FRAMES
FRAMES Film Series is a local endeavour by Sebastian Di Trolio (programming / projection) & Joe Heindl (graphic design) to exhibit moving image artistry on analogue motion picture film. Utilizing 16mm prints sourced from regional collections, archives and institutions, FRAMES strives to present the work of both historical and contemporary filmmakers to audiences in London and nearby communities.
ANIMATED FRAMES
featuring short films by Paul Glabicki, Jennifer Reeves, Yona Friedman,
Doris Chase, Len Lye, Sonia Bridge, Alexander Stewart, and Jeff Scher
1965-2014
ANIMATED FRAMES
Presented on 16mm film
TAP Centre For Creativity 203 Dundas Street London, Ontario
Friday February 16, 2024 7pm
Screening Program
PARTICLES IN SPACE, Len Lye ,1979, 4 min, UAS/New Zealand, Black and White
ERRATA, Alexander Stewart, 2005, 5 min, USA, Colour
ETCETERA, Yona Friedman, 1964, 6 min, France, Black and White
CIRCLES I, Doris Chase, 7 min, 1971, USA, Colour
COLOR NEUTRAL, Jennifer Reeves, 3 min, 2014, USA, Colour
JETSAM, Sonia Bridge, 2 min, 2002, UK, Blck and White
FILM-WIPE-FILM, Paul Glabicki, 28 min, 1983, USA, Colour
TURKISH TRAFFIC, Jeff Scher, 3 min, 1997, USA, Colour
total duration: 58 minutes + brief intermission
Notes From the Program
ANIMATED FRAMES returns with an eclectic selection of abstract experimental short films by Paul Glabicki, Jennifer Reeves, Yona Friedman, Doris Chase, Len Lye, Sonia Bridge, Alexander Stewart, and Jeff Scher.
With works spanning half a century, this program includes an array of vibrant and vividly textured gems to compliment the culminating centrepiece of the program, Paul Glabicki's staggeringly expansive hand-drawn maximalist minimalist masterpiece, Film-Wipe-Film (1983).
Presented by FRAMES Film Series & London Ontario Media Arts Association (LOMAA)
FIRST SIGHT Films For All Eyes
featuring short films by Dirk de Bruyn, Henry Hills, Chick Strand, Gary Beydler,
Frank & Caroline Mouris, Barbara Hammer, Jeff Scher, and Jodie Mack.
1975-2013
FIRST SIGHT Films For All Eyes
Presented on 16mm film
TAP Centre for Creativity 203 Dundas St. London, ON
Saturday October 7, 2023 7pm EST
Initially presented upon invitation in Montreal by la lumière collective under the title: PREMIERE VUE, the first instalment in their ongoing series inviting Canadian filmmakers and programmers to select works for young audiences. .
Screening Program
BOERDERY, Dirk de Bruyn, 1985, Australia, 9 min, 16mm, Sound
SSS, Henry Hills, 1988, USA, 5 min, 16mm, Sound
Anselmo, Chick Stand, 1967, USA/Mexico, 3 min, 16mm, Sound
Glass Face, Gary Beydler, 1975, USA, 3 min, 16mm, Silent
Coney, Frank & Caroline Mouris, 1975, USA, 5 min, 16mm, Sound
Plance Mattes, Barbara Hammer, 1987, USA, 8 min, 16mm, Sound
Yours, Jeff Scher, 1997, USA, 3 min, 16mm, Sound
Glistening Thrills, Jodie Mack, 2013, USA, 8 min, 16mm, Sound
Curt McDowell
CONFESSIONS: Films by Curt McDowell
Presented on 16mm film
TAP Centre for Creativity 203 Dundas St. London, ON
Friday December 2, 2022 7pm EST
Content Warning: nudity & explicit content.
Screening Program
Notes on The Program
In commemoration of World AIDS Day, LOMAA presents a selection of works by the prolific American filmmaker Curt McDowell (1945-1987), whose provocative and endearingly irreverent short films embrace the outlandish in a salacious celebration of early 1970's queer underground cinema.
Featuring a recurring ensemble of family & friends, these outrageously bawdy and memorable low-brow delights depict an array of outcast degenerates in a series of subversive broken dream melodramas and campy musical routines.
Craig Baldwin
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America
featuring films by Abigail Child & François Miron
1989-1994
Craig Baldwin
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America
Presented on 16mm films
TAP Centre for Creativity 203 Dundas St, London
Friday August 12, 2022 7 pm
Screening Program
MERCY, Abigail Child, 1989, USA, 10 min, 16mm
THE EVIL SURPRISE, François Miron, 1994, Canada, 16 min, 16mm
TRIBULATION 99: ALIEN ANOMALIES UNDER AMERICA, Craig Baldwin, 1991, USA, 48 min, 16mm
Notes From the Artists
MERCY—An encyclopedic ephemera, exploring public visions of technological and romantic invention, dissecting the game mass media plays with our private perceptions. (A.C.)
THE EVIL SURPRISE—A kinetic collage preoccupied with social conditioning and absurdity, a mind bending psychedelic optical printing film, a brain probe and a short journey out of your mind, 'The Evil Surprise' is inside your head. (F.M.)
TRIBULATION 99: ALIEN ANOMALIES UNDER AMERICA—Every imaginable scrap of found footage, re-filmed TV and industrial sound is obsessively organized into 99 paranoid rants, together constituting a psychotronic pseudo-pseudo-documentary that desperately details the hidden history of alien intervention in Latin America. (C.B.)
Louise Bourque
GOING BACK HOME
featuring films by Matthias Müller, Patricia Gruben & Phil Solomon
1977-2000
Louise Bourque
GOING BACK HOME
Presented on 16mm film
TAP Centre for Creativity 203 Dundas St, London
Friday July 15, 2022 7pm
Screening Program
IMPRINT, Louise Bourque, 1997, Canada, 14 min, 16mm
THE CENTRAL CHARACTER, Patricia Gruben, 1977, Canada, 15 min, 16mm
FISSURES, Louise Bourque, 1999, Canada, 3 min, 16mm
ALPSEE, Matthias Müller, 1994, Germany, 15 min, 16mm
THE SNOWMAN, Phil Solomon, 1995, USA, 8 min, 16mm
GOING BACK HOME, Louise Bourque, 2000, Canada, 1 min, 16mm
Notes From the Program
This one hour programme of works explores themes of discordant domestic spaces and the underlying unease that resides beneath an otherwise wholesome veneer. Notions of memory & nostalgia anxiously intertwine through painterly impressions imbued in the frayed emulsions of decaying home movie footage paired alongside depictions of familial recollections bordering on psychodrama.
Roger Beebe
FILMS for ONE to EIGHT PROJECTORS: EXPANDED CINEMA PERFORMANCES
Presented on 16mm Multi-Projector Performances
In partnership with TAP Centre for Creativity
TAP Centre for Creativity 203 Dundas St, London
Friday, April 1, 2022 7pm
Accessibility: masks & proof of vaccination will be required for entry
Screening Program
Lineage (for Norman McLaren), 2019, 4 min, 16mm
de rerum natura, 2019, 3 min, 16mm and Video
Home Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry, 2021, 4 min, 16mm
seven-projector show-stopping Last Light of a Dying Star, 2008-2011, 16mm
Notes From the Program
In the wake of our year(+) of lockdown and of telepresence, Roger Beebe returns to the road with a program of 16mm multi-projector performances.
He will also include a sampling of recent essayistic videos, presented as live-narrated documentaries. These works take on a range of topics from the forbidden pleasures of men crying (Historia Calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes)) to the racial politics of font choices (The Comic Sans Video) and the real spaces of the virtual economy (Amazonia).
Roger Beebe is a filmmaker whose work since 2006 consists primarily of multiple-projector performances and essayistic videos that explore the world of found images and the "found" landscapes of late capitalism. He has screened his films around the globe at such unlikely venues as the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square and McMurdo Station in Antarctica as well as more likely ones including Sundance and the Museum of Modern Art with solo shows at Anthology Film Archives, The Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City, and Los Angeles Filmforum among many other venues. Beebe is also a film programmer: he ran Flicker, a festival of small-gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000 and was the founder and Artistic Director of FLEX, the Florida Experimental Film Festival from 2004-2014. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Art at the Ohio State University.
Co-Curated Barbara Sternberg
Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada
Co-Curated Barbara Sternberg
Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada
Presented on 16mm films & videos
In partnership with TAP Centre for Creativity
TAP Centre for Creativity 203 Dundas St, London
Friday March 25th, 2022 7pm
Accessibility: masks & proof of vaccination will be required for entry
Notes From the Program
A selection of works by historical and contemporary avant garde Canadian filmmakers, this programme offers a glimpse into the vibrant landscape of moving image artistry in Canada.
Inspired by the recent release of the extensive compendium book of the same title, edited by Barbara Sternberg and Jim Shedden, which features essays & profiles by Michael Zryd and Stephen Broomer tracing the various figures, film scenes, co-ops and movements from the 1950's to the present day.
The 70 minute screening will feature 16mm films & videos by Joyce Wieland, Keewatin Dewdney, David Rimmer, Gariné Torossian, Jennifer Dysart, Rhayne Vermette, Richard Kerr, Al Razutis, Christine Lucy Latimer and Arthur Lipsett.
Barbara Sternberg will join us in person to introduce this event and copies of the book Moments of Perception: Experimental film in Canada (published by Goose Lane Editions) will be available for purchase at the gallery.
Teo Hernández
Shattering Appearances: Films by Teo Hernández
Presented on Super 8 & 16mm film
207 King Street
In Partnership with PIX FILM & LIFT (Toronto)
Friday, October 18, 2019 7-9pm EST
Screening Program
Tables d’hiver, 1979, 39 min, Super 8mm, Sound, Colour,
Nuestra señora de Paris, 1982, 22 min, 16mm, Sound, Colour
Pas de Ciel, 1987, 29 min, 16mm, Silent, Colour
Notes From The Curator
Tables d’hiver: An intimate chronicle of a winter. The days follow one another, the daily gestures, the meals. A reality that passes before our eyes and suddenly turns into an imaginary one. Tables that become carpets or mirrors, where the desired image is placed or reflected. Space and time constantly transformed by vision. In turn reality or dream.
