The above photo shows Louise Curham from the TLC making a cracking point at the plenary discussion session at the end of the Disappearing Video Conference. To her right are Lyndal Jones, Andrew Frost, Stephen Jones and Danni Zuvela.

It was a really interesting day. Here’s my round-up of a few random thoughts:

Stephen Jones is a walking encyclopedia. The man cannot be contained within a 1/2 hour presentation. Next time he needs to be given an hour, with a secret half hour snuck in at the end which he doesn’t know about, to contain his rich and fruity overspill.

Danni Zuvela gave a fantastic talk about “forgetting” as an Aussie characteristic that goes waaaay back. So it’s no surprise that our avant-garde ephemeral art histories blow away. They’ve got nothing to plant themselves into.

Jon Conomos. Man, this guy is great. He told an anecdote about listening to a lecture by Buckminster Fuller, back in the 1960s(?). Apparently, Fuller’s talk was like an incredible collage of references, quotes and images, rambling in all directions for 3 hours. It blew Conomos’ mind. Likewise, Conomos seems to have borrowed this strategy of bricolage-as-lecture format, and I was awash with the pleasure of his tales. When you carry so much memory in your body, it seems almost impossible to say anything without it being a quote. Didn’t Umberto Eco say something like that?

Andrew Frost gave a provocative forecast for what video art will look like in the future. Very futuristic. You know, screens scrunched up like handkerchiefs in your pocket, and micro-chips embedded in brains and all that. Probably will come true though. I hope he posts his paper online.

For me, Louise Curham’s talk was a highlight, and I’m not just saying that because she is my good colleague here at the TLC. She managed to bridge the fields of video art and archiving, the materiality of the medium and its cultural significance. She spoke the with energy and vigour of someone to whom this stuff really matters, as a film making artist and professional archivist.

I’m trying to get hold of the audio for Louise’s talk from the MCA to post online here – hopefully soon.

Oh, and the Disappearing Video screening was great too. I sat across the aisle from Albie Thoms and David Perry…that was something of an honour for this young whippersnapper. My faves were Peter Kennedy’s Idea Demonstrations – they were very medium-specific – interacting with the ghosting effects of 1970s cathode ray tubes. Of course, CRTs don’t ghost like that anymore. What sense does this work have now? How could it meaningfully be migrated to newer forms of presentation?

And also I loved “Built in Ghosts Inside Television” (I think that was the one) it was a cut-n-paste from TV and advertising, as taped from live to air telly in the early 1980s. It was striking because it was all about the mainstream fear of television, that “social scourge”. Almost 20 years later, it’s parody-effect seems almost unnecessary – television is no longer the big boogy-man – it’s been replaced by the internet…
-Lucas

Screening Details:
Loose Space and Circular Time
Steven Ball’s Mini-Retrospective
7:30pm, Friday 25th July 2008
SYDNEY
302 Cleveland St Surry Hills NSW
—Entry by gold coin donation—

UK film and video veteran Steven Ball will be in Sydney briefly next week. The Teaching and Learning Cinema is delighted to be presenting an retrospective of his film and video work produced during the last twenty years.

Lucas from the TLC first met Steven in 2003 during an Expanded Cinema research trip to London. Steven is a research fellow at the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, and he helped dig through the archives to find documentation of film performances from the 1970s in London.

As it turns out, Steven actually spent a several years in Melbourne from the late 1980s, shooting and organising screening programmes with the Melbourne super 8 group. In London, he is one of the organisers of cogcollective, a group which curates grassroots screenings of experimental film and video work.

Steven has prepared a special programme for Sydney. You can view the whole programme in detail here.

We’re very pleased to see that the programme includes Super 8 films shot in Australia, some of which he has re-edited recently, drawing together fragments of small-gauge footage in a memory-montage landscape film: The Ground, The Sky and the Island (2008). Our screening event will be the world-premiere of this work!

Between the longer pieces, Steven’s programme is peppered with his “videoblog” experimental sketches from the series Direct Language.

