CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN PRESERVATIONS
Saturday 27 October 2007, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

FUSES
Carolee Schneemann, USA, 1964-67, 16mm, colour, sound, 29 min
I wanted to see if the experience of what I saw would have any correspondence to what I felt – the intimacy of the lovemaking … And I wanted to put into that materiality of film the energies of the body, so that the film itself dissolves and recombines and is transparent and dense – as one feels during lovemaking … It is different from any pornographic work that you’ve ever seen – that’s why people are still looking at it! And there’s no objectification or fetishization of the woman. (Carolee Schneemann)

By interweaving and compounding images of sexual love with images of mundane joy (the sea, a cat, window-filtered light), she expresses sex without the self consciousness of a spectacle, without an idea of expressivity, in her words, ‘free in a process which liberates our intentions from our conceptions’. Carolee and her lover James Tenney emerge from nebulous clusters of colour and light and are seen in every manner of sexual embrace … one overall mosaic of flesh and textures and passionate embraces. Every element of the traditional stag film is here – fellatio, cunnilingus, close-ups of genitals and penetrations, sexual acrobatics – yet there’s none of the prurience and dispassion usually associated with them. There is only a fluid oceanic quality that merges the physical act with the metaphysical connotations, very Joycean and very erotic. (Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema)

Pornography is an anti-emotional medium, in content and intent, and its lack of emotion renders it wholly ineffective for women. This absence of sensuality is so contrary to female eroticism that pornography becomes, in fact, anti-sexual. Schneemann’s film, by contrast, is devastatingly erotic, transcending the surfaces of sex to communicate its true spirit, its meaning as an activity for herself and, quite accurately, women in general. Significantly, Schneemann conceives the film as shot through the eyes of her cat – the impassive observer whose view of human sexuality is free of voyeurism and ignorant of morality. In her attempt to reproduce the whole visual and tactile experience of lovemaking as a subjective phenomenon Schneemann spent some three years marking on the film, baking it in the oven, even hanging it out the window during rainstorms on the off chance it might be struck by lightning. Much as human beings carry the physical traces of their experiences, so this film testifies to what it has been through and communicates the spirit of its maker. The red heat baked into the emulsion suffuses the film, a concrete emblem of erotic power.’ (B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Art Institute)

The preservation of Fuses by Anthology Film Archives, New York, was supported by the University of Chicago Film Studies Center and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

KITCH’S LAST MEAL
Carolee Schneemann, USA, 1973-76, 2 x 16mm, colour, sound-on-cd, 3 x 20 min
In Kitch’s Last Meal synchronicity becomes a physical property, as with accident, as with joke – double entendre. The actual projection system is of two simultaneous Super 8 reels – vertical, one above the other. The disjunctive imagery has been intricately edited: two reels periodically phrase simultaneous images of the local freight train, which ran behind our house, as well as domestic events between the artist couple and the thematic constancy of the cat, Kitch, eating during the last four years of her life.

The film is composed of five hours of double co-ordinated reels; each set approximately twenty minutes long, so that various time units can be shown. The reels were edited over the five years of the filming. The sound was edited on cassette tapes.

The double vertical projection was intended to increase perceptual tension and its incremental satisfactions during the unexpected synchronisation of the horizontal entrance and exit of the train, of the figures moving in space, of the cat leaning to her dish. The verticality emphasises the axis of the body – its aspect of elongation in contrast to more predictable bilateral symmetry, the horizontal nature of stereoscopic vision. The repeated motions of the freight train situates a narrative physicalisation, corresponding with film itself moving through the mechanisation of the fixed track. Here the edge of the frame implies a leakage of time existing both before and after, just as the train enters our perceptual field seemingly from elsewhere (behind, moving forward to an invisible destination). At the conclusion of reels 11 & 12, I stand in the railroad tracks filming a train in diminishing perspective – as if time is actually being pulled away, as if the scale of an object can be reduced to a grain, a blur.

