Date: Tuesday 28 September 2pm– 6pm | Location: Glasgow Film Theatre

With a line-up of leading speakers and presentations from programme and filmmakers, game developers and web designers and people behind emerging creative digital media technologies, FilmCamp 10 explores the future of moving image, multi-platform content and the increasing convergence of technology. Aimed at freelancers in broadcast and digital industries, as well as final year students, programmed commissioners and editors, FilmCamp 10 is an event inspired by the spirit of BarCamp – a free, ‘un-conference’ designed to facilitate the sharing of ideas in an open environment. The event will end with an opportunity for networking and refreshments.

To reserve a place at this event, please complete the form here. You will receive an email confirmation containing a link which must be clicked to complete the reservation process. Places will be allocated on a first come first served basis.

Dates: 23-26 September | Location: Jersey

If you’re a cinephile looking for a late summer holiday break then we recommend you take a look at the Branchage Festival (that’s ‘bron-carge’ by the way). For it’s third edition, alongside the launch of a swanky new logo, the team have put together a stellar line-up of live soundtracks, performances, parties, masterclasses and films in unusual locations.

There are some wonderful highlights: particularly the presentation of Yuri Norstein‘s Russian Fairytales; psychedelic Japanes group, Bo Ningen performing to the surreal anime short Cat Soup by Tatsuo Sato; the Victorian Jersey Magic Lantern Show with live music by electronica artiste Scanner; a screening of Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes in The Parish Church of St Helier; and if you like those Cravendale ads, then you’ll love A Town Called Panic, the hilarious stop-motion feature by Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier aka Pic Pic Andre.

For more information about tickets, travel and the full line-up, visit the Branchage Festival site.

She Had Her Gun All Ready, Vivienne Dick, courtesy of Oberhausen Short Film Festival

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”[1]

Given its relative youth, there is a remarkable amount hidden in or obscured by the various histories of cinema. The Oberhausen Short Film Festival plays a unique role in helping to excavate and bring to light former manifestations of cinema. Taking a cue from the famous LP Hartley quote, the curators of the From The Deep: The Great Experiment 1898-1918 at this year’s festival introduced their programme as follows:

“Cinema from the era before the First World War is truly a missing continent. [...] The entire richness and diversity of this ‘cinema before cinema’ was in a way hidden from us until the end of the 1980s. But thanks to the efforts of various film archives and research by historians, the treasures concealed in the depths have re-emerged and come to the surface little by little.”[2]

Curator Mariann Lewinsky and filmmaker Eric de Kuyper have assembled the first large scale programme at Oberhausen to explore cinema prior to the festival and the short films that it has championed in many forms since its inception in 1954. But what is there to discover in this period? Important pioneers such as the Lumiere Brothers, Georges Méliès, Mitchell and Kenyon or Edwin S Porter are widely known and later figures such as Louis Feuillade or D.W. Griffith are celebrated as originators of narrative forms still at play today.

But the curators argue that to solely understand this period through the prism of what follows, namely the narrative feature film, is to dismiss the sheer variety of films produced and the unique ways film was often exhibited. The work from these years of cinema has languished under dismissive labels, most typically that of ‘primitive’ cinema. The core argument behind From the Deep was that everything from the types and manner in which films where made to the ways they were shown, are wholly distinct from the cinema that has largely obscured it since the 1920s.

The ten programmes at Oberhausen offered remarkable glimpses of this distinct film culture, rich in the range of forms and techniques employed and diverse in the variety of subjects. Films ranged from Italian comedian’s Tontolini discovery of the restorative magic of cinema in Tontolini Is Sad (Italy 1911) to fascinating insect life in The Carrot Caterpillar (1911, France) rendered in striking colour to news as re-enactment in The Revolution In Russia (1905, France) and images from the outposts of the colonial Empire in Exploitation and Coffee Farming (1909, France). The sheer diversity of this cinema, and the absence of the familiar ways to understand the films, makes these works both tantalising and elusive. As soon as you think you have a grasp on this period, a film appeared that turned everything on its head, such as the Western Burning Heart (1912) filmed by Jean Durand on the French coast or the remarkable demonstration of hysteria by as masked patient under the guidance of Doctor Camillo Negro in Neuropathology (1908, Italy).

This is not a period prior to industrial cinema and one of the distinct ways the films can be understood is in relation to different companies that produced or commissioned them. Exhibitors (who ran venues ranging from circuses to fairgrounds) or technical companies produced films as well as still existent media giants such as Pathe and Gaumont whose work permeated the programmes. But there were also works from many long forgotten and mysterious organisations such as Eiko-Film founded in Germany around 1912, which produced the work of director and star Max Mack, including the self-reflective The Unemployed Photographer (Germany 1912) which sees Max stumble into the new position of cameraman, to the risqué Austrian company Saturn founded by photographer Johannes Schwarz to produce stag-films and promote his own collection of photos of naked women.