On his visit to Sydney, Steven looks forward to engaging with local film and video makers, and he will be happy to discuss his participation in the many film and activist groups which he’s been involved in for many years.

Reel Rescues at the State Library of Queensland

Reel Rescues is an exhibition of home movies, silent films and original newsreels, acting as a time capsule of Queensland life from the 1920s through to the 1970s in moving image form. The show is co-curated by OtherFilm’s Sally Golding (along with Bryony Nainby) and features Golding’s conservation work, with detailed studies of beautifully deteriorated film frames. Reel Rescues also features contemporary film works dealing the broader notion of ‘the archive’ by artists Jim Knox and Kerry Laitala, and a new sound piece ‘Sonic Projection’ by OtherFilm’s Joel Stern.

Reel Rescues, SLQ Gallery, Level 2, until Dec 2nd 2007. Free Entry.
http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/whats-on/exhibit/cur

passing along this info!

Programme at the AGNSW for all fans of experimental cinema
Saturday 16 June 2pm
Saturday 23 June 12noon
Saturday 7 July 12noon
Saturday 21 July 2pm
Domain Theatre, Lower Level 3

This series focuses on the enduring traditions and lasting influence of experimental and avant-garde filmmaking. This is so-called formalist cinema, using film in ways that are comparable to the aims of modern painting and sculpture, foregrounding the medium itself, emphasising the film strip, the frame, montage, projection, and even the chemical and technological processes. The rejection or subversion of Hollywood-type storytelling generates works with a loose or non-linear narrative, making unexpected dislocations of time and space, permitting personal explorations and poetic or ironic juxtaposition. Taken together, these journeys of colour and sound demonstrate the sheer dynamism of experimental cinema over the past 85 years.

the programme:

Saturday 16 June
Expansive Cinema 2: Visual music

Emulating and augmenting specific musical compositions, the films in this collection are a meditation on musical form, seeking a graphic, cinematic equivalent.

2pm

Opus 1
Dir: Walter Ruttman 1921 Germany
7 min. 16mm b&w (tinted) silent (with musical accompaniment)
Considered the first abstract, animated film ever to be shown publicly, the Opus series led to Ruttman’s association with Walt Disney and work on the groundbreaking animation Fantasia in the late 1930s.

Colour flight
Dir: Len Lye 1938 Great Britain
4 min. 16mm colour sound
Made as an airline commercial, celebrated filmmaker Len Lye painted image patterns directly onto the celluloid film strip for this abstract interpretation of the popular tune ‘Honolulu Blues’.

Polka graph
Dir: Mary Ellen Bute 1952 USA
5 min. 16mm colour sound
Making her first film in 1934, Mary Ellen Bute spent much of her pioneering career making short, abstract films. Using a laboratory oscilloscope, this animation refracts electronic patterns through colour filters in counterpoint to Shostakovich’s polka from The Age of Gold.

Charlemagne 2: Piltzer
Dir: Pip Chodorov 2002 France
22 min. 16mm colour sound
Pip Chodorov shot raw Super 8 footage at an opening at the Gerald Piltzer Gallery in Paris, where the pianist, Charlemagne Palestine, was performing. His completed work is at once a diary, a document of the concert, a lyrical flicker and a graphic representation of music.

Swinging the Lambeth Walk
Dir: Len Lye 1939 Great Britain
4 min. 16mm colour sound
Direct painting on film is combined with the use of the optical printer and colour mattes in another of Lye’s abstract animations synchronised to music.

Light play
Dir: Dirk de Bruyn 1984 Australia
7 min. 16mm colour sound
Created by scratching, drawing and painting directly onto the film strip, Light play is an abstract flow of light, colour and patterns synchronised to music by Michael Luck.

(10 min. intermission)

3pm

Thirty-two short films about Glenn Gould
Dir: François Girard 1993
93 min. colour 35mm Rated G
Celebrated pianist Glenn Gould had all the hallmarks of genius – perfectionism, exceptional talent and tenacity. His legendary status resulted from his reshaping of classical musical texts (principally the works of Bach) with an electrifying combination of technical mastery and creative daring. In Thirty-two short films about Glenn Gould, director François Girard makes a playful and eccentric homage using a myriad of experimental and documentary film techniques to imagine Gould’s curious and often troubled inner universe.