The visual parameters were determined by placing the camera close to positions occupied by the cat. The sound was recorded by suspending a microphone adjacent to the cat both indoors and outdoors. My premise was to film fragments of Kitch’s observations so long as she lived. I began this diary film on returning home to the Hudson Valley with the cat after dislocated years in Europe. Kitch, returning to her original house was already 16 years old. Since death and film seemed in a determined interchange, my intention was to film the cat in our domestic surround until she died.

Stan Brakhage always told me how mysteriously and consistently places he filmed were subsequently destroyed – houses disappeared, bridges were taken down; friends appearing in his films would soon move away, often without a trace. With Fuses, the celebration of an equitable and passionate relationship unexpectedly dissolved; Plumb Line became the imprints of a deforming love affair; Viet-Flakes observed fragments of brutality and disaster; while my small film portrait Carl Ruggles Christmas Breakfast captured the composer at 84 years old – the unintended poignancy of a simple meal. By 1973, the premise of Kitch’s Last Meal seemed to provide certain safety valves.

Our collusion was such that Kitch died almost 20 years old while eating a lamp chop. Kitch died on February 3rd. In March, the Walkill Valley Railroad announced that the small freight running behind the house from Albany to Walkill would be discontinued and the tracks dismantled. In May, my partner Anthony McCall decided we should separate and in June I was informed my teaching position would not be renewed. So much for my anticipated trade-off with film-death!

(Carolee Schneemann)

The 16mm blow-up and preservation of Kitch’s Last Meal by Anthology Film Archives, New York, was supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

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NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR
Sunday 28 October 2007, from 12-7pm
London BFI Southbank Studio

NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR
Rachel Reupke, UK-China, 2007, video, colour, sound, 9 min
This video work reflects Rachel Reupke’s long-standing fascination with science fiction and the inherent problem of visualising the future.

Beijing is in the throws of a construction boom, break-neck in speed. Building sites are hemmed in by developers’ hoardings, each displaying an architect’s visualisation of what is to come in ambitious, blurry-soft style. Thousands of these billboards intrude on the streets: the future of the city rendered as illustrated inserts into the reality of its present – just as Beijing’s tourist maps pre-empt the completion of these projects, in order to keep up with the relentless pace of change. This visual overlay of proposed onto existent gives the impression that time is being compressed, and that tomorrow might actually be running concurrently with today.

Now Wait for Last Year takes the idea of these developers’ hoardings as its starting point. In a hybrid of architect’s projection and corporate video, Beijing’s buildings are presented in single-shot fixed frames, both monumental and unreal. Photographic in nature, but with visible post-production, the idea is that these images resist being located in a specific time or place. The collage aesthetic coupled with the incongruous design of some of these structures prompts the question as to whether these buildings actually exist in present day Beijing, are plans for future developments, or are sheer fantasy.

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OVER LAND AND SEA
Sunday 28 October 2007, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

THE IVALO RIVER DELTA
Patrick Beveridge, UK, 2007, 16mm, colour, silent, 17 min
The title of this film refers to the landscape where it was shot – an open marshland in northernmost Finland. This terrain, which is covered in thick snow during the winter months, provided a surface for filming changes in nocturnal light that are in response to the movement and position of the moon, and the sporadic displays of the polar lights. Such a project inadvertently raises the problem of landscape film as a genre in its own right. However, the film also has elements of astronomical and atmospheric photography. In particular, some experiments using film cameras placed on rotating celestial mounts lead to the unpredicted outcome of both the earth and the sky staying in focus with prolonged exposure for each frame. The film has a number of tracking shots, assembled in the chronological order they were taken, that document the events of particular nights. In filming above the horizon the camera moved with the stars across the northern sky. Against this backdrop displays of the polar lights occurred on clear nights, of which, during the unusually warm winter of 2005, there were few. (Patrick Beveridge).