In amongst these films various directors work is distinguishable, such as the French master of the silent serial and the surrealists’ favourite filmmaker Louis Feuidalle, whose Policemen as They Are Presented To Us – Policemen The Way They Really Are (France, 1908) is remarkable for its reflection on cinematic stereotypes and the amazing catholic fantasies of Spain’s Segundo de Chomón[3] such as Mysterious Flames (Fr, 1908), in which a devil dances amongst fireworks and hellish hand painted flames. These years of cinema where promiscuous and rife with remakes, copies and imitations which makes the largely uncredited works (even those attributed to certain directors are not definitive) all the more fascinating and mysterious. As the curators stated:

“As a whole, the production is anonymous, serial, without stars, without masterpieces. No short film of these years contains its entire meaning, for an important part of this meaning was inherent in the function that the film took in the overall programme of a cinema presentation.”

Given the emphasis placed on the screening context it felt like a missed opportunity that the programmes in Oberhausen where generally assembled along conventional lines and all accompanied by the same pianist (occasionally to dire effect). Works such as Neuropathology we were told were presented as part of a medical lecture, or dance films where presented as part of a cabaret performance. If this is a ‘cinema before cinema’ then surely contemporary exhibitions need to pay as much attention to the forms of presentation as is obviously given to the delicate and rare film material.

This period offers insight into the society at the beginning of the century, largely through many of the films most remarkable moments which are incidental details, like the casual brutality displayed when unloading cattle from a ship in the travel film Au Maroc: Tanger (France, 1908, Pathe), to the expressions of children in Turin posing for a photographer, some delighted some traumatised in Children’s Beauty Competition (Concorso di bellezza fra bambini a Torino) (1909, Italy, Aquila). Yet some of the most problematic and as such intriguing works were buried in programmes, making it difficult to establishing a critical relationship with these works, especially as the curators seemed more determined for people to marvel at the richness of these works and enjoy their inventions.

Concorso di bellezza fra bambini a Torino, photo: Film Institute Netherlands

Fascinating films such as Exploitation and Coffee Farming (1909, France, Pathe) provide an insight into colonial attitudes and although beautifully filmed Types of Indians and Ceylonese (1912, France, Eclair) is disturbingly prescient of the eugenics movement. Many of these works reveal the social discrepancy of the time without any pretence at equality. Filmmakers such as Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, or Vincent Monnikendam[4], have explored the brutality at play in these early films and crucially shown that there is no neutral way to present or approach them. These films reveal attitudes at the foundation of  Western society with unapologetic frankness, even in such apparently innocent films as Cosmopolitan Dances (1907, France, Pathe), a cabaret trick film where the two dances perform in costumes from around the world, which magically change throughout the film. To appreciate this film solely on the level of its energy, vitality and its simply yet ingenious trick, is to disregard the complex processes of role-playing and how the film reveals that the technology of cinema marks the ambiguous beginning of our globalised culture. If we are to take these films seriously we need to extend them the same critical rigour we would any era of cinema, as the films prove again and again they are far from innocent.

No More New Waves

Oberhausen played host to another archaeology of cinema’s past in the brilliant No Wave 1976-1984 programme, which offered a surprisingly complimentary parallel to From the Deep. Curated by Christian Höller[5], and later expanded with feature films by Jim Jarmusch, Amos Poe and Bette Gordon among others at the Austrian Film Museum[6], the series surveyed the underground largely super8 film movement in New York with works by Vivienne Dick, Beth and Scott B, James Nares, David Wojnarowicz and many others. Jim Hoberman announced the arrival of the movement in Village Voice in 1979, declaring it a ‘new wave of content-rich, performance-oriented narrative films.’[7]

Working in parallel and often in collaboration with No Wave musicians such as Lydia Lunch, James Chance and Arto Lindsay, the disparate group of filmmakers where united by their rejection of any movement and their radical opposition to the films, both experimental and commercial, made in New York before them. As opposed to the formalism of experimental film as much as the art scene in the late 1970s, their works employed an unpolished ‘on the street verité’[8]. Works were shown in host of non-conventional spaces, often at rock clubs, or abandoned apartments, or most famously in and around Times Square for a show organised by CoLab[9] in 1978. Given their opposition to the existing institutions, the activity of this disparate group of artists gravitated around various projects, such as the artists collective Colab, and the production of unofficial newscasts for cable television and publishing X Magazine.

Given the involvement with the New York music scene and the later integration of various filmmakers into independent film circuits, No Wave films have never been entirely forgotten[10], even if they are sometimes mistaken and overshadowed by the later more sensational yet in comparison less innovative Cinema of Transgression[11] movement lead by Nick Zedd, Richard Kern and Lydia Lunch (one of the key links between the two movements). Works such as L.E.S (USA, 1976) by Coleen Fitzgibbon, provides an invaluable portrait of the Lower East Side in the late 70s, despite its laconic, stoned Chris Marker-esque narration, it bares striking witness to the utter desolation of the area, including a remarkable scene where children recall a fire that burnt down their apartment block or James Narres’ Waiting For the Wind (USA, 1982) which includes a kinetic scene in which his apartment appears to be hit by a tornado. The posturing, the disregard for brevity and lack of self-censorship in these works, allows the time, place and people to impose itself in a remarkable fashion. Even works like Men In Orbit (USA, 1978, John Lurie) which basically consists of John Lurie and Eric Mitchell, failing to convince as astronauts as they succumb to fits of hysterical laughter, can be seen more in the genre of silent film actualities, fascinating in the same way that the children in the film from 1907 struggled to pose for a photographer.