Saturday 23 June
Expansive Cinema 3: Alchemy

These works can be viewed as vehicles for exploring the material properties of the film strip. Many visual effects have been created through the ‘alchemy’ of direct manipulation: scratching, drawing, painting and hand-colouring onto clear or opaque film, ’shadowcasting’ onto raw film stock, or deliberately degrading existing images. Some filmmakers have used unusual processing and exposure techniques (radical use of chemicals, home processing and forced processing) to create unique effects.

12noon

Dog Star Man
Dir: Stan Brakhage 1961-64 USA
78 min. 16mm colour silent
Complete version of the much-revered but rarely seen film by prolific director and key figure of American experimental cinema, Stan Brakhage. Often regarded as his masterpiece, this intensely mythic work, structured around a spiritual quest, was made in five parts over a four year period. Freely dispensing with story and representational imagery, the silent film explores nature and creation through a mosaic of stunning, swirling, abstract imagery applied directly to the film strip.

(25 min. intermission)

1.45pm

Particles in space
Dir: Len Lye 1979 USA
4 min. 16mm b&w sound
Len Lye’s American films developed his pioneering techniques in stunning new directions. Concerned with the energy of free movement, this work is synchronised to African drumming.

Colour cry
Dir: Len Lye 1952 USA
4 min. 16mm colour sound
Lye’s innovative ‘direct’ film is inspired by Man Ray’s ’shadowcast’ experiments in which film stock is exposed without the use of the camera, patterns being created by placing stencils and coloured gels over the unexposed film.

Faint echoes
Dir: Paul Winkler 1988 Australia
17 min. 16mm colour & b&w sound
Newsreel footage from the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin is ‘re-worked’ using radical techniques including piercing the film strip with nails and burning it with a soldering iron. A powerful emotional response to images of Hitler by filmmaker Paul Winkler.

Rote movie
Dir: Dirk de Bruyn 1994 Australia
11 min. 16mm colour sound
Dirk de Bruyn’s experimental road movie depicts the emotional landscape of a traveller as he contemplates his loneliness and the incoherence of his life. His state of mind is evoked by increasingly fragmented images – direct-on-film animation collage, rotoscoped animation and reworked photographic images.

Black trip
Dir: Aldo Tambellini 1966 USA
4 min. 16mm b&w sound
A bombardment of black and white images – some etched by hand, others by controlled light sources. A film ’sculpted’ by Aldo Tambellini without the use of a camera.

Free radicals
Dir: Len Lye 1979 Great Britain
4 min. 16mm b&w sound

Free radicals is the companion to Particles in space. A kinetic dance of white lines and angles meticulously scratched onto black and white film and synchronised to field recordings of drumming performed by the Bagirmi tribe of Africa.

(10 min. intermission)

2.45pm

Happy together
Dir: Wong Kar-Wai 1997
96 min. 35mm colour Rated MA15+
Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung
Cantonese with English subtitles
Follows the volatile romance between two gay Chinese expatriates living in Buenos Aires. Wong Kar-Wai’s elliptical exploration of crazy love, loneliness and dislocation is simultaneously delirious, intimate and hyperkinetic. Features the expressionistic, stylised brilliance of Christopher Doyle’s cinematography, employing radical film processing techniques to provide the high-key colours, grain and visual textures which are pivotal to the films emotional ambience.

Saturday 7 July
Expansive Cinema 4: Portraits, poems, places

These cinematic portraits explore notions of identity, personality and place, encountering reality via experimental film techniques.

12noon

Portrait of Ga
Dir: Margaret Tait 1952 Great Britain
4 min. 16mm colour sound
An affectionate portrait filmed in Orkney of Scottish filmmaker, Margaret Tait’s grandmother.

