Mono no aware: ‘One Hundred Foot’ program
20 films by international filmmakers and artists – Live score by Dennis McNany
Friday, April 5 2013,19:30h
The Center For Performance Research

361 Manhattan Avenue, Brooklyn, New York

Curated and Produced by UK-based artist, Jim Hobbs. Presented by MONO NO AWARE

As an industry standard, 100 feet of film (just under 3 minutes) is the given length for a small spool of 16mm film. This given/standard/restraint remains a pertinent form/format for creating films. In understanding that film, as opposed to digital, is measured in this tactile and physical form of length, the filmmaker/artist must address the issue of time through the measurement of a material length. For some, this constraint is seen as a time limit; for others, it becomes a finite amount of physical material in which to construct a work, similar to a sculptor’s material; and again, for others, their considerations may combine or reach beyond these deceptively simple approaches. The concerns around this issue are as idiosyncratic, subjective, and varied as the artists’ work itself – yet it is within this standardized and objective limit of 100 feet of film, that each maker must compose their subject matter through an exercise of economy. Whatever the filmmaker’s or artist’s intent, there is no doubt that this specific measurement is an actualized consideration for any artist working with film.

Holding true to this interest, and while still being open to interpretation, Jim Hobbs has collected films by artists and filmmakers whose work falls within the parameters of One Hundred Foot. Collage, found footage, handmade processes, film manipulation, short sketches, finished works, end of reels, rushes, and cans that haven’t been off the shelf in years – these films offer up a type of B-side mentality and a glimpse into many of the artists working process.

Programme:
- Denis Masi, ARTIST & MUSE (1970, B&W, silent, 16MM)

Masi’s intention in this work is to explore the idea of loss in general and historical loss in particular; the loss of a traditional mode of inspiration. The use of the female figure over thousands of years has been a support and often essential for the production of what we now consider art. This traditional mode has been marginalized by a shift in some areas of contemporary fine art practice. In this performative work Masi follows a choreographed sequence of movements using entrances, exits and props to picture the cancellation of a tradition.

- Zoe Brown, UNTITLED (2012, color, silent, 16MM)

A revisit to one of the first films shot while at the Slade.

- Jim Hobbs, CHEWY (2012, B&W, silent, 16MM)

This past summer, I spent a day with our dog Chewy, chronicling his routines. Part documentary and part home movie, the film captures his seemingly mundane activities – lying around, sleeping, walking in Peckham Rye Park, and a trip to our local pub. It was probably the most difficult and most pleasurable film I have had to make. Chewy is now 14, and suffering from kidney failure, arthritis, failing sight and hearing – but he still keeps going. He is an amazing animal and friend.

- Richard Bevan, RF# (2011, B&W, silent, 16MM)

When I was younger, my father would take me to the forest on weekends. Some of the other children in my school did the same with their fathers but I guess they must have talked about and looked at other things. One day one of the other kids said, “See that bird, what kind of bird is that?” and I said “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of bird that is.” He said, “It’s a brown throated thrush” or something, “Your father doesn’t teach you anything.” But it was the opposite: my father had taught me. Looking at the bird my father had said “in Chinese it’s a….., in Japanese a……”, et cetera. “Now”, he says, “you know in all these languages what the name of the bird is, and when you’re finished with all that,” he says, “you’ll know absolutely nothing what so ever about the bird. You only know about humans in different places and what they call the
bird.” “Now”, he says, “let’s look at the bird”.

- Sean Edwards, LAP STEEL (2008, color, silent, 16MM)

A short film shot in Port Townsend, Washington, USA.

- Jayne Parker, MUSICAL EQUIVALENT (2012, color, silent, 16MM)

This roll is intended for a film I am currently editing, a second version of a previous film featuring cellist Anton Lukoszevieze. It was shot in my garden at night and just in time as the next day the flowers were beginning to go over. Both the cello and the magnolia tree have featured in several of my films. I think of the magnolia buds as a musical equivalent. In this new film they will also serve as a memorial.

- Stephen Broomer, MEMORY WORKED BY MIRROS (2010, B&W, silent, 16MM)

A mirror in the filmmaker’s backyard reflects his childhood home. The black frame of the watermarked mirror becomes a mysterious portal, distorting brick, branch, and flesh into an amorphous hodgepodge. A self-portrait.

- Bea Haut, ARM, FLEXION, EXTENSION (2011, B&W, silent, 16 MM)

Arm, Flexion, Extension is a study of domestic time and space. Haphazardly hand processed 16mm film blurring the distinctions between the darkroom and the kitchen sink. Task as performance: A mundane action turned into an imperative gesture, the author struggles to control her environment. Slipping between a narrative of DIY and a meditation of light and intervening matter as shadow. Base material pulses between the abstract and the everyday.

- Juliana Cerqueira, Leite EIGHT (2012, B&W, sound, 16MM)

Eight is a sketch. The film was shot in its entirety four times, being rewound back to its start between each take. During shots, movements were carried out along four directional planes over a chair and then reversed: north/south, east/west, northeast/southwest, northwest/southeast. These motions were done to time kept by the artists’ voice counting to eight repeatedly.
The work, by overlaying the four exposures of the film, reveals not only the slight discrepancies between each repetition, how the motions fall in and out of timing with each other but also how they combine to form new shapes uniting and then fragmenting visually. The film is a look at time, space and how movement is key in determining the interactions between these elements. The work’s aesthetic suggests elements of dance film, touching upon the question of what is so fascinating about movement self-consciously carried out in time.

