E X P E R I M E N T A L _ F I L M C L U B

LANDSCAPES ON FILM

2011-05-12T05:23:00.000-07:00

LANDSCAPES ON FILM

THURSDAY MAY 19th / IRISH FILM INSTITUTE / 7pm

Landscapes on Film is a selection of films that explore diverse investigations of landscape on film and video. This programme includes works by Eve Heller, Chris Kennedy, Miriam de Burca, Ariane Michel, Matthew Buckingham & Joachim Koester. These works alternate between lyrical exploration, particularly apparent in Heller's abstract landscape poem shot on residency in Ontario, and the more overtly political. Kennedy's film deconstructs idealised landscapes with reference to classical landscape painting paradigms. The works of De Búrca and the Koester & Buckingham collaboration hover between fiction and fact, disclosing hidden subtexts in Belfast and Christiania, Denmark. Ariane Michel explores an uninhabited landscape abandoning a human viewpoint for that of an animal protagonist. Each of these filmmakers adopts a strong individual position in order to articulate contested and appropriated landscapes.

Behind the Soft Eclipse / Eve Heller / 2004 / 10mins / B&W (screening on 16mm)

A crossing of paths behind the seen, a labor of love in the wake of one who was just here.

I was imagining a collaboration of parallel worlds or a kind of doubled consciousness, a sense of the corporeal and the riddle of absence. The film is structured along a line of contrasting elements in the form of negative and positive imagery, day and night shots, under and above water elements, presence and disappearance. Light and motion, jarring and gentle, weave the hand-processed elements. #Eclipse# is an elegy for Marion McMahon who co-founded the Film Farm (Independent Imaging Retreat) in Southern Ontario, where it was produced. (Eve Heller)

Tamalpais / Chris Kennedy / 2009 / 14mins / Colour (screening on 16mm)

Shot on Mount Tamalpais, a spatial matrix replaces temporal causality with contiguous space. A view of landscape is taken apart, to be reconstituted through memory. The grid, a reference to the “veil of threads” invented by Albrecht Dürer as an aid for perspective drawing--to transfer vision to a sheet of paper--is used for an opposite effect--to disperse a landscape across time. The viewer is asked to remember the space as it passes and reconstitute it from memory, actively connecting the image across space and time. (Lightcone)

My Home is His Castle / Miriam de Búrca / 2011 / 7min / Colour / Video

After spending several years living in an urban environment, de Búrca has moved to an old, remotely situated colonial estate. Her subject matter has changed but the underlying questions have not. She continues to explore territory and its impact on one’s sense of identity and belonging. Living on the estate, she considers herself to be part of an historical process of decolonisation, undermining the old power structures by her very presence. (Miriam de Búrca)

Stealing Weeds / Miriam de Búrca / 2006 / 3mins / Colour / Video

A contradiction in terms, it would seem, ‘stealing weeds’. How can it be stealing if they are only weeds? And, if they are considered to be of no worth, why would one feel the need to go to such lengths? After all, they grow abundantly and thrive wherever the ground offers the minimum requirements for light, nutrition and drainage. They are considered a nuisance; they spring up where they are not wanted. Yet here they are being specially selected, uprooted, and taken away. Should anyone have objected to it? (Miriam de Búrca)

Three Dots & Sandra of the Tulip House or How to Live in a Free State / Joachim Koester & Matthew Buckingham / 2001 / 19min / Colour /Video.

Past and present life in the anarchistic "free city" of Christiania, in Copenhagen, Denmark, is the subject of "Sandra of the Tuliphouse Or How to Live in a Free State". In"Sandra of the Tuliphouse or How to Live in Free State" Christiania is approached at face-value, as a self-described laboratory of freedom, an environment that provides an almost unparalleled opportunity to unravel a very particular history of markedly contrasting power relations and vivid social forces.. The situation at Christiania in 2001 is compared with its distant past as a military base, its more recent utopian regeneration, and its possible future. The viewer engages with the work by following the shifting and unstable voices, sounds, and images as they relate the experiences of a fictional character named Sandra, who is temporarily staying in Christiania. (Matthew Buckingham)

Aprés les Pluies / Ariane Michel / 2003 / 8min / Colour / Video

In an uncertain night, a wandering wolf-hound, and the athmosphere of the “after”. South of France, after the 2002 ﬂoods. When a single moment has turned familiar places into sets of fantasy. When the dog becomes a beast, the only one left of all the ones that lived there before. The animal becomes the aesthetic motif of the film as well as being the reactor or mechanism of movement. The dog/wolf wanders through two waters, between day and night, passing and re-passing. The dog /wolf creates a game of the codes of perception, plunging a lost body into the regard of it’s own image. (Ariane Michel)

Links coming soon.

Ariane Michel

PROGRAMME 21

2011-03-06T13:41:00.000-08:00

THE WINDOW, THE WOLF AND THE PIG
Films by Julius Ziz

THURSDAY MARCH 24th / IRISH FILM INSTITUTE / 7.10pm

Many Irish filmmakers have spent periods involved in the experimental community of New York and the strong Eastern European and Russian presence there has often found a cross-pollination with the Irish through venues like Anthology FIlm Archives. As a Lithuanian filmmaker who has lived and worked in New York, Julius Ziz continues this cross-pollination as he now lives in County Clare, while working around the world.
The three films featured in this programme are sequenced in such a way as to create a trilogy on several levels, or a viewing experience which brings one on an odyssey of character, style and form. In terms of the latter two, there is a progression from the non-narrative, through the narrative with experimental elements, to the very experimental in the found footage - mirrored by the shift from black and white and sepia film to strongly contrasted and colourful video to the unpredictability of found footage quality.
In terms of character, the protagonist of The Wolf can be felt lurking at the kitchen table in the childhood memories of The Window, from where a subliminal sense of the fairy tale develops with the images of the grandmother, the child and the woodcutter, followed by the emergence of The Wolf in the actual character of the second film. These three films also give a full stylistic and technical overview of the work of Julius Ziz.

The Window / 1989 / 18min / 35mm ( screening on Beta )

Shot in Lithuania "The Window" is a portrait of the artist's grandmother. A still film, it builds on themes of childhood and old age, with a sense of transition between worlds, revolving around the symbolic window. There is also a sense of an ambiguity of distance in time enhanced by alternating between black and white and colour.
" Ziz's verse is shadow, his lyric interior landscape. Nuanced and inflected by subtle changes in colour and sound, "The Window" is like a melancholic poem, both crystalline and ambiguous, about serenity and passage". ( Laurence Kardish Senior curator of The Film Department.The Museum of Modern Art New York )
The negatives of this film were destroyed when the Tbilisi Film Academy was bombed during the Georgian civil war. The only existing print is now in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art New York.

The Wolf / 2008 / 20min / Video ( screening on Beta )

Following a film with themes of childhood and transitions to the adult world, 'The Wolf', with its protagonist on the run, unfolds as an interesting parallel for mid-life projection back to childhood.
"Julius Ziz's disturbing ... short film balances between beauty and menace. It suggests that there may be grace in being threatened, tracked and hunted: it posits evil in the power of the pursuer and shows how that power infects innocence. Shot in bright sun and light-dappled forests,"The Wolf", speaks of the horror of mankind in the ravishing face of nature. It is a remarkable work about how society defines itself in terms of whom it excludes, a fearful portrait of tribalism". ( Laurence Kardish MoMA New York )
The simple shooting style and non-narrative structure of The Window is also thrown into relief by the more elaborate and stylized camera work of The Wolf.

And Pig Was Born ( Et Le Cochon Fut Ne ) / 2000 / 23min / 16mm ( screening on film )

Moving from The Wolf to found footage in 'And Pig Was Born' is a striking transition which should create a sense of pushing the audience into subconscious territory - an interesting progression after the literal death of The Wolf, which highlights cycles of birth and re-birth as a subtext in The Pig.
"A tour-de-force montage film with the spirit of Vigo and Bunuel hovering over it. Made before Godard's "Origins of the 21st.Century", Ziz's film provokes interesting comparisons. Both deal with images of the 20th century. But while Godard's film could be described as a poster, Ziz's film is a poem. I don't have to tell you which one I prefer..."
( Jonas Mekas )
Made for the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris exposition VIOLA, from "found" footage taken from hundreds of unfinished films stored in Anthology Film Archives' basement.

Julius Ziz

Julius Ziz was born in Lithuania in 1970. He studied film at the Tbilisi Film Academy Georgia from 1988 to 1992.
He has works in the International Collections; Museum of Modern Art, New York / 'My Motherland', Anthology Film Archives / Cinemateque Francaise, Paris / The Oesterreichiscies Film Museum, Vienna / Marcel Duchamp Estate, France.
He now lives in County Clare, Ireland, and works internationally.

This programme was curated for the Experimental Film Club by Alan Lambert.

Links coming soon.

PROGRAMME 20

2011-01-14T07:30:00.000-08:00

THE TRAIN, THE CINEMA

Wednesday 19th January / Irish Film Institute / 6.50 pm

The train was and is a reflexive tool for the cinema, providing a means by which
it can marvel at the spectacle of its own processes.
James Benning's 2007 film 'RR' (showing here in a rare 16mm print)
Geoffrey Jones' 1967 short 'Snow'
Introduced and selected by Daniel Fitzpatrick (director of the Kilruddery Film Festival)

The Train, The Cinema - James Benning’s RR and the death of a medium
by Daniel Fitzpatrick

“As a machine of vision and in instrument for conquering space and time,
the train is a mechanical double for the cinema.” Lynne Kirby

‘Marx says that revolutions are ‘the locomotives of world history’. Things are entirely different. Perhaps revolutions are the reaching of humanity traveling in this train for the emergency brake.’ Walter Benjamin

It is difficult to divest ourselves of the feeling, while watch James Benning’s 2007 film “RR”, that we are bearing witness to the death of a medium. The film, the author’s last shot to be shot on 16mm stock, makes a fitting swansong to the medium’s history and should this history ever need a full stop this would probably suffice. The train was the first reflexive tool for the cinema, providing a means by which it could marvel at the miracle of its own processes and stare aghast at a spectacle of mechanised movement. Wolfgang Schivelbsuch describes how, for early travellers, the world came to be seen “through the apparatus” of the train (1986: 57), the train representing a dramatic shift in spatial and temporal understanding. Lynne Kirby expands further - “the phenomenon of railway travel made deception easier…in part through high-speed, physical displacement” (1997 : 25), a disorientation that would later be extended within the processes of the cinema “where it translates into a visual questioning of what is true and false”. The perceptual correlations between train and film are contained most obviously in their twin ability to mechanically combine movement and stillness, yet their histories are more deeply connected than we might first imagine. Benning’s film acknowledges the scope of this shared history by returning us to the cinema’s starting point, its ‘primal scene’, inviting us to fill in the gaps of the history that has existed between this scene and our current vantage point.

The dramatic impact of the shift in perceptual understanding that occurred with the introduction of film is typically contained in shorthand within the unreliable image of the cinema’s first spectators. These earliest audiences, when met with the image of an approaching train in the Lumieres’ L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat (1895), allegedly found themselves unable to distinguish clearly between the reality of what was appearing on screen and their own everyday perceptual reality. Audiences became so struck by this perceptual disruption that they allegedly ran screaming from the room or cowered under their seats in terror. While Tom Gunning and others have rightly questioned the accuracy of these early accounts, the image remains as a powerful and persuasive myth of the cinema’s becoming. In spite of early accounts of panic and fear such as these the reality illusions of the cinema would quickly become accepted and normalised, so much so that by as early 1901 the naiveté of early audiences was being self-reflexively mocked through the cinema’s own texts. RW Paul’s The Countryman and the Cinematograph, (1901) re-enacts this early scene just a few short years later and in this film the earlier Lumiere film becomes a film within the film. Here a ‘rube’ replays the reactions of those initial spectators, becoming visibly panicked when faced with the cinematic image of an oncoming train, much to the amusement of the now far more sophisticated audiences, demonstrating a rapidly widening gap in audience expectations and demands.

Benning’s film, which is essentially a series of static shots of trains passing a camera, invites us to also examine our own spectatorial experience as it differs from those first cinemagoers, and to contemplate the gap that has developed over the interceding century. Contained also within the film, however are hidden truths about the domestication of a medium. Through it we can begin to understand how the train was transformed through the cinema, from a powerful signifier of the revolutionary potential of the medium to the nostalgic signifier of a disappearing past. Looking back we also realise that the cinema had historicised its own processes in a similar fashion, long before it was necessary to do so. In a truly film appropriate temporal reconfiguration the medium had prefigured its own demise.

Phantom Ride

Lynne Kirby describes the train as a ‘protocinematic phenomenon’, a precursor to the cinema, rehearsing an ‘annihilation of time and space’ that would only be made complete with the arrival of film. With the cinema anything seemed possible, where the transport revolution of the 19th century had brought distant locations ever closer, the cinema could, it seemed, be anywhere at the blink of an eye, or within 1/24 of a second. For the train’s first passengers, it was impossible to divest themselves entirely of the potential for unfathomable catastrophe which the train journey seemed to contain. We see in initial reactions to the train, a set of fears and anxieties played out no less dramatic than those experienced by the cinema’s first spectators. In spite of this the train would be rapidly assimilated and incorporated within the fabric of modern everyday existence. An essential aspect of this process was the train’s domestication and Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes how as the bumps and bangs of train travel were ‘upholstered’ and cushioned, the private space of the Victorian home was recreated within the public space of the train, creating an illusion of safety. With the train all “outward perceptions of danger” were reduced, creating an “artificial environment which people become used to as second nature” (1986: 162). The correlation then between train and film in this regard is obvious as the modern film industry quickly settles on a form of realism which prioritises invisibility of form and largely rejects the revolutionary potential of the medium suggested so strongly in the period of its initial becoming.

Dziga Vertov's Man with the Movie Camera (1929)

When we look closely at the development of the train on film this becomes clearer still as we witness the train being transformed from a powerful reflection of the revolutionary potential of the medium to the nostalgic signifier of a disappearing and idealised past. The domestication of the filmic medium and its settling, in commercial terms at least, upon a narrative tradition which favours invisibility of form will by as early as the 1920s necessitate the rise of an alternative avant garde tradition, a tradition from which Benning springs. The train would retain its interest for filmmakers working within this tradition and would be a constantly recurring motif throughout its history, particularly for those filmmakers like Benning with an overt interest in the medium specificity of film.

Benning’s films, particularly his more recent ones, have often been referred to as ‘landscape films’, he also trained as a mathematician and is often described as a structuralist and in RR we get a little of both. Where in previous films, like 13 Lakes and 10 Skies, the structures were defined by the medium itself, essentially static shots of landscapes and skies the duration of each shot was defined by the length of a single reel of 16mm film. In ‘RR’ however, the title of which is an abbreviation of railroad, the power of the filmic machine is ceded to the power of the on-screen machine. Here each shot begins when a train enters the frame, or a beat before, and only ends when the train has finally left the frame, or a beat after. As in earlier films like Landscape Suicide Benning continues to be preoccupied with the changing shape of the American landscape and here he examines the ways in which it has been shaped by the train and framed through the cinema. Benning uses songs, recorded speeches and other non-diegetic sounds sparingly throughout the film, adding some context here and there and deepening the film’s rhetorical intent. For the most part however these interventions are largely irrelevant as they generally reiterate meanings already present within the image, images that are at their best when simply accompanied by the location sound recorded by Benning. As Mark Peranson notes in his review in Cinema scope “RR is filmmaking at its most elemental, and most accomplished. And, typical of Benning’s work, it’s nowhere near as simple as it initially seems.”

10 Skies and 13 Lakes

An interview with Benning
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/33/james_benning/

PROJECTION 19

2010-07-12T13:33:00.000-07:00

A B I G A I L C H I L D
"IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR?"

/// Sunday 18th July / The Odessa Club / 8pm / Doors: 7 euro (5 euro concession)

The Experimental Film Club, in association with the SoundEye Festival, The National Sculpture Factory and Cork Film Centre, is presenting a very special screening of the acclaimed American experimental film maker and poet Abigail Child. The filmmaker will be present to discuss her work.

“Abigail Child’s series IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR? is one of the most assured and important projects to have emerged over the last decade. Constructing from and subverting a wide galaxy of source materials, these films are archeological digs into the very stuff, the conceptions, we are born into. Child decomposes the materials and gestures that would compose us. The films are charged with a startling and playful musicality and poetic and rigorous compression. Each image and sound cuts deep and works over time containing hidden and unhidden detonations working against the manufactured ambush that images have in store. Agile dances through treacherous debris, they negotiate an obstacle course of polar anatomies zig-zagging with corkscrew twists and nuclear splits -- a gambol against the hazards.

Detournments, deviations, disruptions, allures. Can aggression be sumptuous? These films are volatile and they have bite. Here the subliminal cannot caress, it comes out with its hands up, the smile wiped from its face. The accelerated velocity of these films doesn’t create an alternate camouflage. At this speed viewer passivity is unsafe and active viewing is a necessary pleasure. We are provoked to get up to speed, to be resourceful, dance, break step. These films put a spin on things. Shift the coordinates. The peripheries relocate to the core drawn by the centrifugal force of the editing. Posing a threat to threatening poses these frictions erupt with new clarity.” (Mark McElhatten, Associate Curator of Film & Video. American Museum of the Moving Image).

