Sarah Turner

APEngine talks to Sarah Turner, about her new experimental feature, Perestroika, which premieres at the London Film Festival.

Why did you start making films?

Oh god, I wasn’t really expecting a question like that!

I went to art school because basically I was useless. Like everyone who goes to art school. There’s a quote – something like “People who go to art school don’t know what to do with the world and the world doesn’t know what to do with them.”

But I did have a very strong craft base for observational drawing, and I always wanted to go to art school. When I was first at school I began to write a lot and to take photographs, and both are time based mediums, and the relationship between the two is somehow a relationship of language – by which I mean ideas in time.

Film was the logical conclusion, but I trained within fine art. My course at St Martin’s was Fine Art, Film and Video, and then I went to the Slade and did another two years within the media department, so again working in time and space.

What kind of work, what kind of artists, filmmakers, were influencing you or were you looking at?

I was more driven by the novel to be honest; by literature. I had more access to literature than I did to artists’ film. I was pretty much obsessed with Marguerite Duras, people like that. But once I was a student, I was compelled very much by people like Lis Rhodes, William Raban,  Tina Keane.  And Sandra Lahire. Sandra was a very good friend of mine and I found her work extremely compelling because of the way she used a formalist discourse but there was intense emotion in the work.

And Duras was someone who also made films. You left the Slade, you started making your own work, and you also worked at the London Film Makers’ Co-op.

I was working in distribution – I went back later to curate the launch programme of The LUX Cinema, with John Thomson. I had access to thousands of very interesting films, and also a fantastic community of artists; that was the most exciting thing about working there.

I was also programming – that’s what you did in distribution so I took over doing the avant-garde showcase at the NFT from Tony Warcus, who’d set up that and was doing fantastic work.

Perestroika, your new film, is feature length, but it’s not your first feature length film, is it? You made Ecology before that. But they’re very different films, aren’t they? I mean, how would you describe Ecology?

There are similarities. Ecology uses a more straightforward approach to narrative. A really big part of my practice as an artist is writing. My short film Cut was a short story before it was an experimental film.

Having gone through a very long period of working – making short films with funding from the Arts Council and Channel 4, I was being commissioned by the BFI to write a feature film, and at that time, you know, however kind of left field they were – and they’d supported some wonderful left field work like Andrew Kötting’s Gallivant, Patrick Keiller’s work, and they’d worked with Sally Potter.

But in the late 90’s, there was a movement towards recruiting artists to make more commercial work, just on a very low budget. For me to be commissioned to write a feature script was really fantastic. And a really interesting challenge as a writer.

But because I trained through the art school, I then had to train myself to write in a completely different way – the paradigm of screenplay. It’s a lot of work, to learn to do that. It is a craft, and it’s a brilliant craft to learn, screenwriting. Because of the way you have to use compression and the image in the space.

I learned an enormous amount from doing that, and also from working with very talented script editors. In hindsight it was a really positive process. There are frustrations.

That developing a script doesn’t necessarily get a film made?

That’s one of them – a core frustration to an artist who’s used to making work and putting it into the world. I spent two years writing a feature film script, and it’s an interesting piece of writing, and an interesting process, but actually that script exists in a file that only a series of writers and producers and commissioning editors have read. The BFI script was actually bought by FilmFour Lab and I then went on and did other drafts of it.

The process in some sense becomes more and more frustrating, because that form of writing is mediated by other people’s desire. And those desires are contingent on many other ideas – their ideas around market and commodity really, and particular ideas of audience, in this cultural moment. I think there are moments in British history where that hasn’t been the case.

Derek Jarman was certainly left alone to write his scripts, which wouldn’t have been that coherent on the page, but still very strong pieces of writing. But they certainly don’t conform to the three act, rising action line, in a conventional narrative structure.

Was there a stage, having been through that experience, that you decided that what you actually wanted to do was actually make a film… was the way you set about making Ecology in response to what you’d been through?

It was more than that, because a really big part of my practice was as a writer, and I felt extremely frustrated not just by the semi-commercial paradigm. I also felt completely constrained by the limitations of the screenplay form, which isn’t about language, actually, because nothing that is on the page in a screenplay ever is on the screen other than dialogue, which for me is the least interesting thing in a screenplay.

