pigment (Lampenschwarz), transparent glue and blank film. These materials were brought onto the transparent film with the tips of the fingers, frame by frame. This film shows 17,000 of these different black and white images through the rapid speed of the projector, thus creating ‘black and white movements’. —Goh Harada
IF ONLY
Fred Worden, USA, 2003, 16mm, b/w, silent, 7 min
The bubble shaped orb of the human head, perched atop its touchy-feely transport system has seven moist oval openings through which everything outside comes in: two eyes, two nostrils, one mouth and two ears. Inside the bubble head, bubble universes spawn ad infintum and the only passable direction is directly into the steady headwinds of an ever advancing infinity of veils. A high wire bobbing and weaving just to stay upright. These artful if endless veil penetrations are at once the human job description as well as nature’s shot at vindicating the transient in the face of the impassive infinite. Nature makes the orifices moist so things can stick, at least momentarily. The intoxicated camera operator shoots the moon slipping through the barren trees. The rabbit hole’s light shadow appears and he obliges, head first, no looking back. His cranium (like yours) is packed with illusions, but down the rabbit hole they treasure the same just so long as they’re custom fabricated, hand tooled and conscious. Down this hole, stalking the unforeseen non-translatable is all. Join in here. —Fred Worden
I AM LOST TO THE WORLD
Ichiro Sueoka, Japan, 2003, 16mm, b/w, sound, 7 min
This title is quoted from the poetry of Friedrich Rueckert (“Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”). This German romanticist poet wrote of the sadness of disappearance. An anonymous amateur cineaste shot and recorded the some scenes of Kyoto in 1934, but the films are suffering from vinegar syndrome, since they have been badly stored. The films were just falling into decay, and would probably only disappear, without looking back to anyone. ‘Film’ is not an immortal document, but a vanishing existence. —Ichiro Sueoka
ENCOUNTER IN SPACE
Thomas Draschan, Austria-Germany, 2003, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min
Encounter in Space relates the story of a man and his alter egos, abandoned in the midst of an unknown extraterrestrial region, immersed in the sinister light of an unholy radiation, which arouses in him sexual craving and human desire. He has to encounter a number of adventures and to give proof of his potency, while having to cope with an eye operation and several other incidents. He is noticeably getting lost in the battles among his alter egos. Eventually, part of his personality leaves the planet, and the part of his personality that remains behind is able to embark in peace on a quest for new amusements. —Thomas Draschan
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
James Otis, USA, 2002, 16mm, colour, sound, 2 min
Upbeat, fast-paced, crowd-pleasing investigation of marketing and the original sin, based on a South African apple juice commercial. The sound track is an obsessively synchronised, mad marimba version of the old mission hymn, “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains”. —James Otis
OUTLINE
Sandra Gibson, USA, 2003, 35mm, colour, silent, 6 min
Defining the shape of everyday objects (ferns, forks and flowers), the strip of film was unwound on the studio floor and decoratively stencilled. At 24 frames per second, the objects dissolve into a filmic downpour. —Luis Recoder
JOURS EN FLEURS
Louise Bourque, Canada, 2003, 16mm, colour, sound, 5 min
A reclamation of flower-power in which images of trees in springtime bloom are subjected to the floriferous ravages of menarcheal substance. The title is based on an expression from my coming of age in French Canada, where girls would refer to having their menstrual periods as ‘être dans ses fleurs’. As a result of incubation in menstrual blood for several months, the original images on the emulsion undergo violent alterations. The shedding of the unfertilised womb depredates the fertilised blossoms and substitutes its own dark beauty. From the dissolution of the pro-filmic, the scale shifts abruptly and kaleidoscopically from the macro to the microcosmic and with it another representation of nature emerges. —Louise Bourque
RESURRECTION
Trish Van Huesen, USA, 2002, 16mm, colour, sound, 3 min
A hand processed Super-8 film, where individual frames have been scratched, painted and bleached in order to portray the emergence of consciousness. —Trish Van Huesen
DAYLIGHT MOON
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2002, 16mm, colour, sound, 14 min
There are things I could say about Daylight Moon but very few I want to before someone has seen it. But I will say this: of all the films I’ve made using collage to muck around in the past, this one gets the closest to what I’m after. —Lewis Klahr
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Date: 1 November 2003 | Season: London Film Festival 2003 | Tags: London Film Festival
IMITATIONS OF LIFE
Saturday 1 November 2003, at 9pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
Mike Hoolboom, Imitations of Life, Canada, 2003, 75 min
A series of topical news headlines sound like it might as well be the end of the world, but this is 1993, the year the filmmakers’ nephew was born. It’s an event that leads him to contemplate the ceaseless urge to photograph and be photographed. For Hoolboom, this compulsion indicates our discontentment with the world, which is compensated by reproducing it as ‘experience in a crisis-proof form’. Imitations of Life is a 10-part suite of dreams and memories that integrates original footage with instantly recognisable images from commercials, cinema classics and recent blockbusters. In Jack’s early years, the filmmaker sees (and shows us) the world through a child’s eyes. Later, this sense of open wonder is retained, though tempered in the knowledge that modern life doesn’t permit us such indulgence. We are ‘the children of Fritz Lang and Microsoft’, striving to give our lives shape and meaning through photographs, tv and movies. Through a vast wealth of adopted images, this video questions the values of lives lived through the lens. If movies carry our collective baggage and teach us about the world around us, do they hold us back from inventing the future?
Also Screening: Saturday 25 October 2003, at 8:30pm, London ICA2
PROGRAMME NOTES
IMITATIONS OF LIFE
Mike Hoolboom, Canada, 2003, video, colour, sound, 75 min
Expanding on the structure of Panic Bodies, with its discrete but interconnected shorts, the latest found-footage feature from Mike Hoolboom is a ten-part meditation on childhood, visual representation and the future in a world of pictures. Breathtaking in its encyclopaedic recycling and appropriation, the film moves beyond scratch video, assemblage and recontextualisation; in Hoolboom’s words it “strains childhood through a history of reproduction, culling pictures from the Lumières to the present day in order to find the future in the past.” Much more than just a poetic essay on mediation and simulation at the end of history, the film situates the ethical challenges of the future within the context of picture making, pointing to our current crisis as one of (a failure of) imagination, representation and technology.
Already acclaimed as a short in its own right, Jack works as the heart of the film, with Hoolboom’s familiar, wryly wise voice-over recounting visits with his nephew as we witness Jack growing up in processed Bolex images. Here we see possibility, for Jack makes happiness his profession and ponders if politics could ever be an expression of love.
Throughout the film, the presence of childhood, whether in pictures, voice, story, or reflection, forces us adults to rethink our responsibility, imagination, apocalyptic terrors and the formation of our own memories. The title section itself, proposes science fiction as a species of film haunted by science, obsessed with death and always about catastrophe. With visuals weaving together Riefenstahl, Terminator and many more familiar images, it leaves us with the challenge of how we will invent the future. —Ken Anderlini, Vancouver International Film Festival, 2003
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