Abigail Child is a film and video maker whose work in montage and sound/image relations pushes the medium of film/video with humour and ephemeral beauty. Her films explore mixed genres and strategies for rewriting narrative, as well as investigating public space through memory and history. Child is, also, the author of a number of critical articles and several books of poetry

‘How meaning is made, how elements join together, how far elements can stand apart and still “connect”, how resonance and meaning is created, how putting together fragments of the world can create new forms, new ways of thinking, the utopian aspect, and the problematic of that desire […]‘

Child does not approach these issues primarily as a theorist (although theory is one component of her work), nor as a historian (although history remains important to her), but as a maker, and is that sense an experimenter as well as a poet. These works (both films and writings) are not products, but processes.

Child began filmmaking in 1970 as a documentarian. In the mid 70s, Child began to produce experimental work, culminating in her series IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR? , which includes the films Prefaces (1981), Mutiny (1983), Both (1988), Perils (1986), Covert Action (1984), Mayhem (1987), and Mercy (1989). If Child’s work took its initial energy from the utopian and liberatory rush of the counter-culture sixties, it was tempered and formed in the consequent critical reassessment of that period that came in the seventies, performed especially by both feminism and structuralism, in different ways.

(Written with reference to www.abigailchild.com and Tom Gunnings introduction to AC’s This is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film)

P R O G R A M M E _ T I T L E S
(TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 56 MINS APPROX.)

M U T I N Y
(1983, 16 mm, b/w and color, sound, 11 min.)

P E R I L S
(1986, 16 mm, b/w, sound, 5 min.)

C O N V E R T A C T I O N
(1984, 16 mm, b/w, sound, 10 min.)

M A Y H E M
(1987, 16 mm, b/w, sound, 20 min.)

M E R C Y
(1989, 16mm, color, sound, 10 min.)

PROJECTION 18

2010-06-02T14:48:00.000-07:00

SILENT Q

/// Wednesday 9th June / Irish Film Institute / 7 pm / Doors: € 7.75 ( € 6 concession)

The first of an ongoing collaboration between the Experimental Film Club and the IFI. ‘Silent Q’ explores the deconstruction of television in the comedy of Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and director Richard Lester in the 1950’s, placing it in relation to Dada silent cinema and the subsequent avant-garde scene of New York in the 1960’s. The programme includes films by Jonas Mekas, Richard Lester, René Claire and Francis Picabia.

PROGRAMME TITLES
(TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 87 MINS APPROX.)

RENE CLAIRE & FRANCIS PICABIA'S "ENTR'ACTE"
( 1924, 14 mins, b&w, 35mm screened from DVD )

RICHARD LESTER'S "THE RUNNING, JUMPING AND STANDING STILL FILM”
( 1960, 11 mins, b&w, 16mm )

RICHARD LESTER'S "A SHOW CALLED FRED"
( 1956, 25 mins, b&w, 16mm )

JONAS MEKAS' "SCENES FROM THE LIFE OF ANDY WARHOL: FRIENDSHIPS AND INTERSECTIONS”
( 1963, 37 mins, colour, 16mm )

This programme brings the viewer on an unorthodox path through familiar territory of 20th century avant-garde and commercial film and television forms. The comedy of the Goons in England in the 1950's and the New York scene of the 1960's and 70's, as viewed through the camera of Jonas Mekas, are rooted in well documented eras, but not often experienced in the same breath. European Dada from decades earlier may be equally exhaustively documented, but seeing these works alongside their descendants reveals a skeleton of modernism in a more visceral manner.

'Entr'acte' is a short film directed by René Clair in 1924. It consists of loosely connected narrative sequences. Artists who were, at that point, neither part of Tzara's Dada camp nor Breton's surrealist camp, take part in a series of 'comedic' gags. Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray play a game of chess on a rooftop, a ballerina is revealed to be a bearded man, a huntsman shooting an ostrich is shot himself, a funeral hearse is drawn by a camel and a funeral procession chase begins. Picabia said of the film: "Entr'acte does not believe in very much, in the pleasure of life perhaps; it believes in the pleasure of inventing, it respects nothing except the desire to burst out laughing."

'The Running, Jumping And Standing Still Film' is a short film directed by Richard Lester and Peter Sellers in 1960. It became a favourite of the Beatles, which led to Lester being hired to direct 'A Hard Day's Night'. Again, it consists of loosely connected narrative comedic situations, and, like an 'Entr'acte' of its own era, it hosts a number of English artists and performers in cameo apperances. Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan weave their way through groups more familiar from the later 'Carry On' films. But the inversion of social hierarchy through seemingly random devices is as prevalent in Lester's work as it was in Clair and Picabia's.

'A Show Called Fred' is the first episode of television comedy directed by Richard Lester and starring Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and many of the above-mentioned 'Carry On' crew. 'Fred' was very much the fore-runner of Spike Milligan's infamous 'Q5' ( from which this programme takes its title ). Influential and controversial though they were, works like 'Entr'acte' and 'The Running, Jumping' film, were relatively underground influences. But Milligan's experimental comedy broke through onto the level of a mainstream commercial audience. It dissolved the conventional TV sketch show format, predating Monty Python and led the way for outrageously surreal comedy on mainstream television.

More so than comedy, it seems the critique of social order is the thread running through these works, achieved by the application of apparently random devices common in many Dada and Surrealist practices, but which seem to manifest themselves most comfortably in the form of processions. The funeral procession of 'Entr'acte', the chasing campers of 'The Running, Jumping' film, the forlorn exposed television crew members of 'Fred', simultaneously recall the polarities of the silhouetted hillside figures of Bergman's 'Seventh Seal' and the closing title sequences of 'The Benny Hill Show'. These processions lace together three distinct periods and groups of experimenters.

'Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol: Friendships and Intersections' is a film made by Jonas Mekas in 1963. Like many of Mekas' impressionistic diary-like films 'Scenes' is a poetic, unbiassed visual document of New York of the early 1960's. The random and documentary style of Mekas' approach inevitably leads to a more picaresque, scene by scene, experience which lends itself well to the building of processions and the inversion of hierarchies.

Like the above films, but without the overt comedy, 'Scenes' is a procession of key personalities of the place and time. Jack Smith and Maria Montez, Stephen Shore and Nico, are all seen with Andy Warhol and Mekas, at the first public performance of the Velvet Underground. Andy Warhol: "The second the main course was served, the Velvets started to blast and Nico started to wail. Gerard and Edie jumped up on the stage and started dancing, and the doors flew open and Jonas Mekas and Barbara Rubin with her crew of people with camera and bright lights came storming into the room and rushing over to all the psychiatrists asking them things like:

'What does her vagina feel like? Is his penis big enough? Do you eat her out? Why are you getting embarrassed? You're a psychiatrist; You're not supposed to get embarrassed.'

The targeting of psychiatrists is pure Dada / Milligan / Python, and Jonas Mekas and Barbara Rubin with crew and camera storming into the room is not entirely unlike Spike Milligan turning the television camera around 180 degrees and proceeding up the aisles into the audience to the dismay of the television producers almost a decade earlier across the Atlantic. But the real link can be seen in Mekas from a decade later, when John Lennon and Yoko Ono became an integral part of the New York experimental filmmaking circuit. The nonsense poetry of Milligan, and the directing of Richard Lester, had been a big influence on Lennon's lyrics and art generally. With the help of Jonas Mekas, Lennon, with Yoko Ono, began making experimental films in the late 1960's and early 1970's. This thread will be continued in later parts of this programme, but for now, the link begins with the Velvet Underground, making their first public 'procession' while Q5 and the Beatles were cooking.

Curated for the EFC by Alan Lambert.

Films provided by Re-Voir, Paris / BFI National Archive, UK / Lightcone Distributors, Paris

Links:
IFI Irish Film Institute: http://www.irishfilm.ie
BFI British Film Institute Archive: http://www.bfi.org.uk
Re-Voir, Paris: http://www.re-voir.com
Lightcone, Paris: http://www.lightcone.org
Jonas Mekas: http://www.jonasmekas.com
........

PROJECTION 17

2010-02-19T08:54:00.000-08:00

EXPERIMENTAL CONVERSATIONS

/// Sunday 28th February / The Odessa Club / 5pm / Doors: 7 euro (5 euro concession)

The following was written by Donal Foreman for Estudios Irlandeses in 2008:

Halfway through EXPERIMENTAL CONVERSATIONS (Fergus Daly, 2007, 98 mins), a quote appears on screen which boldly situates Fergus Daly’s film in opposition to almost all other documentary explorations of Irish cinema. The quote, from Irish filmmaker and critic Maximilian le Cain, declares: “Since there is no worthwhile commercial cinema in Ireland, all great Irish films come from experimental cinema.”

From its outset, Daly’s film seems to implicitly endorse this position — but rather than using it as the basis for a reductive partition of Irish cinema, this narrowing of focus is taken as an opportunity to open up the discussion in other ways, as Daly suggests links, parallels and exchanges between Irish experimental cinema and its international counterparts, particularly in France. Divided into broad thematic chapters, the film uses interviews with an array of Irish and French filmmakers and critics to explore various aspects of experimental film practice. French critic Nicole Brenez sets the tone with a working definition of experimental cinema: while “the so-called standard cinema standardises emotions, sensation, perception and belief,” experimental cinema “re-opens the entire field of experience”. It’s the “exploration of all possible conceptions, which don’t pre-exist the exploration itself.”

“All possible conceptions” may sound like pretty expansive subject matter for a two-hour documentary, but Experimental Conversations strikes an engaging balance between narrative cohesion and discursive looseness. Not forcing his featured filmmakers too tightly into generic categories, Daly at the same time allows their thoughts and experiences to parallel and intermingle under shared headings, and, by focusing on the specificities of their own work, prevents the discussion from becoming too unwieldy to manage. The selection of artists covers a broad (if mostly French) spectrum, ranging from cult arthouse directors Philippe Grandrieux and FJ Ossang through established avant-garde figures like Malcolm le Grice to lesser known independent figures such as Augustin Gimel. The Irish contingent encompass a somewhat narrower range, with most (such as Gerard Byrne, Clare Langan, Grace Weir) working on film within a fine art context. Interestingly, the least recognisable of the Irish filmmakers featured, Vivienne Dick and Maximilian le Cain, are the only ones who began working independently, outside of the fine art world.

The dialectic between the singularity of each artist and their commonalities emerges as one of the film’s main thematic concerns. Daly has described “the ethics of the experimental filmmaker” as entailing a simultaneous commitment to working in relation to a tradition of experimental practice, while at the same time constantly seeking out new and unexplored formal possibilities.(1) The film exhibits that same double commitment. So, while ample time is taken to discuss, for example, the unique qualities of Grandrieux’s cinematography or Langan’s technique of hand painting lens filters, there is a repeated movement between this kind of specificity and a contextualisation of their work in relation to other artists and cultural milieus. Vivienne Dick and Jackie Raynal are dealt with in terms of their interactions with the New York art scene of the late ‘70s; Ossang discusses the impact of futurism and rock ’n’ roll on his work; Byrne talks about his engagement with the detritus of US pop culture. The particular exchanges between French and Irish culture are highlighted by French critic Raymond Bellour’s lecture on James Coleman, an Irish artist whose work straddles the border between cinema and photography, and a defining influence on some of the younger Irish artists, despite having a much stronger reputation in France than Ireland.

Although its basic building blocks film clips and talking heads — are ubiquitous within TV and documentary, there are no real reference points for a film like Experimental Conversations within Irish cinema. There has been a surge in arts documentaries in recent years, but almost all have been single-artist studies, and to my knowledge no-one has ever attempted the kind of cross-cultural reflection Daly does here. One can see some precedence, however, in Daly’s previous documentary, Abbas Kiarostami: The Art of Living (co-directed by Pat Collins, 2003), which, while fitting the single-artist mode, had an unusually strong focus on critical and conceptual analyses and structured itself around such discussions. Daly’s work as a film critic obviously feeds into this; he has written for Film West, Cahiers du Cinema and Senses of Cinema, co-authored a book on Leos Carax, and has often focused on formal and philosophical parallels between films across an international spectrum (the influence of Gilles Deleuze on his work in this respect is worth noting).

But in a broader Irish context, Daly’s film is perhaps most usefully seen in contrast to Irish Cinema: Ourselves Alone? (1996). Directed by Donald Taylor Black and written by Kevin Rockett, now two presiding figures in Irish academia as heads of the National Film School and Trinity Film Department respectively, Ourselves Alone? is probably the defining documentary account of Irish cinema. Taking a broad and linear historical view, the film charts the development of indigenous filmmaking in Ireland since the early 20th century. The development is framed mainly in terms of the many false starts of indigenous industry, hampered by unsympathetic government policy, with the success and recognition of ‘90s Irish cinema positioned as a final flowering of a long-stunted aspiration. Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan, as the figureheads of this culmination, are the star interview subjects, with First Wave filmmakers such as Bob Quinn, Joe Comerford and Pat Murphy given supporting roles as the pioneers who laid the foundations for the ‘90s filmmaking boom. There is, however, little focus on questions of style and no mention of experimental cinema or non-industrial forms of filmmaking.

Daly’s approach is implicitly oppositional to Black’s in many respects. First of all, apart from a passing reference to Thaddeus O’Sullivan, Daly deals with ‘70s Ireland solely through the lens of Vivienne Dick, the only First Wave filmmaker completely ignored by Black. As Maeve Connolly, one of the few Irish scholars specialising in experimental cinema (and the only one to feature in Experimental Conversations), has written, “Within Irish cinema studies, the period from the late 1970s to the early 1980s has been historicised in terms of the emergence of an indigenous industry.”(2) Daly’s focus on Dick rejects this historicisation, as unlike her Irish contemporaries, Dick’s work (mostly shot on Super 8) has never so much as flirted with industrial production. It also indicates that Daly is as uninterested in national identity as he is in national industry, as Dick is significantly the Irish filmmaker most formed by and engaged with international currents, having begun working in the New York “No Wave” scene and later working with the London Filmmakers Co-Op.

Implied in these contrasts is the most pivotal difference between the two films. Black builds a picture of a body of work called Irish Cinema — not homogenous or static, but still identifiably corporeal. Although the Le Cain quote mentioned at the beginning may suggest a desire to build an alternative body — that of Irish Experimental Cinema — Daly undermines such an image from clearly emerging. Concerning itself much more with the creation of links than boundaries (Daly’s narrative doesn’t even limit itself to cinema; theatre, photography, fine art and science all emerge as interconnected disciplines at various points), Experimental Conversations is in many ways an experimental work in itself, and the conversations of its title — conversations between different cultures, arts, generations — are central. As Daly puts it, “This ability to experiment in a conversational situation is analogous to what experimental film and video artists do in their daily practice: to push forward without pre-conceived idea or prepared answers.”(3) Rather than offering an alternative history of Irish cinema, Experimental Conversations in fact offers an alternative discourse; a different way of thinking about cinema in which Irish Experimental Cinema isn’t something one can formulate in isolation.

There are weaknesses to this approach. As in the Kiarostami documentary, Daly is much more interested in a non-linear tracing of influences and concepts than with material facts. As a result, cinema is almost never discussed by the interviewees in terms of their personal background or social or economic situation, for example. Arguably such avoidance reinforces the misconception Connolly criticises, “that avant-garde practice constitutes a transient process of ‘experimentation’ rather than a critique of the industrial apparatus and the institutions and structures of production and reception.” (4) Stimulating as Daly’s focus on conceptual and formal thinking may be, the issue arises of how useful it is in terms of addressing or assisting experimental cinema’s current situation in Ireland.

Before answering, it’s worth briefly outlining that situation. After many years of invisibility, experimental cinema is enjoying an increasingly stable and supported position as a discipline within fine art practice in Ireland. In galleries and graduate shows, film, mainly in the form of video installations, is becoming ubiquitous. This seems natural, given that the fine art world, in contrast to the relatively confined parameters of the film industry, provides an attractively open, multi-disciplinary, and international base in which to work (the international question emerges in Ourselves Alone? only in the pragmatic guise of how to negotiate Hollywood’s global hegemony). The place of experimental cinema within film culture, however, is increasingly negligible. Despite the First Wave’s mix of industry and experimentation, all its members have either effectively “dropped out” (Dick, Comerford) or gone the industry route (O’Sullivan, Cathal Black) — and there is now little interaction between the world of “film film” and “fine art film”; their audiences, for example, tend to rarely overlap. It doesn’t seem insignificant that Dick and Le Cain have recently moved towards the gallery (5), but it’s also worth noting the stifling effect this separation can have on fine art filmmakers, leaving them without a foothold in the international avant-garde film scene that operates outside of fine art. Daly seems aware of this situation when, opening his film at a bookshop event in Paris which brought together “not only filmmakers and critics, but also composers, photographers, painters, actors…” , he states that “such a gathering confirms my belief that Paris is the only place in which to ask ‘What’s at stake in the new wave of Irish artists? What’s the international context for their sounds and images?’”