AT SEA
Peter Hutton, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, silent, 60 min
Films by Peter Hutton appear more closely related to landscape painting and still photography than contemporary cinema. In their stately portrayal of urban and rural locations, they afford the viewer a rarefied and highly-focused mode of looking, a stillness seemingly at odds with everyday life. Over shots of extended duration, the world reveals itself before the camera, which often records only subtle changes of light and atmospheric conditions. Peter Hutton began making films in 1970 and has work in the collections of the Whitney Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou and the Austrian Film Museum. A former merchant seaman, he has been a professor of film at Bard College in the Hudson River Valley since 1985. (Mark Webber)

Put simply, the film tells the story (‘the birth, life and death’, in the director’s words) of a container ship – but there are no words to adequately describe the film’s awesome visual expedition. Hutton knows the sea. His experiences as a former merchant seaman have informed his filmmaking practice, known for its rigour and epic beauty. At Sea begins in South Korea with diminutive workers shipbuilding. The colossal vessel is revealed in de Chirico-worthy proportions, its magnitude surreal to the human eye. Off to sea, the splendour and intensity of the water – set against the vibrant colours of the containers – causes us to see the world anew. The film concludes in Bangladesh amidst shipbreakers as enthralled by Hutton’s camera as we are by his images. (Andréa Picard, Toronto International Film Festival)

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THE PERCIPIENT IMAGE
Sunday 28 October 2007, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

DISCOVERIES ON THE FOREST FLOOR 1-3
Charlotte Pryce, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, silent, 4 min
‘Three miniature, illuminated, hagiographic studies of plants observed and imagined, hand-processed and optically printed.’ (Charlotte Pryce)

THE SKY WALKS ME HOME
Allen D. Glass II, USA-China, 2005, 16mm, colour, silent, 24 min
Humankind in the unfamiliar landscape, composing itself rhythmically and even lovingly into poetry. Nature as mammal music. The Life Dance. Foreign smells. And silences that are, of course, their own music. (Dorothea Grossman)

THE CROSSING
Timoleon Wilkins, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, silent, 6 min
This film was born on two lazy afternoons – a product of my child’s eye fascination with the (always black) magic of viewfinder perception vs end product (the film). At the time I was deeply affected by Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Crossing, the second in his ‘border trilogy’ coming-of-age sagas set during the last vestiges of the truly wild west (Mexico-US border region circa 1930-40). The central character of this eerily perfect novel is a beautiful and adept teenage idealist who journeys on horseback into Mexico with the goal of returning a captured wolf to its native land. McCarthy’s seamless alternation between adventurism and spiritual naturalism is my inspiration. The resulting images of my ‘crossing’ are abstract by varying degrees. I later edited the film during a period of the most intense depression and self-doubt I have ever experienced: The resulting film-rhythms are punctuated by retinal afterimage and the odd alternation between the soft/tentative and the harsh/concrete. There is a visual allusion to crossing a river, and so this may also be interpreted as a contemplation of death’s journey. In actuality, it is the most highly worked-over of all my films, a departure that seems to be an appropriate nod to middle age and the peeling away of old concerns – my own, belated ‘coming of age’ story. (Timoleon Wilkins)

THE BREATH
Minyong Jang, Korea, 2007, 16mm, colour, silent, 10 min
An immersion in a bamboo grove, displaying all of Jang’s characteristic technical skill and capacity for abstemious observation. The Breath is a process of tension and release. The camera alternately distills and frees its attentions, cycling from tautly-held focus to diffuse, verdant colour fields. It’s light-as-air, following the breeze to track and rack down stalks, up stems, through leaves – ultimately following the rhythm of the filmmaker’s own respiration, merging Jang’s vital nature with its photosynthetic object. (Jeremy Rigsby, Media City)

PITCHER OF COLORED LIGHT
Robert Beavers, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, silent, 24 min
I have filmed my mother’s house and her garden. The shadows play an essential part in the mixture of loneliness and peace that exists here. The seasons move from the garden into the house, projecting rich diagonals in the early morning or late afternoon. Each shadow is a subtle balance of stillness and movement; it shows the vital instability of space. Its special quality opens a passage to the subjective; a voice within the film speaks to memory. The walls are screens through which I pass to the inhabited privacy. We experience a place through the perspective of where we came from and hear someone else’s voice through our own acoustic. The sense of place is never separate from the moment. (Robert Beavers)

