Stephen Dwoskin (1939–2012) began his filmmaking career in the New York underground scene of the early 1960s, then moved to London in 1964, where he became a leading figure in avant-garde film, and was one of the founders of the London Filmmakers Co-operative (now LUX). His early works, such as Dyn Amo (1972), are synonymous with the male gaze.
This Summer, Pugnant Film Series will be A homeless mobile cinema at the ruins of Athens. Have you noticed that as the cities are getting more and more old, their ruins are remaining young at all? With a prehistoric youth, similar to the material from which the films are made. With this sacred feeling, we will make some screenings of films that we love at some abandoned houses, factories, rivers and places of Athens.
Inside the gallery artist Philomène Hoël presents six performative screenings, from 25-27 May at Chalton Gallery, London, featuring films of Stephen Dwoskin, Jean Genet, and soundpiece by Gavin Bryars. It is the last work from a series in dialogue with the film piece Dyn Amo from the artist and film-maker Stephen Dwoskin (1973).
Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image in collaboration with Reading School of Art presents Essay Film Festival Prelude 1: The Cinema of Stephen Dwoskin and Trying to Kiss the Moon
This screening and discussion provides an introduction to the work of Stephen Dwoskin through his autobiographical montage-film Trying to Kiss the Moon (1994, 95min) and Anna Ambrose’s portrait The Cinema of Stephen Dwoskin (1984, 60min),
The 1970s was an enormously creative period for experimental film. Its innovations and debates have had far-reaching and long-lasting influence, with a resurgence of interest in the decade revealed by new gallery events, film screenings and social networks that recognise its achievements. Professor Laura Mulvey, and writer/director Sue Clayton, bring together journalists and scholars at the cutting edge of research into 1970s radical cinema for this collection.
Belgian experimental film festival L’Âge d’or 'returns' to Brussels on October 8-14. 'Reviving the spirit' of the EXPRMNTL festival will present twenty-three films in competition as well as programmes dedicated to and with the presence of Birgit Hein (president of the jury), Gustav Deutsch (who will also deliver a masterclass), Friedl vom Gröller, Matthias Müller and Christoph Girardet, Robert Todd and John Smith. Mark Webber, editor of the recently published anthology of writings by Gregory Markopoulos will introduce two programmes of his works with new prints. The festival will also pay homage to Stephen Dwoskin and Adolfas Mekas and present curated programmes dedicated to the Italian avant-garde, and a double selection of “ethnographic poems”, with works by Raymonde Carasco and Robert Gardner.
The festival's brochure, including the complete programme, can be downloaded here.
Phantoscope is Triskel Christchurch’s new quarterly experimental cinema event. In combining programmes of shorts and features from past and present, it promises to leave both eyes and minds wide open with its striking selection of some of the most startling and unusual films cinema has to offer. It launches with the late Stephen Dwoskin’s masterpiece Dyn Amo, a searing and controversial exploration of the distinction between a person’s self and the projection of that self to others, set in a strip club. The hallucinatory intensity of Dwoskin’s unique camerawork is memorably underscored by Gavin Bryars relentless drone soundtrack.
- Dyn Amo (Stephen Dwoskin, 1973, UK, 120 min) Starring: Jenny Runacre, Pat Ford and Catherine Kessler
Phantoscope is programmed by Cork-based filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain, who brings to the task four years of experience as film curator of Black Sun, the noted experimental music/film event that was a mainstay of the Cork scene between 2009 and 2013.
Xcèntric: Visions of the Body III: Dwoskin Sunday March 24 2013, 18:30h Xcèntric CCCB, Montalegre, 5, 08001 Barcelona
Stephen Dwoskin’s body (1939-2012) is framed in all his films, in which he delimits a film space that makes his inability to move visible, thereby creating an extensive body of film in intimate proximity with his own partially paralysed body. His cinema, physical and visceral, centres on the flesh, nakedness, “corporeal subjectivity” and the voyeuristic obsession with the female body as an object of desire and the embodiment of his scopic drive. Times For, his first full-length film, is a claustrophobic study of the latent sensuality of four women and a frustrated man. This film is a metaphor of the intensity of sexual experience, which Jonas Mekas considers one of the most solid and original works of erotic cinema.
- Times For (Stephen Dwoskin, 1970, 16 mm, 80 min.)
