Fylkingen and Turbidus Film present Landscapes and abandoned places, a second program with five experimental film makers that focused on landscapes, architecture, abandoned places, strata, glimpses of gardens, light patterns, and elements as earth, water, fire and wind...
Films by: Julie Murray (IRL), Giovanna Puggioni (IT), Adèle Friedman (US), and Arthur & Corinne Cantrill (AUS). All films on 16mm.
Programme
6:30pm - Doors Open
7:00pm - Film Programme 1 - Home Movie - A Day In The Bush (Arthur & Corinne Cantrill, 1969, 16 mm, 4' 00) Our young sons are formally filmed in repeated actions: approaching the camera (from the far distance to close-up), across the field, and away from the camera, the tension released by repeated 360-degree whirling images. The sound by Arthur Cantrill uses a South American bellbird (recorded at London Zoo) in various configurations: speeded-up, slowed-down and with reverberation, edited with a heavily reverbed and manipulated recording of the boys’ voices.
- Island Fuse (Arthur & Corinne Cantrill, 1971, 16 mm, 11' 00) Island Fuse is a reworking of a part of the filmmakers’ own ‘film history’. Black and white images shot ten years earlier on Stradbroke Island, Queensland, were re-filmed in colour and superimposed to point up the energies of the ocean and the bush, and to analyse the action of an archetypal figure in the Australian landscape: a camper chopping away at the bush. The film is concerned with the process of its making: the interaction of rear-projected image with camera, projector, colour filters and the film strip. The accompanying sound composition is of electronically modified sea sounds and bird calls, with a looped tone.
- In/Contro/Luce (Giovanna Puggioni, 1976, 16 mm, 9' 00)
- Oltremare (Giovanna Puggioni, 1985, 16 mm, 9' 00)
I was interested in giving light back its intensity, which can even be blinding at certain points of the day, in the same way as the luminosity, the intensity of the objects, of bodies, of landscapes, of their essence: their colours. The filters highlight the dominants, yellow, red, blue around which the images condense. I also wanted to record and reproduce the movements of exploration, of research, of pleasure and of desire. The camera traced the pathway of the gaze without interruption: the editing was done directly in the camera. As well as this, I wanted to trace out the places, the atmospheres with the eyes "after", as if they observed the memory I was creating. The gaze chose what the memory would be.
- Quattro Stagioni (Giovanna Puggioni, 1999, 16 mm, 3' 30)
- Antologia Della Materia: Fuoco (Giovanna Puggioni, 2006-2007, 16 mm, 3' 30) The idea here is to create a sort of catalog of materials, of textures, by filming "objects" which are both very simple and very complex - such as fire, water or earth, for example.The result will resemble a patchwork in which each element is autonomous, but at the same time attached to the other elements by subtle, sometimes invisible "connections". "Fuoco" is the first part of this ensemble, whose final outcome is yet to be determined: fireworks and lights were filmed in superposition, with the same strip of film passing through the camera six times, the film itself having been pierced at random with a needle.
8:00pm - Film Programme 2 - Verdauwoo (Adèle Friedman, 1989, 16 mm, 6' 00) Verdauwoo is a portrait film, a portrait of a landscape. It was filmed in the mountains of Colorado, an area with a serene, meditative presence. It was a beautiful landscape where every small movement and wind seemed to hold some significant quality. As it was autumn, the colors were varied and changing, leaves were in the process of falling, and the film turned into a portrait of change as well as of nature.
- I Began To Wish... (Julie Murray, 2003, 16 mm, 5' 00) The sea sucks the seed back into the ocean, the flowers fold like umbrellas, shoots recoil into hiding, in seeds that shrink. The plants accelerate their tremble and wobble and glass unbreaks all around them. Strawberries blanch and tomatoes grow pale. The father, leering, holds forth a flower and suddenly his smile fades to awful seriousness. In an odd concentrated ritual the father and son carefully tip over all the flower pots, laying the plants to rest and it is in this end, around the time he figures the flowers are talking to him, that the son wishes his father had killed him.
- Orchard (Julie Murray, 2004, 16 mm, 8' 00) Much of the footage that comprises Orchard is of a 19c ruins that included a walled orchard in and area known as Rostellen in southwest Ireland. It is set deep in the woods and the crumbling brick and mortar of the broken walls has become the anchor for the roots of slender trees, so uninhibited for all this time that they reach twenty feet in height and have thick roots that follow like slow lazy trickles of water and in other places branch and wind over the brickwork in an arterial arrangement reminiscent of the human body. Some footage of Central Park is in there, as well as Niagara Falls, the main Dublin-to-Cork road and a thin smoking woods on the outskirts of Rosslare, Co. Waterford These are facts may be incidental to the film’s eventual form, which winds the images into an arrangement of continuous wandering. All this is attended by environmental whispering sounds until a voice calls out toward the end, in dream-bound recognition, to a figure from the far, far past.