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SEVEN EASY PIECES BY MARINA ABRAMOVI?
Sunday 28 October 2007, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank Studio

SEVEN EASY PIECES BY MARINA ABRAMOVI?
Babette Mangolte, USA, 2007, HD video, colour, sound, 93 min
Bruce Nauman, Body Pressure, 1974
Vito Acconci, Seedbed, 1972
Valie Export, Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969
Gina Pane, The Conditioning, the first action of Self-Portrait(s), 1973
Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965
Marina Abramovi?, Lips of Thomas, 1975
Marina Abramovi?, Entering the Other Side, 2005

In Seven Easy Pieces Abramovi? re-enacted seminal performance works from the 1960s and 70s by Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Valie Export, Gina Pane, Joseph Beuys and herself, interpreting them as one would a musical score. The film is a reflection on performance art and body art outlining physical fragility, versatility, tenacity and unlimited endurance as seen in the work of Marina Abramovi?. The film of Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovi? is about the performing body and how it affects viscerally the people who confront it, look at it and participate in the transcendental experience that is its primary effect. The ceremonial and meditative are the common responses to the week-long series of performances that took place in November 2005 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. From an art event to a social phenomenon, the seven performances became the talk of the town because they created among the visitors a sense of sublimation, like prayer. The film attempts to reveal the mechanisms of this transcendental experience by simply showing the performer’s body living the events inscribed in each piece with details that outline the body’s fragility, versatility, tenacity and unlimited endurance. The fascination comes from the revelation of the physical transformation of Marina Abramovi?’s exposed body due to the rigorous discipline of being there on display each day for seven hours without any restrictive boundaries. The relentless progress of time is revealed each day by the acoustics of the building with its waves of crowds that roll like an ocean and marvel at the performer’s steadfastness with respectful silence. That the performer’s required discipline had to be so different from one piece to the next is one of the mysteries. How the attentive audience fed into the art and Marina’s aesthetics is what is explored. It is as if a monastic urge attracted the mystical among us viewers who were there to participate. And the film, by focusing on Marina’s minute changes and strain during the long seven hours of each piece, explores in a systematic way a body without limit and increases the awareness of how participatory body art is. The film follows the linearity inscribed in the weeklong event, from body pressure, audience participation and confrontation in the first three pieces to the ceremonial in the last four pieces as mapped out by Marina Abramovi?. It is only after the fact that the film viewer will realize how much the project’s concept enlightens us on aesthetics that place physical experience over reason, process over iconography and testify to the power of audience participation over passive spectatorship. (Babette Mangolte)
www.babettemangolte.com

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THE ANAGOGIC CHAMBER
Sunday 28 October 2007, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

FILM FOR INVISIBLE INK, CASE NO: 71: BASE-PLUS-FOG
David Gatten, USA, 2006, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
David Gatten’s placid, comically lyrical new Film for Invisible Ink, Case No. 71: Base-Plus-Fog calls to mind the self-referential highjinks and bone-dry textual wit of Owen Land. But Gatten’s approach is in some ways more classically minimalist than Land’s. Invisible Ink is largely composed of a series of sprocket-hole outlines that seem to materialize from the white screen, the ‘image’ consisting of clear leader and its dust granules until one of the rounded rectangles dips down and floats forward into the frame of reference. They each occupy pretty much the same position and, although they are mostly identical, the ongoing procession gives us time to notice their differences – a smudged lower boundary, say, or an unstable corner. In between, Gatten silently presents texts from a Kodak manual, detailing what I can only assume to be the film-developer hazard that we’re observing – problems in base-plus-fog density. (Don’t ask me. For all I know, this could refer to an ambiance management conundrum at a discotheque.) Gatten has been working for years now with the particular juncture at which text and image become indistinguishable, but Film for Invisible Ink displays an impressive recommitment to the less-is-more aesthetic that lent such subtlety and refinement to his earlier What the Water Said series. The new work is as delicate yet muscular as an Agnes Martin canvas or a Fred Sandback string sculpture. (Michael Sicinski, Green Cine Daily)
www.davidgattenfilm.com

