Events

  • AAFF 50th: Retrospective Screening #4

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    Asparagus (Suzan Pitt, 1979)AAFF 50th: Retrospective Screening #4
    January 25th, 2012, 19:30h
    Michigan Theater, Ann Arbor, MI
    Tickets: $5 - $10

    Portraits, the fourth Retrospective Screening, curated by Toronto filmmaker, critic and author Mike Hoolboom, features three past AAFF award winners. Films programmed include: Asparagus; Suzan Pitt's celebrated cult animation, a moving meditation on art and the cost of reproduction, Meditations on Revolution Part One: Lonely Planet; Robert Fenz's stunning silent poetic vision of Cuba and Al Neil: A Portrait; David Rimmer's exquisite depiction of jazz iconoclast Al Neil- poet, recluse and shaman.

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  • Light Industry: Charles Atlas's Torse

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    Torse (Charles Atlas, 1977)Light Industry: Charles Atlas's Torse
    Tuesday, January 24 2012, 19h
    155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, 11222 New York

    If there can be said to be a subject of Torse, Merce Cunningham’s remarkable and remarkably difficult 1976 dance, it is the torso. But though every imaginable position of the back and backbone is in evidence, the torso is here as much a point of departure as it is an object of inquiry. (Indeed, the dance taxed every element of the body: “My calves were in contraction for about three years,” said Ellen Cornfield, a dancer who was part of its original cast.)

    Charles Atlas’s 1977 film of Torse is an achievement in itself, a significant example of Atlas and Cunningham’s unique approach using film or video to “see” choreography. Atlas shot the dance with three 16mm cameras over the course of three days at the University of Washington, where the company was then in residence. Two mobile cameras captured close-ups, while a single stationary camera was set up for long shots. Atlas and Cunningham manned the mobile cameras while a technician handled the static camera, and the results were edited by Atlas into a single, two-screen film that was originally shown via a now all-but-extinct dual-interlock 16mm projection system.

    The fifty-five-minute work features music by pioneering composer Maryanne Amacher and costumes by the company’s longtime designer, Mark Lancaster. As was typical in Cunningham’s practice, the choreography and sound were made separately, so that any relationship between music and movement is serendipitous. Torse is also notable as an instance of Cunningham’s use of chance operations; the choreography comprises sixty-four distinct phrases, and the floor space is divided into sixty-four squares—a reference to the number of hexagrams in the I Ching. Cunningham created separate “space charts” and “movement charts” and tossed coins to determine the combinations for the ten dancers (Cornfield, Karole Armitage, Lisa Fox, Meg Harper, and Robert Kovich are among those who appear in the film). The result is, as Arlene Croce once described it, “monomaniacally urgent.” That, and something else: one felicitous decision after another, a sublime study in the intersection of rigor and contingency.

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  • 13th dresdner schmalfilmtage

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    13th dresdner schmalfilmtage13th dresdner schmalfilmtage
    26th to 28th of Januar 2012
    at Motorenhalle. Project Centre for Contemporary Art

    ... consumption, digestion and the radical otherness
    We guzzle, we shit, we are fancy complex systems of consumption and digestion. Despite social conventions and civilized behaviour, we are what we are! Thus eating has always been a main issue in Fine Arts being presented in films as well: As a symbolic character among sex and violence it has been a metapher for human dependency, obsession and drives. The dresdner schmalfilmtage presents works in the foodfilm-programme which show how Super8-filming was influenced by different ways of feeding and different kinds of food. A Best-of Super8-kitchen-classics.

    The Wiener Aktionismus on the other hand crosses completely different borders of taste. They do not dread taboos. Naked bodies, automutilations and the forced game with flour, blood and excrements excruciate the audience. The Vienna Actionists digest society based on order, and permanently, purement and self-control and truly excrete them. The radical otherness presents the moviemaker Samantha Rebello. She is nowadays one of the "young and upcoming" in London's film and art scene. The human body and daily objects were transformed by extreme close-ups, strict cuts and different uses of music to unknown materials and newly discovered worlds: the radical otherness.

    ... Spanish eyes
    The 13th festival edition focuses on Spain presenting two special sessions. The development of the "other cinema" in Spain was for a long time influenced by the political and cultural restrictions due to the Franco Regime. After the dictatorship the artificial controversy lacked a political rubbbing against it. The 13th dresdner schmalfilmtage centre two Spanish artists, Albert Alcoz and David Domingo aka Stanley Sunday, who both use filming and innovative optical alienation but with very different results.

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  • Aldo Tambellini - Back to Black

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    Black Video II (Aldo Tambellini, 1966)Aldo Tambellini - Back to Black
    January 6-8 2012
    Centre Pompidou, place Georges Pompidou
    75004 Paris

    The Italian filmmaker and multimedia artist Aldo Tambellini is the protagonist of a six-programme retrospective at the Centre Pompidou next January 6-8. This event is an historic one since not only is the greatest retrospective of Tambellini's visual works to date, presenting his famous  'Black film' series, a compilation of his performances and cathodic works; it also includes many works unseen until now and that have been recently 'rescued' and restored from the artist's personal archive. The retrospective closes with a 'carte blanche' programme curated by Tambellini, where he presents a selection of films that he screened at the historic Gate Theatre.