Nuestra señora de Paris: The camera, as extension of the body, swirls and convulses, abstracting the light cast through the stained glass of Notre Dame into brilliantly luminescent patterns. The dense soundtrack layers and collages noises of tourists and performers in the hectic square outside.
Pas de Ciel: A rhythmic study of the body in motion, this film is an improvised in-camera collaboration between the filmmaker and French dancer/choreographer Bernardo Montet.“A body between sea and sky, the silent presence of the wind, a few birds: elements of a fundamental mythology transformed into lyrical abstraction.” — Dominique Noguez.
Teo Hernández’s films remind us that the subversive power of the image does not derive from its capacity to reflect or reproduce reality; rather in its power to summon a deeper knowledge or extra-sensory perception, like a ritual or magical experience. Similar to shamanism, Hernández’s cinematographic technique explores other ways of seeing, hearing, and ultimately other bodies that may provoke another way to feel, to re-create and to re-write the world.
From a disobedient lens, Teo triggers auto-reflective and intimate exercises that deconstruct and question our sensibilities to restore the body as an active principle or desire. In that effect, by destabilizing the fundamentals of the camera lens, narrative, among other elements of film language, Teo Hernández questions not only his individual and artistic identity but also the function of cinema itself.
Within a body of work of more than 150 films, this programme emphasizes his radical intention to produce a tactile cinema informed by performing arts and contemporary dance, in order to to invoke future bodies and realities. It offers a glimpse of some of Hernández’s concerns, obsessions, and desires circling identity, ritual, the body and the city. — Andrea Ancira García
Teodoro Hernández was born in 1939 in Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico. After studying architecture, he co-founded the C.E.C (Centro Experimental de Cinematografia), in Mexico City in the early 1960s. He moved to Paris in 1966 and for the next decade traveled extensively though Europe, Asia and North Africa making Super 8 films. Many of Hernández’s films are marked by strong sweeping camera movements and single-frame shooting of places and spaces near and dear to him. He later flirted with feature-length works, including a queer take on Salomé, which heralded the emergence of a new movement in French experimental filmmaking, dubbed “l’école du corps” (“the School of the Body”).
“Until his death in 1992, Teo continued to create a work that was inextricably linked to his life, and his life and work were carefully recorded in his diary and in the preparatory files for his films. poetic prose where he tells us about his experience and what cinema means to him.” — Xochitl Camblor-Macherel
Barbara Sternberg
Like a Dream that Vanishes: Films by Barbara Sternberg
Presented on 16mm film
John Labatt Visual Arts Centre – Western University
In Partnership with Department of Visual Arts & Artlab Gallery at Western University
Friday, October 4, 2019 7pm EST
Artist Talk
Presented at John Labatt Visual Arts Centre Artlab
Originally presented on Friday, October 4, 2019 6pm EST
Screening Program
Like a Dream that Vanishes, 1999, 41 min, 16mm, Sound, Colour,
Far From, 2014, 17 min, 16mm, Sound, Colour
Like a Dream that Vanishes : continues my work in film both thematically and formally: the ephemerality of life echoed in the temporal nature of film, the stuff of life in the emulsion, and the energy, life-force in rhythmic light pulses. (Your life is like a candle burning…) Imageless emulsion is intercut with brief shots of natural elements and mise-en-scene of the stages of human life: a little boy runs and falls; teens hang out together at night smoking; sun shines through tree branches; men pace, waiting; flashes of lightning; an elderly man speaks philosophically about miracles. The movement between form and formlessness, appearing and withdrawing, creation and dissolution (death) are felt. The film image, as the reality behind it, is not quite graspable. (B.St).
Nuestra señora de Paris: The images that constitute our memory tend to rigidify into spectres in the course of their (collective and individual) historical transmission. Hence the task is to bring them to life. – Giorgio Agamben, “Nymphs” Constructed with repetitions and variations, in reference to the musical form of a Nocturne, Far From is an accumulation of layers, a density of living, the noise of existence. Ghosts of lives lived and traces of lives being lived, rising. (B.St).
Toronto-based filmmaker Barbara Sternberg has been making films since the mid 1970s. Her films have been screened widely across Canada as well as internationally at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, The Museum of Modern Art and Millennium Workshop in New York, and the Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto. Her work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada. She has been a visiting artist at a number of Canadian universities and galleries and in 2011, Sternberg was made a Laureate of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Sternberg’s film work combines reflections on the medium itself with social issues and universal questions of how we experience reality, how we as humans are situated in the world. Films are themselves experiences, realities. Her films work at the intersection of film and life – questions of vision, perception, motion and temporality. Although her main practice is film, Sternberg has worked in other media including performance, installation and video.
Sternberg has been active in a number of fronts in Toronto, teaching at York University, working for Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre, serving on Toronto and Ontario Arts Council juries and committees, helping to organize the International Experimental Film Congress (May 1989), and was a founding member of Pleasure Dome, artists’ film and video exhibition group. She wrote a handbook and conducted workshops on Media Literacy for high school teachers. She recently organized the “Association for Film Art” (AFFA) to actively support and promote awareness and appreciation of film art. While living in the Maritimes, Sternberg co-founded Struts, an artist-run centre in Sackville, New Brunswick.
Sternberg wrote a column, “On (experimental) Film” for several years for Cinema Canada, and has written essays on artists and on filmmakers. As well, she has written on the status of film art in galleries and museums—an issue on which she has conducted symposia and lobbied vigorously.
Frenkel Defects
Curated by Kevin Rice
Presented on 16mm film
In partnership with McIntosh Gallery 207 King St. London, ON
Friday, February 1, 2019 7pm EST
Frenkel Defects is a traveling program of workshops and screenings that attempt to form in its audience imperfect ideas of film. It takes the ordered sequence of thoughts and feelings we hold about the medium and disrupts them or deforms them. These imperfections are not the same for each individual. They are not a prescription of a specific idea of film. They are an opening to new and unique sensations of wavelengths and frequency. An exposure on the mind and body to particles of light, for only fractions of a second, but nonetheless imparting a latent image within us to be developed.
Screening Program
26 Pulse Wrought Volume 2: Exceptional Violents, Andy Busti, 2018, USA, 3 min, 16mm
Decoy, Alee Peoples, 2017, USA, 11 min, 16mm
Elli, Esther Urlus, 2016, Netherlands, 8 min, 16mm
A Study in Natural Magic, Charlotte Pryce, 2013, USA, 3 min, 16mm
Ascensions, (((arc))) , 2018, USA, 6-8 min, 16mm
Deletion, Esther Urlus, 2017, Netherlands, 10 min, 16mm
Prima Materia, Charlotte Pryce, 2015, USA, 3 min, 16mm
AN EMPTY THREAT, Josh Lewis, 2018, USA, 8 min, 16mm
Notes From The Curator
26 Pulse Wrought Volume 2: Exceptional Violents, We…the vessels of maddened lovers on fattened horses
Decoy sees bridges and walls as binary opposites and relates them to imposters in this world. Humans strive for accuracy. You don’t always get what you wish for.
Elli, Calm shots of a seascape also examine optical colour mixing using various flicker effects. Shot on the exact spot in Greece that marked the country’s entrance into World War II
A Study in Natural Magic, Witness an alchemist’s spell: the transmutation of light into substance: a glimpse of gold.
Deletion, An explosion of colour, yet without any clear, identifiable images. Still, the spectator, almost unconsciously, notices that something distressing is going on. Something that makes you shudder and awakens a deep, dark part in your primordial instinct. In our view on the world we continuously filter, block and distort certain parts. We commit ourselves to a perception that does not necessarily correspond with reality. Maybe not being able to identify what we see is essential to provoke our imagination. Will you look differently at the image knowing that it represents something horrible? DELETION is inspired on the abandoned process of creating colour, Autochrome, and is made with homebrew film emulsion.
Prima Materia, Delicate threads of energy spiral and transform into mysterious microscopic cells of golden dust: these are the luminous particles of the alchemist’s dream. Prima Materia is inspired by the haunting wonderment of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. It is an homage to the first, tentative photographic records that revealed the extraordinary nature of phenomena lurking just beyond the edge of human vision.
AN EMPTY THREAT, A sequence of truces, a personality test offering mostly slippage.
Kevin Rice has been working with film since 2007. His practice is predominantly based in the darkroom where he researches all aspects of photochemistry and performs in depth experiments on 16mm which occasionally result in a “film.” In 2012, he co-founded Process Reversal, a non-profit whose mission is to advocate and ensure the viability of film for all. His work there has included a wide spectrum of outreach activities aimed at helping to develop an artist run film lab network in North America. During his time with Process Reversal, he developed a model for traveling screenings and workshops which would eventually be structured as the traveling program, Frenkel Defects. As of 2017, Kevin has been based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he is working to build a new artist run film lab and cinema. His current film project is a site specific adaptation of the book General Sensitometry by Yuri Nikolayevich Gorokhovskii.
Primarily a filmmaker, Andrew Busti has been making “handmade” films for 15 years. Technical advisor of Film Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, he is also an instructor for Alternative Process Cinema. Film facilitator, archivist, and preservationist, he runs Analogue Industries Ltd., while also board member of the non-profit analogue film collective Process Reversal.
Alee Peoples is an artist from Oklahoma City, currently living in Los Angeles. She maintains a varied practice that involves screen-printing, sewing and sculpture. Film is another medium in her work that relates to how we understand language in a linear format. Aside from Oklahoma City, she has called Kansas City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Providence home. She has taught youth classes at Echo Park Film Center. In April of 2014, along with her friends Abby Banks and Cosmo Segurson, Alee got in a van and shared their films and videos across the Southwest/Southern regions of the U.S.
Esther Urlus (1966, Netherlands) makes films, performances and installations on 16mm, 35mm and Super-8. The DIY method is always present in her work. Urlus is co-founder and leader of the experimental WORM.filmwerkplaats in Rotterdam. Her films have been screened at several festivals worldwide, such as 25FPS Festival Zagreb, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Sonic Acts, and International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Charlotte Pryce has been making films and optical objects since 1986. She has taught experimental film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Academy of Art (San Francisco), Kent Institute of Design (Canterbury, England), and is currently a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts (Los Angeles). She is a graduate of the Slade School of Art, University College London (BFA) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA). In 2013 the Los Angeles Film Critics Association honored her with the Douglass Edwards Award for best experimental cinema achievement. In early 2019 the International Film Festival Rotterdam will present a retrospective of her work.