- Louise Colbourne, REVOLVER (2012, B&W, silent 16MM)

Louise Colbourne works primarily with film, video and sculpture, often embellishing the mundane with a visually monumental presence. The work has a ‘make-do and mend’ aesthetic combining humour with a more ominous content… There is also a strong sense of physicality through the movement of the figure, sculptural forms and the camera motion itself. Repetition in much of Colbourne’s work begins, with a certain temporal overlap, which echos and resonates according to an almost musical rhythm.

- James Holcombe, BLOOMS (2012, color, silent 16MM)

Blooms comes from a series of film works which takes the idea of failure of and in film as a starting point. For Blooms, short lengths of super 8 film were exposed to unsuitable environmental and biological conditions as not recommended by all major archives in their guidance notes to the long term storage and conservation of motion picture film. Thus corrupted, the films were then re-worked as short loops using a home made optical printer to re-articulate the still frames that survived the process into a new work within the limitation of the 100ft 16mm roll of film.

- Chris Kennedy, ONE ROLL IN THE BLACKNESS (2011, B&W, sound, 16 MM)

Keiji Haino, live in Toronto, June 22, 2011. A single roll of film, shot one frame at a time. Special thanks to Keiji Haino and Adam Rosen.

- Vicki Thornton, EVERYTHING WHICH WE CALL NATURE… (2008, color, silent, 16 MM)

This film takes its title from a paragraph in Kasimir Malevich’s ‘The Non-Objective World’, and attempts to reveal links between imaged and imagined space, abstraction and reality. It continues a series of works that explore rhythms within the everyday through the psychological and sculptural investigation of the lived environment. Each work in this series concentrates on a particular location and attempts to decipher something of its subconscious. This becomes apparent when the image and its associated ‘stillness’ are deconstructed through the process of applying analogue animation to them. ‘Everything which we call nature…’ is created using a combination of travelling mattes, filters and optical printing techniques. The result is a cacophony of primary coloured shapes that frenetically interrupt a inert monochrome forest scene, visually resembling experimental sound notations or an abstractionist composition.

- David Leister, CUTTING GRASS (2012, B&W, sound, 16MM)

John and Marge Schlintz have lived across the street from my parent’s old house in Franklin, Wisconsin, ever since I can remember. John always seemed to be cutting grass, and always in a different pattern. I always wondered about this. So 50 years later I asked him.

- Jenny Baines, AGAINST THE TIDE (2010, B&W, silent, 16MM)

I work predominantly with 16mm film, in which myself, or other person actions for the camera, documenting apparently futile yet defiant physical feats. The wind up mechanism of the camer functions like a timer, the action performed for a short period before the film cuts and the process starts over. These actions can seem like a romantic response to, or an urge to escape from the space in which they are performed. The observed repetition becomes a comical and absurd attempt to achieve a pointless task. In the film “Against the Tide”, I attempt to swim against a current that is too strong resulting in my being repeatedly washed from the frame.

- Nick Collins, PONT DU TARN (2010, color, silent 16MM)

100′ of 16mm colour neg remaining after shooting two other films – I had hoped for more, to explore something I had had in mind for a couple of years. Anyhow, as so often, the single roll enforced a familiar economy, a sense of focus, even a kind of excitement. The resulting film combines three elements in pairs: rock and water, trees and rock, water and trees. Water surface, diffuse shadows and sharp reflections interact in natural superimposition.

- Irena Kalodera, A FAR CRY FROM EDEN (2010, color, silent 16MM)

The film’s title ‘A Far Cry From Eden’ makes reference to the 70′s block of flats ‘Eden House’ where the film was made, and which was built on the site of Church Street’s West London Theatre where Charlie Chaplin performed as a young man. The stage, in this case, is that of a fixed domestic setting shot on a single 100ft roll of 16mm film. The improvised players on display – a geranium plant and a ficus benjamina, two pears and a stone, a small eerie basket containing a curled up cat made of rabbit fur and a money plant – are all placed in a chain of carefully chosen and timed consecutive images. The scenario – objects bathed in sunlight beamed in from the window positioned out of frame, with the sequence continually punctuated and interrupted by the violent red and bright flares of light generated within the camera. Calm and stillness become disrupted, while portraiture and family groupings are recalled and set the mood to the piece.

- Melanie Counsell, 4KG (2008, color, silent 16MM)

change of place – by which has been carried / change of state – external forces at play / change of place (again) – by slippage, a flush of enthusiasm / change of mood – if only, on reflection…

- Michael Jones, SPIRAL STUDY (2012, color, silent 16MM)

Spiral Study is a 100 foot -16mm film made through the stop-animation of a book spinning in circles. The book depicted is titled “Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty” published by the Dia Art Foundation. The image on the cover of the book is a still from the 1970 thirty–two minute film Smithson made about his iconic earthwork the Spiral Jetty. Largely regarded as his signature statement the Jetty measures some fifteen hundred feet in length and is composed from 6,650 tons of basalt rocks. Here it is re-represented in a 100 foot spool of film.

- Oliver Bancroft, TEST (2012, color, sound 16MM)

A roll of film marked ‘Test’ was rescued from the control room of a dismantled TV Studio. The footage is an extract from a 1950′s-60′s (?) medical film and Colin Firth. As an act of preservation the whole roll of film has been included in the re edit; the scraps and trimmings have been left in. Through re-editing the shots, scrapping and masking the sound, a new narrative is told; an unnerving tale of physical contact and intimacy.