So as an artist, I found that a very constraining to work within that. So Ecology wasn’t just about getting a film made, it was about a form of performative writing and using a form of experimental writing within the feature form. I’d spent by that time five, six, seven years writing screenplays. So for me, I couldn’t have gone back to making a short film.

I could now – it’s the difference between a short story and a novel. But the stuff around duration and complexity of ideas was so much by that point in my kind of blood, that I needed to – just for simple self-development, really – to push that further as an artist, and take what I’d learned from the training of writing more conventional work.

So how did Ecology write itself?

Well, I wrote it. It evolved out of the experience of the landscape that it was shot in. And the constraints, potentials, and limitations of that landscape, and the experience of being there, the experience of being on a writer’s retreat working on another film, and probably realising by this point that it was emotionally destructive to go down a path of writing another screenplay that I would need half a million pounds to make, and I would lose all control. Basically, I wanted my control back.

So in that landscape, I had the idea, and the idea was complete for Ecology – I had key images and the emotional movement of each character, and then I wrote it bit by bit.

So you had a script of Ecology and then you set about making the film – they’re separate films?

I wrote three short stories, so it’s actually a piece of experimental writing that exists on its own, that are in no way a script, because they’re a stream of consciousness monologues. And the writing itself performs the characterisation, in terms of the way of ‘she’, ‘you’ and ‘I’ are used. So the personal pronoun frames experience.

And it’s about a relationship, relationships and there are actors who play characters in it. Whereas in Perestroika there’s a more explicitly autobiographical trigger, isn’t there?

Yes is the blunt answer to that.

What triggered you to make this film?

Wanting to make another long form piece of work, which again had an experimental approach to writing and would formally stretch me. And not repeating myself. The autobiographical trigger was that I’d made this journey as a very young woman, I was 20, and I became 21 – I was a second-year student at St Martin’s, and it was the first time I’d properly used a video camera. I shot out the window. I’d never done anything at all with this footage from 20 years ago. And in the ellipsis between then and now –

Sarah Turner, Perestroika (2009). Image courtesy of the artist

You shot through the window of the Trans-Siberian train.

From Moscow to Irkutsk. I shot other footage on that trip, but the bulk of my rushes from then from 1987, 1988, were from the window of the train, and we see a lot of that footage in Perestroika. And between then and now, 20 years, there’s been an awful lot of change, social, cultural, historical, political, and obviously personal.

So the personal experience is, well, I’m 20 years old then; that’s interesting in itself, to return to the self, experience of self, and there’s an awful lot of loss involved in that around time, and memory. But key to that loss is the loss of two of my best friends, who were both on that train. One, Sian Thomas, whose voice we hear extensively, who actually facilitated that trip for me. She was killed in a cycling accident in Siberia in 1993. And Pat Finn, who I became close friends with on that trip, because we were the only young single women. We were travelling for four weeks, and Pat and I developed a very intense bond, and became, very, very close friends. Pat died just before Christmas in 2000 of breast cancer.

Death is a big part of this. I can talk about it up to a point. But obviously in the sector that we work in, as you know, we’ve had lots of losses as a sector, and key to that is Sandra Lahire. Sandra was a very close friend of mine as well, and I wanted in some way to explore the idea of some kind of loss. I’d been back many times – Sian married a Russian and lived in Moscow – but I hadn’t been back since her death, so that was quite a challenge.

What I became fascinated in is an idea about the relationship between photography and death, which an awful lot has been written about. But very little has been written about the relationship of sound, in terms of technologies of memory, if you like, which is how I started thinking around this. I was much more compelled by sound, and I can’t explain it, but it’s the voice that continues to echo and reverberate, because we hear it now, right?

We can look at a photograph of someone who’s dead and it’s..the ‘index’, the indexical experience, the trace of that moment, and the trace of that person, and it’s very Roland Barthes. It really is that moment of death. But in sound, we don’t have that separation, because we’re re-experiencing it – now. These things are things that were driving my writing.

So I was more compelled by the sound than by the images, and that’s what I really worked with. And then obviously what’s happened in that twenty years is the much wider cultural and historical significance – Eastern Europe has ceased to be the Eastern Bloc, and communism within Europe has ceased to exist. So, to return to a culture that I experienced as a Communist culture, and in this particular moment, when of course world capitalism is finally collapsing!

It’s making a comeback.