(((arc))) is usually initiated by tooth, an artist living in Oakland who has operated the microcinema/archive black hole cinematheque since 2009. Their work has been presented locally and internationally at Other Cinema, ATA, San Francisco Cinematheque, The Lab, Shapeshifters Cinema, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Nightingale (Chicago), Massart Film Society (Boston), NDSM Treehouse (Amsterdam), and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, among others.
Josh Lewis is an artist and filmmaker working at a fluid intersection of abstraction, documentary, and narrative forms. Coming from a background of work in photochemical film processing labs, Lewis’s handmade films explore the boundaries of manual knowledge, bodily struggle, and the persisting enigma of material potential. He’s shown work at venues such as The Centre Pompidou, Anthology Film Archives, Microscope Gallery, Eyebeam, Uniondocs, The Filmmaker’s Co-op NY, and at festivals such as The International Film Festival Rotterdam and Ann Arbor Film Festival. Josh is a lab technician and founder of the artist-run film lab Negativland.
JODIE MACK
DUSTY STACKS OF MOM: THE POSTER PROJECT + other colourful creations
Presented on 16mm film
In partnership with McIntosh Gallery
207 King St. London, ON
Friday December 21, 2018 7pm EST
This screening features a selection of New Hampshire-based artist Jodie Mack’s quirky and colourful hybrid animations, inviting audiences to partake in her stunningly vibrant visual experiments. The centrepiece of the programme is a whimsical stop-motion animated rock opera performed by the artist.
Screening Program
Posthaste Perennial Pattern, 2010, 4 min, 16mm, Sound
Glistening Thrills, 2013, 8 min, 16mm, Sound
Let Your Light Shine, 2013, 3 min, 16mm, Sound
Dusty Stacks of Mom: The Poster Project, 2013, 41 min, 16mm, Sound
Notes From the Artist
Posthaste Perennial Pattern Rapid-fire florals and morning bird songs bridge interior and exterior, design and nature.
Glistening Thrills A shiny otherworld of holographic reverie pairs dollar store gift bags and haunting resound, unfolding an effervescent melancholy in three parts. Featuring compositions for bowed vibraphone by Elliot Cole.
Let Your Light Shine A spectacle for prismatic spectacles. Handmade optical polyrhythms and a thousand rainbows explore the grating equation.
Dusty Stacks of Mom: The Poster Project , Witness an alchemist’s spell: the transmutation of light into substance: a glimpse of gold.
Deletion Interweaving the forms of personal filmmaking, abstract animation, and the rock opera, this animated musical documentary examines the rise and fall of a nearly-defunct poster and postcard wholesale business; the changing role of physical objects and virtual data in commerce; and the division (or lack of) between abstraction in fine art and psychedelic kitsch. Using alternate lyrics as voice over narration, the piece adopts the form of a popular rock album reinterpreted as a cine-performance.
Malena Szlam
Of the Night
Presented on Super 8 &16mm films
207 King St. London, ON
Friday September 14, 2018 7pm EST
Malena Szlam’s Super 8 &16mm films traverse the realms of dream and memory, capturing ethereal imagery of light reflection and refraction pulsating through the camera. The richly saturated colours convey otherworldly visions, transmuting the landscape to a point of near abstraction.
This programme was chosen by the filmmaker and includes selections of additional work by two influential filmmakers that inspire and inform her own practice, presented here in dialogue alongside her own artistry.
Screening Program
Chronogram of Inexistent Time (Cronograma de un tiempo inexistente), 2008, Chile, Canada, 6 min, 35mm to digital, Sound, Colour
Anagrams of Light (Anagramas de luz), 2011, Canada, 3 min, Super 8mm, Silent, Colour
Rhythm Trail, 2010-2011, Chile, Canada, 10 min, , Super 8mm, Silent, Colour
Beneath Your Skin of Deep Hollow (Bajo tu lámina de agujero profundo), 2010, Canada, 3:40 min, Super 8 to 16mm, Silent, Colour
Lunar Almanac, 2013, Canada, 4 min, 16mm, Silent, Colour
Morfología de un sueño (Morphology of a Dream), 2018, USA, Canada, 5:30 min, 16mm, Silent, Colour
ALTIPLANO, 2018, Chile, Argentina, Canada, 15:30 min, 35mm on digital, Sound, Colour
Orchard, Julie Murray, 2004, Ireland, USA, 9:30 min, 16mm, Sound, Colour
By the Lake, Chick Strand, 1986, USA, 9:30 min, 16mm, Sound, Colour
Notes From the Artist
Chronogram —A photomontage that explores stillness, motion, and memory. Using a 35mm still camera, multiple exposures were composed and edited in-camera, creating frameless sequences of images printed on 35mm filmstrips. When projected, these images become a non-linear, non-synchronized collage. The ephemeral quality of the images—their transparency, layering, and repetition—invites us to reflect on the role memory plays in perception, the ways we mentally reconfigure fragments to construct stability and meaning in an environment of perpetual flux..
<em Anagrams of Light—Light breaks the darkness in playful rapture—a film dedicated to my dear friend Javiera.
Rhythm Trail—Like notes written in a diary, Rhythm Trail is an open-ended film composed of a series of Super 8mm sketches edited in-camera. These collected notes are traces of moments and places that reflect on the immediacy of sight.
Beneath Your Skin of Deep Hollow—Translates night and water into arrhythmic movements of light in a fugue of colours. Shifting impressions emerge on the surface of an agitated stillness, while darkness illuminates reflections and sight.
Ô miroir !
Eau froide par l’ennui dans ton cadre gelée,
Que de fois el pendant des heures, désolée
Des songes et cherchant mes souvenirs qui sont
Comme des feuilles sous ta glace au trou profond,
Je m’apparus en toi comme une ombre lointaine,
Mais, horreur ! Des soirs, dans ta sévère fontaine,
J’ai de mon rêve épars connu la nudité!
–Stéphane Mallarmé, Hérodiade.
O mirror!
Cold water by weariness frozen in your frame,
How many times and during many hours, desolate
By dreams and seeking my memories which are
Like leaves beneath the deep hollow of your ice,
I saw myself in you like a distant shadow,
But, horror! Some evenings, in your harsh pool,
From my scattered dreams I have known nakedness!
– Stéphane Mallarmé, Hérodiade.
Lunar Almanac—Initiates a journey through magnetic spheres with its staccato layering of single-frame, long exposures of a multiplied moon. Shot in 16mm Ektachrome and hand processed, the film’s artisanal touches are imbued with nocturnal mystery.”
—Andréa Picard, TIFF Wavelengths, 2014
“Harnessing chance as much as film’s innate technical abilities, Lunar Almanac is an exquisite miniature of wonderment.”
—Ana Hušman, Johann Lurf and Andréa Picard, 25 FPS Festival, 2014
Lunar Almanac traces the observational points of the lunar cycle in a series of visual notations. Using single-frame and long-exposure photography, the unaltered, in-camera editing accumulates over 4000 layered field views of half-moons, new moons, and full moons. These lunar inscriptions flit across the screen with a frenetic energy, illuminating nocturnal reveries that pull at the tides as much as our dreams.
Morfología de un sueño (Morphology of a Dream)—A visual study of the rhythms of sleep cycles during the phase of rapid eye movement. Filmed in the forest in Colorado, Morphology em> explores an oneiric world that expresses place and memory in a fleeting succession of colors and sensations hovering between the “real” and abstract worlds.
ALTIPLANO—Filmed in the Andean Mountains in the traditional lands of the Atacameño, Aymará and Calchaquí-Diaguita in Northern Chile and Northwest Argentina, ALTIPLANO takes places within a geological universe of ancestral salt flats, volcanic deserts, and coloured lakes. Fusing earth with sky, day with night, heartbeat with mountain, and mineral with iridescent cloud, ALTIPLANO reveals a vibrating Ektachromelandscape in which a bright blue sun forever threatens to eclipse a blood-red moon.
Coupled with an entirely natural soundscape generated from infrasound recordings of volcanoes, geysers, Chilean blue whales and more, ALTIPLANO makes use of in-camera editing to create evocative visual rhythms through the ecstatic clash of color and form. Landscapes pulse and stutter, transformed through complex 16mm pixelation and superimposition techniques into spaces that exist in a multitude of times simultaneously. Located at the heart of a natural ecosystem threatened by a century of saltpeter and nitrate mining practices and recent geothermic exploitation, ALTIPLANO reveals an ancient land standing witness to all that is, was and will be.
Orchard—Much of the footage that comprises Orchard is of a 19th century ruin that included a walled orchard in and area known as Rostellen in southwest Ireland. It is set deep in the woods and the crumbling brick and mortar of the broken walls has become the anchor for the roots of slender trees, so uninhibited for all this time that they reach twenty feet in height and have thick roots that follow like slow lazy trickles of water and in other places branch and wind over the brickwork in an apparently intelligent arterial arrangement reminiscent of the human body. (Julie Murray)
By the Lake—A collage film made from Third World images and found sound from a 1940s radio show (“I Love a Mystery”), live recordings of an operation on a horse, and a 1970s church service, all taken out of context and reconstructed into new relationships and meanings. An Anglo woman’s interpretation of magic realism. br>
Born and raised in Chile, Malena Szlam is an artist-filmmaker based in Montréal. Working at the intersection of cinema, installation, and performance, her practice explores the relationship between the natural world, perception, and intuitive process. The poetics developed through her time-based works and in-camera edited films engage the material and affective dimensions of analogue film practice. She is a member of Double Negative, an artist collective dedicated to the production and exhibition of experimental cinema.
Szlam’s work has been exhibited in numerous festivals and museums, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Hong Kong Film Festival, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art. A recent retrospective of her work was presented at Los Angeles Filmforum and ATA – Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco. Szlam is recipient of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto’s (LIFT) Roberto Ariganello Artist Residency Award (2018).