Daly argues that “for Irish artists thinking more conceptually has meant thinking more globally”(6) and this film is the beginning of a discourse in those global terms. His emphatic forging of links with France (where film and fine art seem quite healthily entwined), seems to imply that such a discourse is currently lacking in Ireland, but the very making of the film suggests a desire to initiate it. It also explains the film’s more tenuous associations; for example, the argument that French playwright Antonin Artaud’s 1937 trip to Ireland “tied us irrevocably to the French avant-garde” seems more like wishful thinking than historical reality — but it does tell us something about the way Daly’s film works. The relevant question seems to be not “did Artaud really influence Irish culture?” but rather “what can be gained for Irish culture now by imagining that influence and contemplating its implications?”

This is what problematises Experimental Conversations as a documentary and what makes it all the more significant as a cultural provocation; on the one hand its refusal to acknowledge that which it does not believe in (commercial cinema, for example, or the economic context of experimental cinema) and on the other hand its supposition of links in a way that encourages a re-imagining and re-contextualisation of Irish experimental cinema. As a work in itself, Conversations is clearly less interested in being a record of connections than an active means of forging them; by placing Irish artists and critics within an international context, Daly is encouraging an exchange and expansion of Irish cinema rather than a definition of it. Whether there is an audience willing to follow Daly’s lead isn’t clear yet — the film has only been screened once in Ireland(7) —, but there have been a spate of recent cultural events which seem to be advocating a likeminded international and cross-medium expansion of how we view experimental cinema: for example, the Darklight Symposium, the Dublin Electronic Arts Festival and Esperanza Collado’s film screenings at Thisisnotashop gallery, as well as visual arts events such as Tulca in Galway and Mamuska in Limerick.(8)

...........................

Footnotes

1. Daly, Director’s Notes

2. Maeve Connolly, “Sighting an Irish Avant-Garde in the Intersection of Local and International Film Cultures” in boundary 2 31.1 (2004)

3. Connolly, “Sighting an Irish Avant-Garde in the Intersection of Local and International Film Cultures” in boundary 2 31.1 (2004). Daly’s approach also leaves out questions of arts policy and its importance as a means to support, or marginalise, experimental cinema — as well as what we might learn from France on the matter.

4. Daly, Director’s Notes

5. Dick’s last film, Excluded by the Nature of Things (2003), was her first gallery installation, and Le Cain exhibited (…from a dying hotel), a site-specific installation, last year.

6. Fergus Daly, Film Synopsis (emailed by author)

7. The film premiered at the Cork Film Festival and has since been screened only one other time, at the Alternative Film/Video Festival in Serbia. Two clips from the film can be viewed on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itmZstYeudo

8. For more information on these events, check out http://www.deafireland.com;
http://darklight.ie/pages/talks.htm;
http://tulca.ie and
http://thisisnotashop.wordpress.com/2007/11/09/esperanza-collado-zero-degree-the-new-image-of-thought

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2009-11-20T10:01:00.000-08:00

The Experimental Film Club during the screening of Tony Conrad's The Flicker (1966) as part of the programme

"Flecks of Interruption". 15th November 09, Odessa Club, Dublin.

PROJECTION 16

2009-11-06T10:06:00.000-08:00

FLECKS OF INTERRUPTION

/// Sunday 15th November / The Odessa Club / 5pm / Doors: 7 euro (5 euro concession)

“Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking”, said Martin Heidegger. Such statement opens the main notions and considerations that motivate the programme the Experimental Film Club presents at an unusual time this month. The reason for such an odd date comes from the inspiring source of this programme: the two-part international group exhibition "Automatic", curated by Gavin Murphy and Chris Fite-Wassilak, currently on at Pallas Contemporary Projects (Dublin). Gavin and Chris proposed to us to organize a film session that explored similar ideas to those that embedded the exhibition, which works, in their own words, attempt to “stretch out the persistent, ghostly sensory circuit between the artist, artwork and audience”. Perception was indeed one of the main subjects we discussed during the plotting of this programme, not so much as an experience which could be rationally comprehended, but as a vigorous, direct and impacting encounter with a percept, or a series of percepts, beyond immediate conscious understanding.

Theories of the mind such as the gestalt system, and a considerable part of Structural Film that explores the shape-forming capacity of the senses were important factors to take into account. Nevertheless, these factors couldn’t be separated, especially in experimental filmmaking, from the event of light itself. This is where flicker cinema comes into play, because its metrical montage and absence of images –subsequently, its absence of illusionist movement-, result in an exploration of intermittent light as the most essential cinematic mechanism. The way the brain reacts before such a phenomenon was intensely explored by mathematician, artist and composer Tony Conrad in his iconic avant-garde film The Flicker, which is an essential part of this screening programme. The Flicker is a study of neuro-physiology in the form of a meticulous orchestration of black and clear leader, silence and white noise; rather than addressing the senses, the stroboscopic effects produced by The Flicker, trigger neurological operations that generate optic impressions of colours and shapes.

On the other hand, the title of the show, “Automatic”, immediately brought to my mind the works of William S. Burroughs and his collaborations with Brion Gysin and British filmmaker Antony Balch. Burroughs explored the subconscious operations of the mind in literature and film with automatic writing and the Cut-Up technique of composing texts and movement-images, but it was Antonin Artaud’s ideas around what he named “spiritual automaton” that seemed to come closer, conceptually speaking, to the subjacent approach of this programme. According to Artaud, what cinema advances is not the power of thought but, on the contrary, its “impower”. He believed cinema didn’t need a language because it is a matter of neuro-physiological vibrations: the image, therefore, must produce a shock, a nerve-wave in order to give rise to thought.

What Artaud’s understanding of cinema and automatic writing have in common is the materialization of a controlled gathering of critical and conscious thought with the unconscious in thought. Towers Open Fire (1963) is an excellent example of such process. The film is articulated as an experimental montage, an assault on linear narrative that features images of Gysin operating his flicker experiment, the Dream Machine, along with the voice of Burroughs reading excerpts from The Soft Machine. An important part of the film, running for around thirty seconds, is the first filmic illustration of the Cut-Ups method, culminating in a frenetic random, mathematically organized, series of images shot in Paris. Written by Burroughs and directed by Antony Balch, with contributions from Gysin and Ian Sommerville, Towers Open Fire is the first but not last collaboration between Balch/Burroughs, a true challenge to the audience.

The use of the flicker effect and the breakage of linear narratives by ways of repetition and circular entrapment are some of the features common to the works described above and Maximilian Le Cain’s, whose outstanding video pieces have been part of our programmes on a regular basis. One of the most fascinating aspects of the work of Cork-based artist and critic is its capacity to turn a given architectonical edifice into “thinking space”*, a process that is never presented exempt of a high degree of inexplicability or strangeness. Slavoj Zizek said the most disturbing moments in David Lynch’s films are those that seem to be trapped between fantasy and reality, not being entirely in one territory of the other, but in unknown’s land. Watching Point of Departure (2008) inspires a similar thought; the tension is built between two irreconcilable worlds or two parallel dimensions failing to syncretize. The protagonist, Betty (theater actress Anna Manahan who recently passed away), is trapped between the claustrophobic institution in which she spends the last years of her life and her desire to escape. An oneiric black and white, slow motion picture combined with the usual idiosyncrasy of Le Cain’s sound treatment, form the reality of Betty: a maze of corridors and closing doors.

As Betty goes to bed, it is perhaps time for us to wake up to the fact that extreme slowness, or even immobility, equals absolute speed. The zig-zag that glides between the explosive animated collages of Jeff Keen, the author of the ‘Artwar’ film series, gives substance to such energy. Although in a fragmented manner, assaulting the senses both visually and sonically, with his guerrilla filmmaking. The works of Brighton-based artist and pioneer of expanded cinema Jeff Keen amalgamate animation, live action and collage. They abound in references to popular culture such as toys and dolls, comic strips, Hollywood lines and photos, pre-war pulps, etc. In Artwar ⌗3: Irresistible Attack (1995), as in the rest of the series, art is under an “irresistible attack”, more plastic, materialist and malleable than ever, by “a prisoner of art”.

It has been said that Keen’s oeuvre is a fusion of the arts. This programme certainly is a synthesis of several art practices, including painting, music, literature, and sciences. While The Flicker offers a vocabulary of structure, physics, and mathematics, Point of Departure provides the most classic cinematographic aesthetics to the programme, especially considering its dramatic, silent film tone. And, there are, still, infinite common elements among the works discussed here. For instance, both the Dream Machine and The Flicker have been addressed as visual experiences that can produce hallucinations without chemicals, while some relationship could be traced between the intent of Burroughs to erase the word and Jeff Keen’s own Dada-like vocabulary ('blatz', 'blatzom', 'kinozap', 'omozap') and approach towards language: “kill the word, don’t let the word kill you!”.

*As it has been suggested with respect to Le Cain’s Making a Home, screened at the EFC as part of our past programme "T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, The Architectures of Perception".

PROGRAMME TITLES
(TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 78 MINS APPROX.)

MAXIMILIAN LE CAIN’S “POINT OF DEPARTURE”
(2008, 8 mins, b&w, video, courtesy of the artist)

ANTONY BALCH / WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS' “TOWERS OPEN FIRE”
(1963, 16 mins, b&w, 16mm, distributed by LUX)

JEFF KEEN’S “ARTWAR ⌗ 3: IRRESISTIBLE ATTACK
(1995, 15 mins, colour, 8mm screened on dvd)

TONY CONRAD’S “THE FLICKER”
(1966, 30 mins, b&w, 16mm, distributed by LUX)

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SUGGESTED LINKS:

The "Automatic" show, at Pallas Contemporary Art Project, is on until the 21st of November: P C P

About Point of Departure and Anna Manahan, see: Close Watch

William S. Burroughs community: Reality Studio

Jeff Keen's website: Kinoblatz

Interview with Tony Conrad about the inspiration behind The Flicker

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FLECKS OF INTERRUPTION is a film-programme curated by Esperanza Collado for the Experimental Film Club.

PROJECTION 15

2009-10-24T06:52:00.000-07:00

M A U R I T A N I A
MOIRA TIERNEY & COLLABORATORS
‘MAISON DES CINEASTES’
/// Sunday 25th October / The Odessa Club / 5pm / Doors: 7 euro (5 euro concession)

'La Maison Des Cineastes', Mauritania, is an independent cultural establishment, created in 2003 by Mr. Abderrahmane Ahmed Salem and Abderrahmane Sissako. One of the aims of 'La Maison Des Cineastes' is to create a culture and industry of cinematography in Mauritania which incudes programmes on formation, production, diffusion and archiving. La Maison Des Cineastes works with 35 permanent operatives and 200 young volunteers.

Website: http://www.lamaisondescineastes.com

MOIRA TIERNEY'S "HABIBI"
(16mm 7 mins colour)

Filmed in New York in the summer of 2006: a march across the Brooklyn Bridge in support of the Lebanese population. Habibi means Beloved in Arabic.

MOUSSA SAMBA M'BOW'S "AMANDA"
(DV 6.5 mins colour)

The return from El dorado ...

DEMBA OUMAR KANE'S "LE COUMENE"
(DV 7 mins colour)

Was it the mythical Coumene, or just a lost child?

AHMED TALEK OULD TALEB LEHLAR'S "LA-BAS DANS LA CAPITALE"
(DV 3 mins colour)

From frying pan to fire: nomads' move to the city.

MARIAM MINT BEYROUK'S "LES CHERCHEUSES DE PIERRE"
(DV 25 mins colour)

Grassroots enterprise; or what happens when ladies hit the desert ...

MOIRA TIERNEY'S "HOPE'S VOICE"
(Super8 10 mins b&w)

A portrait of the Hope's Voice campaign members during a photo shoot in Brooklyn and Harlem in the summer of 2006: www.hopesvoice.org

TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 60 MINS

...

Moira Tierney's biography:

Born in 1969 in Dublin, Ireland. Lives and works in New York.
Working in set design at a film company in Ireland sparked Moira Tierney's interest in filmmaking. She received a Masters degree in Fine Arts from the École nationale d'arts in Cergy-Pontoise in 1997 and moved to New York on a Fullbright scholarship to Anthology Film Archives in 1999. One of her American Dreans series, American Dreams #3, was shot on 16 mm from the window and roof of her Brooklyn loft on September 11, using all of her film stock, a combination of black & white and color negatives, often a hallmark of her working methods.

MAURITANIA is a film-programme curated by Alan Lampert in collaboration with Moira Tierney for the Experimental Film Club and DEAF.

PROJECTION 14:

2009-06-22T03:39:00.000-07:00

S E L F - P O R T R A I T S

/// Sunday 28th June / The Odessa Club / 5pm / Doors: 7 euro (5 euro concession)

Experimental cinema is known for its rigorous investigation of the properties and possibilities of the film medium. But, given the intimate and homemade nature of most experimental filmmaking practices, it can also facilitate a rigorous investigation of the properties and possiblities of oneself. While none of the films in this programme are “self-portraits” in any conventional sense, all employ their authors’ own bodies as visual subjects, and explore human experiences of love, grief and loneliness that are extremely personal to their creators. This rootedness in personal experience can make them, in a way, more accessible than more purely formal experimental works. But it also presents a danger: that we will view these works primarily in terms of their autobiographical import rather than their powers as an aesthetic experience.

In seeking to address this, the films in this programme have been selected to cover a range of distinct formal approaches to self-reflection through cinema. Each offers a reinterpretation and expansion of what “portraying oneself” through cinema might be and might lead to. If the resonance and power of these films is strengthened by the impression of unflinching honesty and self-revelation that they share, it is ultimately the different ways in which they are stylistically organised that ensures their impact—rather than the (in some cases, quite ambiguous and tenuous) relation of the films to the specific facts of their authors’ lives.

Two classic experimental films were intended to open this programme—FUSES (1967, Carolee Schneemann, 22mins) and WINDOW WATER, BABY, MOVING (1959, Stan Brakhage, 13mins)—but unfortunately were not obtainable within our budget. (You can watch them online here and here.) Nonetheless, they’re worth mentioning because they represent an important approach to self-reflection through cinema. In Fuses, Schneemann documents her own lovemaking with her then partner James Tenney. These intimate and sensual scenes are fragmented and recombined through a mixture of collage and a material manipulation of the film footage. According to Schneemann, she “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...” Window Water, Baby, Moving depicts the birth of Stan Brakhage’s first child, fragmenting the event into a series of sensual close-ups which build up rhythmically throughout the film. In both films the camera’s point of view is elusive, merging between the filmmaker, his/her lover and a third, inbetween perspective that seems to belong to the camera itself. The result is a form that powerfully captures the intersubjective expansion of self that occurs in romantic relationships.

SELF-IMPORTANT EMPIRICAL FILM #3, WITH VOICE-OVER (2005, Dave Andrae, 5mins) is a contemporary work that bears some relation to the work of Brakhage and Schneemann in its carefully fragmented formal approach—but the key differences are Andrae’s use of narration and his related focus on the experience of isolation and loneliness as opposed to the intense connectedness and intersubjectivity of the earlier films. Andrae describes the film as “an honest attempt at examining the heavy fog of apprehension that pervaded my early twenties. In making the film I wanted to capture the listless abandon of young adult life—not just the obvious awkwardness and disillusionment, but also the occasional grace achieved during solitude.” If, in the earlier two films, the filmmakers’ self is defined and expressed in terms of what it is connected to (a lover, a family), in Self-Important… Andrae is left with nothing but himself with which to define his “self”. The filmmaking process—by allowing Andrae to film himself and his everyday world, and subsequently order and narrate these images—becomes a means of facilitating this internal process. In this case, the film’s formal innovation (in particular, it’s creative use of dissonance between the narration and imagery) develops from a very personal impulse—an attempt to elucidate and overcome his apathetic state of being.

The other three films in the programme highlight the ways in which film can be used not only to express but to actively develop and transform oneself. One of the key ways of doing this is by turning the camera on the filmmakers, subverting the traditionally voyeuristic relation filmmakers maintain with their subject. This puts the artist in the exposed position of performers, but with the added vulnerability of being seen as the author of their own image.

Perhaps the most complex film from this point of view is five more minutes (2005, Dena DeCola and Karin E Wandner, 17mins), at once the most constructed and the most disarmingly direct work in this programme. DeCola and Wandner star in the film, acting out a roleplay between a mother and her young daughter. What at first seems like almost camp make-believe builds to a harrowingly emotional catharsis as it becomes clear that these women are not just play-acting for fun. Described by its makers as “an exploration of grief”, the film’s raw camerawork and occasional self-reflexive ruptures (the women sometimes fall out of character, the camera is not always ignored) emphasises the artificiality of this role-play while simultaneously suggesting the veracity of the context surrounding it. However, it’s worth noting that the artists’ own synopsis of the film describes its characters in the third person: “Two women spend an afternoon recreating lost time”, suggesting that whether these “two women” are carefully written constructs or the authors’ own exposed selves is perhaps besides the point. Either way, the film serves as a vivid articulation of the ways in which theatricality can be used as both a means of protection and a pathway to deeper revelation.