Yeah. Sadly not. So there parallels, between the social, political, historical material.

I think that all comes through in the film, but it also strikes me that there’s a kind of fictional premise, in that it’s a therapeutic journey for the main character. The narration is about a psychological struggle, but there’s this whole epic journey – there’s the whole of Russia outside the window of the train carriage. Was that a disjuncture that you set out to explore?

Very much, and for me, the film very explicitly functions as an environmental allegory. Here we are, and we’re experiencing the narration through the psyche, if you like, of the character who is Sarah Turner, who has retrograde amnesia which was caused by a brain injury in a cycling accident. So it’s a memory work, re-experiencing an experience. And here we are on this train, and almost literally we are boiling – the train is very hot.

I wrote Perestroika in the same way that I wrote Ecology, in that I had an experience, and then I wrote in response to the experience. And key to that experience was the difficulty of returning, the difficulty of being on the train because of the heat, and the astonishing experience of the change in the landscape. I travelled on the same dates – so we were on that train on New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day, we left on the 28 of December, so we were travelling through the middle of Siberia in December, and this time there was no snow, for vast portions of the journey, when there was before – cutting between now and footage from 20 years ago.

Metaphorically, and symbolically, so we are seeing something which is actual, but the film is exploring ideas of what is real, what is fact, what is evidence, what is recorded. What do we think we are seeing and what are we actually seeing? There’s a kind of cultural amnesia happening generally at the moment, because here we are, sitting in our overheated little units, our overheated units of quotidian domesticity, while the planet boils.

At the very beginning, there’s the voiceover, saying about your bicycle accident, “I understand the context of manic and reckless.” ‘Manic and reckless’ becomes applicable to much wider political issues doesn’t it.

Yes, I’m grateful for that observation, thank you! No, I am, seriously. Obviously the train itself is a metaphor – and a key symbol of the Industrial Revolution and all of the things that we equate as progress. So we literally swathe through landscape in this train, while the world outside our window is heating up.

It’s an epic journey. And at the end of it. where have we arrived?

Literally and emotionally in a form of hell. If you’re in any way interested in environmental politics, which I very much am, just with regard to the science, Siberia is one of the world’s tipping points. Where the planet will do much more damage to itself than we could possibly do in 200 years of excessive carbon emissions. The Siberian permafrost covers a significant portion of the world, and underneath that is vast amounts of methane. As the permafrost melts, the methane is leaking, and of course, methane is a very very intense carbon gas. The science of it is astonishing.

Siberia is the site of some of the world’s most important resources – its oil, gas, minerals.

You say it’s the world doing damage to itself, but that’s triggered by us?

By us, of course. But there are lots of tipping points that we can’t control, unless you literally deflect the sun. Lake Baikal is now a world heritage site – the deepest lake in the world. An extraordinary natural geological phenomenon, it’s the oldest and the deepest lake in the world, and it’s of enormous scientific interest and a geological resource.

You mix Hi8 footage from 20 years ago with pixillation shot with a stills camera and HD. Generally pointing the camera out of the train window. Were you expecting to capture such exquisitely beautiful imagery, just by pointing your camera out of the window?

Yes, I was. And with very little grading. Matthew Walter, who did the photography with me, is a stills photographer, but an absolutely brilliant cinematographer as well. For myself, as a filmmaker, I’m interested in beauty both as an aesthetic and as a device, and that’s a choice. Many artists work against beauty, against that as a set of values and ideas. I choose to worth with, if you like, ideas of the sublime, and work with beauty.

And key to that is our craft base. So we didn’t just stick the camera out the window – although of course we did – and there’s a lot of reflexive commentary on that which is playing a game with it. We worked non stop on the train to frame and compose and constantly have those stills cameras clicking on timers. What I was interested in there was film history, film as a series of stills – so the train became a natural shutter.

There is an image from the first trip which I’ve used, which I have on my wall – of Sian with a camera, photographing me, filming her. I have that still image which I didn’t take, and I don’t know how I have it, or when it was given to me. It’s interesting in terms of history – autobiography and storytelling – that I don’t understand my own narratives, my own stories, because we forget.

Photography is telling us something that we don’t know. It wasn’t until I was really looking at this footage that I realised that this moment was the moment of her taking that image, which is shocking – that here is the dead person, who’s alive in the moving image footage, taking a photograph of the living person who is ‘dead’ in the still photograph. All of these ideas, which are complex, and available to some audiences and not available to others, and not interesting for other people – they are there in the thinking of the film.