“Malena Szlam’s films are meticulously assembled using a menagerie of techniques to physically alter the film elements resulting in dreamlike, collaged, flickering images leaving viewers with a sense of wonderment, displacement and an expanded sense of time. Szlam’s careful construction of her works serves to ground and guide viewers on a serene journey through these brief and powerful cinematic experiences.” – Becca Keating, Los Angeles Filmforum
https://vimeo.com/malenaszlam
Jennifer Reeves
CHRONIC
Presented on 16mm film
In partnership with Inclusive Arts London
TAP Centre for Creativity 203 Dundas St. London, ON
Friday June 15, 2018 7pm
LOMAA presents a selection of 16mm films by New York-based artist Jennifer Reeves. Featured is her 1996 film, CHRONIC, an elegiac and transcendent portrait confronting disorder, trauma, tragedy and loss. Both honest and unflinching, this semi-autobiographical portrayal of a young woman’s struggles and experiences with severe mental health issues is conveyed through an impressionistic style, collaging dream and memory while offering a profound message of resilience and catharsis through artistic expression. Accompanying the film are two other shorts by Reeves, exploring themes of queerness, longing and identity.
Content Warning: this film may be difficult and/or triggering for some audiences; subjects include trauma, self-harm and suicide.
Screening Program
MONSTERS IN THE CLOSET, 1993, 15 min, 16mm
CHRONIC, 1996, 38 min, 16mm
WE ARE GOING HOME, 1998, 10 min, 16mm
Notes From the Artist
MONSTERS IN THE CLOSET—Dirty little girl stories, girl gangs, and other tales from the closets of adolescence.
CHRONIC—An experimental narrative about a young woman who began mutilating herself as a girl to cope with a traumatic mid-western childhood. The lush optically-printed scenes take Gretchen’s point of view from her punk youth, a stay in a mental hospital, and her release into the big city. Scripted scenes are inter-spliced with documentary and found footage, illustrating the culture Gretchen lives in, her inner world and relationships from her birth to her final day.
WE ARE GOING HOME—Solarized, tinted, and optically-printed, this is a surreal portrait of desire, ghosts and pursuit of the sensual. Rhythmic color shifts in the emulsion bring life to the rural landscape, which seems to embody the terrain of the subconscious. Three women seek pleasure and the beyond in parallel universes, which never quite intersect. When one finds another, she is either buried in the sand or asleep under a tree.
WE ARE GOING HOME was shot at Philip Hoffman’s film retreat in rural Ontario. The film was made in the memory of Marian McMahon, an experimental filmmaker who died of cancer in the fall of 1996.
Jennifer Reeves (b. 1971, Sri Lanka) is a New York-based filmmaker working primarily on 16mm film. Her work has shown around the globe from microcinemas in the US to the Berlin, New York, London, Sundance, and Hong Kong Film Festivals, the Robert Flaherty Seminar, the Museum of Modern Art, and at various universities and arthouse cinemas in the US, Canada, and Europe. She has had multiple-program retrospectives at the San Francisco Cinematheque, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, Anthology Film Archives, the London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in the UK and a major 10-screening retrospective at the Era New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland in 2009.
Reeves has made 20+ film-based works dating back to 1990. Since 2003, she has collaborated with numerous composers, including Marc Ribot, Ikue Mori, Skúli Sverrisson, Elliott Sharp, Zeena Parkins, Anthony Burr and Eyvind Kang for a series of live multiple projection performances that have toured internationally.
She does her own writing, cinematography, editing, and sound design. Her subjective and personal films push the boundaries of the medium through optical-printing and direct-on-film techniques including hand-painting film frames. Reeves has explored themes of memory, mental health and recovery, feminism, sexuality, landscape, music, and politics in her films.
Reeves also teaches film part-time at The Cooper Union in NYC.
Sky Hopinka
Voices of the Land
Presented on Video
TAP Centre for Creativity 203 Dundas St. London, ON
Friday December 22, 2017 7pm
Screening Program
Kunįkága Remembers Red Banks, Kunįkága Remembers the Welcome Song, 2014, 9:50 min, Digital Video
Jáaji Approx., 2015, 7:50 min, Digital Video
Visions of an Island, 2016, 15 min, Digital Video
I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become, 2016, 12:50 min, Digital Video
Dislocation Blues, 2017, 17 min, Digital Video
Notes From the Artist
Kunįkága Remembers Red Banks, Kunįkága Remembers the Welcome Song—The video traverses the history and the memory of a place shared by both the Hočąk and the settler. Red Banks, a pre-contact Hočąk village site near present day Green Bay, WI was also the site of Jean Nicolet’s landing, who in 1634 was the first European in present day Wisconsin. Images and text are used to explore this space alongside my grandmother’s recollections. Each serve as representations of personal and shared memory, as well as representations of practices and processes of remembrance, from the Hočąk creation story, to Jean Nicolet’s landing, to the present.
Jáaji Approx.—Logging and approximating a relationship between audio recordings of my father and videos gathered of the landscapes we have both separately traversed. The initial distance between the logger and the recordings, of recollections and of songs, new and traditional, narrows while the images become an expanding semblance of filial affect. Jáaji is a near translation for directly addressing a father in the Hočak language.
Visions of an Island—An Unangam Tunuu elder describes cliffs and summits, drifting birds, and deserted shores. A group of students and teachers play and invent games revitalizing their language. A visitor wanders in a quixotic chronicling of earthly and supernal terrain. These visions offer glimpses of an island in the center of the Bering Sea.
I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become—An elegy to Diane Burns on the shapes of mortality, and being, and the forms the transcendent spirit takes while descending upon landscapes of life and death. A place for new mythologies to syncopate with deterritorialized movement and song, reifying old routes of reincarnation. Where resignation gives hope for another opportunity, another form, for a return to the vicissitudes of the living and all their refractions.
“I’m from Oklahoma I ain’t got no one to call my own.
If you will be my honey, I will be your sugar pie way hi ya way ya hi ya way ya hi yo”
-Diane Burns (1957-2006)
Dislocation Blues— An incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections from Standing Rock. Cleo Keahna recounts his experiences entering, being at, and leaving the camp and the difficulties and the reluctance in looking back with a clear and critical eye. Terry Running Wild describes what his camp is like, and what he hopes it will become.
Sky Hopinka is a Ho-Chunk Nation national and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. He was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, and Portland, Oregon and is currently based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His work centers around personal positions of homeland and landscape, designs of language and facets of culture contained within, and the play between the accessibility of the known and the unknowable. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
His work has played at various festivals including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images Festival, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, American Indian Film Festival, Sundance, Antimatter, Chicago Underground Film Festival, FLEXfest, Projections, and the LA Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial and the 2017 Whitney Biennial. He was awarded jury prizes at the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, the More with Less Award at the 2016 Images Festival, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, and 3rd Prize at the 2015 Media City Film Festival.
Nazli Di̇nçel
Note To Self: Psychosexual
Presented on 16mm film
Forest City Gallery 258 Richmond St London, ON
Saturday December 2, 2017 7pm
Screening Program
Reframe, 2009, 4 min, 16mm, Silent
Leafless, 2011, 8 min, 16mm, Silent
Her Silent Seaming, 2014, 10 min, 16mm, Super 16 Image-Sound, Colour
Sharing Orgasm: Communicating Your Sexual Responses, Found Film, 1977, 12 min, 16mm, Optical Sound, Colour
Solitary Acts #4, 2015, 8 min, 16mm, Optical Sound, Colour
Solitary Acts #5, 2015, 5 min, 16mm, Sound, Colour
Solitary Acts #6, 2015, 11 min, 16mm, Optical Sound, Colour
VOID (4.INABILITY), 2016, 4 min, 16mm, Silent, Colour
Shape of a Surface, 2017, 9 min, 16mm, Sound, Colour
Notes From the Program
An evening of visceral and provocative handmade films that explore bodies, acts of the solitary, text, language, visual information and personal exposure. Nazlı Dinçel’s work reflects on experiences of disruption. She records the body in context with arousal, immigration, dislocation and desire in juxtaposition with the medium’s material: texture, color and the passing of emulsion. Her use of text as image, language and sound attempts the failure of memory and her own displacement within a western society.
Notes From the Artist
Reframe—8 stereoscopic slides taken to the jk-104 optical printer, shot frame by frame, by hand. The slides were found at a thrift store, of Cuba between 1948 and 1950 taken by an army officer. To reclaim his touristic gaze, photographs are fragmented into new frames, reviving the bodies that may have perished by the revolution in 1952.
Leafless—Leafless is an expansion of collections, a hand processed love poem of textures about becoming familiar with a significant other’s body in reservation with its landscape.
Her Silent Seaming—A transcription of what I have been told during intimate experiences while separating from my husband. Sections consist of destroyed originals from Leafless (2011) and motifs of the “feminine”. These decorative objects are re-valued through a controlled act of cutting, with an allusion to synchronization. Direct sound of cuts and hand processing are composed of 26 frame shots. Un-synced, it reveals a hearing of past images, as an act of translation.
Solitary Acts #4—The filmmaker films herself masturbate the object of debate. She hears others claim her body, her habits: those in her conservative surroundings as a child. She learns how to read.
Solitary Acts #5—The filmmaker films herself practice kissing with a mirror. She recalls teenage memories of overconsumption, confusing oral fixations that are both sexual (kissing) and bodily (eating). She ends up eating the carrot she is masturbating with, and she feels a sense of cannibalism.
Solitary Acts #6—The filmmaker films her subject in a private act, complicating what could be considered a solitary act. This is a feminist critique of the Oedipal complex. It is not the male child’s desire to have sexual relations with the mother. It is the mother’s desire to be sexually attracted to child-like men. The filmmaker recounts an abortion she had in 2009. If she had the child, he would have turned six in 2015. The aborted child survives and becomes her lover.
VOID (4.INABILITY)—Inability is the first film in the series about human failure. The filmmaker destroys and re-creates a film she was unable to finish in 2013. Filmed at the Sutro Bath ruins in San Francisco and in final domestic spaces occupied with her husband. Film was destroyed in ocean water.
Shape of a Surface—The ground holds accounts of once pagan, then christian and now muslim ruins of the city built for Aphrodite. As she takes revenge on Narcissus, mirrors reveal what is seen and surfaces, limbs dismantle and marble turns flesh.
Born in Ankara, Turkey, Dinçel immigrated to the United Sates at the age of 17. Dinçel resides in Milwaukee, WI where she is currently building an artist run film laboratory. She obtained her MFA in filmmaking from UW-Milwaukee. Her works have been exhibited in numerous venues around the world including Tiger Shorts competition at IFFR, New York Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival and Dallas Contemporary. She recently won the Marian McMahon Akimbo award at the 2017 Images Festival with Untitled (2016) and was also awarded Best Experimental Film at the 2015 Chicago Underground Film Festival with Her Silent Seaming (2014).