STAGES OF MOURNING (2003, Sarah Pucill, 17mins) also deals with grief, but in a more restrained and formal way, exploiting cinema’s power as a means of remembering and reflecting more than as a space for performance. Pucill confronts the mediums in which her late lover and collaborator, Sandra Lahire, still exists: photography, film and video that were produced in their six years of collaboration. The delicate series of title cards that open the film makes clear its personal thrust: addressing Lahire, Pucill writes, “I put you together / to put myself together”. Like the earlier films, there is a complex mix of formal intricacy and self-exposure: the intangible past represented in the photos, films and videos of Lahire are connected to Pucill’s present-tense body and domestic space in a way that is both inventive and emotionally revealing. While Brakhage and Schneemann’s films are both collaborations between lovers, and depict an expanded and interconnected sense of self as a result, Stages of Mourning is a working-through of the aftermath of such a collaboration; an attempt to recuperate oneself after part of it has passed away. These “stages of mourning” are not illustrated through the film, but are actually enacted through the filmmaking process.

Considering that his filmography mainly consists of narrative feature films, defining Caveh Zahedi as an experimental filmmaker may be a controversial move, but he is certainly one of the most prominent examples of self-portraiture through cinema, and the one filmmaker in this programme who describes himself as an autobiographical filmmaker. This has taken the form of re-enactments (his first feature, A Little Stiff), experiments in filmmaking without control (I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, which he described as “directed by God”), video diaries (In the Bathroom of the World) and mixtures of all of the above (his most recent film, I am a Sex Addict).

One of the few experimental figures who has documented his own everyday life as persistently as Zahedi is Jonas Mekas—but the key difference is that Mekas’ camera is expressive and visionary, concerned with capturing the way he sees the world and the poetry of the everyday. Zahedi’s camera is more prosaic formally, partly because it’s usually not held by Zahedi himself, but pivotally because it’s treated more as a means of studying and provoking situations than as his primary means of self-expression. In THE WORLD IS A CLASSROOM (2002, Caveh Zahedi, 14mins), a documentary film class Zahedi was teaching in September 2001 is overtaken by a feud between Zahedi and a student in his class who objects to his methods and, in particular, doesn’t want to be featured in the film Zahedi is making about his class. Just as Pucill’s “stages of mourning” are not illustrated through film but are actually acted out through the filmmaking process, Zahedi’s filmmaking becomes the catalyst for its own drama: it’s by exposing himself and his students to the camera that he pushes them all into more expressive and revealing “performances”.

For Zahedi, filmmaking “is about process as much as the final product. I'm always trying to make films that, in the making of the film itself, somehow improve my life or relationships. In that sense, I'm always putting myself on the line. I'm not interested in a prefab kind of experience. It's always about testing and challenging and growing and seeing where something will take one.” But this is a process that these filmmakers also offer to the viewers in the experience of watching their films—all of which are very much embodiments of a process, a journey for each viewer that cannot be summarised. It’s significant that critic Ray Carney described five more minutes as “an attempt to open us up.” Indeed, perhaps “self-portraits” is less appropriate a term than self-expansions, since all of these films hint at the (ultimately desirable) uncontainability of the self. Critic Fred Camper argued that to call Brakhage’s work personal could be used to imply a certain limitation, when in fact “one characteristic of the arc of his career is a continual broadening of his own notion of the ‘self.’ ” And Sarah Pucill’s work has been described in terms that can apply, in different ways, to all of the films in this programme: an exploration of “the mirroring and merging we seek in the Other; a sense of self which is transformative and fluid” and “the idea that as subjects we are not separate.”

(First photo above taken by Star Barry. For more information on Dave Andrae, click here. For more information on five more minutes, click here. For more information on Sarah Pucill, and to purchase some of her films, click here. For more information on Caveh Zahedi, and to purchase some of his films, click here.)

SELF-PORTRAITS is a film-programme curated by Donal Foreman for the Experimental Film Club.

PROJECTION 13:

2009-05-31T08:24:00.000-07:00

CITY SYMPHONIES PART 2

/ Sunday 31st May / Odessa Club (upstairs) / 5pm / Doors: 7 Euro /

Berlin/ Symphony of a City
Walther Ruttmann 1928 B&W silent 65'

Ca Sera Beau (From Beyrouth With love)
Wael Noureddine 2005 colour sound 30'

'City Symphonies'. Ruttmann’s silent film 'Berlin/Symphony of a City' made in 1928 will be accompanied a reading of extracts from Seigfried Kracauer's 'The Mass Ornament'. There is an interesting relationship between the film and Kracauer's text. Ruttmann's 'Berlin/Symphony of a City' shows empty Berlin streets and works as a melancholy meditation of a city revealed through it's architecture and light rather than the activities of it's inhabitants. Kracauer was critical of this lack of human life in the film. In 'The Mass Ornament' Kracauer discusses the seduction and power of large spectacles and display. There is a tension created between the juxtaposition of the film and the text. Wael Noureddine's film 'Ca Sera Beau (From Beyrouth with Love)' madein 2005 is a tender portrait of a war torn city. Amongst ruins, the camera moves through the streets and into peoples apartments giving an intimate glimpse of his friends lives. With a vibrant soundtrack 'Ca Sera Beau' works as a temporal film collage revealing the little seen effects of war. Ruttman's 'Berlin/Symphony of a City' made in 1928 between the two world wars also captures a city at a pivotal moment in
history.

Film-programme by Aoife Desmond

PROJECTION 12:

2009-04-23T03:22:00.000-07:00

THE WIZARD OF OZ ... AND OTHER DREAMS / THE GOLD STANDARD

/ Sunday 29th April / Ha'penny Bridge Inn (upstairs) / 4pm / Doors: 5 Euro /

Joseph Cornell's "Thimble Theatre", "Jack's Dream" and "The Children's Party" circa 1930 - 1970, with "The Wizard of Oz - a la 'Rose Hobart' circa 1925 - 2009.

" ... the old-time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as "historical" in the children's library; for the time has come for a series of newer "wonder tales" in which the stereo-typed genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incident devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident."

This statement was made by the author of 'The Wizard of Oz', L. Frank Baum, in Chicago, in this month, April, of 109 years ago. To put it in context, Baum had just been editor of a silverite newspaper in South Dakota, from where he had been watching the intense American elections of 1896 and 1900. The Democrats intended to make silver money at the ratio of 16 ounces of silver to 1 ounce of gold, arguing that there was lots of silver out West, but the world's small stock of gold was controlled by wicked bankers in New York and London. The Republicans ran against this plan, but Baum supported the Democrats. With the abbreviation of 'Ounce' to 'Oz', in the financial lexicon of the day, the term 'Oz' must have abounded in the editor's articles. From his political perspective the wicked witches were in the East and West, the good witch was in the North ( an electoral mandate ), and the utopian 'Oz' was in the very centre of the country. After vanquishing the Wicked Witch of the East ( the Eastern bankers ) Baum's protagonist 'Dorothy' ( every woman ) frees The Munchkins ( the little people ) and with the witch's silver slippers ( the silver standard ), she sets out on the Yellow Brick Road ( the gold standard ) to the Emerald City ( Washington ), where they meet the Wizard ( the President ).

In attempting to write a modern children's story without moral undertones, if this was indeed his intention, it appears that the author, in this instance, may have completely failed. The Wizard of Oz, however, is not material to be taken lightly, as silent screen star, actor and director, Larry Semon discovered 20 years later. Semon had Baum's son working on adapting his father's material for the script of the 1925 silent version, but that didn't cut him the slack he expected and his career took a hit from the serious backlash against its differences from the original novel. He reconfigured it as a slapstick comedy with elements of political intrigue, but none that hark back to the election's witnessed by his screenwriter's father or the issues of the gold standard. The film uses a strange framing device, a man reading his daughter the novel ( even she's bored with the political mumbo-jumbo ). This device isn't so strange by modern standards, but the film has no yellow brick road, no witches, no toto, no munchkins, no emerald city and no recognizable version of the Wizard. In attempting to adapt a modern children's story without moral undertones as a movie of political intrigue, if this was indeed his intention, it appears that the author's son, in this instance, may have completely failed.

In the year of the release of Larry Semon's mis-directed revisioning of The Wizard of Oz, Joseph Cornell was converting to Christian Science after a 'healing experience' in New York. Surrealism was beginning to be felt in America and in November 1931 Cornell discovered Julien Levy’s newly opened gallery. He showed Levy some of his collages. They closely resembled the collages of Max Ernst. Through Levy, Cornell became acquainted with a wide range of Surrealist art as well as with various artists in New York, including Marcel Duchamp. In January 1932 he was included in the Surrealism exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery, the first survey of Surrealism in New York, to which he contributed a number of collages and an object. By the time of his first one-man show at the same gallery in November 1932 he had started producing his famous "shadow boxes". These were small circular or rectangular found boxes containing mounted or unmounted engravings and objects. At the same show, which was concurrent with an exhibition of engravings by Picasso, Cornell displayed 'Jouets surréalistes' and 'Glass Bells'. The former were small mechanical and other toys altered by the addition of collage, this use of toys suggesting the relationship between art and play.

This relationship between art and play is essential in Cornell's work, and the re-contextualizing of images and themes from fairy tales and children's stories is a running theme. His work also drew upon the basic Surrealist principle of the juxtaposition of unlikelies—“as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella,” as Lautréamont put it. In the early 1930's Cornell started making films from off cuts of Hollywood B-movies and showreels. The source material footage for his shorter montages revolve around a fascinating mélange of: a children’s party; circus performers and animal acts; science documentaries, etc. Cornell cuts freely and intuitively from one to the other. A second look reveals all manner of visual rhyming—e.g. a circus strong-man lifts a chair with his teeth/kids apple-dunk at a party; or children fling confetti about/a chorus girl plays flamboyantly with feathers. An image of a twirling ballet dancer, overexposed against a pitch-black background, becomes an abstract pattern of fluid shapes, as if it were quicksilver darting about on a Petri dish. 

At one point in "The Children's Party Trilogy", there is, curiously, footage of a little girl on a horse who is playing Godiva in a pageant and appears to be unclothed under her thick long tresses. It’s an innocent image that is also a tad unsettling. This is generally true of Cornell—there is great innocence and yearning and delicacy in his images, but they contain little spiky dissonances without ever shading into either carnal or outright disturbing.

P. Adams Sitney notes:

" In a way, Cornell’s wit is like that of Hans Christian Andersen, who can tell a story about an Emperor who exposes himself to a whole city, and especially to a little girl, without the readers noticing what is happening in the story. Successive generations of parents have proven the moral of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” by seeing only the moral and blinding themselves to the exhibitionism. The children to whom they read it tend to titter; they understand what it is about."

Cornell’s best-known film is "Rose Hobart", a re-editing of an obscure B-movie jungle drama called East Of Borneo (1931) starring the equally obscure actress who gives the film its title. He stripped it of sound and eliminated all the strong plot points—a journey upriver through the jungle, a volcanic explosion—and instead edited together, blithely ignoring linearity and continuity and following only his poetic instinct, a collection of reaction shots, gestures and expressions. Sitney writes:

"Cornell’s montage is startlingly original. Nothing like it occurs in the history of the cinema until thirty years later. The deliberate mismatching of shots, the reduction of conversations to images of the actress without corresponding shots of her interlocutor, and the sudden shifts of location were so daring in 1936 that even the most sophisticated viewers would have seen the film as inept rather than brilliant. […] [He] used some shots just as they were fading out or just as a door was closing, omitting the main action. By wrenching the images out of their narrative function, he suddenly freed them, making them instruments of suggestion".

The manifesto of the author of one of the most lasting and potent children's stories, 'The Wizard of Oz', to the effect that " ... the old-time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as "historical" in the children's library; for the time has come for a series of newer "wonder tales" in which the stereo-typed genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated" may have been more prophetic if it had been made by a pre-Surrealist Dada in relation to the emancipation from meaning achieved in Cornell's found footage films ...

This month, The Experimental Film Club presents Larry Semon's mis-directed 1925 adaptation of 'The Wizard of Oz', re-edited in the flavour of Joseph Cornell's 'Rose Hobart' and accompanied by a selection of Cornell's found film montages applying Surrealist principles to images from Children's culture - parties, circuses and fairy tales, made sporadically between 1930 and 1970 and left to a friend to finish. As L. Frank Baum's son attempts to re-contextualise his father's attempt at a 'modern' fairy tale, and as Cornell juxtaposes a puppet asleep by a fire in the cottage of Little Red Riding Hood with a slowly sinking pirate galleon, to be finished and scored by a friend, so friends and relations and subsequent generations are left to re-interpret and re-contextualise the works of artists, commercial and experimental. Perhaps Lautréamont's 'juxtaposition of unlikelies" can act as a kind of mesh through which a real emancipation of "the old time fairy tale", as Baum puts it, can truly occur. With such a powerful conversion device a far better ratio than 16 ounces of silver to 1 ounce of gold can be achieved by the 'gold standard', or 'Oz' of the art of assemblage.

Film-programme by Alan Lambert.

PROJECTION 11:

2009-04-06T02:10:00.000-07:00

C I T Y S Y M P H O N I E S

/ Sunday 29th March / Ha'penny Bridge Inn (upstairs) / 4pm / Doors: 5 Euro /

JEAN VIGO'S "À PROPOS DE NICE" (1930)

"In this film, by showing certain basic aspects of a city, a way of life is put on trial... the last gasps of a society so lost in its escapism that it sickens you and makes you sympathetic to a revolutionary solution." Jean Vigo described the film in an address to the Groupement des Spectateurs d'Avant-Garde. ‘À Propos de Nice’ is a 1930 silent short film directed by Jean Vigo and photographed by Boris Kaufman. The film depicts life in Nice, France by documenting the people in the city, their daily routines, a carnival and social inequalities. A propos de Nice constructs around the central motif of the carnival a savage, frenetic vision of a superficial society in a state of putrefaction. As bold in its formal experimentation as it is in its gleefully morbid fascination with ugliness, the grotesque humour of its portraits of the holidaymakers that swarm over the Promenade des Anglais (sometimes suggestively intercut with shots of animals!) is brutally undercut by images of distressing poverty. The uneasy atmosphere of indolence and boredom boiling over into lustful frenzy while willfully ignoring the encroaching sense of death and decay that surround it makes this Vigo's darkest film. A propos de Nice limits itself to the death dance of caricatures, caricatures all the more startling for being stolen from life with a hidden camera. What is already present in A propos de Nice is Vigo's ability to capture the natural beauty of a real, non-studio setting and spontaneously elaborate on the impression, transforming the commonplace into the magical. His eye for atmosphere and detail would grow from film to film, but from the outset it was rooted in a documentary practice that simultaneously transcended the documentary."

(Le Cain, Maximilian. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/vigo.html, Senses of Cinema http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/vigo.html)

DZIGA VERTOV'S "THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA" (1929)
Live music by Benedict Schlepper-Connolly (Dublin)

"I am an eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, I am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see" Dziga Vertov

"I was returning from the railroad station. In my ears, there remained chugs and bursts of steam from a departing train. Somebody cries in laughter, a whistle, the station bell, the clanking locomotive...whispers, shouts, farewells. And walking away I thought I need to find a machine not only to describe but to register, to photograph these sounds. Otherwise, one cannot organize or assemble them. They fly like time. Perhaps a camera? That records the visual. But to organize the visual world and not the audible world? Is this the answer?"- Dziga Vertov

‘The man with Movie Camera’ is a silent feature length film directed by Dziga Vertov and photographed by his brother Mikail Kaufmann. It is shot in more than one city and depicts Soveit urban life in general. Vertov says in his essay "The Man with a Movie Camera" that he was fighting "for a decisive cleaning up of film-language, for its complete separation from the language of theater and literature. For Vertov, "life as it is" means to record life as it would be without the camera present. "Life caught unawares" means to record life when surprised, and perhaps provoked, by the presence of a camera This explanation contradicts the common assumption that for Vertov "life caught unawares" meant "life caught unaware of the camera."

"We all felt...that through documentary film we could develop a new kind of art. Not only documentary art, or the art of chronicle, but rather an art based on images, the creation of an image-oriented journalism" Mikhail Kaufmann.

‘Man with a Movie Camera’ is at once a documentary, a newsreel and an experimental film. It reveals Vertov’s deep criticism of a cinema and documentary tradition tied to narrative and literary structure. He deconstructs the image by using different camera techniques slow motion, fast motion freeze frame etc. In the use of these more abstract and cinematic techniques he reveals an everyday experience. Often using hidden cameras he seeks a new cinematic truth. The images become linked by chance, rhythm and visual connections.

Film-programme by Aoife Desmond.

PROJECTION 10:

2009-02-14T06:16:00.000-08:00

V E N O M, E T E R N I T Y & O T H E R D I S C R E P A N C I E S

/ Sunday 22nd February / Ha'penny Bridge Inn (upstairs) / 4pm / Doors: 5 Euro /

Calm down, you assholes, shut up!
First of all, I think the cinema is too rich. It’s obese. It’s reached its limits, its maximum capacity.
A mere blockage will shatter this fat-filled pig into a thousand pieces.
I hereby announce the destruction of cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of disjunction, the rupture of this ballooning, and pot-bellied organism known as film.
(Excerpt from Venom and Eternity, Isidore Isou)

This month’s film programme pays homage to Discrepant Cinema, the bold manifesto by one of the most radical filmmakers in film’s history: Jean-Isidore Isou. According to Isou, one must divide to conquer. This applies to the two wings of cinema: sound (speech) and image, which he wanted by all means to sever: “I want to separate the ear from its movie master: the eye.” Isou advocated for a cinema in which the images, in their photographic and representative obsolescence, must rot, giving way to the breakage of the spontaneous association that made speech the correspondent of vision. “Who ever said that cinema, whose meaning is motion, has to be the motion of images and not the motion of words?” Isou proclaimed.