But again, that’s paralleled in the ecological interests in the film, isn’t it, in that it’s a recording of the planet then and now, and it’s a different planet.

And key to that is ideas of storytelling and who’s telling which story, which story is framed, who’s telling it and how has it been told.

You used the word sublime, and I think it’s sometimes misused, because sublime isn’t just about beauty, it’s actually about terrible and terrifying – Edmund Burke said “terror is in all cases.. the ruling principle of the sublime.”

I’m using it in that way – the apocalyptic movement in the film at the end.

And even more so in this film than in your other films, because this is a film about the planet, and the world, it’s a film about light, and it’s a film about colour, and it’s a film about beauty which is terrifying, it’s luxurious film to experience, do you think?

I hope it’s very visceral experience. I work very hard at that, and the discipline of that – of very disciplined formal approach that we only see out of the window, or the movement through the carriage, and the movement up to the hotel. So we never see the person seeing, other than briefly in an out of focus still, which is speaking about the inadequacy of the family photograph, the happy holiday snap – well the inadequacy of all photography.

There are reflections. Which seem to sum up the film…

Ghosts.

Ghosts. Things we can’t grasp.

Yeah, yeah. Ghosts.

Helen De Witt

With the London Film Festival just about in full swing, we talk to Helen De Witt, the Festival’s Producer.

Hi Helen. Now, you’re the producer of the London Film Festival…
Yes, and the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

How many festivals are there?
The two that I produce and two that are run by the BFI.

Which are the other two?
No, just these two.

I wanted to first ask you about your previous life.  Because…
You believe in reincarnation.

Yes.  I know you worked at the Scala a long time ago, when was that?
That was in the early 90’s. I was the last programmer before it closed.

The closure was very sad for London.
Very, very sad.

And where did you go?
I went to Cinenova, the women’s film and video distributors in Bethnal Green. I was there for three years, looking after acquisition and distribution. And after that I went to what was still then the London Filmmakers Co-op, and which, after the move to the LUX Centre in Hoxton Square, merged with London Electronic Arts. I became Head of Cinema at LUX.

Apparently the same job, but it was the LUX Cinema programme offered you a wider scope didn’t it, than programming at The Film Co-Op?
I didn’t programme the cinema at the old Co-op – I joined just before the move into the building. But it was Sarah Turner and Jon Thompson who programmed the introductory season to the LUX – so I went there and planned the subsequent programmes.

Your approach to programming at the LUX Cinema was quite broad, wasn’t it?
Oh certainly, the LUX always had a broader brief than the Filmmakers Co-op. For a start, it was a cinema that screened five days a week, sometimes seven days a week,  whereas at the Co-op it was only two, sometimes three.
And the Co-op’s brief was largely experimental, avant-garde film and some video, whereas the LUX was the point of kind of convergence of the media – although we kind of forget now how controversial that actually was at the time.

There’s film and celluloid, and then there’s video.
Yes, and digital media.  Now it almost seems like a completely false issue.

The other thing you were able to do at the LUX centre was programme independent and experimental work, so that the two could kind of reflect on each other?
Oh completely yes.  We often did that – seasons of work around themes that combined experimental cinema, artists film and videom and independent feature film making. And occasionally, for instance if we did a season on film and architecture, then mainstream Hollywood films would come into that too. We didn’t preclude anything – it was always about the context and curatorial ideas. About the nature of film making, the nature of image making, artist practice and so on. But we didn’t preclude any material from within what we would select for those seasons.

It was a terrible thing when The LUX Centre closed. Though of course there was the new LUX organisation. But have things changed in the last few years?
They have and they continue to do. There are some very exciting things happening. One of the most interesting curators in London at the moment is Ian White at the Whitechapel. Because I’m always on the look out for seeing either work that I don’t know, which sounds very very interesting, or work that I do know of, but have never seen. Or work that I’ve never heard of – or even work that you know well -  but which is programmed in a different context. Ian does all of those things in a very interesting way.
Obviously The Tate has a good programme. It can be fairly sporadic and a bit dependant on what exhibitions might be on. I think that Stuart Comer is still slightly hamstrung by that, slightly reined in, but they do some great seasons there.  Although it can be uncomfortable going to the Tate because you still feel that moving image, despite all the inroads it’s made into galleries – or certainly single screen moving images in the cinema space, is still seen as second fiddle in terms of what the institution is about.