James Narres made the link to the silent period explicit at the festival, stating that he was conscious that they were living and working where early single reel films were produced before the formation of Hollywood. Indeed it in New York on 23rd April 1896[12] that the first projected movie show was held in America. As well as often making films in single reels of Super8, which were largely edited in camera and then joined together, the films also shared an itinerant exhibition history with early cinema with works shown almost anywhere but conventional cinemas. In early cinema we can gain unparalleled insight into the late Victorian period, in the films from the No Wave period there’s an insight into a long gone New York, captured prior to the redevelopment of Manhattan, revealing in particular the empty shell of the lower East Side, as if it were a former war zone.

Many of the works transcended their fascination as records of the time, such as David Wojnarowicz’s beautiful black and white film Heroin (USA, 1981) showing posed drug casualties across the city or the wonderful films of Vivienne Dick, one of the few filmmakers who has maintained and developed a strong body of work following this period[13]. She Had Her Gun All Ready (USA, 1978, Vivienne Dick) is a vivid psychodrama, played out like a movie serial, strikingly shot and staged amongst the architecture of New York, including a climatic strangulation on one of Coney Islands roller coasters. The films of Scott B and Beth B are some of the most rigorously constructed and provocative of the period, subverting media and political oppression. G-Man (USA, 1978) is particular strikingly combines newspaper reports of terrorist attacks with re-enactments and restagings of dialogue drawn from an interview with head of NYC’s bomb squad and telephone conversations from Beth B’s day job as a telephone receptionist for an escort service. Finally one of the real discoveries of the programme, and a film which stood out for its idiosyncrasies and disarming formal play was Andrea Callard’s 11 through 12 (USA, 1977) inspired by the I Ching, the film is constructed around a series of deadpan addresses to camera, trying to understand how to measure and quantify the world. The directness and unrestrained attitude of films in both programmes, testify to cinemas h, both as a witness and expression as well as to the hidden depths still to be discovered in cinemas many past lives.

Footnotes:
[1] The quote is from the first line of L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between published in 1953

[2] ‘ The Deep’ catalogue essay by Eric de Kuyper and Mariann Lewinsky, 56 Internationale Kurzefilmtage Oberhausen, 2010

[3] A selection of Segundo de Chomón’s films can be seen on UbuWeb

[4] In particular Mother Dao The Turtlelike (Netherlands, 1995) which is constructed from the former Dutch East Indies

[5] Christian Höller is the editor and co-publisher of the magazine springerin – Hefte für Gegenwartskunst

[6] No Wave: New York 1976-84, June 4-14

[7] Jim Hoberman, No Wavelength: The ParaPunk underground, Village Voice, May 21, 1979

[8] Jim Hoberman, ibid

[9] Colloborative Projects Ltd and information on the Times Square Show

[10] See for example the recent online exhibition at LUX featuring various films and Nick Abrahams
Ana Cory-Wright’s documentry on the movement (which blurrs figures from No Wave with Cinema of Transgression) No Age New York

[11] Various Cinema of Transgression films as well as Nick Zedd’s manifesto for the movement can be seen online on UbuWeb

[12] The first theatrical exhibition was organised by Vitascope, Edison’s projection company and largely managed by Edwin S. Porter. The screening took place on April 23 1896 at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in Herald Square, New York City

[13] For details of Vivinne Dick’s other work see the excellent DVD and accompanying booklet ‘Between Truth and Fiction: The Films of Vivienne Dick’, published by LUX and The Crawford Gallery, Cork

About the Author: George Clark is a curator, writer and artist. At the Independent Cinema Office between 2006 and 2008 he managed a range of touring projects including: ‘Essentials: The Secret Masterpieces of Cinema‘, ‘Artists & Icons’ and ‘The Artists Cinema 2006′. Independent curatorial projects include ‘The Unstable States of…’, ‘Without Boundaries: European Artists’ Film and Video’ and the retrospective ‘The Cinema of Miklos Jancso’ [co-curated with Travis Miles]. He has written for Art Monthly, Afterall, Sight & Sound, Senses of Cinema and Vertigo Magazine among other publications. He recently collaborated with the artist Beatrice Gibson on the script for a film commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery and Camden Council.

Dark Glass by Clio Barnard

Clio Barnard’s brilliant debut feature The Arbor – an Artangel/Jerwood commission – opens in the UK on 22 October, after Barnard won the Tribeca Film Festival Award for Best New Documentary Filmmaker earlier this year. We’ll be posting an interview with Clio nearer the release date, but in the meantime take a look at Dark Glass.

Clio made Dark Glass in 2006 for Single-Shot, part of the Arts Council England/UK Film Council Moving Image Initiative collaboration, that has also supported Gillian Wearing’s forthcoming feature, Self Made. Shot on a mobile phone, in one take, it’s a remarkably haunting work. You can see it here, along with other Single-Shot commissions and selected films.

Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1980 – 1981 (Time Clock Piece)

This year is a Liverpool Biennial year, and the International 10 show at FACT will make it well worth a visit. Presenting new commissions from artists including Yves Netzhammer and Minouk Lim, Touched will consist of new work that affects the viewer deep down: “art that moves us in mind, body and soul”.

Pedantic-iti-ness aside –  (Isn’t that what art exhibitions should be doing anyway?) – the line-up looks a treat. Focusing on works that examine ideas around separation and loss the show seeks to explore how, when more and more of us live urban lives dispersed across cities and overseas, do we learn new virtualised ways to be touched and touch?

A highlight will be Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1980 – 1981 (Time Clock Piece), presented in the acclaimed artists’ first European exhibition. The film documents the artist’s project of punching a worker’s time clock in his New York studio on the hour, every hour for a whole year, capturing a single frame of 16mm of himself in the act each time.

The 6^th Liverpool Biennial runs from 18 September to 28 November

There’s only four days left to submit your film to the inaugural Animatron Festival. If your work incorporates animation techniques, such as CGI, stop-motion, claymation, paper-cut, Pixilation, RotoScope, 3D and machinima, then you are eligible to enter.

There are five award categories to submit your film to: anime, fantasy, humour, minis and real life. The films will be scrutinised by a panel of judges including experimental filmmaker Jeff Scher, Producer Charlotte Bavasso  from Nexus Productions and A Scanner Darkly Producer Tommy Pallotta.

The winners from each category will be screened at this year’s Hamptons International Film Festival alongside a screening of animated shorts, a symposium discussion among notable animators, and an Animatron Festival reception.

Visit Babelgum for more information. Deadline: midnight (EMT), 22 August.

Craneway Event, Tacita Dean

Space, concludes Frederic Raphael in his memoir of the period of time spent as scribe to Stanley Kubrick, is limited strictly by the rigid frame of the cinema screen. Writing specifically on why he felt it was that a great many filmmakers were unable to effectively replicate the true form and intangibility of dreams (and dream-space) on screen, it was, he felt, one of the difficult tasks to create expansive, indefinable space within a framed medium.

Recently released in London are two notable dance films. Following a lengthy wait since its successful UK premiere at the 2009 London Film Festival is Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse: Le ballet de l’opera de Paris, and at Frith Street Gallery is the late Merce Cunningham’s final dance-on-film work, a feature-length artist’s moving image piece by Tacita Dean, Craneway Event.

The great artistic skill that both Wiseman and Dean display is in the patience that they hold for their subjects. Wiseman’s subject is the Paris Opera Ballet.  Similar to previous documentaries, his film is about the institution itself. Though taking far less screen time than an actual dance rehearsal and performance, long stretches are dedicated to the efforts required in fundraising and the minutiae of building the costumery, the cleaning, the refurbishment. Given equivalent care and attention these non-performative elements underpin the level of discipline required in order to successfully stage a world-class dance performance. In this way, the daily performances of artistic director Brigitte Lefevre (the star of the piece, if there is one) are as standardised and stylistic interpolations of expression as any one of the dancer’s movements. The movements are defined –  refined through extensive rehearsal – in fact it is the rehearsal that primarily interests both Wiseman and Dean.

Craneway Event was filmed over three days of rehearsals for pieces of Cunningham’s works chosen for staging. Focussing her camera on fixed points, Dean allows the dancers to define their own on-screen space, to learn to be uninhibited by the frame of the lens. Wiseman’s approach is more fluid, using expansive wide shots generously focussed and punctuated with small, almost gestural camera movements. Shooting rehearsals predominantly from behind, he uses reflections from the mirrored walls to open up the audience’s sense of space in relation to the dancer.

In his 1991 book Boundaries of the Mind, psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann identified two descriptions of personal emotional attachment: one thin, one thick. These are manifested in a physical sense by the boundaries people put up when engaging with others. Where some people utilise a thin description and are perhaps not observant of any literal or figurative boundary, others knowingly develop a thick boundary of resistance, are detached and observant, and will stand markedly apart from others, for example. Of human behaviour, a thick description is one that explains by observation the behaviour by its context. What we learn about the dancers, the artistic director, the corps de ballet are gleaned through their own actions, relations and interpretations. A decade ago Nils Tavernier (son of Bertrand), took his camera to the Paris Opera Ballet and received freedom within the institution equal to Wiseman in order to make his documentary Tous pres des etoiles, Les danseurs de le ballet de l’opera de Paris. In direct opposition to Wiseman’s methods, Tavernier’s is a thin boundary and the dancers, his interviewees, speak at length on their work and their emotion personally defines their own structure of learning and what they hope it will lead to. He is sensitive to the dancers, as a group and individually, but his camera finds it difficult to keep just enough distance – the end result being that Tavernier’s film feels more directed than a documentary should.

Similar to the work of Edgar Degas, Wiseman’s and Dean’s figures are largely anonymous. The filmmakers relax the boundary between subject and background. Robert Rosenblum notes that the effect of Impressionism is that “…the (work)…resembles… a part of a larger reality captured as if by chance.” (1989). Dean especially with her use of fixed point camerawork and affected lighting presents a sense of depth to what is a flat object (as highlighted above, Wiseman does it with mirrors).