SHADOW TRAP
Greg Pope, UK-Norway, 2007, 35mm, colour, sound, 8 min
Shadow Trap was conceived as a companion piece to the live film performance Light Trap. In Light Trap action is taken to remove all emulsion from completely developed black film loops; Shadow Trap operates in reverse – a film created by the application of film emulsion ‘dust’ to a clear base. In a way Shadow Trap is a documentary – a record of previously executed actions – an exhibition of the evidence. I also regard it as a found footage film, where material from one film is re-presented and re-examined in another. In this case the re-presented material has been subjected to extreme abrasion and reduced to dust. I was also excited by the notion of fragmenting the base unit of film language to a level below that of the classical single frame, where frames are ‘atomised’ and we start to examine the building blocks of film. The image-as-sound / sound-as-image crossover also mirrors the audio element in Light Trap (where a live scratch soundtrack is created). Using the inherent sound technology of 35mm projectors I can play back surround sound audio (sound which is created by the image), over which I have very limited control. (Greg Pope)

THE OBJECT WHICH THINKS US: OBJECT 1
Samantha Rebello, UK, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min
The Object Which Thinks Us: OBJECT 1 is a film about human beings in the 21st Century, though paradoxically it is a film in which the human image plays no more than a fleeting part. Objects: utilitarian articles which play a major role in our everyday existence (though to which we pay little attention) are at the core of a film which uses them as a mirror in which we are able to view ourselves. People are nowhere to be seen though human presence is felt everywhere in the things which fill the screen. Humans are modified and directed by those objects they deem to be in control of. Our gestures and movements are constantly guided by things which do more than aid us in our day to day activities. The film seems intent on opening our eyes to the hidden qualities of manufactured goods and articles, exposing them to be enigmatic and imposing operators
in our existence, and human beings are shown at the periphery of an object world. ‘Through the objects, other human beings are haunting us.’ (Samantha Rebello)

FUGITIVE L(I)GHT
Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Canada, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min
This film explores the morph-like quality of the Serpentine Dance and its intricate play on the visible and the invisible, which extends to the larger context and legacy its originator, the American born Loïe Fuller. fugitive l(i)ght is composed of elaborately reworked found footage, originally captured by Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers, of various renditions and imitations of Fuller’s Serpentine performances. These found films are woven into intricately reworked sequences using several computer programs and following poetic interpretations of several artists who experienced Fuller’s performances in person: texts of Mallarme, lithographs of Toulouse-Lautrec, sketches of Whistler, and futuristic manifesto on dance by Marinetti. The music for this film was composed by Toronto based composer Colin Clark who reworked various LP recordings of Wagner’s Die Walküre, the music that often accompanied Fuller’s Serpentine performances. fugitive l(i)ght emphasizes rhythmic structures over and above representation, by drawing the viewer’s gaze into a maze of multiple folds of continuously unfolding colour patterns. fugitive l(i)ght aims to evoke a charge of energy that might have been experienced by the audience of the 1890s in the presence of Fuller’s light performances, and therefore permitting her to meet us again, one century later by making herself and her performance (in)visible to us through its palpitating playful rhythm expressed as a field of energy that resonates within the spectator. (Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof)

SICK SERENA AND DREGS AND WRECK AND WRECK
Emily Wardill, UK, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 10 min
Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck revels in a subset of fiction – allegory, with its roots in Medieval poetry – that ricochets retrospectively into Emily Wardill’s other films, into us watching them, into a methodology or a thought process being made manifest in which we are complicit. Allegory is an illusion of the highest order, fiction crystallised into a specific or mysterious instructional purpose. It tells two entirely co-dependent stories absolutely simultaneously, one which we are actually reading, the other the lesson to be derived from it. Through coherent, albeit often surreal narrative, we are taught something about how to behave, told our own story. These (invariably moral) coda only make sense if the narrative we are reading or watching remains in tact. Allegories are told like fairytales or made into pictures that have a similar symbolic order. Religious images are not strictly allegorical, but they are instructional and in the close-ups of Sick Serena’s stained glass the figures crunched between thick lead with animals and angels, reframed here as decapitated, broken, they are reinterpreted as mysteriously, dramatically symbolic. What is more they come to life. To ‘life’. They come to whose life? (Ian White)