Shoppingtown
Dir: David Caesar 1987 Australia
8 min. 16mm colour sound
Filmmaker David Caesar reveals the humanity of customers and workers in a large suburban shopping mall by encouraging his subjects to confront the film camera directly.

Chewing gum girl
Dir: John Smith 1976
United Kingdom
12 min. 16mm b&w sound
A nondescript street scene shot on a grey day in Hackney appears to be controlled by voice-over instructions from an unseen film director.

Passionless moments
Dir: Jane Campion 1984 Australia
13 min. 16mm b&w sound
Jane Campion’s celebrated early short film is a collection of cinematic portraits, giving a quirky slant to everyday human experiences.

The drift back
Dir: Margaret Tait 1957 Great Britain
11 min. 16mm b&w sound
Scottish filmmaker Margaret Tait documents a farming family returning to the island of Wyre in the Orkneys after relocating for some years due to economic difficulties.

Mexico
Dir: Mike Hoolboom & Steve Sanguedolce 1992 Canada
35 min. 16mm colour sound
A poetic essay that sets out to understand the travel bug. The voice-over offers the viewer an air-tight experience of a Third World holiday, while images of an archaeological museum, a bullfight and an auto factory establish the related contexts of tourism and Free Trade.

(20 min. intermission)

1.45pm

Tokyo-ga
Dir: Wim Wenders 1985
91 min. 16mm colour
A poetic portrait of Tokyo and a melancholy homage to the Japanese filmmaker, Yasujiro Ozu (1903-63). Using a loose, diary format, Wenders explores the Japanese city most affected by the impact of postwar Western values, searching for traces of the lost world so affectionately observed in Ozu’s feature films. Includes interview with Ozu’s regular cameraman, Yuhara Atsuta.

Saturday 21 July
Expansive Cinema 5: Found footage

Since the 1930s, found film footage has been sourced as raw material by experimental filmmakers. The imagery of archival film can have a spellbinding effect on the viewer. Relishing this quality, filmmakers have ransacked documentaries, newsreels and instructional films. Evoking nostalgia, stimulating memory, deconstructing cinematic language or establishing the aesthetic textures and registers of reality, this raw material is used to forge new meanings and associations.

2pm

At the Academy
Dir: Guy Sherwin 1974 Great Britain
4 min. 16mm b&w sound
Playing on the repetitive mechanical nature of a countdown leader (known as an Academy leader), Guy Sherwin obsessively reprints to create a fascinating and hypnotic effect. The image of the leader gradually builds up in layers, slightly out of phase and generating a wild variety of rhythms and patterns.

Midnight party
Dir: Joseph Cornell USA 1947
4 min. 16mm b&w Silent

Cotillion
Dir: Joseph Cornell USA 1947
8 min. 16mm b&w Silent
Indebted to basic Surrealist principles, artist Joseph Cornell created some of the first films constructed from found footage. Midnight party and Cotillion form part of his Children’s Trilogy – fantasy worlds created from early, silent cinema footage scavenged from the shops of 1930s Manhattan. The films are purely associative, following Cornell’s poetic instincts and cutting freely and intuitively from one subject to another.

Valse triste
Dir: Bruce Conner 1974 USA
5 min. 16mm colour/sepia sound
A young boy dreams of farm life, school scenes, railroad trains, cars. The found source material depicts Kansas in the 1940s and Conner’s assemblage suggests highlights of the boy’s imagined life.

Time out for sport
Dir: Paul Winkler 1996 Australia
17 min. 16mm colour sound
A short piece of found footage is optically reworked as text versus image versus spoken narration. The story of a famous golf player becomes ‘curiouser and curiouser’.

Mongoloid
Dir: Bruce Conner 1978 USA
4 min. 16mm b&w sound
A parody of American life composed of hilarious instructional diagrams, old television commercials, and found footage to the sound track of ‘Mongoloid’ by the American punk-rock group DEVO. Conner was among the first to use pop music for short experimental films, which are now considered to be precursors of the music video genre.