Wiseman’s and Dean’s dancers are abstracted forms, emphasising an arched back, a foot en pointe or a hand curling up from the shoulder. The filmmaker’s focus on the dancer’s rehearsal period culminates at the end of every scene with the memory of a collection of repeated poses and postures. It is this preoccupation with form, and the context of form, that reinforces the notion that the role of the documentary filmmaker (as essayist, as film artist, as onlooker) will have above all else (talent included) patience because in the here-and-now (or, conversely, there-and-then) he or she is better best ignored.

About the Author: Ajay RS Hothi is a documentary filmmaker. He is a research student at the Royal College of Art, focussing on art writing and it relationship to gallery-based exhibition, and is currently manager of tank.tv.

Lenny's Documentary, Ian Bourn, 1978

Dates: 9 September – 7 November | Location: Raven Row, London

Polytechnic is an exhibition of video, installation and tape/slide works made between the mid seventies and early eighties by a number of artists in the UK who were developing new relationships between ‘experimental’ media and ideas of narrative. The complex and hybrid works in the exhibition talk about autobiography, television, diaries, lost histories, sexuality, the communist bloc, popular culture, fictions, soap operas and murder.

Polytechnic has a particular emphasis on video work. As well as the emergence of the domestic video recorder, the period covered by the exhibition saw artists gaining increasing access to video cameras and recording decks. This engagement with technology was encouraged through the development of media departments in Art Schools and Polytechnics, where many of the artists studied and taught.

The artists featured are John Adams, Ian Bourn, Ian Breakwell, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, David Critchley, Catherine Elwes, Roberta Graham, Susan Hiller, Stuart Marshall, Cordelia Swann and Graham Young. Polytechnic is curated by Richard Grayson, an artist curator and writer based in London.

Non Places, Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, 1999

no.w.here is a unique space in London combining film production alongside critical dialogue about contemporary image making. As an artist run organisation no.w.here has supported the production of hundreds of artist works, run multiple workshops and critical discussions and actively curated performances, screenings, residencies, publications, events and exhibitions.

You work as artists, as curators, but also as creative cultural entrepreneurs. What do you call describe the other stuff you do, the stuff that isn’t being artists or curators?

Brad Butler: We just call it no.w.here…!

Karen Mirza:  I’ve been thinking about it recently as ‘the artist as…’. So, as researcher, as facilitator, as curator, as producer. It reflects the notion that practice has shifted. For example some curators now describe themselves as a curator/writer/artist. I am interested in roles and definitions not being fixed categories.

Do you think that’s understood, by a wider audience? People might need it explained?

Brad: People encounter our practice in very different ways, but some people do only see us as facilitators. It’s a big jump for some to recognise that no.w.here is an artists’ platform, that we make work ourselves, and that no.w.here addresses the complications and ideas that come out of our own practice.

One of the rare things about no.w.here is that it’s an artists’ platform with production facilities. But over time we’ve established our own body of work outside of no.w.here. In fact, right now is the first time I’ve been personally really happy with the balance in the perception between our own work and no.w.here, at least in the UK.  Outside of the UK it’s no problem – we’ve been working outside of the UK much more in the last three or four years. Really putting our energy out there, because our experience of being abroad is that people are generally more open to be able to allow you to be the sum of your parts.

Karen: Or to read the shifting register that we propose. They don’t put us in a box so easily.  That’s what I meant about is it understood, that desire by others to categorise what you are and what you do.

You started working together as artists before you started doing the other things. How did you happen to come to work together – because you come from different disciplines, don’t you?

Karen: We met as students at the Royal College of Art. We were both working with film or moving image, but in completely different ways and in different departments.

Brad was making documentaries in the Film Department, and I was in Communication Art and Design. I was in an inter-disciplinary space, I’d come from painting in Camberwell, where I didn’t quite fit, and ended up at the Royal College doing my masters.

We met, and made our first film, Asylum. Brad’s brief had been to make an arts documentary, and he took a slightly different approach, inviting an artist, me, to collaborate with him. So we made a piece of work that didn’t take straight roles of the artist as the subject and the filmmaker as the documentarian – it was quite a controversial piece.

And how your dialogue develop. Did you find that you had different critical languages?

Brad: One of the things we realised was that we’d often use very different ways to get to the same point.  And that became interesting, especially in the way we described things.  Though we never thought this would end up becoming a production space, not back then.  no.w.here was – and is – an idea to do with articulations around practice and the overlaps and the layers and the confluences. The conflicts and negotiations between our different ways of making work.

no.w.here has always been a discussion between Karen and myself about what it means to make work ‘now’, at this point. And part of this has always been an interest in language, an investment in language. Whether you take that as cinematic language or the limits of language or text as image…

Karen: In my painting I was interested in investigating the image, and in questions around representation. Brad was coming from anthropology and documentary. So there was a strong connection where our relationship to the moving image was coming from non-fiction – we weren’t working with theatrical models of cinema or narrative.

Questions of representation are fundamental to both painting and documentary factors – was that a key thing?

Karen: Yes. And being at college and being exposed to a lot of avant-garde film practice was a real eye opener. You could think about film and image in time, in an exciting way.