VICTORY OVER THE SUN
Michael Robinson, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound, 13 min
Dominant sites of past World’s Fairs breed an eruptive struggle between spirit and matter, ego and industry, futurism and failure. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory; nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain. (Michael Robinson)
www.poisonberries.net

TODAY!
Jessie Stead & David Gatten, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, sound-on-cd, 11 min
Touch what you see when you find it or pick it up.
Fall off tomorrow’s promise, not injured and again.
In the woods there is snow, in the water there is sugar,
bodies are made of salt and (yesterday is unaware).
(Jesse Stead & David Gatten)
www.jessiestead.com
www.davidgattenfilm.com

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PETER HUTTON IN THE ELEMENTS
Monday 29 October 2007, at 7:00pm
London Tate Modern

NEW YORK PORTRAIT: CHAPTER 2
Peter Hutton, 1980-81, 16mm, b/w, silent, 16 min
The second part of an extended life’s portrait of New York.

“Hutton’s black and white haikus are an exquisite distillation of the cinematic eye. The limitations imposed – no colour, no sound, no movement (except from a vehicle not directly propelled by the filmmaker), no direct cuts since the images are born and die in black – ironically entail an ultimate freedom of the imagination. If pleasure can disturb, Hutton’s ploys emerge in full focus. These materializing then evaporating images don’t ignite, but conjure strains of fleeting panoramas of detached bemusement. More than mere photography, Hutton’s contained-with-in-the-frame juxtapositions are filmic explorations of the benign and the tragic.” (Warren Sonbert)

BOSTON FIRE
Peter Hutton, 1979, 16mm, b/w, silent, 8 min
“Boston Fire finds grandeur in smoke rising eloquently from a city blaze. Billowing puffs of darkness blend with fountains of water streaming in from off-screen to orchestrate a play of primal elements. The beautiful texture of the smoke coupled with the isolation from the source of the fire erases the destructive impact of the event. The camera, lost in the immense dark clouds, produces images for meditation removed from the causes or consequences of the scene. The tiny firemen, seen as distant silhouettes, gaze in awe, helpless before nature’s power.” (Leger Grindon, Millennium Film Journal)

IMAGES OF ASIAN MUSIC (A DIARY FROM LIFE 1973-74)
Peter Hutton, 1973-74, 16mm, b/w, silent, 29 min
“Images of Asian Music represents footage compiled during 1973-74 when Peter Hutton was living in Thailand and working at sea as a merchant seaman. While the film is silent, the title was intended to evoke a comparison to the movement of classical Asian music. Images of Asian Music is a personal celebration of Asia formed by a sensitivity to filmic composition and to the perception of these images in a silent time created by the filmmaker.” (Whitney Museum of American Art)

“The camera records a ship working out of Thailand, the faces of the seamen, the sea, a storm, fireworks, a big snake coiling exploratorily about a young girl, the huge Buddha in the lotus position and landscapes and skyscapes reminiscent of the film work of Satyajit Ray. It is beautiful, mute, and meaningful in the silence.” (Archer Winston, New York Post)

LANDSCAPE (FOR MANON),
Peter Hutton, 1986-87, 16mm, b/w, silent, 19 min
“Much of the imagery in Landscape (for Manon) is suggestive of Thomas Cole’s Catskill paintings – some of Hutton’s imagery was made in and around Kaaterskill Clove. In general, the film recalls those Cole paintings usually seen as forerunners of Luminism – ‘The Clove’, ‘Catskills’ (1827), for example, and ‘Catskill Creek’ (1845) – though the sensibility it reflects and the experience it provides is quite close to Fitz Hugh Lane, Martin Johnson Heade and John Frederick Kensett. Landscape (for Manon) is made up of twenty-two shots. The first and last shots frame the film as a tribute to Hutton’s young daughter, Manon: in the film’s delicate and arresting final shot, we see her face in close-up, double exposed with mottled light.” (Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine)