In addition to exhibiting with institutions, Dinçel avidly self-distributes and tours with her work in micro-cinemas, artist run laboratories and alternative screening spaces in order to support and circulate handmade filmmaking to communities outside of institutions.
Ian Hugo
The Dangerous Telescope
Presented on archival 16mm film prints
John Labatt Visual Arts Centre – Western University London, ON
Friday November 3, 2017 7pm
Curator Talk
Presented at Artlab John Labatt Visual Arts Centre – Western University London, ON
Originally presented on Friday November 3, 2017 7pm
This program will be introduced by filmmaker and scholar Stephen Broomer, who is presently completing a manuscript on the films of Ian Hugo.
Screening Program
Ai-Ye, 1950, 19:50 min, 16mm
Bells of Atlantis, 1952, 9 min, 16mm
Melodic Inversion, 1958, 7:50 min, 16mm
Venice Etude #1, 1961, 7:50 min, 16mm
Through the Magiscope, 1969, 10 min, 16mm
Apertura, 1970, 6 min, 16mm
Aphrodisiac I, 1971, 6 min, 16mm
Aphrodisiac II, 1972, 5 min, 16mm
Levitation, 1972, 6 min, 16mm
Notes From the Program
Ai-Ye—At the same time as he found his style, he also found the subject of his work: the life of man, born out of the ocean, which goes through childhood, passes through the battles of manhood to age and death, and is resurrected by plunging back into the ocean. In a Nigerian dialect, “Ai-Ye” signifies “mankind,” and this is the title the black American singer Osborn Smith has given to the film for which he improvised the soundtrack while watching the images pass, blossoming into the black magic of a melodic lament, punctuated by the sound of the tom-tom and shreds of shouted African words. –Lotte Eisner.
Bells of Atlantis—Onto the surface of authentic nature—reflections of the sun’s rays oscillating on the pebbles below the water surface—he superimposes abstract compositions of great pure lines and color. Stylized waves—the synthesized vision of the engraver—submerge the carcass of a wrecked ship at the bottom of the sea while in superimposition there floats the blurred shape of the beautiful Anais Nin, Hugo’s wife and a poetess of an intuitive lucidity. –Lotte Eisner
…the first successful cinematic poem which is worthy of that name. –Abel Gance
…the lost continent in ourselves. –Marianne Moore.
Melodic Inversion—A visual melodic study of transposal…brilliantly diffused colors with fluid, water-like movements…refracted representation of the inner world. –Rosalind Kosoff
Melodic Inversion attempts to reproduce an inverse reality: the surfaces of the film seem to undulate, the outlines seem to double, to multiply as though they were seen through a shard of glass or a drop of water. They recall somehow those floating visions in a fog Man Ray created in the Twenties for his black and white film, L’Etoile de Mer. In Ian Hugo’s film, the color adds its whirl of nuances, its hazy sway, its gradations. And this filmmaker, who has moved from impressionism to a surrealism of the screen, provides us once again with his fascinating impressions which, by a few turns of a film negative, can suddenly burst forth in an extravagant fantasy. –Lotte Eisner
Venice Etude #1—What is the difference between Ian Hugo’s film Venice Etude One and other films of that much photographed city? A cliché image is one we no longer see, whose familiarity no longer stirs our senses. By a sequence of montages and superimpositions, Hugo shows us the essence of Venice composed of fluctuating textures, light-speckled rhythm, water-tinted moods, sea-lulling cadences. He reveals its seduction and its inner myth, the more subtle beauty under the surface which has stirred many a visitor. The legend of Venice’s wedding to the sea, which is re-enacted each year by the throwing of a wedding ring into the canal, could not be more accurately portrayed than in this film in which the sea seeks to engulf the city by immersion in reflections. The wedding to the sea presents also a danger of death as Hugo portrayed it by superimposing over the luminous images of a wedding the image of a burial. Hugo in a few intense moments gathers together the elements of Venice, glass, mirrors, gold, statues, cupolas, cathedrals, floating palaces and gondolas, in a marriage with water ever seeking to swallow the stones. Only by such poetic liberties, such telescoping of past and present could the dream-like quality of Venice be evoked, one not visible to the superficial eye. –Anais Nin, Film Culture
This film like all my films is made to be interpreted by each spectator with his own personal associations. A new attitude is demanded of the spectator, who must discard any idea that this film is about modern Venice. Whatever documentary material I have selected, whether modern or old, was used as raw material for transformation into something of poetic significance. –I.H
Through the Magiscope—Here is no literal story, but the dramatic progression of a multitude of women, seen through translucent and transparent sculptured glass and acrylic. –George Amberg, New York University.
Apertura 6—The myth of birth, ritualistic ordeals through a labyrinthian underworld…a ceremonial beauty for which the artist has powerful visual equivalents. –George Amberg, New York University.
Aphrodisiac I—A modern painter’s film…an abstract expression of human sensibilities. –I.H.
Aphrodisiac II—Another experiment pointing to how color film may eventually surpass painting as an art medium. –I.H.
Levitation— A Japanese mime explores Anais Nin’s statement: ‘The poet teaches levitation.’ –I.H.
Ian Hugo’s films, made between 1948 and 1979, betray a fascination with the mystic and exotic, the flow of energy, and like a distorting mirror, they give a vision of a world in flux. From his psychodramas, inspired in part by the writings of his wife, Anais Nin (Bells of Atlantis, Melodic Inversion), to his documentaries (Ay-Yi, Tropical Noah’s Ark), to his experiments with pure abstraction (Aphrodisiac I & II), Hugo’s films are an invitation to the most puzzling and difficult strains of American underground cinema.
Lynne Sachs & Gunvor Nelson.
House of Science: A Museum of False Facts
Presented on 16mm film
In partnership with TAP Centre for Creativity
TAP Centre for Creativity 203 Dundas St. London, ON
Wednesday October 18, 2017 7pm
Screening Program
House of Science: A Museum of False Facts, Lynne Sachs, 1991, USA, 30 min, 16mm, Colour
Schmeerguntz, Gunvor Nelson & Dorothy Wiley, USA, 1966, 15 min, 16mm, Black and White
Notes From the Program
House of Science: A Museum of False Facts— Offering a new feminized film form, this piece explores both art and science’s representation of women, combining home movies, personal remembrances, staged scenes and found footage into an intricate visual and aural college. A girl’s sometimes difficult coming of age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth. –SF Cinematheque
Throughout The House of Science an image of a woman, her brain revealed, is a leitmotif. It suggests that the mind/body split so characteristic of Western thought is particularly troubling for women, who may feel themselves moving between the territories of the film’s title -house, science, and museum, or private, public and idealized space – without wholly inhabiting any of them. This film explores society’s representation and conceptualization of women through home movies, personal reminiscences, staged scenes, found footage and voice. Sachs’ personal memories recall the sense of her body being divided, whether into sexual and functional territories, or ‘the body of the body’ and ‘the body of the mind.' –Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archive
Schmeerguntz—SCHMEERGUNTZ is one long raucous belch in the face of the American Home. A society which hides its animal functions beneath a shiny public surface deserves to have such films as SCHMEERGUNTZ shown everywhere – in every PTA, every Rotary Club, every club in the land. For it is brash enough, brazen enough and funny enough to purge the soul of every harried American married woman. – Ernest Callenbach, Film Quarterly
Lynne Sachs makes films, installations, performances and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project.
Gunvor Nelson studied at University College of Art, Craft and Design (1950-51) and at Beckmans College of Design (1952-53), both in Stockholm. Moved to the USA in 1953 and studied at Humboldt State College (1954-57), San Francisco Arts Institute (1957) and Mills College in Oakland (1957-58). She graduated with an MFA in painting. At the Institute she met Robert Nelson whom she married in 1958. Film debut with Schmeerguntz in 1965, co-made with Dorothy Wiley. Teaching positions at San Francisco State University 1969-70 and San Francisco Art Institute 1970-1992. Moved back to Sweden in 1993 and began creating new work in video and installation. Numerous major awards and grants, most recently the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s Grand Award (2006).
Philip Hoffman & Milada Kovačova
Passing Through / Torn Formations
Presented on 16mm film
Forest City Gallery 258 Richmond St. London, ON
Saturday August 19, 2017 7pm
Screening Program
Searching for My Mother’s Garden, Milada Kovačova, 1992, Canada, 13 min, 16mm
passing through / torn formations, Philip Hoffman, Canada, 1988, 43 min, 16mm
Notes From the Program
Screening of the works by Canadian filmmakers Milada Kovačova and Philip Hoffman, framing unique experiences from their own respective pilgrimages in rural Czechoslovakia to ancestral villages, recounting and reliving familial tales through a diarist’s lens.
Searching for My Mother’s Garden—SEARCHING FOR MY MOTHER’S GARDEN has been described as a whisper. Partially shot in the rural part of the former Czecho-Slovakia, this film investigates the phenomenon of no longer being rooted to a motherland yet being tied to one’s origins. This experimental film utilizes the womb as a pivotal point from which to delve into and weave together the Victorian medical diagnosis of Hysteria, with peasant women and Mother Mary’s stories. –M.K.
passing through/torn formations accomplishes a multi-faceted experience for the viewer. It is a poetic document of family, for instance – but Philip Hoffman’s editing throughout is true thought process, tracks visual theme as the mind tracks shape, makes melody of noise and words as the mind recalls sound. –Stan Brakhage
Milada Kovacova is a Toronto-based filmmaker and curator who spent her childhood both in North America and behind the Iron Curtain in Czecho-Slovakia. Beginning as a painter, Milada shifted to filmmaking in order to explore the possibilities of multi-layering in a time based medium. She holds several degrees including a BFA in Film Production from Concordia University. Her films have shown locally and internationally.