And is that where your championing of both historic and contemporary avant-garde film practice started? Were you looking to situate your practice in some kind of context?

Karen: Not really, that was more a part of the artistic process. When I make work there are films and texts that are part of the thinking. We’re both avid readers, so there’s always theory and critical texts around our discussions. But also, there are always things that happen in the everyday. An observation, an experience or an encounter.

And all those things go in to making the work. When we were making Asylum there were already ideas we knew we couldn’t contain within that work, they spill out. Whenever we’re making a work, we’re always seeding the next work, so half way through making Asylum we’d already come up to the observation of what became the next film, which was Non-Places.

The way I think about no.w.here and our own practice is as a set of dialogues that happen around our interests that are working their way through into new work. And then there are larger dialogues which are not right to put into our personal work but which are an influence, and no.w.here as a framework reflects them both. We develop discussions and see if other people are interested in them also.  This creates the facilitation, the exhibition of other work, the showcasing of work.

It’s striking, in both your art practice and the other things you do, that it’s an engagement and dialogue with historic avant-garde, but that your work doesn’t simply emulate that interest in material.

Brad: On the issue of materiality and the historical avant-garde, one thing that has occurred to me is how as a society we quickly leap onto the newest thing. But for me when we talk about an historic avant-garde, well, I consider these people to also be peers and it’s very exciting to be in dialogue with them. This is a dialogue with people who are forever embedded in the apparatus… for example when artists first picked up the cine camera. I don’t think these attitudes should be silenced because history or technology looks forward.

I think we’re agreeing..! There is historical practice, but having a dialogue with that practice isn’t the same thing as simply perpetuating a kind of rulebook for the avant-garde. In your own work, you might break a lot of those rules for example, in that it’s always interested in something in addition to the formal and materialist – in that, while it isn’t representational, it’s questioning representation. But how does that work?

But how do you make avant-garde films that are also of the broader political culture? I think this is a roundabout way of asking you if you’re political artists.

Karen: Well, yes. Though I’d qualify that in that politics is a much more explicit interest in our current work. The earlier work gathered significant support but in very marginal places – the kind of classical spaces of avant-garde practice. Certain film festivals, certain curators. But otherwise, its politics were mostly overlooked and we were mistakenly branded materialists.

I do consider that this work was always political. In 1999 we made Non Places on 16mm black and white film, as a site of resistance to the emerging digital wave and the arguments about technological determinism. It was made for cinema and the gallery. It can be read as a linear fifteen minutes beginning, middle and end film, but it also has meaning if you enter and exit at any point. It has an internal logic that doesn’t compromise either format – cinematic or gallery.

These are the kind of debates that were happening around film and video at that time, and this was a work that was clearly addressing those. And it was also screened and ‘performed’ – as was always the intention – in one of the filmed locations, the underpasses of Marble Arch in the West End. The intervention into public space; the relationship of media into public space, to public art, is another highly politicised space of intervention. Who has rights to public space? What’s the relationship of private and public space? These negotiations interested us in making this kind of event, including the reading of this work by different viewers – joggers, tourists, workers, homeless people, the police, the art audience – that congregated on that evening.

Brad: A key thread that runs through no.w.here implicitly, and now is in our work explicitly, is the question: How does one resist? A difficult question considering the many complexities of the ‘political’. We’re quite explicit about this in our new work The Museum of Non Participation which is the way we are personally addressing this question, whereas no.w.here proposes a relationship between art and film and looks to reflect back what’s happening in society more generally, because it’s about contemporary practice. But now in our practice we are also explicitly saying, “This is a big question for us.”

So how has your work changed from Non Places – what are the changes in your approach to making work?

Karen: For me this started when we were invited to do a project, to collaborate with another filmmaker and curator in India, on the Experimenta film festival. This was about constructing an independent film platform inside India across different regions, filmic histories, and cultural languages.

Experimenta was partly about bringing classical North American and European avant-garde works to India – some of the works that even Indian intellectuals and academics had only read about, and showing them alongside new film and video work from India. That was a five -ear collaboration with Shai Heredia – travelling, thinking, working and living – and gradually shifting our own working practice, context and ideas to embrace other modernisms than the Western, North American and European frameworks.

And that fed back into your own work?

Karen:  Yes, absolutely. Our research, no.w.here, the work that you’re seeing from us now, the conversations we’re having on issues from Afghansitan, Pakistan, the Middle East to local politics. These are explorations that we are involved with, like you would if you were painting or drawing, we’re sketching a new context.

Brad: But also, when thinking about all of these activities, there was also the timing of things. Locally in 2000 the The Lux Centre collapsed, which was a big problem for us.  And globally, the shift in geopolitics was emphatic…

So what happened? You were working as artists. You had a curatorial practice. What’s the step to what no.w.here became?

Karen: You’re referring to our original 291 screenings. There was such an energy around showing that work at that time, we carved out a space and invited other artists. It was like doing a club night, but for avant-garde film, contemporary and historical work.

This happened because The Lux Centre closed the month that we started dong the screenings – we’d already been planning to do these because we were thinking there’s a dialogue about saving the collection, but there’s not a dialogue about production. So I think people gathered around the 291 screenings as an energy around ‘practice’.

