The Poor Stockinger …

Wednesday 10 October 2012, at 6pm, ICA

The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott
Luke Fowler | UK 2012 | 61 min
The new work by Luke Fowler, a current nominee for the Turner Prize, explores the role played by left wing intellectuals in the working class communities of post-war Yorkshire. At night schools organised by the Workers’ Educational Association, adults with no other access to further education were taught by progressive thinkers such as Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and E.P. Thompson, from whose treatise The Making of the English Working Class the film takes its long-winded title. As in previous studies of R.D. Laing and Cornelius Cardew, Fowler makes effective use of archival and contemporary materials. The result is far from a conventional documentary: in place of objective commentary, the soundtrack features the lilting voice of artist Ceryth Wyn Evans reading Thompson’s class reports (pointed and often droll). For the present-day images of municipal buildings, West Riding towns and surrounding landscapes, Fowler shot in collaboration with American independent filmmaker Peter Hutton.

The ICA screening will feature an extended introduction by social historian and former WEA employee Dr. Tom Steele (University of Glasgow).

Mark Webber

Also screening:
Sunday 21 October 2012, 4pm, NFT3

Breaking the Frame

Wednesday 10 October 2012, at 8pm, ICA

Breaking the Frame
Marielle Nitoslawska | Canada 2012 | 100 min
Breaking the Frame is the first feature-length documentary on Carolee Schneemann, an artist whose pioneering work has transformed discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. In cinema history, she is primarily known for Fuses, an honestly explicit film of lovemaking from a feminine viewpoint shot between 1964-67. For decades, Schneemann has similarly challenged taboos in other media, making paintings, performances, video, collage and installations in which personal experiences are absolutely entwined with formal considerations: ‘Form is emotion. I work towards metaphors of sensation, a dramatization of loss and recovery.’ Her kinetic performance style, developed while a key member of the Judson Dance Theater, produced pieces such as Meat Joy, Up To And Including Her Limits and Interior Scroll, now regarded as seminal works of live art. In this mesmerising film, which forgoes chronological biography, the artist generously shares her memories and extraordinary personal archive. 

Mark Webber

Also screening:
Friday 19 October 2012, 9pm, NFT3

Peter Kubelka: The Essence of Cinema

Thursday 11 October 2012, at 6pm, ICA

The seven films made by Peter Kubelka between 1955 and 2003 are an extraordinary demonstration of cinematic possibilities. In the ‘metric’ films Adebar, Schwechater and Arnulf Rainer, each individual element is precisely placed in relation to each other and the whole, resulting in a rhythmic viewing experience that articulates his assertion that ‘film is not movement’. The ‘metaphoric’ works Mosaik im Vertrauen, Unsere Afrikareise, Pause! and Dichtung und Wahrheit explore ways in which meaning can be constructed by the juxtaposition of images and sound. Astounding at first sight, our understanding of these films deepens with repeated viewings. Mark Webber

‘Kubelka’s cinema is like a piece of crystal, or some other object of nature: It doesn’t look like it was produced by man; one could easily conceive that it was picked up from among the organic treasures of nature.’ (Jonas Mekas)

Mosaik im Vertrauen
Peter Kubelka | Austria 1955 | 17 min
‘Kubelka’s motives for making the film lie in his belief that commercial films do not fully exploit cinematic possibilities. He declares that the place of the plot and its ostensibly disparate scenes in the screen, and the time shall be any time at which the film is shown.’ (Alfred Schmeller)

Adebar
Peter Kubelka | Austria 1957 | 2 min
‘Here, at last, is a filmmaker´s ear that creates in contrapuntal accord with his eye in the making. If the projection of Adebar is perfectly synced, the experience is an indescribably new one for any with eyes and ears to see/hear it.’ (Stan Brakhage)

Schwechater
Peter Kubelka | Austria 1958 | 1 min
‘Kubelka’s achievement is that he has taken Soviet montage one step further. While Eisenstein used shots as the basic units and edited them together in a pattern to make meanings, Kubelka has gone back to the individual still frame as the essence of cinema.’ (Fred Camper)

Arnulf Rainer
Peter Kubelka | Austria 1960 | 6 min
‘Arnulf Rainer is an architecture built in time by cinema. It uses only the four essential elements of the medium: light, darkness, sound and silence.’ (Peter Kubelka)