- Elements (Julie Murray, 2008, 16 mm, 7' 00) This atmospheric landscape is largely un-peopled but nevertheless expresses the busy presence of ghosts that reside in the snowy fog-bound woods, the movement of the moon and in the hesitancy of the clouds. It is an exploration of location/place both macro and micro, visited by a few incidental shadowy figures related to one another through the rhythm of their gestures.
- Distance (Julie Murray, 2010, 16 mm, 12' 00) Time spent at two shores, one thinly populated, the other a wasteland, joined by the interluency of various paths taken, each bit real enough, though exact measures being obscurely indicated. Notions of home and its ache are, to borrow a phrase, “not capable of being told unless by far-off hints and adumbrations”.
All films from Light Cone
Bios Julie Murray (EI) Julie Murray studied Fine Art in Dublin, Ireland, and in 1985 moved to the US. While creating and exhibiting paintings and photographs there she began exploring moving image media and making experimental films. Continuing to work in as well as draw relationships from painting and photography, she has completed many short films and has collaborated on numerous film installation/performance events with artists, musicians and filmmakers. Her films have been included in many festivals including the New York Film Festival, Images Festival, Toronto, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, the Museum of Strasburg, the Dublin Film Festival, Ireland and the Times London Film Festival. Her work was exhibited in the Whitney Bienniel in 2004. Murray has presented her films in person at the Art Gallery of Ontario Cinematheque in Toronto, Anthology Film Archives in New York, Redcat in Los Angeles, Film Forum, LA, San Francisco Cinematheque and the Pacific Film Archive in California. She has been a guest artist at numerous universities where she has taught courses in film and video production and surveys of experimental film history. The Museum of Modern Arts Film Archives as well as the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired prints Murray's films for their archives and her films are part of the New York Public Library's Special Collections, NYC. Her film, Elements, won Best Cinematography award at the 2008 Ann Arb.
Adèle Friedman (US) Adèle Friedman has made over 100 super 8 mm and 16 mm films, some with sound, but most with silence, preferring the viewer to be absorbed completely with the image. Friedman is a native of Chicago, with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her films have been exhibited internationally in 7 countries, including Scratch Projection in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Arsenal der Freunde de Deutschen Kinemathek in Berlin, the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt. Light Cone has been distributing her films since 1986.
Giovanna Puggioni (IT) Giovanna Puggioni was an experimental film maker and writer, born in Milan, Italy, lived most of her life in Paris together with her husband Christian Lebrat (experimental film maker and theorist). In 1983, together with Prosper Hillairet and Lebrat, Puggioni created Paris Expérimental, the first publishing house dedicated to experimental cinema ever to exist in France and probably anywhere in the world for that matter. There was very little written trace available in France dedicated to the extraordinary work and achievements of French and international avant-garde and experimental filmmakers, whether living in France or abroad. Almost no texts were published or translated from other languages about this art. This was a cinema genre that was unknown to the general public. Except for a couple of festivals in France and some theoretical classes in the early 1970s, by teachers at St Charles University (Sorbonne Paris 1, created after the 1968 political events in France) and the University of Vincennes, this form of cinema held no established place in the cultural heritage of the 7th art.
Arthur and Corinne Cantrill (AUS) Arthur Cantrill, AM, and Corinne Cantrill, AM (born Sydney, Australia, 1938 and 1928 respectively) have been making 16mm films together since 1960; at first films for children and documentaries on art, interspersed with short experimental films. After working in London for four years (where Arthur Cantrill was a film editor at Halas and Batchelor Cartoon Films and then at BBCTV current affairs and documentary), they returned to Australia in 1969 to take up a Fellowship in the Creative Arts at the Australian National University in Canberra during which they made several films financed by ANU, the main work being the feature-length Harry Hooton. From that time they have worked solely in film as a medium combining kinetic art with formal cinematic concerns and experimental sound composition, and also film-performance. Expanded Cinema, a multi-screen film-performance developed at ANU, was presented at the Age Gallery (administered by the National Gallery of Victoria), Melbourne, February 8-27, 1971. A simplified version was revived in 2006 for the OtherFilm Festival, Brisbane, and in 2009 for the Melbourne International Film Festival (see below).
Fylkingen May 26, 7pm 60 SEK (card is the Queen) Torkel Knutssonsgatan 2 Subway: Mariatorget Facebook: www.facebook.com/events/1778153269070258