Breaking Ground: 60 Years of Austrian Experimental Cinema
August 17 - September 22, 2012
UCLA Film & Television Archive - Billy Wilder Theater
10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90024

Austria’s avant-garde film tradition, arising at mid-century (and thus, relatively later than those of other Western nations) has been among the most sustained and radical of such traditions. As with other Austrian arts, it is a response (in part) to past national decadence and entrenched conservatism; its repository of cutting-edge experimental film and video works is uniquely impressive and progressive, fracturing into ever-newer distinctions.

The programs in this series have been constructed from avant-garde films and videos produced between 1955 and 2010 in which virtually every technique and genre imaginable is employed, from formalist and structuralist works by such globally renowned figures as Peter Kubelka, Peter Tscherkassky and Martin Arnold, to the radical work by performance-based artists such as VALIE EXPORT, Mara Mattuschka, Kurt Kren and the Viennese actionists, as well as the boundary-breaking contemporary output of artists including Siegfried A. Fruhauf, Johann Lurf and Virgil Widrich.

Luke Fowler: All Divided Selves
Friday, July 27th, 19h
Flat Time House
210 Bellenden Road, London SE15 4BW, UK

A lyrical collage of film about R.D. Laing completed in 2011. Using footage from the Flat Time House archive amongst multiple other sources, Luke Fowler's film focuses on one of the key characters in the history of Better Books.

The film concentrates on archival representations of radical psychiatrist RD Laing and his colleagues as they struggled to acknowledge the importance of considering social environment and disturbed interaction in institutions as significant factors in the aetiology of human distress and suffering. RD Laing was associated with the art and poetry gatherings at Better Books and his controversial psychiatric writings and methods considerably influenced the creative practices of the artists involved at Better Books. All Divided Selves reprises the vacillating responses to these radical views and the less forgiving responses to Laing's latter career shift; from eminent psychiatrist to enterprising celebrity. A dense, engaging and lyrical collage- Fowler weaves archival material with his own filmic observations including footage from a SIGMA gathering with John Latham and others at Brazier's Park in 1964.

Ben Rivers: Shorts
Saturday August 4th, 16:10h
Sunday August 5th, 2012 18:40h
Thursday August 9th, 2012 18:40h
BFI Southbank
Belvedere Road, South Bank, London SE1 8XT

This new LUX touring programme brings together five early shorts by Ben Rivers - The Coming Race; This Is My Land; A World Rattled of Habit; Origin of the Species, Ah, Liberty - which together present a series of portraits of unconventional lives - of people existing, to varying degrees, in wilderness or isolation. River's films are compassionate and elliptical, ambigious documents of both the reality of life outside urban norms and our own Romantic preconceptions of a life beyond bounds. The programme includes This Is My Land, Rivers' first portrait of Jake Williams, later the subject of Two Years at Sea.