Light Industry at Film Forum: Black Audio Film Collective
Tuesday, August 30th, 19h
Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, New York, NY

- Handsworth Songs (John Akomfrah/Black Audio Film Collective, 16mm, 1986, 60 mins)

In light of the recent waves of social unrest in Britain, we have decided to present a screening of Black Audio Film Collective's seminal essay film Handsworth Songs, which takes the 1985 Birmingham riots as its point of departure.

"The collective's key work, Handsworth Songs (1986), is a succinct articulation of the dialectic of crisis and difference, and a critical primer - in artistic terms - of transnational post-colonialism. Though Handsworth Songs is an analytical essay on the cultural conditions under which young black men and women in Britain lived, and the racist policing tactics directed against them, the film, produced for Channel Four, did not merely reflect upon the structural violence of Thatcherism. In the aftermath of the protests in Handsworth, the film inhabits a different order of things: it is as much about elsewhere as about Britain.

Light Industry: David Gatten's Secret History of the Dividing Line
Friday, September 10, 2010, 19:30h, 7$
177 Livingston Street, Brooklyn, NY, USA
Friday, September 10, 2010 at 7:30pm

Secret History of the Dividing Line, A True Account in Nine Parts (Parts I-IV)
David Gatten, 16mm, 1999-2004, 97 mins

Presented with Triple Canopy as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival.

David Gatten's ambitious 16mm cycle Secret History of the Dividing Line attempts a rare feat, an investigation of the borders between word and image influenced equally by Stan Brakhage and Ludwig Wittgenstein (both veterans of related pursuits). The results are formidable: Of a planned nine, Parts I through IV currently run 97 minutes, yet indeed feel like the finely constructed beginnings of a grander architecture still to come. Gatten draws from the massive library of colonial Virginia gentleman William Byrd II, with occasional dips into his daughter Evelyn's journals, producing artfully composed typographies that suss out an invisible web of connections and epiphanies. But Gatten also expresses the indigestible bulk of history's verbiage through a mobile concrete poetry. Not all his quotes allow for reading; some words flutter past too quickly to serve as more than compositional elements, while others appear in negative, close-up and grainy, like luminous alphabetic windows. Attempting to glimpse a lost world recorded through texts, Gatten offers the paper-thin screen between past and present as just one of his project's ultimately ineffable dividing lines.

- Secret History of the Dividing Line (16mm, 24fps, 20 mins, 2002)
- The Great Art of Knowing (16mm, 24fps, 37 mins, 2004)
- Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises or The Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing (16mm, 18fps, 26 mins, 1999)
- The Enjoyment of Reading (16mm, 18fps, 16 mins, 2001)

Light Industry: Onishi Kenji's A Burning Star
Tuesday, July 13, 2010 , 19:30, 7$
177 Livingston Street, Brooklyn, NY, USA

- A Burning Star (Onishi Kenji, 16mm, 1995, 95 mins)

One of the most notorious yet unseen works of Japanese experimental cinema, Onishi Kenji’s A Burning Star operates with an emotional and physical intimacy reminiscent of both the confrontational style of Hara Kazuo and the radically subjective camerawork of Stan Brakhage. Made when Onishi was in his early 20s, the film documents his father’s funeral and cremation through subtle Super-8 lensing and a rigorous sense of real-time. At the funeral site, Onishi undresses and manipulates the corpse, scrutinizing it with his camera, then later records the act of cremation through the furnace’s portholes. This last sequence is the morbidly compelling heart of the film, presenting unearthly images reminiscent of an alien planet's gaseous surface, with flames licking over quasi-organic landscapes that look increasingly less like a skull, a ribcage or a hip bone.

Of A Burning Star, Onishi writes, “my inner conflicts find a cruel form." By fixing with unsettling intensity on his subject, but only briefly focusing on himself, Onishi evacuates his own emotions from the event’s depiction. Instead, he creates a film that speaks through its relentless examination of mute objects—what remains of his father—by capturing the very moments of their inexorable disappearance.

Light Industry: The Hart of London
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 7:30pm
177 Livingston Street, Brooklyn, 11201 NY
Tickets - $7, available at door.
Introduced by Carolee Schneemann

The Hart of London (Jack Chambers, 16mm, 1970, 79 mins)

Perhaps it was ten years ago that the artists Arakawa and Madeleine Gins told me of a scientist researching optical physiology. He had determined that cats would be his living subjects. To this end he had constructed a three-story-high narrow cylinder. Along its interior vivid images were pasted, illuminated. Photographs within these cylinder walls depicted elements interesting to cats: brightly colored birds, bowls of food, shimmering fishes, wild animals, human faces. The experiment was contrived to photograph the last retinal image mirrored on the pupils of the cats immediately after their death--killed from the impact of being thrown down the narrow cylinder.

If there could be a retinal analysis of imprinted filmic imagery, expanded in time by description, compressed as memory, as an intensity of linked recognitions--this optical imprint on my inner vision would be inscribed with fragments from the films of Jack Chambers.

Perhaps, my first viewing of Jack Chambers' films occurred shortly after being told of the sadistic cat experiment. A few years later, I was able to teach his indelible works during a year as film faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute. Associations with the brutal cat experiment recurred, when I realized I would have to lock my students in the film viewing room if they were to see the complete projection of The Hart of London. Unlike the cats, whose volition was stolen from them, my students stood scratching at the locked door insisting. "We're not watching this!"

They could close their eyes, but could I shift their resistance to the gestural flinch and muscular reciprocity of Chambers' images: moist animal eyes, spurt of blood, birthing of a human infant, fire, shadow--this threshold of spectral literalizations that the mad scientist had intended to capture on the retina of the just-dead cats? Could I brand the students' vision with Chambers' fleeting forms, their flash and tumble, an energy which tosses us into an unconscious ecstatic terror? Because Chambers' images emerge as if structure in time is propelled, an eddying, oceanic force; edited so that we viewers are engulfed by the rhythms of an inspiration as challenging and unstable as the invisible sources of imagination itself.

So that suddenly we inhabit a ghost city constructed before our very eyes, a hundred years ago. Blacked swirl of smoke. Muscular gestures, men laboring. Darkening clouds. Rail tracks' horizontal spin into receding horizon, parried dissolve of vertical smokestacks ascending. Ascending. Incandescent shapes emerge, dissolved into grains, celluloid falling snow. Dissolve. Intercut to black.

Dissolve to whitened/greyed curly fur. Close-up sheep's eyes glistening terror: sacrificial ballerinas balanced on planks, facing the camera eye. Slaughterhouse blades gash. Lens eye splattered. Exploding blood. Indelible chaos. (Domestic food chain.) Intercut to black. - Carolee Schneemann

Jack Chambers is one of Canada's most famous and greatest living painters. Why then have his films been as neglected as they have been? I feel that it is because his films do not arise as an adjunct to his painting (as is true in the case of most other painter film-makers) but that, rather, Jack Chambers has realized the almost opposed aesthetics of paint and film and has created a body of moving pictures so crucially unique as to fright paint buffery: thus his films have inherited a social position kin to that of the films of Joseph Cornell in this country. The fact is that four films of Jack Chambers have changed the whole history of film, despite their neglect, in a way that isn't possible within the field of painting. There are no "masters" of film in any significant sense whatsoever. There are only "makers" of film in the original, or at least medieval, sense of the word. Jack Chambers is a true "maker" of films. He needs no stance, or standing, for he dances attendance upon the coming-into-being of something recognizably new: (and as all is new, always, one must question the veracity of all works, whatever medium, which beseem everything but that truth). - Stan Brakhage