projection 7:

Dance Play Ritual

With guest filmmakers John Super8 Porter and James Hosty

4pm / 26 Oct 2008  

Upstairs at the Ha'penny Bridge Inn (Dublin)

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).

Curated by Aoife Desmond.

projection 6:

TVs & Bodies

A selection of work by experimental video artists

4pm / 28 Sep 2008  

Upstair at the Ha'penny Bridge Inn (Dublin)

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.

Curated by Donal Foreman.

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

projection 5:

The Practice of Anti-Illusion

A selection of materialist films and film-performance by guest Canadian filmmaker John Super8 Porter 

4pm / 31 Aug 2012  

Upstairs at the Ha'penny Bridge Inn (Dublin)

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.

Curated by Esperanza Collado.

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

projection 4:

TRON: REDUX

With live soundtrack by 3EPKANO 

4pm / 29 June 2008  

Upstairs at the Ha'penny Bridge Inn (Dublin)

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.

Curated by Alan Lambert.

projection 3:

Play and Destruction

Guest artist: Irish Underground filmmaker Vivienne Dick

4pm / 18 May 2008  

Upstairs at the Ha'penny Bridge Inn (Dublin)

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.

Curated by Esperanza Collado and Donal Foreman.

projection 2:

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:

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.