Isou (Rumania, 1925), founded Lettrism or Letterism in the late 1940s in France, an avant-gardist movement that covered a galaxy of practices (writing, performing and plastic arts, music, etc.), and has been associated, for its multidisciplinar vocation and antiartistic ideation to Dada, Futurism and Fluxus. We are showing Traité de Bave et d’Éternité or Venom and Eternity (1951), the first film Isou made, which constitutes the manifesto of Lettrist cinema. The film was made from footage found in labs rubbish combined with original 16mm film footage, and was presented that same year in Cannes Festival, receiving the Prix des Espectateurs d’Avant-garde award from a jury formed by Jean Cocteau among others.

Isou saw debate as the superseding of cinema: “since cinema is dead, we shall turn debate into a master piece”. Venom and Eternity begins with a five-minute sound poem over black leader. What follows is Isou’s visionary contra-cinema speech, a revolution against the decadent and dilapidated conventions of the medium. Isou wants to transpose the art of debate and sound, in its various forms, directly into cinema and in detriment to the photographic image.

It isn’t surprising that American filmmaker Stan Brakhage admired and wrote about Isou’s work. Brakhage’s films are a latent manifesto against visual representation: “I now no longer photograph, but rather paint upon clear strips of film – essentially freeing myself from the dilemmas of re-presentation. I aspire to a visual music, a music for the eyes (as my films are entirely without sound-tracks these days). Just as a composer can be said to work primarily with «musical ideas», I can be said to work with the ideas intrinsic to film, which is the only medium capable of making paradigmatic «closure» apropos Primal Sight.”

The film we are showing on this programme by Brakhage, The Dante’s Quartet (1987, 16mm, 7mins) has been especially recommended by Pip Chodorov (founder of distribution company Re:Voir in Paris, which has recently restored Isou’s film). The Dante’s Quartet is the result of Brakhage's long-standing fascination with The Divine Comedy, “a brief but spectacular filmic attempt to find a visual equivalent or rhyme for the four stages of the ascent from hell depicted by Dante”(1). Brakhage’s late films embody a sort of abstract expressionism in motion informed by his interest in hypnagogic or closed-eye vision, which he described as “what you see through your eyes closed - at first a field of grainy, shifting, multi-colored sands that gradually assume various shapes. It's optic feedback: the nervous system projects what you have previously experienced - your visual memories - into the optic nerve endings. Moving visual thinking, on the other hand, occurs deeper in the synapsing of the brain. It's a streaming of shapes that are not nameable - a vast visual 'song of the cells expressing their internal life.”(2)

The absence of images, the black screen in the first minutes of Isou’s Traité de Bave et d’Éternité (or in Howls for Sade, a film containing no images whatsoever Isou ideated with Guy Debord and was later realized by the author of The Society of Spectacle in 1952), in many of Brakhage’s films (Dog Star Man, for instance, or Reflection on Black), and in Aldo Tambellini’s Black Films (Black Is [1965], Black Trip 1 [1965], Black Trip 2 [1967], Blackout [1965]), is of a special significance. The absence of images, the black screen expresses disbelief for the association of images – while all associations are possible – it is a space dedicated to imagination.

Aldo Tambellini’s Black Films (1965-7) are non-photographic too. In these films, Tambellini used clear leader, which he used as a scroll, turning a blind eye to the frames, a mixture of chemicals, paint, ink and stencils (sometimes using found objects, such as computer cards) as well as slicing and scraping the celluloid directly. The Black Films are concerned, as John Cage’s conception of silence, Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings, or Takahiko Iimura’s films Ma:Intervals (1977), with notions of time as a colourless intersection, void and nothingness. (Henri Bergson: “I cannot get rid of the idea that the full is an embroidery on the canvas of the void, that being is superimposed on nothing, and that in the idea of «nothing» there is less than that of «something». Hence all the mystery.” [Creative Evolution, 1944]).

As the title of Isou’s film, this programme is drawn according to three axis: the propagandist solemnity (traité) of Venom and Eternity, the negation of a contemptible past of photographic cinema, or a cinema of sound/image associations (bave), and the ambition of reaching the excellence of celestial space (Éternité). Aldo Tambellini’s Statement on BLACK expresses the latter:

suspended
over the void
the immense
black space

the silence of
the universe
the infinite sky

how intensely BLACK
how deeper than BLACK
how blacker than BLACK
can space be
when the sun
is blackout
&
throughout
the universe
BLACK IS

the blind see
a transplanted prophetic vision
projecting darkening images
over the sun

the sun burns the eyes
of those who can see
& have no vision

somehow
the solar winds navigate the BIG THOUGHT throughout black space infinity
somehow
a message breathes from the universe consciousness
somehow
there is a language to be decoded
somehow
there is still silence in its echo
somehow
we are in a mindless voyage to destruction

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) Adrian Danks, Across the Universe: Stan Brakhage's The Dante Quartet, in Senses of Cinema, 2004.
http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/04/32/dante_quartet.html
(2) Stan Brakhage quoted in Suranjan Ganguly, “Stan Brakhage – The 60th Birthday Interview”, Film Culture no. 78, summer 1994, p. 26.

Film-programme by Esperanza Collado with Donal Foreman.

Films politically

2009-02-14T05:32:00.000-08:00

F I L M S P O L I T I C A L L Y

The Experimental Film Club is branching out, with a series of feature film screenings taking place at the autonomous social centre Seomra Spraoi. (The monthly screenings in the Ha'penny Bridge Inn will be continuing as usual.) This series will explore the convergence of film and radical politics in the late 1960s from the perspective summed up in Jean-Luc Godard's famous line: "The problem is not to make political films, but to make films politically."

For over a century, film has been recognised as a powerful political tool---but in the heightened climate of the US and Europe in the late 1960s, that power was understood in new and innovative ways. One of the key characteristics of the radical cinema that emerged in this time, particular in the epicentres of New York and Paris, was a keen awareness of the political implications of form, style and the filmmaking process that has often been neglected in contemporary radical and activist filmmaking.

For these filmmakers, it was not possible to simply make a Hollywood film, using the established modes of production and distribution and the established stylistic and narrative conventions, and insert within that a set of radical anti-war or anti-capitalist messages. It was not possible because those established conventions were not neutral, but had serious political implications themselves, implications that overrided any message one may try to propagate within them.

This series of screenings attempts to explore some of the new, politicised forms of cinema that were created during this time, and discuss what lessons they may hold for activists and artists in today's world.

For more information on the series, please visit filmspolitically.blogspot.com or contact experimentalfilmclub@gmail.com .

PROJECTION 9:

2009-01-18T13:36:00.000-08:00

T , O , U , C , H , I , N , G
THE ARCHITECTURES OF PERCEPTION

/ cinematic enchainment & sentient machines // invited artist Maximilian Le Cain /

/ Sunday 25th January / Ha'penny Bridge Inn (upstairs) / 4pm / Doors: 5 Euro /

This month’s programme looks at plastic, quasi-sculptural aspects of cinema as present in a series of correlated explorations of light, space and repetition. The starting point in selecting these films was Making a Home (2007), a video work by Cork-based artist Maximilian Le Cain, who also collaborated in curating this programme. The other films were selected for the various ways in which they resonate with and expand certain features present in Making a Home. In general terms, the films we are presenting (dis)articulate the structures of architecture, in the broadest and most perceptual sense of the word- space as it is objectively constructed (or dismantled), but also as it is experienced by the camera eye, by fictional characters and by the audience. Whilst each of the four films puts a different emphasis on one or more of these three centres of attention, they have in common that their drama is an individual subject’s direct perceptual experience of light, time and space, occurring at the extreme limits of his or her senses.

The unbridgeable gap between internal and external perception explored in Making a Home is proven by the filmer/protagonist’s inability to discover or construct an equitable inhabitable space in accordance with the desires of his subjective being. The torture of the endlessly repeated shots and the fragmentation of the audio-visual discourse (and spoken text) could be interpreted as symptoms of this failure which acquires the form of a cinema that makes space, in its architectonical edifice, stutter. More precisely, this cinema makes the architectures of perception stutter. This is true not only of Le Cain’s film but of the entire programme.

This ‘stuttering’ is a vehicle or catalyst for externalizing pulses, anxieties, desires, for making cinema a sentient contraption that works as a sort of fail-safe device that kicks in when a system created between the filmmaker and his single-handed practice (as each film is shot ‘single-handed’) inevitably fails in attempting a sensual encounter with subjectified architectonical space. There is an overtone of horror and violence in all four films, a kind of sensualized or sexualized horror, depending on the film. In Etienne O’Leary’s Chromo Sud (1968), for instance, there is a queasily disturbing threat of sexual violence that creates an atmosphere of decadent sleaziness.

Ivan Zulueta’s Leo es Pardo (1976) displays a range of sensualism on a visual, aural and tactile level that even encompasses taste. Its result, when embodied and animated by the elements of cinema, is a state of extreme fear and distress in the protagonist. Light further emphasizes anxiety. Whilst in Leo es Pardo the constitution of space is circumscribed by the cinematic fluctuations of harsh, bright light as an externalized form of the main character’s anxiety, the murky light of Chromo Sud blurs reality, aiding its disintegration into an orgiastic ritual of sorts. Making a Home even utilizes what could be seen as traditional horror film lighting. It abounds in shadows and creepy corridors, which, nevertheless, lead not to a lurking monster but to a sensual field of flickering red frames, shortcutting any possibility for representation and opening a crack in the filmer/protagonist’s reality through which the spectator can insert his or her own subjectivity.

As in Paul Sharits’ T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968), this injection of intervallic space or cracks in the flux of representational images offers a manifest assault on the sphere of representation, positing images and language as subjects of entropy and atrophy. The stuttering sound in both T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G and Making a Home (the word “destroy” in T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G and the opening declaration “I thought” in Making a Home are subjected to repetition and enchainment until their meaning distorts) is harmonically accompanied on the visual track by an intoxicating vibration of intermittent light.

There is also a sensualized form of terror present in the violent enchainment of frames in T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, a film that inaugurates corporeal cinema, sculpting light and generating a gaseous type of perception characterized by the dancing corpuscles of its relentlessly flickering images. If Making a Home, Leo es Pardo and Chromo Sud attest a radical internalization of space, the obscene luminosity of T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G reaches a quasi-three-dimensional state of cinema, rushing at the viewer rather than inviting exploration. We could plausibly describe this phenomenon as a sort of chromatic ejaculation of light over the audience, since T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G sprays us with cinematic light, accentuating the viewers’ physical awareness of their bodies and the space surrounding them. Irrational cuts and a zero degree form of representation posit this film at the doors of cinema’s dematerialization (or what has been addressed as expanded cinema). Whilst generating a concatenation of neurophysiological vibrations beyond movement, it explores the physical exultation the rotation of images communicates directly to the brain.

Vibration is indeed one of the main threads linking all four films. They all 'vibrate' markedly but differently. Chromo Sud and Making a Home both modulate the perception of reality from the perspective of the filming subject, the act of shooting opening a space of negotiation between objective and subjective reality. Leo es Pardo, on the other hand, puts the protagonist in front of the camera and at the mercy of an overwhelmingly active transformative cinematic reality. And T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G essentially places the audience itself in her position, as the film’s victims. But to varying degrees the viewers of all four films constantly find themselves sharing in a subjectified experience of the world and falling vulnerable to the threats experienced by different nervous systems without the traditional narrative mediation of a series of causal events.

MAXIMILIAN LE CAIN'S "MAKING A HOME"
(Video, 2007, color, sound, 10mins, Ireland)

Making a Home is 'thinking space', as is plainly expressed in the opening sequences of the film; an undefined, disintegrated building, a large space full of possible discoveries. In Le Cain's words, Making a Home "is an attempt to create a dwelling for and from internal desires using the mystery implied by the given architectural space, which fails". The impossibility of a reconciliation of internal and external insights is illustrated in Making a Home through ways of destabilizing impressions of this space captured on video. Cracks are caused to appear in representation (cracks which return the audience’s gaze from an exploration of a space back on to themselves), through the torture of repetition and the regular presence of black intervals. A sublime sound treatment accompanies this process, adding a series of subtle frequencies to the vulnerability of the subject in his attempt to construct something coherent out of a stuttering space. Making a Home shares the exploration of a ruined architectonical space with some of Le Cain’s other works such as John Puts a Chair Away (2008) and (…from a dying hotel) (2007), as well as the 'thinking space' of buildings made ‘weightless’ in Available Light (2008).

See Maximilian Le Cain's blog: Close Watch

IVÁN ZULUETA'S "LEO ES PARDO"
(1976, 12mins, 16mm on DVD, Spain)

Iván Zulueta is one of the most prolific Spanish filmmakers. He began experimenting intensely with the medium in the 1960s and 1970s, influenced by the avant-garde cinema he discovered in New York. His distinctive style is reflected in his first feature fiction film Arrebato (1979), where his central preoccupations with formal aspects of cinema are intertwined with his passion for horror films and an exquisite obsession with cinematic stases and cadence. As in many of his films, the title ‘Leo es Pardo’ is a wordplay: ‘leopardo’ means ‘leopard’; splitting the word results in ‘Leo (a common female/male name) is brown/dark green’. The film, which premieres in Ireland, is reminiscent of Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon and Kenneth Anger's Puce Moment. The enclosed space of Leo es Pardo embodies, cinematically and in the disparate erotized fluctuations of light and motion, an anxious emotional state which the subject can only externalize through this sentient machine: the cinematic architectures of perception.

ETIENNE O'LEARY'S CHROMO SUD
(1968, 21 mins, 16mm on DVD, France)

One of the very few films made by Etienne O’Leary, all of which emerged from the French underground circa 1968 and can be very loosely designated ‘diary films’. Like the contemporaneous films by O’Leary’s more famous friend Pierre Clementi, they trippily document the drug-drenched hedonism of that era’s dandies. In contrast to the back-to-origins minimalism of the Zanzibar Group (Garrel, Deval, Reynal, Bard, etc), O’Leary worked with an intoxicating style that foregrounded rapid and even subliminal cutting, dense layering of superimposed images and a spontaneous notebook type shooting style. The touchstone would seem to be Mekas and the New York underground rather than Godard. Yet even if much of O’Leary’s material was initially ‘diaristic’, depicting the friends, lovers, and places that he encountered in his private life, the metamorphoses it underwent during editing transformed it into a series of ambiguously fictionalized, sometimes darkly sexual fantasias. Chromo sud, his most sinister work by far, owes as much to Kenneth Anger as to Mekas, presenting the libertarian impulses of the time in as orgiastically morbid and sadistic a vein as Anger’s Scorpio Rising biker culture. In common with O’Leary’s other films, Chromo sud is a testament to the transformative powers of editing and the control it gives the filmmaker in shaping his own reality from the world around him.

PAUL SHARITS' "T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G"
(1968, 12 mins, 16mm, USA)

Paul Sharits, an American plastic artist before becoming an experimental filmmaker, was a notorious member of Fluxus influenced by the teachings of John Cage. Pip Chodorov and Vincent Deville have stated that Paul Sharits' films are legendary for triggering what harsher critics have regarded as masturbatory nonsense: the inaccessible, elitist and uncompromising nature of avant-garde film. Nonetheless, Sharits' films are not solely, as Chodorov and Deville affirm, visual experiences. These are films to be experienced beyond the boundaries of the visual since their fluctuating light floods the exhibition space, influencing the whole environment. In fact, Paul Sharits was one of the first artists to introduce experimental cinema to art gallery spaces with his film installations, which he called ‘locational films’. "The film's title (letters separated by commas) shows the physical conception of Sharits' cinema: starting from discrete units (still frames) a fluid movement is created (the cinematic illusion). […] In this film there are three types of images which show physical contact: the hands performing various destructive actions around the face; a surgical operation on an eye; a photo of sexual penetration. [...] As demonstrated by his project on epileptic seizures (…), Sharits' goal is to penetrate us as deeply as possible through the eyes, to make us vibrate in resonance with his film". (Chodorov and Deville, Understanding Paul Sharits. Madala Films, Re:Voir, Paris, 2003).

T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G The Architectures of Perception is a film-programme curated by Esperanza Collado and Maximilian Le Cain for the Experimental Film Club.

