The Experimenta Film Society is here!
Saturday 11th September, 18-23h
Jaaga Creative Common Ground, Bangalore, India

Please join us for the launch of the Experimenta Film Society on September 11, 2010, 6.15pm onwards at Jagaa Creative Common Ground, Bangalore where Ross Mclaren, the founder of the underground Funnel Experimental Film Theatre (1977-1989) in Toronto, will treat us to his "awkward, jarring, disjunctive, and, of course, ironic" films. Also, our friends from the Images festival, Toronto Canada, Scott Miller B...erry and Pablo De Ocampo, will showcase new experimental work and discuss recent developments in contemporary moving image culture.

The Experimenta Film Society is for all those interested in deep watching, deep listening and deep hanging out. We are open to all those who are open to all things experimental. We will host screenings and performances as and when the weather demands. Attendance is FREE but contributions to keep the society going are welcome.

Please do come and please spread the word

For more information on Ross Mclaren, read the TimeOut Bengaluru issue of September 3-16 or send your queries to Experimenta India

Programme Details
Saturday 11th September, 18:15h
Artist Spotlight: Ross McLaren

For over 30 years, Ross McLaren has worked as a filmmaker, scholar, teacher, and curator. In his native Canada, he founded and was first director of the Funnel Film Centre in Toronto, an institution devoted to the production, exhibition, and distribution of film. Currently, McLaren teaches film and video courses at Cooper Union, Fordham University, the Millennium Film Workshop, and Pratt Institute. McLaren is an alumnus of the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. His films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Documenta VI, the Biennale du Paris XI and XII, the Third Annual Avant-Garde Film Festival (London), Avant Garde Film Practice: Six Views at the Pacific Cinémathèque (Vancouver), and the Ann Arbor, Edinburgh, Oberhausen, and Toronto Film Festivals.

- Weather Building (1976, 16mm, 10.5 min)
- Summer Camp (1978, 16mm 60 min)
- Wednesday, January 17, 1979 (1979, 16mm, 4.5 min)
- 9 X 12 (1979-81, 16mm, 1 min)
- Sex Without Glasses (1983, 16mm, 12.5 min)
- Dance of the Sacred Foundation Application (2003, video, 15 min)

Saturday 11th September, 21h
Disembodied Bodies

Presented by Scott Miller Berry (Images Festival Director) & Pablo De Ocampo (Images Festival Artistic Director); Toronto, Canada

This selection of films was presented as a part of the 23rd annual Images Festival in Toronto bringing together work by both emerging and more established artists. Bookended by two short videos from Toronto artist Jon Sasaki, culled from a series of works shot on a high speed 16mm scientific camera. In these works, the camera captures the artist in the midst of seemingly potent action, which when projected back at 24 frames per second, the extreme slow motion of the actions on screen has the effect of abstracting the movement as well as drawing out, and heightening the drama and the anticipation of a moment the audience all knows is about to happen. This program delves into varied states of these same cinematic evocations of the body and the potentiality of action, danger, and drama. Here, the physical space of the characters on screen is removed, obscured, disembodied through memories and melodrama.

- Wick (Jon Sasaki, Canada, 2009, video, 2 min)
Prologue: Waiting for the light that never lights.

Amidst a shimmering field of emulsion, dust and scratches, faint traces of images float to the surface. Sound Over Water evokes both a physical space and a less tangible place of shifting memories.
- Whose Toes (Barry Doupé, Canada, 2010, video, 33 min)
The ethereal and ghostly worlds which Barry Doupé’s characters inhabit is at once a mirror and an abstraction of the world we know. His exquisitely lo-fi animations depict places and people that are both recognizable and obscured; the language and the narratives that Doupé crafts play out as a dream-like melodrama that constantly shifts between the incomprehensible and the familiar. Whose Toes is a fractured portrait of two such characters, Princess Diana and JFK, moving through a parallel universe that is constantly collapsing in on itself. “A distorted delusion smearing personal and collective failures. Tragedy is in the realization that there are bad things in the world and there is nothing you can do to stop it. The clockwork of human interaction, a historical soft spot and an ethical blind spot.”
- Four Seasons (Keren Cytter, Germany, 2009, video, 14 min)
“I loved you then and I love you.” “... you pushed me. Head hit the floor so hard and my skull cracked wide open...You broke my back. My knees. My heart.” Amidst the swirls of snow-globe snow, a woman enters an apartment to confront a naked man in a bathtub about the noise. A series of deadpan, forlorn exchanges between the characters begins with a brief detour into Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and culminates in a fireworks show of spontaneously combusting household objects: the record player, the Christmas tree, and a plate of cake.
- My Tears Are Dry (Laida Lertxundi, USA/Spain, 2009, 16mm, 4 min)
And if I’m to believe all these things I say are true Then tell me why am I still crying tears darling over you. Tell me please. Come on tears and cry. A Hoagy Land 45, two women, a bed, an armchair and the beautiful outside.
- Lightbulbs (Jon Sasaki, Canada, 2009, video, 2 min)
Epilogue: There is a light and it never goes out. Until it goes out.