Conversations at the Edge: Wavelengths, in the blink of an eye
Thursday, March 21 2013, 18h
Gene Siskel Film Center
164 N. State, Chicago, IL, USA
Curator Andréa Picard in person

Named for but also infinitely inspired by Michael Snow’s 1967 masterpiece, Wavelength, the Toronto International Film Festival’s avant-garde program presents films and videos that defy convention, suggest alternate ways of thinking, and sometimes re-emerge from a distant past in order to comment on the present. Curated by Andréa Picard, who has curated Wavelengths since 2006, this program is a Wavelengths compendium featuring a number of works from the 2012 line-up (including Nathaniel Dorsky’s August and After, Ernie Gehr’s Auto-Collider XV and Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan’s View from the Acropolis which were all cited in the New York Times’ best films of the year wrap-up and screen as Chicago premieres) and highlights from previous editions, including a 35mm restored print from La Cinémathèque française of Henri Storck’s too-rarely seen 1929 Surrealist gem, Pour vos beaux yeux. Blinking is not encouraged!

Light Industry: Two Films by Marjorie Keller
Tuesday, March 19 2013, 19:30h
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, New York 11222

Writing in Artforum in 1981, Amy Taubin praised Marjorie Keller as “perhaps the only major filmmaker that the American independent film has produced since the end of the Sixties.” At the time of her sudden death in 1994 at age 43, she would leave behind twenty-seven 8mm and 16mm films; tonight, Light Industry presents two of her most important works, Misconception and Daughters of Chaos. Built from small-gauge diary footage, both films are at once lyrical and anti-romantic, meditations on female experience that render their subjects through radically nonlinear editing and complex experiments in sound-image correspondence. Like Stan Brakhage, one of Keller's great influences, she transforms her subject matter—a birth, a wedding—from the stuff of home movies to an adventure in perception. Yet she forgoes the self-mythologizing of her predecessor, offering a more earthbound, though no less poetic, take on the subjective nature of memory.

Keller also produced a substantial body of writings, including a book on the role of childhood in the work of Brakhage, Jean Cocteau, and Joseph Cornell, as well as notes towards a proposed study of women’s experimental cinema that would have charted a trajectory from pioneers like Germaine Dulac, Maya Deren, and Carolee Schneemann through to a younger generation represented by Peggy Ahwesh, Su Friedrich, and Leslie Thornton, among others. In addition to her achievements as an artist and critic, Keller played a crucial role in the Collective for Living Cinema, serving on its board of directors and editing the Collective’s publications Idiolects and Motion Picture. She engaged in the evolving debates around feminism, film, and the avant-garde that ran from the 70s through the 90s, vigorously defending a tradition of highly personal, formally rigorous work that some had rejected as irredeemably masculinist, while at the same time subjecting that tradition to a nuanced critique through her own scholarship and filmmaking. Though highly skeptical of the ways in which feminist film studies had, ironically, come to ignore some of the considerable accomplishments by women in the American avant-garde, Keller was nevertheless one of the key figures of her era to synthesize theory and practice at the most advanced level.

Magic Lantern Presents: Print/Process
16mm Films by J.J. Murphy, Phil Solomon, and Karl Kels
Wednesday March 20, 2013, 20h
95 Empire Black Box Theater, Providence, RI, USA

Film, tape and digital video are all subsets of cinema, much like oils, acrylic, egg tempera, spraypaint and watercolor are all included under the heading of painting. Nevertheless, while sharing the predominant qualities of what we generically call "cinema," each material has its own specific aesthetic materiality that is perhaps best revealed in the event of its own failure or deterioration. The video image becomes filled with horizontal lines of interference or static noise; digital images break down into smears of pixels and stuttering motion; similarly, film has its own special form of visual decay. In 1974, J.J. Murphy re-photographed the same minute of footage fifty times; the product of this experiment was Print Generation, a supremely structuralist work that plays at the cinema's limits of abstraction and representation both on the levels of image and sound. Rarely screened and long available only in the most faded of 16mm prints, Print Generation is shown here in a new, immaculate restoration that brings the alchemical of play of Murphy's film back to life. *Print Generation* is complemented by two other works that engage directly with the theme of generation and decay: the enigmatic *Secret Garden* by American filmmaker Phil Solomon, and *Starlings*, an early work by Austrian filmmaker/documentarian Karl Kels. Like the car dredged up from the marsh at the end of Hitchcock's *Psycho*, these pieces put film's materiality on display as a field of potentiality from which a figurative image, like the return of the repressed, may or may not emerge.

Peter Kubelka presents Monument Film
Tuesday April 9 2013, 18:30h
BFI Southbank
Belvedere Road, South Bank, SE1 8XT London

The Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka has been a vital and uncompromising force in cinema for more than half a century. In a body of work that lasts not much more than an hour in total, he condenses and articulates the essential qualities of analogue cinema, distinguishing film as an autonomous artform. His 1960 film Arnulf Rainer, composed only of the purest elements of light and darkness, sound and silence, remains one of the most radical achievements in film history. In response to that earlier work, his new film Antiphon was revealed in 2012 as part of Monument Film, a powerful testament to the entire medium. With two 35mm projectors situated in the auditorium, each film is screened individually, then combined as double projections, both side-by-side and superimposed upon each other. Throughout this extraordinary projection event, Peter Kubelka will discuss his theories, explaining the differences between film and digital media, and articulating his belief in the survival of cinema.

Monument Film
Lecture screening with double 35mm projection
Peter Kubelka | Austria 1960/2012 | c.90 min

Curated by Mark Webber. Presented with the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum, London.

Tickets: £11 / £8.50 concessions (BFI Members pay £1.50 less)

This performance was originally scheduled for the 56th BFI London Film Festival last October. Audience members with tickets for the original event should contact the BFI Box Office on 020 7928 3232 for an exchange.