Then there’s the underground scene, lot of things that are happening with artists themselves putting on screenings, in basements of pubs and so on.  So I think there are  very lively things happening. There’s also more artists film and video programming happening at the BFI Southbank. There may be a way to go in terms of getting some curatorial cohesion for the way that experimental cinema and artists’ work is programmed in the venue, but it’s happening. And even places like the Curzon in Soho have odd screenings that are very interesting and fit into that bracket.
So I think there’s a liveliness about it, but there’s still an absence of debate I feel. The old issues about cinema in galleries still get talked about and they’ve got a bit boring really, a little bit stale. And there isn’t really a discourse about what a progressive moving image practice could and should be. Things are often led by politics – and we’re living in a very deep politicised kind of time, so that could all change.

It’s strange that that’s still a struggle. What Ian and Stuart are doing is all the more incredible because of the evident struggle, that it’s all they can do to achieve what they’re doing, never mind get those institutions to actually take those things on board and integrate or generate that seriousness of debate and discussion.
I think that’s absolutely right and it’s something that the BFI should look at and is looking at. There is a kind of avant-garde working group that’s been formed and Will Fowler is obviously a key person within the BFI and he’s done some great seasons with Jeff Keen and so on. But they’re one off projects rather than having a kind of cohesive programming strategy, where you’d always know what to look for and what kind of approach the BFI is taking. Will’s doing all that he can, but we’ve only got three and a bit screens here and there’s a lot of demand on them in terms of what people want to do and what people want to see, so there’s a lot of ambition – it’s just how to realise that in the right kind of balance.

Because the BFI have obligations to the rest of cinema!?
Oh yes, and there’s a lot of it.

Sarah Turner, Perestroika (2009). Image courtesy of the artist

So what does a festival producer do?
I guess make the Festival happen. I do get asked “what do you do the rest of the year?” and I must admit it does make me want to thump people. It’s making the Festival happen in the broadest possible sense. Our Artistic Director is Sandra Hebron and the way I think about is, I’m the form, she’s the content. Although I like to stick my nose into the content whenever I get an opportunity.
There is all the infrastructural work about the venues, about the staffing. Setting up a huge but temporary organisation. I manage our special projects like the screenings in Trafalgar Square. And the Power to the Pixel digital conference, which is led by Liz Rosenthal as the director, but in terms of managing it as a project for the festival. There’s a training programme that we do that’s funded by Skillset for emerging up and coming filmmakers called Think, Shoot, Distribute.  And also I manage the sub-departments – the education department and the industry department. I manage the managers of those sub-departments as well.
And then there’s all kinds of stuff about set up in terms of IT and estates and finance and stuff.  Riveting.

How big is your team?
At festival time it’s about 50 if you count the agencies that we work with – I manage contracts for the delivery of various aspects of the festival, such as the gala screenings.

The job must have its benefits...
Well it’s an exciting job, it’s a very fast moving job.  And in a sense a festival is nothing in itself, it’s what you put in it, which is of course primarily the films and the filmmakers.  And you work with all kinds of other partners – educational organisations, other parts of the film industry, cultural institutes and embassies.
The festival has changed enormously in the last five or more years, in that we now have to, whether we want to or not – and I think we want to – work with other strategic partners, such as the LDA, the Mayor of London, the UK Film Council, Film London and so on. We might have different ideas about how we should do it, but we all have an ambition for making the best possible festival we can for London and for Londoners.

It feels much less clubby than it did a few years ago.  It actually feels like London’s film festival now.
Yes, that’s exactly what our ambition is.  And this year we’ve had additional funding from the UK Film Council to do even more of that. So it’s all about increasing the access and profile of the festival. Making it more noticeable overseas, working with international press, making the gala presentations more event based, by having more World and European premiers. And although to a lot of people that side of the festival isn’t what they’re interested in, they’re really interested in the Experimental section scandal, Hungarian documentaries or the latest film from Uzbekistan, all of that is still there and there’s no way that any of that work would ever be threatened. But it’s really important for London, for the UK, and for the UK film industry to have a festival that can put its head above the parapet on the international stage because it helps British cinema.  It helps British cinema get better.