PROJECTION 8:

2008-11-28T08:07:00.000-08:00

TIME
///with Anthony Kelly & David Stalling, Stephen Rennicks, Taysir Batniji, Julius ZIZ, Djamel Kokene and Eamon Doyle///

/// Sunday 30th November / Ha'penny Bridge Inn (upstairs) / 4pm / Doors: 5 Euro

Time permeates every aspect of making a film, from frame rates, exposure times and synchronisation of the sound and celluloid itself, to the crossfades and dramatic pauses that describe the time within the world of the film. Most filmworks trick the viewer's sense of time in some way, even with the simplest of narrative transitions - perhaps only the Lumiere brothers can be credited with creating an undistorted, uncheated representation of time in their earliest single shot films - or at least one without such an agenda, as the single shot of Warhol's 'Empire' clearly has. But following the thread of time, in both it's philosphical and mechanical presence in film-making, I find leads to a less abstract and more human path than one would expect. I found that in works that challenge the standard manipulation of time in film - single shot films that deny the expected multiple views of intercutting, slide carousel films that deny the viewer's basic persistence of vision, editing in camera which denies retrospective control of time, slow-motion films that remove something else equally expected and taken for granted - I find in viewing such works I start to look for the personal, as a kind of 'hook', on which to balance myself when the familiar vocabulary is removed. I try to find continuity in familiar articles, intimate objects, clothing and faces, and the process of contemplating an artist's film as a time based work of art becomes unexpectedly personal. It becomes also about the discarded, or the unnoticed, in people's environments - and in environments' people. In these films people reveal something of themselves in the perceived vacuum created by the removal of conventional time manipulation. Djamel Kokene makes a slow-motion transition between alternative selves, Taysir Batniji explores identity, disappearance and absence in the dark spaces between airport terminals and the frames of a carousel, Anthony Kelly & David Stalling give the dark spaces numbers, and Stephen Rennicks observes, in camera, a world without people at all. And Julius Ziz cuts between as many perspectives as there are films in the basement of the Archives. TIME is a programme that cross sections a world explored and expressed in the spaces between.

(Still: Julius Ziz's Et Le Cochon Fut Ne, 2000).

ANTHONY KELLY & DAVID STALLING'S "GHOST SIGNALS 1 - 7"
(2008, Ireland, DVD, colour, 14 min.)

Anthony Kelly and David Stalling have been collaborating on a series of sound and visual pieces since 2003. They have just participated in the sound art exhibition 'Two Places', in the Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, and on the University of Limerick campus in Jan 2008. Recent shows include a screening at Anthology Film Archives, New York, an audiovisual installation at Ginza Art Laboratory, Tokyo and an Artist Residency at Soundworks 2006, Cork. Their work has been released on the sound art label farpointrecordings.com, on the recent 'Bend it like Beckett' CD curated by Danny McCarthy, and a track from their 'Treehouse EP' is available on the Tapper 16 CD with the December 2006 issue of Wire magazine. Future projects include 'Visualising Carlow' in 2009 and an audiovisual installation in the Basement Gallery, Dundalk.

For further info please visit www.farpointrecordings.com

STEPHEN RENNICKS' "NO PEOPLE HERE: Parts 4 + 5"
(2006, Ireland, Hi8, colour, 12 min.)

Stephen Rennicks was conceived in 1972. He currently lives on a small holding in rural Leitrim where he practices, among other things, as a conceptual artist. Notable works to date include the year long 'Junk out of Context'(2004) which explored the audio and video stock of Dublin charity shops; 'Trains for the Blind'(2004), a sound piece released in conjunction with the ESB Dublin Fringe festival; a six month 'secret residency' at Dublin Airport during 2005; 'Imagine Black Lough' installation at The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, Co. Leitrim and his debut solo show 'With & Without Context' at Mantua in 2007.

He uses everyday materials not normally associated with art practice in his work; using things like free template websites, one-take films, standard photo lab processed prints etc, as part of an aesthetic that aims to demystify the medium for the viewer. However, the message in the work itself is always paradoxically designed to be multi layered and mystifying beyond its surface meaning.

TAYSIR BATNIJI'S "TRANSIT"
(2004, DVD, colour, 7 min.)

Born in Gaza in 1967, just before the occupation, and a graduate of the Ecole de Beaux-Arts de Marseille, Taysir Batniji has adopted a multidisciplinary approach to his work through painting, assembling of objects, installation, photography, video, and performance art. His artwork offers a distant conceptual observation of the political and historical events that have shaped his country as well as subjectivity in regards to their resulting impact on humanity. Emptiness, absence, disappearance, and uprooting are recurring notions in his work.

JULIUS ZIZ'S "ET LE COCHON FUT NE ( AND THE PIG WAS BORN )" & "SILENCE SEA AND MARCEL DUCHAMP"
(2000, USA/FRA 16mm, colour/b&w, 23 min.)
Music by Auguste Varkalis

Made for the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris exposition VOILA (Summer 2000), from "found" footage taken from hundreds of unfinished films stored in Anthology's basement. A tour-de-force montage film with the spirit of Vigo and Buñuel hovering over it. Made before Godard's Origins of the 21st Century, Ziz's film provokes interesting comparisons. Both deal with images of the 20th century. But while Godard's film could be described as a poster, Ziz's film is a poem. I don't have to tell you which one I prefer...
Jonas Mekas

The last century is x-rayed to bring out its most unforgivable errors, its fears and hopes which spill out onto the streets of New York and Paris. The horror / terror of war, the lack of defence of nature, the descent into the abyss of modern cynicism and the ritual misanthropy of the power relations between individuals. The mind of the poet, shattered and disillusioned, keeps watch anyhow over this barbarism which has taken over planet Earth. Julius Ziz concentrates all this at a speed of 24 frames per second, making images which are able to persist in our memory as they are lyrically edited in an emotional symbiosis with Varkalis' music.
Piero Pala

"SILENCE SEA AND MARCEL DUCHAMP" (2000, USA/FRA 16mm, colour/b&w, 23 min.) is a film made out of found footage. Marcel Duchamp plays chess by the ocean with his wife, pretending that he is winning, but he is losing.

DJAMEL KOKENE'S "EVENTUAL ISSUE"
(2003, Azerbaijian/France, Video, colour, 14 mins.)

“For me, Eventual issue expresses a situation, still not resolved, from which one can sense the confrontation of imaginaries that intertwine inside the same body. Some nostalgic will see the myth of the beautiful oriental lady, some the treachery and an attack on the decency of a culture, the philosophical myth of the unveiling or the lack of freedom fostered by the news and
the consequences of the irreversible globalization”. Djamel Kokene

Until what point do we expose oneself and what can we expose? Is Eventual issue a taboo of indecency? Out of censorship thanks to the French Ambassador, the work, under the attentive eye of the Muslim Shiite community, has unleashed the local press: "Djamel Kokene makes a striptease". Is this video saying that only fiction has the power to go beyond the antagonism of what is fit to be seen or not? It is perhaps a reflection on the nature of the constraints linked to cultural identity, shaking between the domination of the collective,
that leaves little space to singularity, and domination of the globalized world.
Karine Vonnat (director of the Contemporary Art Centre La Villa du Parc in Annemasse, France)

EAMONN DOYLE'S "POINT MONSTER"
(1996, Ireland, 16mm/BETA, b&w, 7 min.)

Eamonn Doyle is a photographer, music-maker and music promoter based in Dublin, Ireland. He is the director of D.E.A.F.: Dublin Electronic Arts Festival' and runs D1 Recordings. 'Point Monster' is a time-lapse silent 16mm film shaped into a music video for a D1 track by Rob Roland. It utilises the technique of repeating and looping shots common to subsequet D1 videos - a device which gradually removes the viewers understanding of the image, like repeating one's name over and over again until it looses meaning and becomes unfamiliar.

TIME is a film-programme curated by Alan Lambert for the Experimental Film Club.

PROJECTION 7:

2008-10-23T16:53:00.000-07:00

DANCE PLAY RITUAL
///with guest filmmakers John Porter and James Hosty///

/// Sunday 26th October / Ha'penny Bridge Inn (upstairs) / 4pm / Doors: 5 Euro

The theme of this month's programme came out of an interest in the crossovers between dance and film. Most of the filmmakers on this programme, with the exception of John Porter, come from a dance background and made the transition into film. Each filmmaker has approached this transition in a different way. Maya Deren works collectively composing/choreographing multi-layered abstract films. Yvonne Rainer uses pared down movement as the base for films with political and social connotations. Morleigh Steinberg refers back to her experience as a dancer whether filming, editing, lighting or directing. James Hosty uses video in a basic way to document spur of the moment dances in diverse locations. John Porter expands his filmmaking practice to include the body and movement. Each of these artists explore the crossover in dance in film in unique ways. By showing this selection of films together and initiating discussion, it is hoped that some insights into the working process and possibilities in dance and film are revealed.

The work of Maya Deren (1917-1961) is the starting point for this programme. As a highly trained dancer and skilled filmmaker, Deren epitomises dance-film. Her films, in which she usually appears, are quite unique in their particular use and exploration of both mediums. Deren equates the filmmaking and particularly the editing process with choreography by using techniques such as superimposition, multiple exposures and jump cuts that emphasise a feeling of trance or ritual. Films such as Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and At Land (1944) combine abstraction with poetical structures, which she describes ‘vertically’ and ultimately link to surrealist narratives. Deren works with time, slowing it down and de-constructing it. In this way she examines movement and social ritual. She uses a non-literary approach and yet her films are multi-layered and complex. In Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945-46) she seems to explore the fear of rejection and the freedom of abandoning ritual. She worked closely with such contemporaries as John Cage, Anais Nin, Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp.

Both Maya Deren and Yvonne Rainer are key figures in the dance film crossover. Yvonne Rainer is an American choreographer and filmmaker, whose work in both disciplines is frequently challenging and experimental. Her piece Trio A (1978) is a good foundation point for exploring her practice further. Trio A has been performed by numerous dancers in many locations but here you see the original dance filmed in a straightforward way. Her work is linked to Minimalism, she strips back dance and uses everyday movement. Her later film works use text and are critical social commentaries. The sparse de-construction of movement seen in her performance of Trio A is an important element within the development of her later work. Each of the artists chosen for this programme explore the shift between dance and film.

Morleigh Steinberg used to teach Body Weather dance class in Dun Laoighaire, and her films have been shown in different spaces around Dublin. Xing was screened as part of GAIN -an art programme curated by Mark Garry- in The Fringe Festival in 2000. The film was projected onto the side of the civic office. Morleigh’s commitment to dance and her creative relationship with Oguri form her film practice. Oguri’s lifework and investigation is both revealed and complemented by their collaboration. In Xing Oguri dances with the traffic, improvised and feeling for the gaps, the spaces in traffic flow. This relates somehow to James Hosty's Tunnel RawCuts, which takes part of this month's EFC programme too, as both works re-interpret in their own way urbanised settings through the body and film. In Tunnel RawCuts, Hosty has spontaneously chosen a disused tunnel for a gestural dance.

Amusement Park, Firefly and Down on Me reveal John Porter’s performative filming process in which camera and bodily movement often overlap. ‘Amusement Park’ is part of Porter’s ‘Rituals’ series and shares certain elements with ‘Firefly’ and ‘Down on Me’. The latter films take some of the same explorations of light and spiralling circular movement while they all approach these notions in different manners.

MAYA DEREN “RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME”
(1945-46, 14’, USA, b/w, silent, 16mm)

"In Maya Deren's Ritual in Transfigured Time we have gestures that invite us to move into step with them, abandoning the comfort of the known and giving ourselves over to so many strange partners. This silent short begins in a domestic environment, moves to a party scene, and ends with modern dance performed in an outdoor setting. The film's continuity is established by an emphasis on gesture and/or dance throughout.

(...) Maya Deren is most commonly discussed in relation to the history of avant-garde filmmaking and the significance of her role as a woman working in a male dominated industry. Examining Deren's work in light of her connections with, and interest in, dance, foregrounds aspects thus far overlooked in critical approaches, such as corporeal performance in her films, the privileged role given to the moving body, and the influence of choreographed performance on the techniques, aesthetic and overall structure of her films. Beyond this, the gestural operations at work in a film like Ritual… can be read as a dancerly exchange between the on-screen figures that open up the action to the spectator, drawing us into the dance." (Erin Brannigan, Maya Deren, Dance, and Gestural Encounters in Ritual in Transfigured Time, in Senses of Cinema, September 2002).

YVONNE RAINER “TRIO A”
(1978, 10.30’, USA, b/w, silent, 16mm)

Trio A was originally performed at the Judson Church in New York, as The Mind is a Muscle, Part 1 in 1966 by Yvonne Rainer, David Gordon and Steve Paxton. Rainer, along with other members of the Judson Church in the 1960s, rebelled against some of the characteristics of the established modern dance, Cunningham and ballet. With Trio A her objective was to eliminate such aspects as phrasing, development and climax, character, performance, virtuosity, the fully extended body and variation in dynamics. Instead she used every-day, "found" movement, task-like activity and a deadpan performance style that drew attention to real body weight and time.

Yvonne Rainer (born November 24, 1934, San Francisco) is an American choreographer and filmmaker, whose work in both disciplines is frequently challenging and experimental.

MORLEIGH STEINBERG “XING”
(1996, 11’, USA, colour, video, sound)

Known for her work as a dancer, choreographer and lighting designer, Morleigh co-founded ISO Dance, along with Jamey Hampton, Ashley Roland, and Daniel Ezralow, and was a formative member of Momix. She toured the world extensively with both companies and with her solo work. She won an Emmy award for best screen choreography in “Episodes”, a PBS presentation of ISO repertory. Working as a choreographer and performer in numerous music videos and feature films served as a natural progression in her move to directing film. Morleigh is a native of Los Angeles and lives between LA and Dublin, Ireland.

“What has filmmaking brought to my dance practice? I can’t get away from the fact that dance/ movement has been the center of everything I have done creatively. Certainly filmmaking has inspired me to see dance cinematically, like, “now that I have an idea for “ a dance”, how would I film it?” But, it always seems that the dance comes first. I guess filmmaking has made me question more closely “what is the essence of this movement that might be captured intimately on film?” Also I get inspired seeing dance set in real life settings that film can capture and bring to an audience if the real life setting is not conducive to a live audience.
Creating dance on film is incredibly enticing and fascinating for me; almost more so than me creating work for the stage. But having said that, there is nothing like seeing a great live performance. I love that too, because it is alive!” (Morleigh Steinberg, from a conversation with Aoife Desmond).

JAMES HOSTY “TUNNEL RAW CUTS (EXCERPT FROM GUERRILLA DOPE TOURS)”
(2007, 4.38’, IRE, colour, video, sound)

"My films are best described as ‘body haikus’ or ‘satori moments’, moments of inspiration, of something comes, to be, if you stop waiting they happen, try not to try, to be instinctual, getting in the car with the camera and just finding a place. Like free writing, writing without thinking. This is a new process, ‘Raw Cuts’ I would like to develop them later with higher production values but for now I enjoy their roughness, the basic camerawork, just set up the camera and dance, simplicity.” James Hosty (from a recent interview with Aoife Desmond)

‘Through the agency of WDD (Walking Dope Designs), I challenge both myself and the viewer in reference to voyeurism, sensationalism and authenticity, by using performance and filmmaking. One aspect of these live performances is the activity in itself, the act of creation, marks of identity and the moment being a collective and transparent experience. Another area of investigation is body fabric sculpture and absent traces, the imprints the body leaves behind and the contrasts of the physical manifestation and the spiritual. There is an aspect of “the stroke of an artists brush’ the spontaneous, the evoked, informing the process. Sound, movement and lighting come from immediate reactions to the surrounding space, each informing the other. An essential element of this process is the practice of the art forms on a regular basis (without the act to meet a deadline), through a rational discourse and nurturing under the heading of WDD.” (James Hosty)

JOHN PORTER “AMUSEMENT PARK”, “FIREFLY” & “DOWN ON ME”
(1978/79, 13.5’, CAN, colour, silent, Super 8)

Amusement Park documents different thrill rides at Toronto's historic, annual Canadian National Exhibition, all shot at night, at one frame per second, using one-second time exposures. In Firefly, John improvises a performance for the camera, spinning a bright, pinpoint light on a long cord, around himself in a variety of patterns, against a black background. A one-shot film, shot in one hour, at one frame per second. Down on Me is a camera-dance film which uses time-lapse/pixilation. John dances with, and is led by, the camera, which is running at one frame per second and turning its own way on the end of a fishing pole line while being raised and lowered from rooftops and bridges. Throughout the film, the camera is looking down at John on the ground, who's looking back up at the camera and turning with it.

“Film & video were once distinguished by the term "time-based", but I said dance, theatre, music are also time-based. I always have people in my films because I like the innate beauty & humour in human movement. Even uncontrolled crowds seem to be "dancing". And I think both silent dance and silent film are "musical" in structure. (John Porter in conversation with Aoife Desmond).

Dance Play Ritual is a film-programme by Aoife Desmond for the Experimental Film Club.

PROJECTION 6:

2008-09-22T07:35:00.000-07:00

TVs & BODIES
///a selection of work by experimental video artists///

/// Sunday 28th September / Ha'penny Bridge Inn (upstairs) / 4pm / Doors: 5 Euro

The question of whether to shoot a film on video or celluloid has, in recent years, been largely reduced to a question of affordability and convenience. Experimental cinema has always taken such matters of medium a little more seriously. Almost every experimental filmmaker I’ve met has asked me whether I shoot on film or video, always with the implication that this was not simply a matter of economics but a defining philosophical and aesthetic choice.