IN TITAN’S GOBLET
Peter Hutton, 1991, 16mm, b/w, silent, 10 min
In Titan’s Goblet refers to a landscape painting by Thomas Cole circa 1833. The film is intended as an homage to Cole, who is regarded as the father of the Hudson River School of painting.

“Like Landscape (for Manon), In Titan’s Goblet depicts, in a series of often-stunning, silent, black and white, discrete images the Catskill Mountain area. In this case, however, a sequence of lovely images of what at first appears to be mist in the mountains is slowly revealed to be a distant fire of rubber tires that had burned out of control. That is, Hutton’s serene, evocative landscapes are, in this instance, qualified by an environmental problem – one that confronts our hunger for imagery of pristine nature.” (Scott MacDonald)

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PNEUMA MONOXYD
Saturday 25 October 2008, from12-7pm
London BFI Southbank Studio

PNEUMA MONOXYD
Thomas Köner, Germany-Serbia, 2007, video, colour, sound, 10 min
As surveillance becomes a fundamental of today’s society, Köner’s work focuses on its implications by monitoring observation and usurping its tools. With the intention of taking a step forward from here, the artist began to invent his own imaginary tool. The scenes in Pneuma Monoxyd are observed with such an imaginary tool. Its ability to unlock future, past and present unveils the moment as it is being pieced together, blurred and unstable. Premonition, memory and splinters of ‘here’ and ‘now’ become perceptible as part of the fabric of the observed time. A static gaze of a Balkan market unveils the present moment as a porous frontier and seems like a window looking out to the beyond. (Transmediale 2008)

Thomas Köner attended music college in Dortmund and studied electronic music at the CEM-Studio in Arnhem. Extending his explorations of sound and duration to images, he began to work on video installations, photography and net art. Alchemie (1992) was the first of a sequence of collaborations with film artist Jürgen Reble in which sound and image were integrally manipulated during live performance. Köner has also composed music to accompany historic silent films for the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. He has been awarded the New Media Prize at the Montreal International Festival New Cinema New Media (2000), the Golden Nica at the Prix Ars Electronica (2004) and the Tiger Cub Award, International Film Festival Rotterdam (2005). His installation Suburbs Of The Void received the Transmediale 2005 award in Berlin and was presented at La Biennale di Venezia, Teatro La Fenice, as a live performance that the same year. Köner participated in the Media Art Biennal Seoul in 2008, and is currently working on a suite of five permanent sound installations commissioned by the Musée Rimbaud in Charleville-Mézières. www.koner.de

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A SENSE OF PLACE
Saturday 25 October 2008, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

FOUR TORONTO FILMS
Nicky Hamlyn, UK, 2007, 16mm, b/w & colour, silent, 18 min
The suite of four short films explores ideas about framing, centred round the attempt to find a necessary correspondence between the facts of the camera apparatus; fixed, rectangular frame and aspect ratio, and the work’s subject matter. A related idea concerns the figuration within the films of the manner in which the camera creates its own pro-filmic. To this end, there is a more or less recurring theme of frames within frames. Three of the four sections were filmed in, or within a stones throw of, the house in Toronto where I stayed while completing the work as an artist in residence at LIFT workshops (sidewalk, window, back lane). The fourth section was made at Koshlong Lake, near Haliburton, about 100 miles northeast of Toronto. (Nicky Hamlyn)

21 ALLEYS
Robert Todd, USA, 2007, 16mm, colour, soumd, 9 min
Since 1989, Boston-based filmmaker Robert Todd has been quietly developing one of the most distinctive bodies of work in the American film scene. Todd’s beautifully shot films draw together documentary and experimental elements; they don’t hew to a single, clearly defined style, but nevertheless show a consistency of poetic vision, spirit, and purpose. Through suspended moments of reflection and anticipation, Todd’s films explore the difficult-to-define emotions engendered by the stresses of civilization. (Cinemateque Ontario)