Removed
Dir: Naomi Uman USA 1999
7 min. 16mm colour sound
Using ‘found’ sections of an old porn film, nail polish remover, bleach and a magnifying glass, filmmaker Naomi Uman has physically erased the image of the woman from a standard pornographic scenario. In her hilarious deconstructed version, only the leering men (who now respond to a pulsating white space on the film strip) and the original dialogue track remain.

A movie
Dir: Bruce Conner 1958 USA
12 min. 16mm b&w sound
One of Bruce Conner’s most powerful films is a montage of found materials, including newsreels and old western movies. The humorous juxtapositions and associations slowly build to horror.

(15 min. intermission)

3.15pm

The thin blue line
Dir: Errol Morris 1988
103 min. 35mm colour Rated PG
Errol Morris’ groundbreaking film is an investigation into the conviction of a young drifter, Randall Adams, for murder in Texas in the 1970s. At once a documentary, a drama, an interrogation and a poetic reverie, Morris uses a mix of filmed interviews, staged reconstructions and iconic imagery (guns, clocks, empty streets and newspaper headlines) to explore the nature of memory and the shortcomings of the legal system. Shot specifically for this production, but styled to provide the ambience of archival or found footage, the iconic imagery provides a powerful metaphor for the disturbing revelations uncovered by Morris’ 30 month investigation.

[update - there is a review article of this event at Realtime magazine here.]

Teaching and Learning Cinema presents:
MIKE LEGGETT: expanded screen, performed film, structural film 1970-1981
Saturday 28 April 6.30pm-10pm

[view installations of Unword and Vistasound from 6pm-730pm, film screenings from 730pm-9.30pm]

Australian Centre for Photography (ACP)
257 Oxford Street, Paddington NSW 2021
T: 02 9332 1455
F: 02 9332 6104

The TLC continues its work drawing out the primary sources in artists’ film in Australia with an evening with Mike Leggett. Linking Sydney to the heady days of seventies London where he was a founding member of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op, this event explores Leggett’s 1970s structural films, his 1980s media-performance works and his ongoing interactive art research in Sydney.

More Information: louise[at]teachingandlearningcinema[dot]org

read below for full info…

IMAGE © Mike Leggett Sheepman & the Sheared (part 6) ‘Red+Green+Blue’

MIKE LEGGETT: expanded screen, performed film, structural film 1970-1981

Sydney’s Teaching and Learning Cinema will present some film and video works by Sydney-based British born artist Mike Leggett.

Mike Leggett has been making art with film and video since the early 70s. He was a foundation member of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op Workshop, established in 1969. The film labs in the workshop were the platform for key creative output of its era, Mike’s early films using the Workshop labs to explore the physical parameters of film, foregrounding their structure within a system of representation. Included in the program is his seminal 1971 work Shepherd’s Bush.

Mike collaborated and taught with intermedia artist Ian Breakwell in the early days of performance art in Britain. In 1970, Mike and Ian made Unword, a film based on a series of performances. It was not until 2003 that Mike and Ian realised the work in its intended form – cost limitations made finishing it impossible at the time, yet easily done in 2003 with contemporary technology. A startling black and white energy-filled evocation, Unword is in the collection of the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds City Museum and will receive its Australian premiere at the ACP.

Two films in the program, Erota/Afini (1973) and Vistasound (1981), use a rigorous metrical image structure to investigate the scope of readings of cinematic images. Erota/Afini comes to us from the Lux archive in London and its screening involves a `performance for projectionist’ . Vistasound (in a never-before- seen 3-screen version), will be installed in the ACP galleries between 6pm and 7.30pm. Also on the bill is the Standard 8 1968 work Three Women of Bristol, a film thought long lost, re-discovered in 2006.

We are very pleased to be able to present Mike’s film-performance- lecture Image Con Text, as it resonates strongly with the aims of the Teaching and Learning Cinema: that watching films should be a discursive activity – cinema should not merely be passive consumption of moving images.