Born in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Philip Hoffman’s filmmaking began with his boyhood interest in photography. As semi-official historian of family life, Hoffman became intrigued by questions of reality in photography and later in cinema. After completing his formal education which includes a Diploma in Media Arts at Sheridan College and a Bachelor of Arts in Literature at Wilfrid Laurier University, Hoffman began working on his films, as well as teaching film, electronic and computer-based media in the Media Arts Program at Sheridan College. Currently Hoffman teaches in the Cinema and Media Arts Department at York University. A film artist of memory and association, Philip Hoffman has long been recognized as Canada’s pre-eminent diary filmmaker. He has been honored with more than a dozen retrospectives of his work and in 2016, received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. Since 1994, he has been the artistic director of the Independent Imaging Retreat (Film Farm), a 1 week workshop in artisanal filmmaking in Mount Forest, Ontario.
In Dreams
Featuring Barbara Sternberg, Phil Solomon, Amy Halpern, Bruce Baillie, Matthias Müller,
Charlotte Pryce, Sol Nagler & Alexandre Larose
1966-2011
In Dreams
Presented on 16mm film
In partnership with Winter Spectacular
80 Rectory St. London, ON
Wednesday December 14, 2016 8pm
Screening Program
Tung, Bruce Baillie, 1966, USA, 5 min, 16mm, Silent
Transitions, Barbara Sternberg, 1982, Canada, 11 min, 16mm
Sleepy Haven, Matthias Müller, 1993, Germany, 15 min, 16mm
Invocation, Amy Halpern, 1982, USA, 2 min, 16mm, Silent
The Exquisite Hour, Phil Solomon, 1989, USA, 14 min, 16mm
Curious Light, Charlotte Pryce, 2011, USA, 4 min, 16mm
J., Sol Nagler & Alexandre Larose, 2008, Canada, 7 min, 16mm
Notes From the Program
In partnership with Winter Spectacular, LOMAA presents ‘In Dreams’, an hour long film programme suffused with moving images of otherworldly visions, navigating through ambiguous narratives of fever-dream realities and subconscious states of being.
Tung—One of Bruce Baillie’s sensuous tone poems, TUNG is a portrait of a friend; sandy skin and flaxen hair in the early-morning light. – Canyon Cinema.
Transitions—Transitions is a film of inner life and speaks of time, reality, power. It depicts the disquieting sensations of being between – between falling asleep and being awake, between here and there, between being and non-being. Anxiety, a state of depression. The central image is of a woman on a bed over which layers of images and sounds (voices) are superimposed. – B.S.
Sleepy Haven—Accompanied by 19th century tales of the sea, Matthias Müller drowns the bodies of young sailors in Sleepy Haven’s blue ocean of lost love and desire. – Cordelia Swan
Invocation—Hands conjure up a form in space. The illusion is made wholly of lighting and dress – no optical effects. Note: this film is presented deliberately without on-screen titles, and is meant to be a complete bright object in the dark. – A.H.
The Exquisite Hour—Partly a lullaby for the dying, partly a lament at the dusk of cinema. Based on the song by Reynaldo Hahn and Paul Verlaine. – P.S.
Curious Light—A manuscript illuminated: illustrations retreat into the fiber of the page; a fleeting light dissolves into the emulsion of the film: an elusive story is revisited. This film is entirely hand-processed. – C.P
J.—Found memories decayed by the shock patterns of childhood trauma. This film is made mostly with footage found in the bin of an orphanage. The white progressively dissolves within a darkness more and more dense. Faces progressively dissolve within one another. – S.N.
Deborah Stratman
O’er The Land
Presented on 16mm film
Good Sport 256 Richmond St. London, ON
Wednesday November 16, 2016 6pm
Screening Program
O’er The Land, 2009, USA, 52 min, 16mm
Synopsis
A meditation on the milieu of elevated threat addressing national identity, gun culture, wilderness, consumption, patriotism and the possibility of personal transcendence. Of particular interest are the ways Americans have come to understand freedom and the increasingly technological reiterations of manifest destiny.
While channeling our national psyche, the film is interrupted by the story of Col. William Rankin who in 1959, was forced to eject from his F8U fighter jet at 48,000 feet without a pressure suit, only to get trapped for 45 minutes in the up and down drafts of a massive thunderstorm. Remarkably, he survived. Rankin’s story represents a non-material, metaphysical kind of freedom. He was vomited up by his own jet, that American icon of progress and strength, but violent purging does not necessarily lead to reassessment or redirection.
This film is concerned with the sudden, simple, thorough ways that events can separate us from the system of things, and place us in a kind of limbo. Like when we fall. Or cross a border. Or get shot. Or saved. The film forces together culturally acceptable icons of heroic national tradition with the suggestion of unacceptable historical consequences, so that seemingly benign locations become zones of moral angst. — Deborah Stratman
O’er The Land
Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker interested in landscapes and systems. Much of her work points to the relationships between physical environments and human struggles for power and control that play out on the land. Recent projects have addressed freedom, expansionism, surveillance, sonic warfare, public speech, ghosts, sinkholes, levitation, propagation, orthoptera, raptors, comets and faith. She has exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA NY, Centre Pompidou, Hammer Museum, Mercer Union, Witte de With, the Whitney Biennial and festivals including Sundance, Viennale, CPH/DOX, Oberhausen, Ann Arbor, Full Frame, Rotterdam and Berlinale. Stratman is the recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim and USA Collins fellowships, a Creative Capital grant and an Alpert Award. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.
Duo OJOBOCA
Horrorism for Beginners, Beginners for Horrorism
Presented on 16mm film and performance for modified projectors
207 King St. London, ON
Wednesday September 28, 2016 7pm
Screening Program
GENTE PERRA, 2014, 25 min, 16mm, Sound, Colour/Black and White
WOLKENSCHATTEN, 2014, 17 min, 16mm, Sound, Colour
NOW I WANT TO LAUGH, 2014, 15 min, 16mm, Sound, Colour
APOCALYPSE FOR YOU, 2014, 20 min, 16mm, Sound, Colour
Notes From the Program
On this occasion OJOBOCA offers its introductory film massage. With our purpose-made device our trained film masseuses will help you release your other self. Working directly on the invisible flesh, in four distinct movements, the sickness of light will be revealed. A word of caution: This is a device that does not release pressure. This is a device that does not soothe, that does not relieve pain. This is a device that does not apply gentle massage. This is a device that does not ameliorate noise. This is a device that does not remember. This is a device that does not learn. This is a device that is always beginning, that does not know how to end. This device is like a sentient ocean whose behavior is beyond understanding.
Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy are filmmakers living and working in Berlin. Since 2010 they have been working together under the moniker OJOBOCA. Together they practice ‘Horrorism’, a simulated method of inner and outer transformation. Their work encompasses films, performances, installations and workshops. They have presented their work internationally in a wide variety of venues to a wide variety of audiences. They are currently members of the artist-run film lab LaborBerlin.
Paul Clipson
A Wilderness of Mirrors
Presented on 16mm film
Hosted In Partnership with Forest City Gallery. Forest City Gallery 258 Richmond St. London, ON
Wednesday August 31, 2016 7pm
Screening Program
SPHINX ON THE SEINE, 2009, 7:50 min, 16mm-Originally shot on Super 8mm, Colour/Black and White, Music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
UNION, 2011, 14:50 min, 16mm-Originally shot on Super 8mm, Colour/Black and White, Music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
ANOTHER VOID, 2012, 11 min, 16mm-Originally shot on Super 8mm, Colour, Music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
LIQUID CASKET/WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS, 2014, 9:50 min, 16mm, Colour/Black and White, Music by Lawrence English
MADE OF AIR, 2014, 11:50 min, 16mm, Colour/Black and White, Music by Grouper
Notes From the Artist
LOMAA is pleased to present a selection of stunning works by San Francisco-based filmmaker Paul Clipson, displaying his unique vision to transform the everyday into phantasmagoric celluloid landscapes. Hosted in partnership with Forest City Gallery.
SPHINX ON THE SEINE—A series of brief, but enigmatic images taken from around the world. Images suggesting the first moments of dream-sleep, following one after the other, but geographically spanning thousands of miles and large passages of time between each cut.
UNION—An exploration of movement, woven into layers of time, and photographed in natural and nocturnal urban spaces, ambiguous within a confluence of lights, colors and darkness. Filmed in the parks of San Francisco.
ANOTHER VOID— Orpheus meets the bird with the crystal plumage. Filmed at night in San Francisco, this study of the eye in vertiginous color and darkness, broadens and intensifies an exploration into in-camera processes of handheld, small gauge filmmaking, and the rhythmic and graphic relationships of multilayered imagery to music-making and dreams.
LIQUID CASKET/WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS— A restless, traveling consciousness flies across lands vast and small, taking note of possible futures that hint at humankind’s folly of expansion and alienation.
Filmed in London, Leeds, Glasgow and Scotland
MADE OF AIR— A sad and fearful lament for a drowned world.
Filmed in London, Zurich, San Francisco, Berkeley and Napa.
Paul Clipson is a San Francisco-based filmmaker who often collaborates with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. His Super 8 and 16mm films aim to bring to light subconscious visual preoccupations that reveal themselves while working in a stream of consciousness manner, combining densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments, in a process that encourages unplanned-for results, responding to and conversing with the temporal qualities of musical composition and live performance.
He has completed dozens of short films since the early 2000’s and his work has screened around the world in festivals and at sound & film events such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Film Festival and the Cinémathèque Française. Clipson has recently been touring his feature-length sound/16mm collaboration HYPNOSIS DISPLAY internationally with Liz Harris (Grouper).
FINE PAIN
Featuring Christina Battle, Daïchi Saïto, Carl Brown
1999-2012
FINE PAIN
Presented on 16mm film
207 King St. London, ON
Friday July 22, 2016 7pm
Screening Program
buffalo lifts, Christina Battle, 2004, 3 min, 16mm, Silent
Never a Foot Too Far, Even, Daïchi Saïto, 2012, 14 min, Dual-16mm, Sound
Fine Pain, Carl Brown, 1999, 58 min, Dual-16mm, Sound
Notes From the Program
LOMAA presents a selection of 16mm films by Canadian artists exploring the extreme possibilities of the medium through intense image manipulation, at times to the point of near abstraction. Emulsions are boiled and battered, toned and tinted, optically printed and handprocessed in alternative photochemical concoctions, combining multiple projections for a wildly immersive experience that expands the artists’ unique visual expressions.
buffalo lifts—A yellow and black and green daydream of the buffalo herd as it travels across a stretch of broken emulsion. The image of the buffalo was produced by boiling the original pictures and resettling them onto a new length of film (a process called “emulsion lifting,” hence the title). – Mike Hoolboom, 2007
Never a Foot Too Far, Even—Appropriating a brief fragment from an old Kung Fu movie, Never a Foot Too Far, Even is an action movie without action. The film focuses on an obscure figure finding himself in a forest path, caught between perpetual motion and stasis. The painterly images fluctuate in the complex shifting of colour and texture, phasing in and out through a polymetric structure. It is a perceptual journey without destination in the turning sphere of ever-changing image and sound, whose beginning and end move in parallel towards a fleeting point of convergence. With original sound composition by Malcolm Goldstein. – Daïchi Saïto, 2012
Fine Pain—This two-screen dual projector film extends Brown’s use of chemically tortured celluloid to the breaking point. A collaboration with his long-time sound colleague John Kamevaar, Fine Pain is an extended dialogue between image and sound – like a prolonged riff of free jazz between two masters. The discordant tensions of this film will keep you on the very edge of your seat, astonish you with the mesmerizing range of colour and abstraction and the over-modulated sound vibrations. – Pleasure Dome program notes, Toronto, March 2000.