LAST DAYS IN A LONELY PLACE
Phil Solomon, USA, 2007, video, b/w, sound, 22 min
Farewell my friends, Farewell my dear ones, If I was rude, Forgive my weakness, Goodbye my friends, Goodbye to evening parties, Remember me, In the spring, To work for your bread, Soon you must leave, Remember your families, And work for your children, I don’t need much, and the older I become, I realize, My friendships, Will carry me over any course of distance, any cause of sorrow, My friends that last, Will dance one more time with me. I don’t need words, This, I need. (Polly Jean Harvey, Before Departure)

LOSSLESS #2
Rebecca Baron & Douglas Goodwin, USA, 2008, video, b/w, sound, 3 min
Access to experimental films has been limited by the scarcity of prints and often by filmmakers’ careful regulation of viewing conditions and formats. Though for years bootleg tapes, DVDs, and even unauthorized prints have circulated, many experimental films are now receiving much higher circulation through high-quality bit torrents available to anyone with an interest who knows how to find them in the world they share with Britney Spears videos, pornography, amateur video diaries, and first-run movies on the Internet. Lossless by Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin, is a series of works that looks at the dematerialization of film into bits, exposing the residual effects of the process that makes file sharing possible. They used several methods to alter these works, either interrupting the data streaming by removing basic information holding together the digital format or comparing 35mm to DVD and examining the difference between each frame. The project considers the impact of the digital age on filmmaking and film watching, the materiality and demateriality of film as an artistic medium, as well as the social aspects of how the online community functions and the audience for such obscure films. (Carpenter Centre for the Visual Arts, Harvard University)

TRILOGY: KETTLE’S YARD
Jayne Parker, UK, 2008, video, b/w & colour, sound, 25 min
Linear Construction, Woman with Arms Crossed, and Arc form Trilogy: Kettle’s Yard, three films sited at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, and featuring cellist Anton Lukoszevieze. These films are documents of musical performance: respectively ‘Récitation’ (1980) by Georges Aperghis; ‘Sensitivo, per arco solo, n. 7 da 7 Fogli’ (1959) by Sylvano Bussotti; and ‘Raimondas Rumsas’ (2002) by Laurence Crane. They include art objects from the Kettle’s Yard collection, opening up metaphorical space and meaning. Each piece holds a special interest: In ‘Récitation’ the cellist is required to tap the strings with his left hand while speaking phonemes based around the word ‘violoncelle’. Of ‘Sensitivo’ Anton writes, ‘The score of ‘Sensitivo’ is a graphic score for any solo stringed instrument. It was composed to allow a situation where the instrumentalist encounters and creates the graphic score with a combination of improvised gestures and concrete sounds from the notation. In my realization I use the bow to a certain extent as if it were a pen or brush in the hand of an imaginary graphic artist, scanning the contours of drawn and scribbled lines …’ Anton plays sitting in front of Rodin’s bronze of Eve, which Rodin sometimes referred to as ‘Woman with Arms Crossed’. ‘Raimondas Rumsas’ was written specially for Anton to play with his Bach-Bogen, a curved bow capable of playing up to four strings at once. (Jayne Parker)

THE MIRACLE OF DON CRISTOBAL
Lawrence Jordan, USA, 2008, 16mm, colour, sound, 12 min
For a long time I have wanted to construct a melodrama (animated) from the funky engravings of the 19th century which illustrated ‘young peoples’ adventure stories. Eventually, through a great deal of selection, such a film fell into place. I have attempted to present the high emotional overlay of very mundane events in this ‘alchemical melodrama’. To that end, Puccini combines with blatant sounds of police sirens and old door buzzers on the soundtrack, while ‘real’ and nightmare images compete for screen time. (Lawrence Jordan)

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