Unsere Afrikareise
Peter Kubelka | Austria 1966 | 13 min
‘Unsere Afrikareise is about the richest, most articulate, and most compressed film I have ever seen. Kubelka’s film is one of the cinema’s few masterpieces and a work of such great perfection that it forces one to re-evaluate everything that one knew about cinema. The incredible artistry of this man, his incredible patience, his methods of working, and the beauty of his accomplishment, makes the rest of us look like amateurs.’ (Jonas Mekas)

Pause!
Peter Kubelka | Austria 1977 | 12 min
‘Arnulf Rainer’s face art, which constitutes the source of imagery of Pause! is a chapter of modern art in itself. Kubelka had to consume and to transcend not only Arnulf Rainer but also to transcend the entire genre of contemporary art known as face art. Both Rainer and Art disintegrated and became molecules, frames of movement and expression, material at the disposal of the Muse of Cinema. Pause! is an ecstatic work.’ (Jonas Mekas)

Dichtung und Wahrheit
Peter Kubelka | Austria 2003 | 13 min
‘Poetry and Truth features 12 stories; 12 sequences, each composed of one shot that is repeated in three, or five, or a dozen variations. Each take captures a movement from a stasis to motion and back again. For Kubelka, the repetition of physical movement – as in dance, as in film, as in life – is the fundamental law of the universe, from which even civilization’s most complex systems derive.’ (Alexander Horwath)

See also:
Wed 10 – Sun 21 October 2012, 12pm-10pm, BFI: Monument Film (installation)
Saturday 13 October 2012, 1pm, ICA: Fragments of Kubelka
Sunday 21 October 2012, 2pm, NFT3: Peter Kubelka Presents Monument Film

Occupy the Cinema

Thursday 11 October 2012, at 8pm, ICA

Austerity Measures
Ben Russell & Guillaume Cailleau | Greece 2012 | 9 min
Athens at crisis point: a colour-separation portrait of the Exarchia neighbourhood during the anti-austerity protests.

Seeking the Monkey King
Ken Jacobs | USA 2011 | 40 min
Amid the hypnotic, flickering motion of a metallic terrain, vitriolic onscreen texts rail against American culpability, from the Revolution to Iraq to the present administration. Each statement casts an arrow, and J.G. Thirlwell’s monstrously cinematic score drives them home.

Deep State
Brad Butler & Karen Mirza | UK 2012 | 44 min
‘An audacious, semi-fantastical secret history of the counterforces of popular protest and clandestine control, this struggle is told through archive material, contemporary footage and future speculation.’ A direct development of the filmmakers’ visit to Cairo prior to the Tahrir Square uprising, Deep State was commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella, and made in collaboration with author China Miéville.

Mark Webber

Fragments of Kubelka

Saturday 13 October 2012, at 1pm, ICA

Fragments of Kubelka
Martina Kudlácek | Austria 2012 | 232 min (plus interval)

In this extended portrait, Peter Kubelka speaks at length about his life, work and interests, drawing on a vast range of knowledge and experience. Active as a filmmaker since the 1950s, Kubelka’s acclaimed cinematic works are only one aspect of his dynamic personality. In his legendary public lectures, he holds forth on a variety of disciplines including film, music, archaeology and cooking. He has also played an important institutional role in establishing the Austrian Film Museum, and as co-founder of Anthology Film Archives, for whom he designed an ideal viewing theatre known as the Invisible Cinema. Martina Kudlácek (known for previous documentaries on Maya Deren and Marie Menken) immersed herself in Kubelka’s world for several years, researching historical footage, recording lectures, and perhaps most importantly, filming him at home surrounded by his eclectic collection of anthropological objects. In these precious sequences, Fragments of Kubelka provides extraordinary insight in conveying his philosophy on life and art.

Mark Webber

See also:
Wed 10 – Sun 21 October 2012, 12pm-10pm, BFI: Monument Film (installation)
Thursday 11 October 2012, 6pm, ICA: Peter Kubelka: The Essence of Cinema
Sunday 21 October 2012, 2pm, NFT3: Peter Kubelka Presents Monument Film