Initially from Edmonton (AB), Christina Battle is currently based in London (ON). She has a B.Sc. with specialization in Environmental Biology from the University of Alberta, a certificate in Film Studies from Ryerson University and a MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her film, video and installation works are often inspired by the role of official and non-official archives, our notions of evidence and explore themes of history and counter-memory, political mythology and environmental catastrophe. She has exhibited internationally in festivals and galleries and is a contributing editor to INCITE Journal of Experimental Media and a co-conspirator of the media arts exhibition series ‘Nothing To See Here’.
Originally from Japan, Daïchi Saïto is a filmmaker working principally on Super-8, 16mm and 35mm formats. After studying philosophy in the US and Hindi and Sanskrit in India, he turned to filmmaking in Montreal, where he currently resides. He is co-founder of the Double Negative Collective, a Montreal-based artist filmmaking group dedicated to the exhibition and production of experimental cinema. His films have been widely exhibited in major film festivals, museums, galleries and cinematheques worldwide.
Carl E. Brown (b.Toronto, 1959) is a canadian filmmaker, photographer and writer. After two years at the University of Toronto where he studied philosophy and psychology, he decided to study filmmaking, completed in 1982 at Sheridan College. He’s created nearly twenty films which have been screened in many festivals in America, Europe and Asia, and were part of the retrospective ‘Experience chromatiques le cinema contemporain’ at the Louvre in 1995.
Frenkel Defects III
Curated by Kevin Rice
Presented on 16mm film
207 King St. London, ON
Wednesday October 7, 2015 7pm
Film selection and programming by Mariya Nikiforova (Balagan Films) and Kevin Rice (Process Reversal)
Screening Program
Konrad & Kurfurst, Esther Urlus, 2014, Netherlands, 7 min, 16mm
WAKE, Eric Stewart, 2014, USA, 8 min, 16mm, Silent
In the Traveler’s Heart, DISTRUKTUR, 2013, Lithuania/Germany/Brazil, 20 min, 16mm
Aula Magna, Andrés Denegri, 2013, Argentina, 10 min, 16mm
Split Film 100110, Dražen Zanchi, 2010, Croatia/France, 30 min, 16mm
Notes From the Program
LOMAA is pleased to welcome Kevin Rice of the Colorado-based nonprofit organization, Process Reversal, to present the third installment of its unique traveling film series — Frenkel Defects.
Konrad & Kurfurst—A fictional re-enactment of a 5 minutes happening that took place during the Olympic games in Berlin 1936. Made on home brew emulsion and color toned with the helping hand of technical publications from early cinema and photographic experiments. The home brew emulsion as fragile metaphor for the heroism of Konrad and his horse Kurfurst. Falling from his horse he became a national hero but overtaken by history, an anti-hero.
WAKE—Wake is a dirge in celluloid. It is a celebration of my father’s life, a meditation on his body and a visual record of mourning. When my father died, there was never a chance to see his body after life had left it. This film was made by placing his ashes directly on 35mm film in a dark room and moving the film a frame at a time. What we see in this process of photograming is not the object in the photographic sense, but instead a representation of the space surrounding an object. The photogram is a shadow charting the distance between things
In the Traveler’s Heart—The winter reigns as the Traveler crosses by feet an ancient landscape. In this place there’s also another presence, someone who’s very similar to the Traveler. Does the Traveler realise this figure that cohabits the same space as him? Is the other a guardian angel or a devil?
Aula Magna—A structural farewell poem made for a beloved place. The images were shot frame by frame over the course of a year, in order to portray the author’s home main room through the variation of the light coming from a window. The sound, by Pablo Denegri, was made by mixing and processing, in real time, direct recordings made in the same space.
Split Film 10011—Boats are entering in the Split harbor. Each sequence is a maneuver: slow and continuous. Nevertheless, boats and their movements become more and more difficult to recognize because the image is drawn in fluctuations of its physical elements. Textures of bulky light layers and grainy grey noises are confounded with the soundtrack. The latter is articulated around the touch, i.e. local and non-propagating formations grafted on thick resonant and tonal substrate.
Notes From the Series
Frenkel Defects is a recurring series that aims to explore what it means to work in — and exhibit on — photochemical film today, by examining works from artists operating specifically in this practice.
Often, this involves getting their hands dirty at every stage of the process: from optical effects to photo-processing, editing and contact printing, optical sound recording, and even the creation of the photosensitive emulsion itself… As a result (and as suggested by the series’ title), creative aberrations make their way into the standard photochemical process, giving birth to a new, textural aesthetic that plays out on the surface of the film strip. More than ever before, film reminds us of its physicality, giving a new sense to Andrei Tarkovsky’s idea of “sculpting in time.”
For this year’s edition, a 75-minute program of rare and diverse works, nearly all of which originate outside North America, will be presented in their intended 16mm format. Almost all of these films were produced with the help of “artist-run film labs” — collectively-run organizations dedicated to facilitating artists’ working in photochemical film — including LaborBerlin (Berlin), L’Abominable (Paris) and Filmwerkplaats (Rotterdam).
While these and other organizations have been active in Europe for almost two decades, the trend is just beginning to emerge in North America, with experimental laboratories springing up in Boston, Oakland, Denver, New York, Vancouver, Montreal and elsewhere. Process Reversal, having secured abundant donations of lab equipment, hopes to continue assisting in the growth of these spaces by providing communities with the critical tools, knowledge and resources necessary to ensure the viability of the medium for all.
Frédéric Back
3
Presented on 16mm film
Mantis Arts & Eco Festival 689 Griffith St. London, ON
Wednesday August 8, 2015 10am- 6pm
Screening Program
All Nothing, 1978, 11 min, 16mm
Crac!, 1981, 15 min, 16mm
The Man Who Planted Trees, 1987, 30 min, 16mm
Notes From the Artist
All Nothing—The film All Nothing is an allegory portraying humankind’s desire to appropriate all of nature’s beauty and resources. For too long, we have held the mistaken belief that the world was created entirely for our benefit. As countless plant and animal species become extinct, our generous planet has little left to offer: clean water and lush forests are becoming increasingly rare. The film ends, however, on a positive note: Frédéric Back cherishes the hope that future generations will rediscover the joy of sharing and the importance of living in harmony with nature. – fredericback.com
Crac!—Crac! traces the rapid transformation of Quebec society through the story of a rocking chair. In this charming tale tinged with nostalgia, Frédéric Back takes us back to rich traditions swept aside by the relentless forces of progress and urbanization. This Oscar winning animation is Back’s tribute to Quebec, his adoptive home, and to the culture of his wife and children. – fredericback.com
The Man Who Planted Trees—The Man Who Planted Trees tells the tale of the of Elzéard Bouffier, a Provençal shepherd who patiently reforests a barren piece of land in rural France in the early part of the 20th century. The narrator’s fascination with the man and his passion leads him to return time and again to the mountains, where he sees the windswept, forsaken landscape gradually transformed: springs, cultivated fields and thriving villages are regenerated by the incredible forest that is the work of one stubborn and uncommonly selfless man. Narrated by Christopher Plummer, this film received the 1988 Academy Award for best animated short.
Notes From the Series
The 2015 edition of the Mantis Arts & Eco Festival will soon be here and LOMAA will be taking part!
You can find us inside the chalet where you’ll be able to enjoy a screening of three acclaimed short animated works by the beloved Canadian artist and filmmaker Frédéric Back (1924-2013).
Back’s passion and dedication to environmental preservation is evident through themes concerning man’s relation to nature, both in its destruction and eventual renewal, displaying the importance for communities to live in harmony with the land. All three films will appeal to both adults and young folk alike.
Presented on 16mm film. The screening will run about 55 minutes in length and it will be shown at 11am, 1pm, and 3pm.
Altering Perceptions
Featuring Louise Bourque, Kelly Egan, Eve Gordon & Sam Hamilton,
Alexandre Larose, Mark Loeser, Tomonari Nishikawa, John Price, Daïchi Saïto,
Robert Schaller, Mark Street and Peter Tscherkassky.
1996-2012
Altering Perceptions
Presented on 35mm film
Hyland Cinema 240 Warncliffe Rd S London, ON
Wednesday March 18, 2015 9pm
Altering Perceptions, a programme of contemporary experimental film works by various Canadian and international artists, uniquely exploring the boundaries and possibilities of the photo-chemical medium.
Screening Program
brouillard, Alexandre Larose, 2012, Canada, 5 min, 35mm, Silent
Guiding Fictions, Mark Street, 2002, USA, 5 min, 35mm
Party #4, John Price, 2006, Canada, 3 min, 35mm, Silent
Sugar Beach, Mark Loeser, 2011, Canada, 4 min, 35mm, Silent
16-18-4, Tomonari Nishikawa, 2008, Japan, 2.5 min, 35mm, Silent
c: won eyed jail, Kelly Egan, 2005, Canada, 5 min, 35mm
L’Arrivée, Peter Tscherkassky, 1998, Austria, 2 min, 35mm
Intermittent Movement, John Price, 2006, Canada, 7 min, 35mm, Silent
Going Back Home, Louise Bourque, Canada, 1 min, 35mm
Triptych, Robert Schaller, 1996, USA, 3 min, 35mm, Silent
Blue Tide, Black Water, Eve Gordon & Sam Hamilton, 2008, New Zealand, 9 min, 35mm
Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis, Daïchi Saïto, 2009, Canada, 10 min, 35mm
VILLE MARIE, Alexandre Larose, 2009, Canada, 12 min, 35mm
Notes From the Artists
brouillard— A path that extends from my family’s backyard into Lac Saint-Charles in Quebec City, condensed in multiple temporal layers – A.L.