And then naturally whilst we were showing the work we started to think, “How does work get made now?” So it was a very organic kind of set of conclusions whilst simultaneously we were going to these meetings about saving the Lux collection. There was a sense of real support and lobbying for what was going on for the sector.

Brad: It became about necessity. If the work isn’t being shown, you show the work.  If you haven’t got a space to make the work, you create the space. If the equipment is about to be thrown out, pick it up and put it back together. So it started off in Karen’s studio – and the equipment most in demand at that point was an optical printer…

Karen: … it was the most portable and wasn’t in disrepair. Things like the rostrum camera were in multiple pieces. So the optical printer was at least one portable object that could be taken out of the lock up, put into a dark room and we said “you can use it now.”

Brad: But I think the vision was the critical bit, because we were told by the Arts Council very squarely that a co-operative structure was not going to be acceptable. And we had already worked out that it’s not enough just to have the equipment. You have to create a dialogue around using the equipment and you have to show work. So you have a cycle of production, education, distribution and dialogue, critical dialogue.

So you came from being artists and having facilitated curatorial debate and discussion, and then production adds to that activity. I think that’s very different than if you start from offering the means of production.

Karen:  Yes – I think we had the questions of why? Why analogue film, in 2004. And you have to address that contextually. You couldn’t put the production equipment back into use without actually questioning its situation. And as much as we have been accused of being fetishists or materialists, well, that was the furthest from our mind. We’re not in love with the 19th century! It’s about having this broad range of ways to make an image, and continuing to have those options. It is about maintaining critical relationships towards image making per se.

And is it practice-led demand? Artists wanting to work with that material?

Karen: At that particular point, there weren’t that many really. At that time, I’d met Guy Sherwin through showing work and he basically pushed me forward when there was talk in the old Lux about getting rid of film saying, “This is a young person who’s interested in film.” I wasn’t the only one, but a lot of the film had already been run down – if you went to do an optical printing workshop you’d turn up, pay your £50, and half the kit wasn’t working.

Brad: And as a technology dies artists often pick it up at that point. The flame burns brightest at the end! And the digital is an inevitable wave, a tsunami for analogue. And it’s really important to think about film not just as a material but also its thinking processes and its apparatus, the hierarchies and the heritage and the future. But again we were not interested in fighting for an analogue technology. We set up no.w.here in response to philosophical questions.

And pragmatically, digital as a production method didn’t need that kind of support.

Brad:  Yes, and it’s interesting that everyone can now make films in their bedrooms if they like or their studios. The whole sense of working around the co-operative, and the collaborative, is different now and no.w.here addresses that tension.

In your curatorial practice and in your film practice, those debates are often about celluloid as a material, but I’d say they’re not bound by that. You work with film, but it’s ideas and place and things that take priority – or at least that’s what’s prioritised in the way I respond to the work. Even with Non Places – it’s about public space, it’s about how individuals function, there’s a subject there that’s not just the material.

Karen:  I was listening to a discussion recently about operating within the real and the symbolic. Non Places, for me, is also a film about film. It’s about film and cinema as a non-place.  So the site of the auditorium, that space of exchange or contract – you enter and see a film – is a non place. Not a destination and not an arrival point. It’s this imminent space.

And then, also, it is actually physically about place, the film documents and marks London in 1999. And also the relationship to place, ideas about how we live our lives. So a politics of time, because to stop in transit and to be present, is in itself an act of thinking about the politics of time.

Brad:  There’s a saying that the first image of the film is the most important. And every image after that is an attempt to explain that first image. That you can read everything from there in a way. Recently Karen and I were standing in the National Art Gallery in Islamabad, standing in a room full of paintings – paintings of nudes in Islamic society, a problematic space. From there we looked through the window at the lawyers being beaten by police in front of the High Commission in Pakistan, a violent end to a peaceful protest. This experience has now become a metaphor for our interests, an image we are trying to unravel, the idea of being within a contested space and looking out at another contested space and encountering one’s own relationship between art and politics, politics and aesthetics. Where the room is the camera and the window is the lens, and we stand inside the apparatus… what does the window mean? Because, of course, there are different kinds of windows…

I think that’s exactly the difference between Non Places and the work you’re making now in that it’s the apparatus but actually you’re using apparatus as a conceptual tool to discuss that much broader apparatus. And you’re engaging, you’re engaging with the world.  Where Non Places situated itself in the world, The Exception and the Rule is in dialogue with places, with people…

Brad: Perhaps we can think about this as a condition of modernism. That we all share conditions of modernity with each other. One of the implications of this is that we are all living within local and global relationships, forming relationships with countries and cultures we may never visit geographically. This is a kind of very modern anthropology for me, the idea that I can have a media relationship with Pakistan (for example) and yet I may not make time to know my neighbour living next door.

Karen: And that’s partly because of our relationship to images. Image production, circulation, distribution…

Is it the difference between commentary and engagement?

Brad: An implication that we are living through and by the image.

Karen: It’s very rewarding to be able to work across these different platforms as in a sense the Museum of Non Participation as a project and an artwork also incorporates some of no.w.here’s methods and strategies. A constructive exchange between research, facilitation, private and public conversations, film and art.

