projection 10:

Venom, Eternity, and Other Discrepancies

4pm / 22 Feb 2009  

Upstairs at the Ha'penny Bridge Inn (Dublin)

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.


Curated by Esperanza Collado and Donal Foreman.

Films politically

Films Politically

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

T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G The Architectures of Perception

Cinematic Enchainment and Sentient Machines / invited artist: Maximilian Le Cain

4pm / 25 Jan 2009  

Upstairs at the Ha'penny Bridge Inn (Dublin)

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.

 Making a Home, by Maximilian Le Cain
(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

 Leo es Pardo, by Iván Zulueta
(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.

Chromo Sud, by Etienne O'Leary
(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.

T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, by Paul Sharits
(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).

Curated by Esperanza Collado.

projection 8:

Time

With Anthony Kelly and david Stalling, Stephen Rennicks, Taysir Batniji, Julius Ziz, Djamel Kokene and Eamon Doyle 

4pm / 30 Nov 2008  

Upstair at the Ha'penny Bridge Inn (Dublin)

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.) 
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.

Curated by Alan Lambert.

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.