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

It’s rare enough to see a serious exhibition of video art in an Aussie art museum. But accompanying the MCA’s Video Logic show, there is a super rare screening of historical Australian video works. I’ve cut and pasted the screening program below (it’s also available here as a printable pdf).

Also if you scroll down further, I’ve pasted details about the DISAPPEARING VIDEO CONFERENCE, at which the TLC’s Louise Curham will be speaking about preservation and conservation strategies for this most unstable of media.

Louise recently contributed a chapter on audio-visual preservation to the 3rd edition of Keeping Archives.

See you at these events! -Lucas
— — –

DISAPPEARING VIDEO Program
AUSTRALIAN VIDEO ART: SOME KEY WORKS
Thursday 23 Octotober, 6.30 – 8.00pm, Circular Quay Terrace, level 6

David Perry Mad mesh 1968, 4 min
Peter Kennedy Idea Demonstrations # 4 1971, 2 min
Peter Kennedy Idea Demonstrations # 7 1971, 2 min
David Perry Interior with Views 1976, 5 min
Stephen Jones (music by Warren Burt and performance by Eva Karczag) Eva 1978, 3 min excerpt
Warren Burt Nocturnal B 1978, 3 min excerpt
Tsk tsk tsk (Philip Brophy, Maria Kozic, et al) Asphixiation 1979, 4 min
Stephen Jones SPK 1979, 4 min
Eva Schramm & Gary Willis Strategies for Goodbye 1982, 3 min excerpt
Built in Ghosts Inside Television 1983, 5 min
Peter Callas Night’s High Noon: An Anti-Terrain 1988, 8 min
Jill Scott Continental Drift 1993, 12 min
John Gillies & The Sydney Front Techno/Dumb/Show 1991, 5 min excerpt
Severed Heads Big Car Retread 1991, 7 min
Elena Popa Robot Cycle 1992, 3 min
Ross Harley & Maria Fernanda Cardoso Cardoso Flea Circus 1995, 8 min
Linda Wallace Love Hotel 2000, 7 min
Michael Glasheen Teleological Telecast from Spaceship Earth: On Board with Buckminster Fuller 1970, 28 min excerpt

Presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art in association with the College of Fine Arts and d/Lux/Media/Arts, with assistance from the Australian Research Council
Circular Quay West
Sydney Australia
02 9245 2400
www.mca.com.au

- - -

DISAPPEARING VIDEO Program
CONFERENCE
Friday 24 Octotober, 10.00am – 5.00pm, Circular Quay Terrace, level 6
10.00 – 10.30am Registration in Circular Quay Foyer on level 1
Morning tea refreshments in Circular Quay Terrace on level 6

10.30 – 10.45am Welcome and introduction by facilitators John Gillies and Ross Harley

10.45 – 11.15am Stephen Jones The Disassembly of Video Art
The methods and intentions of video art in its early period have largely been subsumed by
the narrative. This talk seeks to remind us of the broader intentions.

11.15 – 11.45am Danni Zuvela Forgetting and Remembering: Australian Experimental Video
Related to the physical loss of works whose material existence is bound to inherently unstable media formats—and equally concerning—is the disappearance from public memory of Australian work from ‘the foreign country of the past’. With discussion of ‘forgetting’ or the evaporation of the immaterial, Zuvela will canvass strategies to inoculate against such disappearances, and suggest ways to bring about a more active remembering of Australia’s rich creative history.

11.45am – 12.15pm John Conomos Between Celluloid, Plasma and Neon
As an artist, theorist and critic, Conomos engages with the ongoing intertextual adventure of seeking new horizons of image, sound, performance and text. From this perspective he shall discuss the historical context of Australian cinema, video and media art.

12.15 – 12.30pm Questions from audience

12.30 – 2.00pm Lunch break (not provided)

2.00 – 2.15pm Introduction to afternoon topics by facilitators John Gillies and Ross Harley

2.15 – 2.45pm Lousie Curham Media Art Archaeology: Making Good Archives and the Problems of
Re-presentation
In a discussion about how we make good archives for video art, Curham proposes an emphasis on context. Thinking through the role of the material form of the work, there is discussion about which properties of the original matter. What and where is the video artwork and what is the role of the original maker? How will we meaningfully pass these artworks on to future generations? How faithful do these need to be? These considerations will touch on practices in existing time based art archives and will think about what Australian archives of media art might look like.

2.45 – 3.15pm Lyndal Jones Propositions for an Uncertain future
Thoughts on technology / video / art / sustainable practice, the ephemeral object and the art system.

3.15 – 3.45pm Exhibition viewing of Video Logic, level 4 galleries

3.45 – 4.15pm Andrew Frost Now to the Future
Video art has achieved an unprecedented level of visibility over the past 5 years with new opportunities for artists and the public to engage with what was once a marginal practice in contemporary art. But what does the future hold for video art? Has the outsider finally joined the mainstream? Or will the recalcitrant medium cling to outmoded methods of production and distribution in an effort to maintain critical purity? And what of the evil art market, the web and iTunes?