Guiding Fictions—Images shot on walks in the forest with an old, twisted 35mm camera. The film trudged through the camera, on a last mission. I buried the film in the front yard. Let the dirt on the film kiss the dirt in the ground. Maryland humidity wore it down to its wisps. Much later, sound recorded in Brooklyn. Teenage skateboarders smoking cigarettes and jumping off the steps at my local subway entrance. A Russian festival in the park, much singing and speechmaking, all incomprehensible to me. The schism between the country and city, so clear at last. – M.S.
Party #4—A special one for my first son… his last as a lone ranger (only child). Shot on double-perforation B&W 16mm, the film ran through the camera twice and doubled the consumption of ice cream and cake. – J.P.
Sugar Beach—Sugar Beach is one in an ongoing series of fixed-camera, multiple-exposure compositions on a single roll of film – M.L.
16-18-4—This film was shot by a still camera with 16 lenses, which takes a series of 16 pictures within 1.5 seconds, fitting onto 2 normal frame areas. The film shows scenes of the event at Tokyo Race- course, when it was holding the biggest race of the year, Japanese Derby (Tokyo Yushun). The excitement of each race lasts about 2 minutes and 30 seconds. – T.N
c: won eyed jail—This film explores experimental narrative and structural forms through the use of traditional “women’s work.” Narratives are told through the symbolic patterning in quiltmaking practices. I wanted to collect and re-present images in order to create a formal narrative guided by structural concerns. I decided to use only found film for this project, incorporating both 35mm still negatives and 35mm motion picture. Although 35mm still photography film and 35mm motion picture film are made from the same stock, there are huge differences in the size of the frame and the intended directionality of the filmstrip. Playing a print consisting of still picture negatives through a motion picture projector has a dramatic effect on the perception of the image. The result is almost like a collage unfolding and accumulating in real time before your very eyes. – K.E.
L’Arrivée—L’Arrivée is Tscherkassky’s second hommage to the Lumiére brothers. First you see the arrival of the film itself, which shows the arrival of a train at a station. But that train collides with a second train, causing a violent crash, which leads us to an unexpected third arrival, the arrival of a beautiful woman – the happy-end.
Intermittent Movement—Disparate moments…. some shot on 16, some on 35, some hand cranked, some not, some spherical, some anamorphic, some black & white, some color, some grainy, some not, some solarized, some not, all processed by hand. The film was commissioned by Niagara Custom Labs for their “Short & Wide” 35mm omnibus project. – J.P.
Going Back Home—Turmoil of unsheltered childhood: the dwelling as self. – L.B.
Triptych—An excursion into the world of hand-made film emulsion and an exposition of some formal possibilities of using three images side by side. A dancer’s brief gesture is treated, repeated, and juxtaposed, becoming the fabric of a visual construction that is less about representation than rhythm and time. Originally created to be projected on three interlocked 16mm projectors. – R.S.
Blue Tide, Black Water—Through macro-photography,BLUE TIDE, BLACK WATER explores the chemical reactions of different liquids to heat. Materials such as paint, India ink, honey and wax are observed boiling and flowering in extreme close up. The resulting microcosm seems a rich primordial soup.
Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis—Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis is Saïto’s second collaboration with musician Malcolm Goldstein, who composed and performed the original structured improvisation score for the film. The film explores familiar landscape imagery Saïto and Goldstein share in their neighbourhood at the foot of Mount-Royal Park in Montréal. Using images of maple trees in the park as the main visual motif, Saïto creates a film in which the formations of the trees and their subtle interrelation with the space around them act as an agent to transform viewer’s sensorial perception. Richly colored and entirely hand-processed, Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis is a poem of vision and sound that seeks perceptual insight and revelation through a syntactical structure based on patterns, variations and repetition.
VILLE MARIE—An optically printed dream of falling, both gorgeous and ominous. The body in mid-air. A canyon of high-rise buildings. – A.L.
Lawrence Brose
All That Glitters: De Profundis
Presented on 16mm film
Forest City Gallery 258 Richmond St. London, ON
Saturday November 15, 2014 7:15pm
Content Warning: Explicit imagery; not suitable for all audiences
Introduction by Scott Miller Berry
Forest City Gallery 258 Richmond St. London, ON
Originally presented on Saturday November 15, 2014 6:30pm
Screening Program
De Profundis, 1997, USA, 65 min, 16mm
Notes From the Program
Scott Miller Berry, of Images Festival (Toronto), will be introducing Lawrence Brose’s experimental film De Profundis.
Buffalo-based filmmaker, curator and arts advocate Lawrence Brose’s landmark De Profundis is a 65-minute meditation on gay desire based on Oscar Wilde’s infamous prison letter presented via lush hand-processed imagery. The film utilizes vintage erotica, home movies, radical faerie gatherings, queer pagan rituals and drag shows alongside a piano score by Frederic Rzewski which incorporates Wilde’s text as a means of exploring assimilation and sexuality through hand painted frames and manipulation. The result is an exploding utopia of colour and a layered but equally privileged soundscape.
Recently the film has come under scrutiny by the US Department of Homeland Security and the US Justice Department as Brose now faces serious charges for allegedly possessing illicit digital images. One hundred of the listed images in the charges are film frames from De Profundis. The fact that he is under indictment for using images made by others to examine the taboos that such laws are meant to prevent is as overreaching as it is disturbing. This prosecution should be viewed as a challenge to artistic freedom, brought by a U.S. Attorney’s office that previously unsuccessfully prosecuted Critical Art Ensemble founder Steve Kurtz.
For more information about Brose’s indictment or to donate to his legal defense fund, please visit
Lawrence Brose Defence Fund
Lawrence Brose is an experimental film artist and has created over thirty films since 1983. His films have been shown at international film festivals, museums, art galleries, and cinematheques in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America. In 1989 he began a series of film collaborations with contemporary composers to explore the relationship between the moving image and music.
Frenkel Defects I
Curated by Kevin Rice
Presented on 16mm film
207 King St. London, ON
Saturday September 14, 2013 8pm
Introduction by Curator Kevin Rice
207 King St. London, ON
Originally presented on Saturday September 14, 2013 8pm
Screening Program
Sucia, Robert Schaller, 5 min, Pinhole Camera, Silent, Black and White
Salt, Martha Jurksaitis, 8 min, 16mm, Tungsten
I Swim Now, Sarah Biagini, 8:50 min, 16mm, Optical Sound, Black and White
Terminus for You, Nicolas Rey, 10 min, 16mm, Optical Sound, Black and White
At Hand, Andrew Busti, 9 min, 16mm, Optical Sound, Black and White
Cornmother, Taylor Dunne, 6 min, Super 8 mm, Silent, Tungsten
Perceptual Subjectivity, Philippe Leonard, 6 min, 16mm, Optical Sound, Black and White
Peach, Martha Jurksaitis, 11:50 min, 16mm, Tungsten
Sanctuary, Kevin Rice, 3 min, 16mm, Silent, Tungsten
Notes From the Program
Sucia—(mostly) shot with my handmade pinhole camera, hand-processed 7363, and part of it (the part shot in a Bolex) manipulated using a homemade self-programmed machine…
Salt—A vision of women playing in the sea at Saltburn in North Yorkshire becomes a celebration of the material nature of film. The silver salts in film that react to light also react to the metallic salts in film toners, and a multi-coloured seascape emerges from the salt of the sea. Filmed on a part of the beach that was once notorious for shipwrecks, Salt is a love letter to film and to the churning, crashing, passionate sea. The opening symbol is the alchemical symbol for salt.
I Swim Now—I Swim Now challenges the visual intelligibility of landscape aesthetics by imagining the experiences of one Violet Jessop, a stewardess on board all three sister ships of the White Star Line – the Olympic, the Titanic, and the Britannic – while each suffered varying degrees of collision and wreckage at sea. I Swim Now evokes the intense brutality and repetition of Violet’s unique physical interactions with nature through an expansive accumulation of optical techniques and manipulations.
Terminus for You—Terminus for you, by Nicolas Rey, takes us on a strange journey. That of passengers in the Paris metro, moving from one platform to another, from one line to another and from one destination to the next. What do we actually see? Geometric shapes come and go. The faces of people come into view and then flit away. Glimpses of words, titles torn from posters, are interspersed between these fleeting encounters; love, solitude, couples, etc… In this short visual essay on the borderline between the documentary and the avant-garde film, Nicolas Rey freely combines painting, photography and cinema and reveals a passion for reality and a love of humanity. – Bertrand Bacqué –Visions du Réel (Nyon) Catalog 1997
At Hand—An exorcism, an exploration, and an unveiling. A subconscious landscape of a withering relationship.
Cornmother—A single cartridge of Super 8 captures my mothers last visit to her garden. Her body is seen slowly dissolving towards illumination, while her image is forever immortalized in light and silver. Poem borrowed from the Wabanaki creation myth of the first woman, The Corn and Tobacco Mother.
Perceptual Subjectivity—Ideas take shape in a kind of cerebral magma where the referents are assigned to parcels of experience from which intelligible elements are formed. Perceptual Subjectivity is an essay on the structural formation of thoughts.
Peach—Synaesthesia is an experience of cross-modal sensuality – ‘hearing pink’, ‘seeing green’, tasting shapes or feeling sounds. I think we are all latently synaesthetic, and that a cinematic work has the capacity to bring about a synaesthetic experience if it is made in a personal, artisanal and ethical way, when the filmmaker and the filmed material sensually respond to one another. ‘Peach’ is an attempt at making a piece of ‘Synaesthetic Cinema.
Notes From the Series
Frenkel Defects is an intermittent, mobile film program focusing on film works from among artist run film labs and film collectives.
This particular edition is incorporated of 16mm works from the Process Reversal Collective as well as select films from L’Abominable (Paris, FR), Double Negative Collective (Montreal, PQ), Cherry Kino (Leeds, UK) and The Handmade Film Institute (Boulder, CO).