{"id":1488,"date":"2009-10-25T19:00:55","date_gmt":"2009-10-25T19:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/?p=1488"},"modified":"2018-05-08T17:32:47","modified_gmt":"2018-05-08T16:32:47","slug":"whirl-of-confusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/2009\/10\/25\/whirl-of-confusion\/","title":{"rendered":"Whirl of Confusion"},"content":{"rendered":"

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WHIRL OF CONFUSION<\/strong>
\nSunday 25 October 2009, at 7pm
\nLondon BFI Southbank NFT3<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mary Helena Clark, And the Sun Flowers, USA, 2008, 5 min
\n<\/strong>\u2018Notes from the distant future and forgotten past. An ethereal flower and disembodied voice guide you through the spaces in between.\u2019 (Mary Helena Clark)<\/p>\n

Greg Pope, Shot Film, UK-Norway, 2009, 4 min
\n<\/strong>Taking the expression \u2018to shoot a film\u2019 at face value, this 35mm reel has been blasted with a shotgun.<\/p>\n

Matthias M\u00fcller, Christoph Giradet, Contre-Jour, Germany, 2009, 11 min
\n<\/strong>My Eyes! My Eyes! Flickering out from the screen and direct to your retina, Contre-jour<\/em> is not for the optic neurotic. Take a deep breath and try to relax as M\u00fcller and Girardet conduct their examination.<\/p>\n

David Gatten, Film for Invisible Ink Case No. 142: Abbreviation for Dead Winter (Diminished by 1,794), USA, 2008, 13 min
\n<\/strong>\u2018A single piece of paper, a second stab at suture, a story three times over, a frame for every mile. Words by Charles Darwin.\u2019 (David Gatten)<\/p>\n

Paul Abbott, Wolf\u2019s Froth \/ Amongst Other Things, UK, 2009, 15 min
\n<\/strong>By chance or circumstance, wolf\u2019s froth\u2019s covert syntax refuses to be unpicked. Entangling anxious domesticity with the spectre of aggression, it conjures a mood of underlying discomfort and intrigue.<\/p>\n

Lewis Klahr, False Aging, USA, 2008, 15 min
\n<\/strong>Klahr\u2019s surreal collage journeys through lost horizons of comic book Americana and is brought back down to earth by Drella\u2019s dream. And nobody called, and nobody came.<\/p>\n

Oliver Husain, Mount Shasta, Canada, 2008, 8 min
\n<\/strong>What is ostensibly a proposal for a film script is acted out, without artifice, in a bare loft space as Mantler plays a plaintive lament. A puppet show like none other that will leave you bemused, befuddled and bewildered.<\/p>\nPROGRAMME NOTES<\/a>

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WHIRL OF CONFUSION
\n<\/strong>Sunday 25 October 2009, at 7pm
\nLondon BFI Southbank NFT3<\/p>\n

AND THE SUN FLOWERS
\nMary Helena Clark, USA, 2008, video, colour, sound, 5 min
\n<\/strong>Henry James had his figure in the carpet; Da Vinci found faces on the wall.
\nWithin this Baltimore wallpaper: a floral forest of hidden depth and concealment, the hues and fragrance of another era. Surface decoration holds permeable planes, inner passages. There emerges a hypnotic empyrean flower, a solar fossil, a speaking anemone, of paper, of human muscle, of unknown origin, delivering an unreasonable message of rare tranquillity. (Mark McElhatten)<\/p>\n

SHOT FILM
\nGreg Pope, UK-Norway, 2009, 35mm, colour, sound, 4 min
\n<\/strong>A shotgun is aimed onto filmstrips. Images and sound are created through the destructive force and spread of the shot. Images as wound \u2013 entry and exit points. A pattern sliced and spliced, a single instant re-presented and duplicated through time. A literal interpretation unmasks the implied violence embedded in a common phrase \u2018to shoot a film\u2019. (Greg Pope)<\/p>\n