    During the retrospective, on January 7th, a double DVD released by the Italian label VON will be presented, including hours of video experiments by Tambellini from the years 1966 to 1976. Another DVD compiling Tambellini's 'Black Film' series will be published by French label Re:voir later this year.

    All the screenings with the presence of the filmmaker.

    This cycle has been curated by Pia Bolognesi and Giulio Bursi, in collaboration with Light Cone/Scratch, La Camera Ottica-CREA (University of Udine) and the Harvard Film Archive

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  • LUX Evening Course: Opening Up The Archive: Further Themes and Forms

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    LUX collection

    LUX Evening Course: Opening Up The Archive: Further Themes and Forms
    Tuesday March 6th to Tuesday April 10th, 19-21h
    LUX, 18 Shacklewell Lane, London E8 2EZ

    This short course offers another opportunity to explore the richness and diversity of the LUX collection, with a further selection of films and videos from its archive. Over six weeks this March and April, a thematic selection of artists’ moving image, from its pioneers to its most contemporary practitioners, bring to light works rarely seen alongside the legendary, tracing the contexts and concerns that shaped them. From the experience of place, whether faraway or in the diaspora, from film essay and film poem, to the art of the joke and the appropriation of the film archive itself, this course considers the myriad and ingenious ways in which artists continue to engage with the moving image.

    It is not necessary for participants to have attended the previous Archive courses, and no previous knowledge is required, just a curiosity to see and find out more about this fascinating area of art practice. Led by the film writer and curator Lucy Reynolds, and held in the screening room at LUX, the course will present new examples of the rarely seen films and videos from the LUX collection in an introduction to, and an insight into, the thriving culture of artists’ filmmaking. Each class will be supported with weekly hand-outs of key texts and further information on the artists and work under discussion.

    Cost £85/ £65 (student/unemployed). To book a place contact [email protected]

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  • Jeff Keen: Works from the 1960s + 1970s

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    Flick Flack (Jeff Keen, 1964 - 1965)Jeff Keen: Works from the 1960s + 1970s
    Elizabeth Dee Gallery
    545 West 20th Street, New York NY 10011
    January 12 – February 11, 2012
    Opening Thursday, January 12, 18-20h

    Elizabeth Dee Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition at the gallery and United States debut of paintings and films by Jeff Keen (b. 1923, UK). This important first exhibition in New York will explore in depth Keen's most influential and fundamental period of work, the 1960s and 1970s, during which he established a prolific visual practice extending to five decades of drawing, painting, experimental film, concrete poetry and performance.

    Keen is primarily known as a legendary underground filmmaker whose work and activities coincided with the emergence of expanded cinema. He was one of the original participants in the 60s at the London Filmmakers Co-op. The BFI and later the British Arts Council supported and enabled Keen to make films and devise a multitude of drawings and paintings. During this period, Keen maintained jobs as a landscaper in the Parks and Recreation department of his hometown, Brighton, and sometimes as a postal worker delivering mail. The artist made movies primarily on weekends with his family and friends in an ensemble cast and his painting and drawing studio was for 40 years a repository of props and art that accumulated to extraordinary effect that has been fully documented.

    Embracing the increasingly available technology of 8mm, 16mm and prevelance of American Pop imagery and Comics (and later Punk), Keen employed modes of popular media, technology and music in painting, drawing and collage using a stop frame animation process and in camera editing, resulting in active and evocative films. Utilizing a frequency of speed not found in work of the period, Keen, through the possibilities of the medium, brought new life to the significance of radical visual media.

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  • An introduction to the Xcèntric Archive

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    Rainbow Dance, Len LyeAn introduction to the Xcèntric Archive
    21,22,28,29 December 2011 / 3,4 January 2012 18:30-20:00h
    Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona - Montalegre, 5 - 08001 Barcelona

    In the first quarter of 2012, the Xcèntric Archive will be completely renewed and extended, and available for public consultation. The aim of this programme is to offer a preview of these new incorporations and an opportunity to discover and to understand this other cinema.

    Programme

    18:30h

    - Love on the wing, Norman McLaren, 4’27’’, 1938
    - La poulette grise, Norman McLaren, 5’33’’, 1947
    - Rainbow Dance, Len Lye, 5’, 1935
    - L’Amour réinventé, Maurice Lemaître, 12’30’’, 1979

    19:00h

    - FRAGMENTOS para una historia del otro cine español (Excerpts for a history of the other Spanish cinema), 2010, 50’

    This documentary directed by Andrés Hispano and produced by La Chula Productions, TVE and the CCCB takes a look at the history of the least conventional Spanish cinema in an uncompromising exploration of its artistic, visual, poetic and conceptual potential. Fragmentos reconstructs the flickering existence of this cinema using testimonies, sequences and documents. For the first time, a documentary brings together the most significant moments in a cinema that is slowly ceasing to be invisible.

    Premiered at the Sitges International Film Festival (October 2010) and broadcast by TVE-2 in January 2011.

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