Mike moved to Australia from the UK in 1988. Through the 90s, he has applied the structural approach of his early film work to digital technology. In 1996 he curated a major exhibition on artists’ CD-roms for the MCA (Burning the Interface ). In 1999 he developed the interactive multimedia prototype Pathscape. He is completing a PhD in the Creativity and Cognition Studios at UTS, investigating how the power of visual memory can be used to link moving images.

Last night down at the ourmedia film screenings, they played some excellent “remoscopes” by a Japanese collective. The idea of remoscopes is to follow the “lumiere rules”:

Lumieré Rule (six conditions)
no effect
no edit
maximum 1 minute
fixed camera
silence
no zoom

Some beautiful works came out of it, full of consciousness of time passing and the beauty of the ordinary. I’d love to see more, and it’d be so easy to organise a night of home grown remoscope!

The Teaching & Learning Cinema invites you to “THIS TIME“, a film screening this Sunday, April 1st, 2007 6.30pm for a 7pm start at ‘Sydney’, Cleveland St (next to Fatima’s) (see http://officialsydney.com)
The screening follows along from a residency that Lucas Ihlein and Louise Curham have been doing in the majestic Track 12 at Performance Space’s new home at Carriageworks.

We’ll roll projector on some of the expanded cinema re-enactments we’ve been working on in the residency and some film prints we brought in for our research.

The prints come from the National Film & Video Lending Service in Canberra and from the Lux, the artist’s film archive in London ( why doesn’t Australia have one of these?). Performance Space are most generously lending a pair of beautiful Eiki 16mm projectors for the occasion.

From our recent work, marvel at the stamina of those who were there for the 24 hours for the ‘Long Film for Ambient Light’. As a kind of private experiment, we recreated the conditions for this 1975 work by Anthony McCall on March 16 and 17 down at the Performance Space. We’ll show a time lapse video (where one hour becomes one minute) and invite those who were there during the event to share their “mental residues”.

Also marvel at the stamina of the participants in our attempt to re-create William Raban’s 1974 film ‘Breath’. The film documents a walk up a hill by a group of walkers carrying whistles. Each shot matches the length of a whistle – a breath. Raban’s film was in the gentle English countryside. The Curham, Ihlein, Shaw version is North Era hill in the Royal National Park. We’ll show ‘Breath 2006′ and Raban’s original.

Enjoy our versions on 16mm film and miniDV of William Raban’s 1973 Expanded Cinema work 2’ 45”. In our reworkings (presented as ‘55 seconds’ (16mm film), and ‘6 minutes’ (mini DV)), we followed Raban’s recipe and projected an image of the projector screen, re-filmed it, projected that image, re-filmed it, projected, re-filmed and so on. The miniDV version has a velvety softness, and reaction between the iterations is a delight. Be part of Iteration 8 as we show you Iteration 7.

Of the films from the archives, we have William Raban’s ‘Angles of Incidence’ (1973). Raban describes this as an experiment in constructing three dimensional space on the two dimensional surface of the film.1 The film is exactly as it came out of the camera. It appears that Raban’s method was to fix a length of rope between a window and the camera and film all the possible views of the window that the rope would allow.

Lis Rhodes ‘Light Reading’ (1979): Those who attended the NowNow film screenings would have seen Lis Rhodes’ ‘Dresden Dynamo’, easily a stand out in visual dynamism with layer upon layer of re-printed lettraset stuck through the optical printer using all the printer lights. Light Reading has more of a polemic as a voice intones an essay on the role of the subject within the object of the film and the gaze of the camera, subverted by extended direct film animation and re-printing that is based on the light meter itself – the ‘eye’ of the camera if you like. This is a dense film but we found it very rewarding.

And the very cute John Smith 1976 film called ‘The Girl Chewing Gum’ – a wonderful spoof where the film director literally directs passing traffic. A subtly formal as it deals with the split between sound and image.

Okay so hope you can come and we’re looking forward to it immensely.

For a jpg flyer advertising the event visit this URL:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/152/435703456_c463d748bc_o.jpg

Cheers!
Lucas and Louise