Last Island, Sibyl Montague, (2009), courtesy of the Oriel Davies Art Gallery

Samantha Moore visits RE:animate, the Oriel Davies Open Exhibition 2010, running until 18 August 2010 at Oriel Davies, Newtown, Wales.

“At the editing table, when I run the trip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe, I slowly wind one frame after another, see almost imperceptible changes, wind faster — a movement.”[1]

The Oriel Davies Open exhibition is held every two years, opening this small contemporary art gallery about to artists from Wales and the border counties. For this themed exhibition however, the brief was opened up nationally and work was accepted from 39 artists, with themes emerging organically from the work submitted rather than invited.

There is a strong flavour of the magical quality of early and pre-cinema in RE:animate. Savinder Bual’s flickering 1 second looped Train (2009) makes reference to the Lumière brothers film L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895). Ruth Martindale’s piece Papermaking Hampstead Heath (2010) is a flipbook and also a DVD of the flipping, the irregular brrrrmmm of the pages being thumbed past at odds with the slick modern flat screen it is displayed on. There’s even a magic lantern installation, Kate Allen’s Circle (2010) where a 35 mm slide projector slowly dissolves images of something which could be a hand, a ruined statue, a selection of geometric shapes or a landscape.

Sara Bjarland’s 2008 piece Blossom is equally low-tech. It is a video of balled up plastic bags unfurling/furling. There is a playful pleasure in the sequential images running both ways, a visual palindrome, and it reminded me of the Bergman quote above – the “dizzy sense of magic” when you first grasp the potential of moving images and willfully trick your eyes into believing what your brain can’t. Sharon Leahy-Clark’s Some made it, some didn’t (2006) also embraces the playful. It is an energetic sequence of primitive clay figures lined up on a narrow shelf, roughly formed and glistening with brights glazes, frozen in wild movement like hyped up toddlers. It makes movement real but isn’t moving, which seems counter-intuitive at an animation exhibition and yet fits with the sense of parlour game trickery.

The gallery space is dimly lit, mysterious with a theatrical quality. Part of this is inherent in the familiar gallery set up of boxed off faux-cinema spaces (there is one ‘box’ cinema and one gallery which is essentially a cinema), but there is also an inviting and appealing quality to the set up as you are drawn into the first gallery which mainly houses the non-time based work. Alex Boyd, curator of the show, is interested in the psychology of the gallery space, and the willing suspension of disbelief which people so happily acquiesce to with animation. This bending of the rules of reality which animation is so comfortable with is demonstrated in the piece which lures you into the space, Sibyl Montague’s Last Island (2009). A fragile pile of flour on the gallery floor, onto which is projected a loop of three characters scrabbling about in the dust. A circular mask on the projector silhouettes the flour hill against the wall behind. Montague references Plato’s Cave in this piece, with concerns about false ideas of reality and an inability to see the truth – interesting in the context of animation in any case.

Another Sara Bjarland piece Flight (2009) is a dead bee on a wire slowly rotating via a motor on a plinth. It brought back to me my childhood fear of animatronics (I blame that creepy cobbler dummy with his incessant hammer) and condensed the impression of the still representing movement, dead standing in for life. I have mixed feelings about this precinematic aura, in some ways it was exhilarating (pre-digital! look what you can do…) but in others it seemed to be a regression into a safer place, a refuge in archaic games.

Two artists’ works finally reminded me that refuges aren’t safe places for everyone; Annabel Tilley’s The second tallest tree in Josef Fritzl’s garden (2009) and Kristian de la Riva’s Cut (2009). Tilley’s work is a set of sequential pen and ink drawings, a repeated image of the very tip of a tree in the garden of the infamous Austrian man found guilty of rape, incest and the false imprisonment of his daughter and her three children. The blandness of the repeated imagery in cross hatched ink belies the context of the image and the fracturing of the cut off tree tip takes on sinister connotations. De La Riva’s Cut is a black and white rotoscoped looped video of a man cutting off bits of himself with various implements. The medium of animation allows a certain distance to be maintained between the acts (disembowelment, castration, slicing off kneecaps etc) and the empathy the audience feels with the bloodless, drawn performance of them. Eventually the relentlessness of the Itchy & Scratchy type violence became too much for me (it was the kneecaps that did it) and I backed off, wincing. Apparently it’s the most popular exhibit with children and young people.

The exhibition prize winners were Pia Borg’s Palimpsest and Sybil Montague‘s Totem. Both will get a gallery space for their own exhibitions in 2011, allowing and encouraging them to develop their practice in this area.

Footnote:
[1] Ingmar Bergman The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography translated by Joan Tate pub. Penguin Books (1989)

About the Author: Samantha Moore developed an interest in animated documentary as a form after making Success with Sweet Peas (2003). She subsequently made doubled up (2004) and  The Beloved Ones (2007). Her film An Eyeful of Sound  (2010) was a Wellcome Trust commission. Samantha teaches at the University of Wolverhampton and has given several papers on animated documentary. She is about to embark on a related Ph.D at the University of Loughborough.