Along similar lines, the Experimental Film Club has always made a concerted effort to project films on film when possible, in recognition of the fact that some of these works lose their magic, and much of their meaning, when they are shown on video (Pip Chodorov calls it the equivalent of exhibiting photocopies of paintings). The corollary of this is that experimental films originating on video also often have meanings and affects that are inseparable from their native medium.

When we talk about video we are of course talking about a constellation of formats and technologies that have existed and evolved in various contexts over the past half century, and the ways in which they have been used by artists covers an even wider spectrum. This programme aims to take four filmmakers from different points on that spectrum—two who were central to the inception of experimental video in the late ‘60s, and two outstanding contemporary video artists—to suggest something about the ways in which the position of video in the avant-garde, and culture in general, has shifted in the past 50 years.

When Nam June Paik and Aldo Tambellini began working with electronic media in the 1960s, video meant one thing: TV. Both artists came to video by way of sculptural and environment-based art, and it was the physical TV set which was their port of entry. Although Paik is the more widely recognised of the two, both featured in the seminal 1969 video installation exhibition, “TV as a Creative Medium” at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, in which TVs were put into all sorts of unlikely sculptural and environmental contexts. The impetus for environment-based art was generally a desire to break down the traditionally passive and disengaged structures of art exhibition. The introduction into this context of that most passive and 2D of forms was seen by artists as a way of reclaiming and (sometimes literally) redesigning an incredibly powerful and dominant form of communication. As Paik put it, "Television has been attacking us all our lives – now we can attack it back."

The inherent problem with this kind of project was finding ways to subvert and circumvent technology that had been designed for reverse aesthetic and political purposes. The critic David E James has argued that “since video depends on advanced technology and on technological systems integrated at the corporate level, it is always possessed by the corporation, always besieged by its values.” As both Paik and Tambellini became more engaged in creating their own video content, their response to these problems tended to oscillate between the destructive and the constructive—on the one hand critiquing and deconstructing TV’s conventional modes, and on the other hand attempting to invent alternative ones.

GLOBAL GROOVE (1973, 29mins) features elements of both, and encapsulates many aspects of Paik’s work, combining elements of his ‘60s installations and various avant-garde art performances alongside kitschy world TV clips and trippy experiments with video synthesisers—all mixed together in a dizzying collage. The video proclaims itself as “a glimpse of the video landscape of tomorrow, when you will be able to switch to any TV station on the earth, and TV Guide will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book”—and its position as a prophecy is complex, at once critic and participant.

Tambellini’s BLACK TV (1967, 10mins) also takes a subversive, collagist approach, but with a considerably darker edge. Utilising ‘60s news footage of race riots, police brutality and Vietnam, Tambellini described the film as being “about the future, the contemporary American, the media, the injustice, the witnessing of events, and the expansion of the senses.” It was this notion of expanding the senses that pre-occupied most of his work. While Tambellini was vitriolic in his opposition to mainstream television (he once called TV “the assassin of reality”), he also saw in it immense possibility as an abstract form of aesthetic communication. Since the technology was here to stay, and as Tambellini saw it, was “affecting all social and human interaction as we have previously known it to be”, it was imperative to find ways to appropriate it artistically.

Almost forty years later, the cultural climate has shifted in some key ways. Video-making technology has never been more democratic or accessible, but corporate images are also more ubiquitous and invasive than ever before. The internet has achieved the global synchronisation Paik visualised in Global Groove, and many of the techniques of the ‘60s avant-garde have been co-opted and neutralised by commercials and music videos. It’s hard to imagine works like the first two in this programme being made today—at least in an avant-garde context—and it’s particularly hard to imagine anyone holding out any hope in the radical aesthetic possibilities of such an increasingly obsolete format as broadcast television. While there are, of course, an endless range of video works being produced today, it’s the argument of this programme that the chosen pieces by Stephen Dwoskin and Maximilian Le Cain represent something distinctly contemporary about video’s cultural role in this environment.

Stephen Dwoskin has been an important figure in experimental cinema since he began working on film in ‘60s New York. One of the central concerns of his work has been described by Paul Willemen as “the relations of desire that can be woven between the camera's way of looking, the subject's wish to be seen, the filmmaker's irrevocable 'separation' from what he wants to see and show, and the viewer's relation to this intricate network of imbricated desires.” These concerns predate Dwoskin’s use of video, but since Dwoskin began working solely with video in the 1990s, his style has found a perfect niche in this context. NIGHTSHOTS (2007, 33mins) is a strong example of this, consisting of three frankly intimate encounters between Dwoskin and different women, all filmed in pitch black using infrared nightvision. The film’s formal devices are unavoidably reminiscent of such key cultural landmarks as the Paris Hilton sex tape, but the results are a million miles away, creating a ghostly impressionistic effect that is actually quite revelatory, all the more so for being founded on such basic formal means.

Maximilian Le Cain is a product of a different age. The 29 year old Cork filmmaker has been working on video since his early teens, developing a prolific body of work in which the relation between video and memory has become a central theme. In FORGOTTEN FILMS ( 2005, 10mins), Le Cain refilms the rushes of an actress from an abandoned fiction work of several years previous, and transforms it into a stunning and moving, melancholic study of memory and distance. Le Cain has described his films as “the memory of images already perceived, thought about and digested”, and there is an implication in his work that video is not just a metaphor for this process, but that the act of recording, revisiting, re-editing experiences through video actually changes one’s relationship to and remembrance (or forgetting) of those experiences. The technology has, as Tambellini assured us it would, reinvented our relationship with reality.

Both Dwoskin and Le Cain’s films are essentially portrait films, in which some kind of personal relationship between filmmaker and subject is implied; and although both use very video-specific formal methods (most of Forgotten is reflimed on a TV screen, and Nightshots is made possible by the nightvision function now standard on most camcorders), neither is self-consciously concerned with video as a medium or its wider context: the spectre of the mass media is nowhere to be found in these films. Unlike the earlier videos—which have the feel of being interventions, the work of renegate artists infiltrating enemy territory—Dwoskin and Le Cain are artists for whom making video is just a natural part of living.

40 years ago Paik argued that "the real issue implied in art and technology is not to make another scientific toy, but how to humanise the technology and the electronic medium.” Indeed, in anticipation of Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), Paik often brought TV into bodily situations in his installations—as in his famed “TV Bra” installation, visible in Global Groove. Today, that process is almost complete: video-making is an integral part of many people’s daily lives and social interaction; it is, as Dwoskin describes it, an extension of our eyes, but also of our memory, our feelings… it might as well be part of our body. The catch is that this state of affairs hasn’t resulted in any widespread release of individual creative potential. It has, in fact, largely disconnected us from real social and physical concerns.

It seems significant, then, that both of our contemporary filmmakers are concerned with intimate, one-to-one encounters. Dwoskin has described his use of film- and video-making as “a way of being with others … a way of touching other people and perhaps them touching me”. He describes his relationship with his subjects as one of dialogue, not voyeurism. “It’s not about looking at something pretty,” he says: “it’s about getting involved.” While Le Cain’s concern with memory may leave his camera’s gaze a little more distant from his subjects, his work is still very much haunted by the spectre of physical connection—even if it is, as Dwoskin put it, the way in which “eyes meeting can be like flesh touching”.

If in 1969, making videos was a way of taking control of a powerful, corporately controlled technology, in 2008, when everybody’s making videos, the problem seems to be how to take control of and get in touch with our own lives.

The question now seems to be, how to humanise us.

TVs & Bodies is a film-programme curated by Donal Foreman for the Experimental Film Club.

................................................................................
For more information on the artists:
paikstudios.com
aldotambellini.com
lecain.blogspot.com
luxonline.org.uk/artists/stephen_dwoskin/index.html

PROJECTION 5:

2008-08-20T10:59:00.000-07:00

THE PRACTICE OF ANTI-ILLUSION
///a selection of materialist films with guest Canadian filmmaker John Super8 Porter///

/// Sunday 31st August / Ha'penny Bridge Inn (upstairs) / 4pm / Doors: 5 Euro

In an attempt to re-define the controversial term Structural Film, coined by American critique P. Adams Sitney in the late 1960s, English filmmaker and theorist Peter Gidal advocated the expression "Structural/Materialist Film" a decade later referring to the practice of avant-garde filmmakers that were revealing and destroying illusionist aspects of cinema. The practice of anti-illusion consisted in dismantling the technical elements that make possible a “suspension of belief” during the act of perception, or the willingness of a person to accept as true the representative and illusionary premises of a work of fiction. The darkness of the cinema venue, the omnipresence of the screen and traditional narrative lines tend to facilitate such redemption of reality in film.

Outstanding avant-garde filmmakers such as Michael Snow, Paul Sharits, Birgit Hein or Ken Jacobs were exploring the material limits of the medium in the late 60s and 70s, exploiting the mechanics of filming and projection and its possibilities within the field of perception. The works we present on this month’s programme are, nonetheless, contemporary. Outer Space by Peter Tscherkassky (Austria), Decasia: The State of Decay by Bill Morrison (USA), and -as Cork Film Festival preview of special guest John Porter, Calendar Girl,- share with the first materialist movement their assault on the illusionist nature of conventional cinema. They approach the materiality of film as a perishable, fragile matter, and exploring, degrading, literally fracturing the physical and aesthetic elements of the frame, they present a substantial difference with the earlier practice of anti-illusion: they work with found footage.

Working with original found footage –a term methodologically anchored in Dada objet trouvé interdisciplinary works- offers a myriad of possibilities, as the works on this programme testify. Possibly, the most overwhelming visual distortion found in Outer Space, Decasia, and Calendar Girl, takes place in the very transformation of realistic imagery into a prism of abstractions in which unique codes between spatial representation and a quasi tri-dimensional layering of images is created. Working with found footage in these films seems ultimately to constitute a manifesto or a radical response to the overpowering presence of digital moving-imagery; a deliberate return to the artistic specificity of cinema's historical expression.

Following the historical genealogy of structural/materialist film in which, degrading the material until the most fundamental components of the medium are revealed –leading cinema, therefore, to a degree zero-, John Porter´s performance Scanning takes the anti-illusionist aesthetic to its logical conclusion. If, after all these experimentations there weren’t many possibilities left in terms of materialist filmmaking, the projection situation had to change, as many artists involved in exhibition and expanded cinema demonstrated in the 70s. Cinema now wanted a body –that corporeal presence which had remained the prerogative of theatre-, and, in the case of performance, that body could be the filmmaker himself manipulating the projector, the audience, or the event itself. Such practice is, in short, in search of new forms of experience, which directly integrate art into life. Beyond the traditional confines of film’s materiality, a cinematic happening as Scanning not only comes accompanied by the activation of the audience; it overcomes the dichotomy of object and depiction, production and reproduction, presence and representation, reality and illusion.

BILL MORRISON'S "DECASIA: THE STATE OF DECAY"
(DVD, 2002, color, sound, 67mins.)
Music by Michael Gordon.

Decasia is an expressionistic film founded on the tension between the hard fact of film's stained, eroded, unstable surface and the fragile nature of that which was once photographically represented. In its fascinating distortion and analysis of destruction, Morrison’s film could be interpreted as a collage of archival footage shot ahead of the 1950s on a celluloid nitrate base, most of it found in advanced stages of decay. Morrison slowed down the footage in order to allow a greater appreciation of the dramatic effect of the severe emulsion deterioration. The aural dissonances of Michael Gordon’s modernist symphony –a soundtrack that decays itself- reinforce the hypnotic effect of Decasia. Gordon took the orchestra to musical extremes by detuning the instruments and using prepared pianos which further emphasize the powerful hallucinatory visual experience.

Decasia´s website: http://www.decasia.com

PETER TSCHERKASSKY'S "OUTER SPACE"
(16mm, 1999, b/w, sound, 9.58mins.)

Tscherkassky is an Austrian avant-garde filmmaker who uses "found footage" and heavy frame-manipulation while editing. His films present a violent force of disjointed narrative and a subversive plot against the conventions of fictional cinema. Outer Space begins with strong implications of genre - a dark suburban landscape with a woman (Barbara Hershey from Sidney J. Furie's 1981 film The Entity) moving towards a dubious sanctuary. As much as the footage was chosen for Hershey's manic performance -attacked by an invisible demon, which in Tscherkassky´s film takes the form of mutilated celluloid-, the symbology of classic horror scenario turns as powerful as persuasive. As the woman reaches the door, the film gesticulates and whimpers. The woman turns the handle and as the door opens a great foreboding falls over the viewer. Slowly, the physical structure of the film reveals itself: images become ghosts of themselves, the soundtrack becomes aggressive and forceful, and our protagonist splits apart. Tscherkassky reduces the original work by subtracting the colour, and, by reworking it, superimposing images, fragmenting through rapid montage, sculpts new time and space rhythms.

Cork Film Festival preview:
JOHN PORTER'S "SCANNING" & "CALENDAR GIRL"
(Super8 film performance, 1983, 3.5mins.); (Super8, 1981-88, color, sound, 3.5mins.)

John Porter belongs to the Funnel collective of independent filmmakers which began operation in Toronto in 1977. Porter was born in 1948. He made his first film, on Super-8, in 1968. Scanning is a series of One-shot Camera Dances, involving "surround super 8" projector dances performed live. Inspired by a projection by Anne B. Walters, Porter produces a continuing series of silent film performances, with hand-holding a super 8 projector in front of the audience. He moves the projected image around onto all the walls and ceiling, following the camera movements in the film. In Calendar Girl, John Porter scratched and painted on a sync-sound, super 8 copy of a black & white, 1960s, pop music film (Scopitone), which he made by aiming his camera at his old black & white TV. Porter's scratches and strokes exaggerate and comment on the sexism in "music videos" of all generations.

The Practice of Anti-Illusion is a film-programme by Esperanza Collado for the Experimental Film Club.

See Cork Film Festival website for more details about special guest John Porter: http://www.corkfilmfest.org/

PROJECTION 4:

2008-06-21T14:07:00.000-07:00

T R O N: R E D U X
///WITH ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK BY 3EPKANO///
/// Sunday 29th June / Ha'penny Bridge Inn (upstairs) / 4pm / Doors: 5 Euro

TRON is a debugging command in the BASIC computer programming language. It is an abbreviation of "TRace ON". This command "traces" the execution of a program, listing each instruction as executed on the screen, so that the programmer can 'debug' the program, finding flaws and eliminating them to make the programme run more smoothly. It is used primarily for debugging GOTO and GOSUB commands. GOTO is a keyword found in several higher-level programming languages which causes an unconditional jump or transfer of control from one point in a program to another. The TRON command's opposite is TROFF, or "TRace OFF", used to turn off command tracing.

The TRON analogy within experimental film-making is that, with a basic understanding of storytelling and structuring a narrative, particularly regarding the commercial screenplay paradigm as a basic programme, any film artist has the ability to fundamentally change a pre-existing piece of work or fragment thereof, 'de-bugging' the original and transferring control to a different set of principles. This month The Experimental Film Club 'de-bugs' a commercial piece of work with a unconditional transfer of control to the live event. Walt Disney's 'Tron' will be re-edited live by his distant cousin Destiny Law as 'The Race Is On', with an original live soundtrack improvised by '3epkano', backed up with a programme of 'Appropriation' - films made from other films - with restructured and inverted images and narratives, re-contextualizing films. But now the command tracing is off - TROFF - because in experimental cinema there is no parallel for the paradigm.

JEAN FRANCOIS NEPLAZ' "ANTE INFERNO"
(2007, Colour/B&W, Video, 100mins.)

Jean Francois Neplaz's 'Ante Inferno' utilizes old school video mixing effects, solarizing clippings of classic silent films over raw video footage of industrial assembly lines, construction sites and political events. An industrial soundtrack creates a monotonous, hypnotic rhythm on which the fragmented film builds. Within the montage newsreel footage of wartime Europe and Sado-masochistic orgies flash through, bringing the underbelly closer to the top. Similar to Zoe Greenberg's film, which integrates the film-making techniques, 'Ante Inferno' uses the rhythm of the snow and distortion of poor tape tension on VHS to contribute to the backbone of the montage.

ZOE GREENBERG'S "3 HOLES"
(2005, Colour, 16mm, 3mins.)

Zoe Greenberg is a Canadian film-maker working in New York. Her '3 Holes' is a montage created from the cutting room floor, including clippings from Moira Tierney's 'American Dreams', here seen as 'smaerD naciremA'. The images and soundscape telegraph through the paraphernalia of film-making, through the punched leader and the distortion of dirty tape heads. Playing on the viewers curiosity, the obscuring of the images and sequences only urges us to look deeper, and the mundane adopts a tone of profundity.

ALAN LAMBERT'S "ZOE GREENBERG'S "3 BLANKETS"
(2007, Colour, 16mm/Mini-Dv, 3 mins.)

While compiling the Solus collective Dvd I was arranging to return the mini-DV tape of '3 Holes' to Zoe. I hadn't seen the film and so I decided to watch it on my mini-DV camera before returning it. What I saw was an unexpected and fascinating series of abstract patterns, squares of colour rotating and dancing randomly across the screen, with images sporadically breaking through. I realised that I was watching her NTSC tape on my PAL camera, and the short film I had just seen was a unique creation of the ether between the formats. With Zoe's permission I captured the film as I had seen it, but I added to the soundtrack a choral sample which I felt emphasised a strangely ethnic undertone to the pixel patterns, which, to my eyes, recalled the traditional woven patterns of textiles common to many cultures, particularly Native American Navajo blankets.

