Close-Up is thrilled to present the first full UK retrospectives of the work of boundary pushing Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky and Austria based, American poetic filmmaker Eve Heller.

The films of Peter Tscherkassky have played a central role in the international reawakening of interest in avant-garde film. At the turn from a photographic to a digital culture of moving images, his work follows in the footsteps of Austrian masters Kurt Kren, Peter Kubelka, and Ernst Schmidt Jr. to create a thrilling filmic language that engages psychoanalysis and semiotics whilst exploring the physicality of the medium and its potential to overwhelm.

Close-Up is delighted to present three films by filmmaker Karel Doing. Doing makes expanded cinema, multi-screen, performative, cross-media and participatory works. His single screen works and installations are often the result of these processes and collaborations. He has worked together with individuals, groups and organisations in many European countries and in Indonesia, Suriname and the USA. His main interest is to reconnect seemingly implausible links: urban/nature, music/maths, passion/ratio, analogue/digital. The films presented in this programme combines documentary with experimental techniques.

Close-Up and OtherFilm present a series of films by experimental filmmakers Makino Takashi and Rei Hayama. The films of Takashi and Hayama, two founding members of the Tokyo film collective [+], are hallucinatory distortions evoking chaos and patterns, nature and organic forms, filtered through an undulating macro and micro impasto view. Takashi’s performative films use points of threshold to push the viewer into beautifully overwhelming transcendent states – where visual and sonic noise engulf senses and imagination. Hayama’s films make gentle use of available resources – soil and insects become her abstract muses, and hand cranked celluloid film processed in coffee are subtle throw backs to harmonious ways of being.