4.15 – 5.00pm Panel discussion and questions from audience

5.00pm Close
Presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art in association with the College of Fine Arts and d/Lux/Media/Arts, with assistance from the Australian Research Council
Circular Quay West
Sydney Australia
02 9245 2400
www.mca.com.au

Speaker Biographies:

John Conomos is a media artist, critic, and theorist who extensively exhibits locally and internationally. His art practice traverses a variety of art forms and deals with autobiography, identity, memory, post-colonialism, and the “in-between” links between cinema, literature, and the visual arts. Conomos is a prolific contributor to art, film and media journals and forums. In 2000 he was awarded a New Media Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts. His essays on cinema, video art and new media were recently published as Mutant Media (2008), and with Brad Buckley he co-edited the anthology Republics of Ideas (2001) and the forthcoming Rethinking the Contemporary Art School, to be published September 2009. Conomos is an exhibiting artist in the MCA exhibition Video Logic, 2008.

Louise Curham is at the forefront of Australian moving image art. Well known for curating innovative expanded cinema events in non-traditional exhibition spaces, Curham is highly regarded in the experimental film world for her work using “obsolete media”. She is involved with Teaching and Learning Cinema, a filmmakers and film lovers group with a focus on re-presenting moving image works from previous generations in events that encourage discussion and break down the passivity of looking at images. Alongside Curham’s practice is her work as an audiovisual archivist, a field in which she has worked since 2002.

Andrew Frost is a writer, art critic and journalist. He is the co-founder and editor of The Art Life and writes and presents television programs on contemporary art for ABC1. He is the author of the forthcoming Burn to Disc: Contemporary Australian Video Art, to be published in 2009.

John Gillies is an artist working with film, sound, installation and video, and often in collaboration with performers from a variety of disciplines. Gillies’ screen work has been shown in festivals such as Videobrasil, Ars Electronica and the London, Sydney and Melbourne film festivals. He is an exhibiting artist in Video Logic at the MCA.

Ross Harley is an artist, writer, curator and educator in the field of new media and popular culture. His work crosses the bounds of cinema, music, art, design, architecture and media art practice. From 1986-91 Harley edited the influential art theory journal Art + Text. In 1992 he was the director of the influential International Symposium on Electronic Art, ISEA. Harley has edited a number of anthologies and conducts diverse research projects extending the electronic media art practice and theory.

Lyndal Jones has a long history of working with new media, video and performance art in Australia. Jones has produced an extensive body of work since the early 1980s, and is known for creating long-term projects which initially focused on performance then video installation. Throughout, her works have addressed the power of the experiential and the development of interactivity. Jones represented Australia at the 2001 Venice Biennale, and has shown her work at numerous galleries throughout Australia and overseas.

Dr. Stephen Jones is an Australian video artist of long standing and independent curator of electronic art. For many years (1983-92) he was the video-maker for the electronic music band Severed Heads. He is an experienced video editor and electronic engineer having developed equipment ranging from analogue video synthesisers to DVD synchronisers, and currently builds interactive installation devices for artists. He also provides conservation and preservation services in the electronic and video arts. Jones has recently completed a book on the history of the first generation of the electronic arts in Australia.

Dr. Danni Zuvela’s interest in experimental moving image encompasses research, teaching, writing, curation and the odd bit of practice (in both senses of the word!). As an academic, she has conducted extensive research into avant-garde film and video art, which she continues to foist on readers of various journal articles and books, and unsuspecting screen studies students. Zuvela is a member of OtherFilm, an artist collective dedicated to the production, distribution and exhibition of avant-garde, experimental, and artists film, video and music. Zuvela
co-curates the OtherFilm Festival, a 4-day festival of expanded, participatory and performative film and music.

The TLC’s Louise and Lucas, joined by Sydney film maven Mike Leggett, recently made the trip to Brisbane to see Guy Sherwin and Lynn Loo do their thing at the IMA. Guy and Lynn’s trip was courtesy of the Brisbane Film Festival and our friends at Otherfilm.

It was totally worth the journey! Some more pictures from our adventure here.

In the meantime, listen to this radio piece with Guy on ABC Radio National, interviewed by Amanda Smith [15 min, 14mb mp3 file]

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.

Waiting To Turn Into Puzzles is a new super 8 film work by Louise Curham featuring hand processed and hand-made film. Frames from the film have been scanned and printed, literally the ground for a new composition by Melbourne composer David Young for a performance by Sydney’s fabulous Ensemble Offspring.