By the time Moira Tierney's 'American Dreams' appears here it is appropriation upon appropriation.

ORIOL SANCHEZ'S "PROFANACIONES"
(2008, B&W and Colour, Video, 22mins.)

Profanations is a three channel video work consisting of appropriation and reconstruction of images and sequences from films by Jules Marey, Pudovkin, Kirsanoff, Eisenstein, Romero, Halpern, Kulechov ... from which a series of micro-stories have been created. These stories have been organized according to Campanas De Luz ( Light Bells ), a music composition by Riera Robuste. Profanations emerges from an interest in exploring relationships between sound and image with narratives and abstraction, playing with the [dis]articulation found in film narratives; creating a rupture within narrative and representation.

TRON: REDUX is a film-programme by Alan Lambert for the Experimental Film Club.

PROJECTION 3:

2008-05-14T03:42:00.000-07:00

PLAY AND DESTRUCTION
///WITH IRISH UNDERGROUND FILMMAKER VIVIENNE DICK///

/// Sunday 18th May / Ha'penny Bridge Inn (upstairs) / 4pm

This month’s programme of films looks at an aspect of experimental cinema that is not always brought to the fore. Particularly now that experimental film is seen as more and more connected to the fine art scene and its conceptual and formal concerns, the fact sometimes gets neglected that performance, fantasy, theatricality, genre—and, last but not least, fun—have all been important tools in avant-garde film.

The three filmmakers who’s work we are presenting today —Adolfo Arrieta, Jack Smith and Vivienne Dick—are powerful examples of this. In their work, each filmmaker draws on elements of genre and narrative that will be familiar to any viewer from commercial cinema. What makes it impossible to confuse these films for anything that might come out of Hollywood is the radical way in which these elements are twisted and reinvented.

One of the key ways this is done is by bringing them back into an intimate and earthly context. While these filmmakers are emphatically not realists, all of them work in a low-budget, DIY context, often shooting handheld, using real locations or makeshift sets and unprofessional actors that contrasts starkly with the pristine fantasy of Hollywood cinema. Their stories may be otherworldly, but they exist in the imperfection of this one. Costumes have holes in them; special effects and camera tricks are less than seamless; the performer’s own existence outside the roles they are playing are more evident than usual.

In the context of mainstream cinema, the word used to encompass all these qualities is amateurism. However, if we accept these films on their own terms, such “amateur” qualities are not liabilities, but have their own distinct powers. By challenging viewers to accept and believe in the artifice, these films relate more to notions of theatricality and play then the verisimilitude of fantasy preferred by more “professional” cinema. They ask for, in the most positive sense, an almost childlike investment of your own imagination.

This is also what separates these films from documentary; even when, for example, Dick’s characters in She Had Her Gun All Ready, are walking around in the “documentary” reality of New York, their actions suggest the film’s interest in performance rather than behaviour. Individuals are presented not “as they are” but in the process of inventing themselves; always aware of the camera, they create their own persona. The social function of these films is also key: without these films, these people would not have been able to “invent themselves” or relate to each other in this way. This is the philosophy Arrieta calls “cinema as life and life as cinema”—filmmaking not as a record of life or an escape from it but a way of living it and making it more interesting.

The title of this programme is intended to represent the dual process these films represent: by taking elements of fantasy and genre and using them in their own lives, these filmmakers reclaim them as objects of play—as a way of reinventing reality rather than avoiding it. But by doing so they are also deconstructing—sometimes very much destroying—those elements as we understood them before. The play and destruction are two sides of the same thing….

VIVIENNE DICK'S "SHE HAD HER GUN ALL READY"
(1978, 16mm, color, 27mins., New York) Distributed by Irish Film Institute

She Had Her Gun All Ready is one of the first films created by Irish filmmaker Vivienne Dick in New York in the late 70s. Sub-cultural forms such as the No-Wave and Punk movements, which rejected both mass-consumerism and the pretensions of institutionalized bourgeois art, are often associated with her films, leading to American film critics such as J. Hoberman (The Village Voice), to suggest that Vivienne Dick is the quintessential No-Wave filmmaker. She Had Her Gun All Ready, made in 1978 with Pat Place and controversial American artist Lydia Lunch, is “a dramatization of interrelational power politics between a bullyish woman (Lunch) and her wimpy companion” (S. MacDonald, 1981).

She Had Her Gun All Ready shares preoccupations with other films by Dick such as Liberty's Booty (1980) and Beauty Becomes the Beast (1979): ‘transgressive behavior’, female sexuality, and the difficulty of relationships which can become empowering. Presented in a visually anarchic hand-held Super8 camera style and set within domestic environments and iconic New York sites, She Had Her Gun All Ready plays with notions of gender and changing identities, with the boundaries between artistic practices and life, between public and private space, theatre and its double.

ADOLFO ARRIETA'S "LA IMITACIóN DEL ANGEL"
(1966, 16mm, 20mins., Madrid) Distributed by Rosebud Films Madrid

Adolfo Arrieta / Alfo Arrieta / Adholfo Arrieta / Udolfo Arrieta is one of the most revolutionary characters of the Spanish late 1960s, who continually changes his name and dislikes the number 13. Made a few months before he moved to Paris -where Cahiers du Cinema had published an article about his film El Crimen de la Pistola-, and with precarious technical conditions, La Imitación del Ángel is a lyrical film that “combines an almost innocent love for adventurous narrative and cinematic illusion with a raggedly offbeat handmade style of filming” (Donal Foreman, 2007).

Arrieta’s films, often compared with Jean Cocteau’s anti-narrative and poetic style, are of a personal nature and underground in their formulation, which shares some notions with the artistic and political avant-gardes that emerged around May 68 in Paris. In an interview in 2008, Arrieta said: “I found out that a story can be fully developed in 4 meters (of film). I think films should not expand their stories according to durational laws predetermined by commercial standards and distributors (...) I do whatever inspires me, that's why I am my own producer, which financially ruins me, but its satisfying to make works that make me happy. I don't follow fashions or popular trends but in many occasions, I prefigured them. When "La Movida Madrileña" took place in Madrid in the 80s, I had already recorded that kind of environment.”

("La Movida Madrileña" is a Spanish sociocultural movement that shares many aspects with No Wave culture. It took place in Madrid during the first ten years after the death of Franco in 1975 and represented the economic rise of Spain and the new emerging Spanish cultural identity. The early provocative films of Pedro Almodovar and Ivan Zulueta are often considered representative works of this movement).

JACK SMITH'S "FLAMING CREATURES"
(1963, 16mm, b&w, 43 mins., New York) Distributed by FDK Arsenal Berlin

Flaming Creatures is the most notorious film by American radical photographer, queer film and performance artist Jack Smith. The film was banned almost everywhere it was shown, and Jonas Mekas was arrested in 1964 for screening it in New York. In its graphic depiction of sexuality, it compellingly broke a number of taboos, while narrative, performance/behavior and heterosexuality become subjects of play and destruction in the film.

Like Broadway on Mars, Flaming Creatures is an innovative and idiosyncratic film that combines mythology with Ali Baba, and the most playful camp aesthetic of delirium with elements of socio-cultural critique. Ambiguous sexualities and identities are explored in Flaming Creatures throught a cast of drag queens, mermaids, vampires, naked poets, and other "creatures" that undoubtedly recreate in subversive manners the secret raptures Smith experienced in his youth through Hollywood kitsch and glamour, the Diva worship of Maria Montez, and the imagery of 1940s monsters movies. “The film is a fantasy of Androgynes and Travestites in which flaccid penises and bouncing breats are so ambiguously equated as to disarm any distinction between male and female.” (J. Tartaglia, 2002). Smith was an important influence on filmmakers such as Vivienne Dick, George Kuchar, Andy Warhol, ken Kacobs, John Waters and Scott and Beth B, and artists such as Cindy Sherman, Carolee Schneemann, and Richard Foreman.

Play & Destruction is a film-programme by Esperanza Collado and Donal Foreman for the Experimental Film Club.

PROJECTION 2:

2008-04-15T13:53:00.000-07:00

EXPERIMENTS IN DIARY FILM
///WITH IRISH EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKER DONAL O´CEILLEACHAIR///

///Sunday 27th April / Ha'penny Bridge Inn (upstairs) / 4pm

Oskar Fischinger’s 1927 film ‘Walking from Munich to Berlin’ interacts on screen with the more recent "With Wind and White Cloud", by Irish filmmaker Donal O´Ceilleachair.

OSKAR FISCHINGER´S "WALKING FROM MUNICH TO BERLIN"
(1927 b&w 16mm silent 5min) Distributed by LightCone Paris

In the Springtime of 1927, Fischinger (better known for his painterly experimental animation pieces) had numerous debts caused partly by the inflation and crisis in Germany. On June the 1st of that same year he left Munich on foot bound for Berlin bringing with him his camera and films. During three and a half weeks he wandered the secondary roads, filming image by image the people he met and the places he passed through.

DONAL O´CEILLEACHAIR´S "WITH WIND & WHITE CLOUD"
(NY 2005 b&w super8 5 min).

Oskar Fischinger’s 1927 film ‘Walking from Munich to Berlin’ was one of the first single-frame films ever made. In the space of three minutes (one camera roll) Fischinger traversed the length of Germany visually articulating the accelerated mode of modern life and anticipating the break-neck speed of the moving image that would come much later with the advent of MTV and television commercials.
In 2003, Donal found himself in Istanbul for the premier CUZCO 1999. Intent on travelling over land to Berlin he made his way on Eastern European trains with a Super 8 camera and a copy of Film Art: An Introduction. He pointed his camera out the window and 14 days, and 3,240 single frame images later (230 per day) this film was complete.
WW&WC is a contemporary homage to Fischinger’s inspired journey; travelling from the eastern tip of Europe and Istanbul’s Bosphorous shores through Eastern Europe to the heart of Alexanderplatz in Berlin.
WW&WC was originally conceived of as a dual projection film comprised of video with superimposed super 8 film projection. The video represents the filmmakers documentation of the ‘real’ while the film, like a dream is closer to his memory of it. This copy displays the video only. Any dreams are 100% the viewers.

JONAS MEKAS´ "LOST LOST LOST"
(1976 16mm b/w & colour 60 minute extract from 180’)

Diaries, Notes and Sketches filmed in 1949-1963. Poet and hero of the American counter-culture, Jonas Mekas invented the diary form of film-making. Born in Lithuania in 1922, and displaced from his homeland by the Soviet and Nazi invasions. Lost Lost Lost comprises fourteen years of filming, starting from his arrival in America as a political refugee. It documents the New York counterculture of the 50’s and the development of Mekas’ own filming style.
“The period I am dealing with in these six reels was a period of desperation, of attempts to desperately grow roots into the ground, create new memories. In these six painful reels I tried to indicate how it feels to be an exile, how I felt in those years. They describe the mood of a Displaced Person who hasn’t yet forgotten his native country but hasn’t yet gained a new one. The sixth reel is a transitional reel, where I begin to find moments of happiness. New life begins ….” Jonas Mekas
“ The borderline is fading between an artifact – an ‘ouvre d’art’, conceived as such, a pure product of stylized imagination – and what can be described as a poet’s account of events; as sincere and as honest as only a poet’s account can be. Maybe Jonas Mekas’ Lost Lost Lost has just marked the beginning of a new genre. In the line of Gide, of a Sarte, of a Malraux. But in film.” Antonin J. Liehm, Thousand Eyes.

Experiments in Diary Film is a film-programme by Aoife Desmond for the Experimental Film Club.

PROJECTION 1:

2008-03-23T04:34:00.000-07:00

MARKER/BECKETT/TIERNEY
Sunday 30th March /// Ha'penny Bridge Inn (upstairs) /// 4pm

CHRIS MARKER´S "LA JETEÉ"
(France, 1962, 29 mins, B&W)

La Jeteé (1963) is one of Marker's few fictional efforts. Done as a series of stills, the 27-min. story follows a man who is scared by an incident from his youth where he sees the most beautiful woman ever, and then a man dying. He grows up and survives World War III, only to live a meager existence underground with the remaining people of France. He is prompted by those in charge to be a part of an experiment — one notorious for leaving men insane or broken. The project's goal is to send someone through time to get help and supplies, and because he's fixated on this woman, the man is the first to successfully take himself back in time. And because of that, he's able to meet, and eventually romance the girl of his (in this case literal) dreams. But his contemporaries have other plans for him and his gift. The short-film subject is often perilous for filmmakers — too often such works feel like half-movies or unfinished thoughts. Such is why La Jeteé is easily one of the best shorts ever created. Indelible, elegant, and haunting, it is a complete and brilliant experiment delivered in the exact amount of time required for this narrative. And the central force of its cinema — told entirely in black-and-white stills — is not simple gimmickry, but Marker's commentary on memory and how we place things. The film has its influences — Marker shows his hand by paying homage to Hitchcock's Vertigo, but the rhythms and sentiments are all Marker's. It also spawned Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, which is broader in scope (and budget) but does not improve on the simple notions presented herein.

SAMUEL BECKETT´S "FILM"
(USA, 1964, 10 mins aprox., B&W).

"The best Irish film", Gilles Deleuze.
The film opens and closes with close-ups of a sightless eye. This inevitably evokes the notorious opening sequence of Luis Buñuel´s "Un Chien Andalou" in which a human eye is sliced open with a razor blade. In fact The Eye was an early title for Film, though admittedly, at that time, he had not thought of the need for the opening close-up. Beckett was a student of French literature and was familiar with Irish philosopher George BERKELEY´s notion of "Esse es percipi" (to be is to be perceived), and probably also with Victor HUGO’s poem La Conscience. ‘Conscience’ in French can mean ether ‘conscience’ in the English sense, or ‘consciousness’ and the double meaning is important. The poem concerns a man -BUSTER KEATON- haunted by an eye that stares at him unceasingly from the sky. He runs away from it, ever further, even to the grave, where, in the tomb, the eye awaits him. The man is Cain. He has been trying to escape consciousness of himself, the self that killed his brother, but his conscience will not let him rest. The eye/I is always present and, when he can run no further, must be faced in the tomb.”

CHRIS MARKER´S "SANS SOLEIL"
(France, 1983, 100 mins, color)

Twenty years later, Marker delivered 1983's Sans Soleil ("Sun Less") from a collection of letters and footage from Sandor Krasna. Krasna's interests parallel Marker's (and though neither the film suggest it, it's been revealed that Krasna is a Marker pseudonym), as he spends time in Japan looking at cat statues — Marker has an obsession with cats and owls — and Iceland, where he sees the happiest moment in three children walking in a field, but also the destruction of their town by an underwater volcano. Krasna also ventures to San Francisco, where he goes to all the locations of his favorite movie Vertigo and observes how little has changed in the 25 years since the film was made. The film is a globe-hopping travelogue, though much of the action is set in Africa and Japan, and mostly Japan. It's there where Krasna observes — in his own curious way — the modern world. Fascinated and repulsed by television, he finds an interesting soul in Hayao Yamaneko, who is a video artist, and feels that he can capture life through video and video games. Sans Soleil is the very definition of a tone-poem, and it marks a high point in the documentary/filmed essay genre, to which Marker is decidedly a progenitor. What makes it so fascinating is Marker's peculiar rhythms — it's a film to sink into, to (as others have suggested) absorb Marker's strange, near-alien frequency.

MOIRA TIERNEY´S "AMERICAN DREAMS #3: LIFE, LIBERTY & THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS"
(16mm 5 minutes color & b/w 2002 music by Charlemagne Palestine)

What happens when the smoke clears?
One of the most remarkable sights was the mass movement of people, on foot, along highways usually reserved for motorized traffic. The Brooklyn & Manhattan bridges, as well as the FDR Drive, which runs along the East River from lower to upper Manhattan, became human rivers with an unhurried but steady flow & no end in sight.
The gnawing question raised by "Ce qui arrive..." (What happens ... , officially translated as "Unknown Quantity"), the exhibition at the Fondation Cartier conceived by technology theorist Paul Virilio and cocurated by Leanne Sacramone, is how this trial run for Virilio's prospective "Museum of Accidents" could possibly have fixed on the destruction of the World Trade Center as the exemplary case. Yet at the core of this show, labeled "The Accident," five extemporaneous recordings of the event by Tony Oursler, Moira Tierney, Jonas Mekas, and Wolfgang Staehle established an unequivocal center of gravity that pulled ineluctably on thirteen similarly shrouded black-box film installations selected, one can only imagine, less along the lines of intrinsic interest or quality than of brute homeomorphism: smoke (Peter Hutton), explosion (Bruce Conner, Cai Guo-Qiang), demolition (Dominic Angerame), anomie (Peter Hutton, Jem Cohen). Although the images of September II could easily have been snipped from the audiovisual continuum that Virilio has so frequently vilified, they nonetheless plugged into (if not to say exploited) our inchoate ideas and active anxieties about terrorist networks and imminent geopolitical upheaval--not accidents - Artforum February 2003.