CONTRE-JOUR
\nMatthias M\u00fcller & Christoph Giradet, Germany, 2009, 35mm, colour, sound, 11 min
\n<\/strong>The look with which we comprehend the world and which it casts back at us in response breaks up in Contre-jour <\/em>into disquieting fragments. Blurs, flashes and stroboscope montages disintegrate reality into shadowy images that inflict pain on the eye. A spotlight precisely cuts the individual out of the darkness.
\n\u2018I wish you could see what I see\u2019 remains a futile hope. Blind spots gape between self-perception and the perception of others. (Kristina Tieke)<\/p>\n

FILM FOR INVISIBLE INK CASE NO. 142: ABBREVIATION FOR DEAD WINTER (DIMINISHED BY 1,794)
\nDavid Gatten, USA, 2008, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 13 min
\n<\/strong>Gatten\u2019s Film<\/em> takes up Darwin to nearly fossilize his words and attempt minute rediscovery in a paper\u2019s inky fibres. Constantly turning the focus (so it seems), Gatten lets these gossamer ink-strands ripple into view out of total blankness (an empty world), more and more, so that even when they are in focus, they\u2019re still just an abstraction: a bunch of fibres entwined. And even, then, of course, there\u2019s the feeling that if Gatten keeps refocusing he\u2019ll discover entirely new strands as well; appropriate to a film whose words are from Darwin, Film <\/em>feels like an archaeological dig. (David Phelps)
\nwww.davidgattenfilm.com<\/p>\n

WOLF\u2019S FROTH \/ AMONGST OTHER THINGS
\nPaul Abbott, UK, 2009, video, colour, sound, 15 min<\/strong>
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FALSE AGING
\nLewis Klahr, USA, 2008, video, colour, sound, 15 min
\n<\/strong>It\u2019s hard to believe that False Aging<\/em> clocks in at under 15 minutes, given how powerfully it evokes passing decades punctuated by muffled eruptions of longing and regret. A button revolves around a clock \u2013 and the world moves with it. Klahr shares Joseph Cornell\u2019s alchemical genius, but his collaged reveries cast deeper shadows and offer little magical protection from death and disappointment. The soundtrack draws on The Valley of the Dolls<\/em>, Jefferson Airplane, and Lou Reed & John Cale\u2019s \u2018Songs for Drella\u2019.
\n\u2018As Cale channels Warhol, recounting a nightmare involving a snowy park under the stairs and anxieties about troubles real and imagined, a blond man peers at cityscapes, a skeletal hand snatches a fortune, and no-longer-redeemable trading stamps flutter by.\u2019 (Kristin M. Jones)<\/p>\n

MOUNT SHASTA
\nOliver Husain, Canada, 2008, 16mm, colour, sound, 8 min
\n<\/strong>Pastel-coloured institutional walls contain fabric-and-pipe-cleaner inventions of a whimsy that almost seems forced, were it not for the total belief evinced by those participating in it. In the background, a man at a cheap keyboard (again, of the sort familiar from middle-school music rooms of a certain era) warbles a story-song as half-formed handkerchief puppets fly around each other on visible wires, the puppeteers made \u2018invisible\u2019 by their white canvas beekeeper suits. Husain\u2019s story is about a mountain trip waylaid by a fog which turns out to be the smoke from a destructive fire. In a sense, this could be a way of understanding Mount Shasta<\/em> as a film. The elements that envelop this gorgeous film in mystery (is this avant-garde? a narrative short?
\na children\u2019s film?) are also the ones that threaten to unmake it at every turn, since \u2018the spell\u2019 is always already about our ability to turn away from its blatant disenchantment. (Michael Sickinski)
\nwww.husain.de<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alina Rudnitskaya\u2019s humanistic approach to documentary filmmaking often brings out the humour in her chosen subjects. As an introduction to her work, this programme depicts three diverse groups of contemporary Russian women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-1488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-london-film-festival-2009","tag-london-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}