‘WTTP is a cinematic experience with live music. Curham’s hand-processed, etched and looped super 8 films are simultaneously an intense visual experience and music notation for Ensemble Offspring. David Young ascribes a vocabulary of musical gestures to the textures, colours and shapes of the projections through a process of composition that explores the continuum between improvisation and notated music. David’s music has been likened to the ‘aural equivalent of seeing a world in a grain of sand’.

The evening commences with drinks in the Chauvel foyer with a screening of Bill Morrison’s ‘Light is Calling’ and is followed by more drinks in the Chauvel foyer.

7pm Wed 25 June
Chauvel Cinema, Paddington Town Hall, Cnr Oxford and Oatley Rd, Paddington
Tickets $35/20 bookingsl 1300 306 776 or www.mca-tix.com

8pm Thurs 26 June
Aphids Reel Music Festival
Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Fed Square, Melbourne
Tickets $20/15 bookings 03 8663 2583 or www.acmi.net.au

From this material, Louise scanned and printed frames of the film to create the ground for a score composed by Melbourne’s David Young. The work will be performed by Sydney’s Offspring Ensemble.

An in-depth interview with Mark Titmarsh, a key enthusiast for super 8 filmmaking in Sydney through the 1980s. Check it out here.

Bob Percival recently wrote a thesis on the history of the Sydney Super 8 Group. Read bits of it here.

[above: the light at 9pm on Friday during Long Film For Ambient Light]

[The following is a short series of excerpts from an interview with Chris Fleming, recorded by Lucas, Friday 16th March 2007, 9pm. These quotes are cut from a longer conversation. You can also read a short note he wrote after the event, here.]

There’s something about the scale of it. When I first came in here I felt my eyes almost felt pulled on…because I’d been in my office all day… so it was really… I just kind of switched off…

LI: You’d said you were zoning oout?

CF: what does zoning out mean? Like a feeling that I didn’t know I was there but I knew I had been there. It’s really strange.

LI: how much time passed do you think in that period?

CF: five minutes? I don’t know.

Also this being framed by something that happened previously. It almost felt like an anchor. I found something vaguely comforting about the fact that something like that was being re-created.

The fact that it was done in the past lent it some weight?

CF – weight’s not the right word. Reassuring. It felt nice there was some continuity of tradition. Tradition’s not the right word, either, dignification. I really don’t know. My whole brain’s just switched off…

[continued, now outside the space]

It also felt a bit naughty coming in there…I was running out of the house. I’d been paralysed by wasting time, I could go in there and switch off without wasting time, there was a guiltless non-doing about it that I really enjoyed. The scale of it just shifts. The change in physicality. Like when you stand on somewhere really tall and you feel your stomach just move. That caused a shift in me that kicked something off, just the scale of it, it was big and enclosed, that was a defamiliarisation effect.

[The following is a short series of excerpts from an interview with Anne Walton, recorded by Lucas, Friday 16th March 2007, 2pm. These quotes are cut from a longer conversation. The full transcript will be more interesting!]

I felt a smoothness… like I was entering into something very smooth […] the light has something to do with it. And all the grey tones in this place. […] A slightly clinical feel. […] I couldn’t help noticing the curtains. Some kind of notion of theatre. Although I quickly realised they were just here, already a part of the space. I felt myself a part of the structure. […] As far as this being an event […] the physical structure and the structure that you… that this event is… it resonates with the notion of intervals and spaces.

When there isn’t much that’s been put here, I start to want to look at what’s been put here already… The little dotted recesses… in the concrete…

I quickly felt some kind of a longing – to be here, for much longer. … It’s a long film, and I’m only here for just a quick glimpse. So I feel…regretful.

[If I stayed longer] I imagine some of the initial romance and positive feelings would start to be challenged…

I started wondering whether lots of conversations will happen – is it a social space? A meditative space? Conversation can be great way to pass the time.

I feel as though if I stayed here longer… I’d do a lot of writing… from a state of relative emptiness… not useful writing, just a flowing writing…

The lightbulb … it is very electric… the thingness of it is very strong… it is a very sharp point in the centre of the space. It’s really crackling…

The time chart and the statement – made me feel supported in being here… they’re a kind of explanation. It helps to frame the experience for me… and give…not clues, but it reinforces…particularly the long scroll…somehow preparatory for my time here…

It’s quite zen …very zen … just attending to the present moment … I can imagine, having been I’m going to go away and take it with me…a consciousness of this slice of time in the space has been carved out, and it’s here, and I entered it for a brief moment, it’s almost like I dipped my toe into a stream and when I go away I know the stream’s there and others are going to come to the spot that’s been carved out for getting right into it … immersion…

Louise was struck by the austerity of this…I said yes, although for me austerity has a harshness about it, I don’t feel yet… There’s more of a sense of generosity in this space…

I’m glad to see it at this time, when it’s still pristine and unspoiled by human … habitation …

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.