Amy Halpern (1953-2022) occupies a singular place in the history of American experimental cinema. She was a key figure who took part in many legendary film shoots and artistic projects, a tireless organizer who co-founded or directed several filmmakers’ associations, and, at the same time, an original and prolific filmmaker in her own right, whose works remained, until very recently, in the shadow of her contemporaries.

Joseph Plateau, who invented the phenakistoscope, the first device capable of producing the illusion of a moving image from a sequence of still images, provided a definition of the persistence of vision in 1829. In his research into visual physiology, he described the effects of light stimuli and colors on the retina, determining their duration to equal one tenth of a second. Yet this value is not constant: it increases as the eye adapts to darkness, hence the sensation of movement which is characteristic of a film projection. Plateau thought that the eye sees at a rate of ten images per second and that, when they are superimposed, the brain links them into a single, continuous, moving image.

To mark the publication of Agir le cinéma - Écrits sur le cinéma expérimental (1979-2020) [Empower Cinema - Writings on Experimental Cinema (1979-2020)], the most complete anthology to date of the writings of yann beauvais, Light Cone presents a double screening that places side by side his work as a filmmaker with his work as a film critic and programmer.

Three upcoming screenings of systematic experimental cinema by Simon Payne with Nicky Hamlyn, Neil Henderson and Jennifer Nightingale at Close-Up (London), BEEF/Cube Cinema (Bristol) and Light Cone/Scratch Projections (Paris).