And the economy in general I don’t doubt?
Exactly. There’s something we’re not very good at it in this country. The cynicism about the Olympics – a lot of which I understand and to some extent share – but we’re not very good at just showing off a bit and being a bit proud and I think we should do really. And that’s also about having a good time – and cinema is about enjoyment and understanding. Whether that be the latest George Clooney movie, The Men Who Stare At Goats, or something like Sarah Turner’s Perestroika – a film about psychic pain.  All those things are important.

The programme this year has been very well received – what do you like yourself?
Well as I just mentioned – Sarah Turner’s film. I’m slightly biased because I had a very – well I can’t even say small hand – I would say little fingernail in being with Sarah as she made that. In terms of the other films – it’s awful to say but this year, at this stage, I’ve seen a very small proportion of the programme. I really like the Ken McMullen film An Organisation of Dreams. In some ways it feels like quite an old fashioned film – a bit like a combination of a Nouvelle Vague film coupled with a 1970s film theorist film – but it’s really interesting! It’s about the relationship of film to philosophy really and what cinema can be as a psychic force, so I very much like that. There’s a
I’ve heard the new Bruno Dumont film about a nun. We have several nun films in the programme this year – that’s very important! He’s a film maker who’s worth looking at. And of course, the closing film, Nowhere Boy – a biopic of John Lennon, but by Sam Taylor Wood’s, one of the UK’s leading artists.

Showing the festival: Gustav Deutsch's FILM IST. a girl & a gun

APEngine talks to Mark Webber about his programming for the London Film Festival.

How – why – did you start programming?

As a teenager I was obsessed with Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground and reading books about The Factory and getting a little glimpse into that world, the New York underground. That’s my way in.

I desperately tried to see the films that were not easily available at the time. Definitely the Warhol films were not available. I can never remember whether the first thing I saw was Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle or a double bill of Ken Jacobs’ Blonde Cobra and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures at the Scala. And I was sort of sold on the basis of that screening – as a 17 year old kid.

But it was several years later that you began to pursue that professionally, as it were.

I’m not sure it’s a profession, it’s an enthusiasm.
The first thing I did was a club night at the ICA called Little Stabs at Happiness, which started in October 1997 and ran once a month for three years. Then I did a large film season for the Barbican and LUX Centre called Underground America in 1998. It was a survey of American avant-garde film from the ‘50s to the ‘70s.

You’re not just a fan … you do a lot of research don’t you – and talk especially to the an older generation of film makers. Would you describe yourself as primarily a programmer or curator or historian or what?

I think you were right when you said fan, it’s really just because I’m interested and I want other people to appreciate the films. One of the reasons I started was because I was hungry to see films and no one else was showing them.

Something I think you’ve achieved – maybe not you alone – is to have transformed the approach to presenting what used to be called ‘difficult work’. You’ve built a community and you create ‘events’. Is that what you meant by the appropriate context?  Because it’s not just about making the appropriate context for the work, it’s making an appropriate context for an audience as well, isn’t it?

Well, when I first became interested I would go to screenings and there’d be me, often the organiser – thought not always – and perhaps three or four other people and it was just so appallingly depressing. I just knew that the work deserved better so I tried to find ways to make it more approachable for people.

And you don’t need to do that so much anymore – you’ve conditioned your audience so, so well. Like Alex in A Clockwork Orange they will sit through everything!

Yes, in a way my job is done here. I don’t do much programming at the moment – there’s so much more going on now  that I don’t really need to. I don’t need to bang my head against the wall anymore.

But it always needs sustaining doesn’t it? And there’s always other stuff to show.
How long have you been programming at the London Film Festival?

I organised some performances by Ken Jacobs in 2000, and slowly the situation became more formalised. For the past five or six years we’ve had this curated weekend of screenings.

And it’s a weekend within the Experimenta programme isn’t it?  It’s not the whole Experimenta programme.

It’s not, no.  Experimenta is a broad church.

How would you describe the weekend?  Would you use the words ‘avant’ and ‘garde’?

I have done in the past but the more observant viewers may have noticed that particular phrase was phased out last year. I used to colloquially call it the ‘avant-garde weekend’ and now I don’t. I used to use the phrase ‘in the tradition of the avant-garde’ which is somewhat a misnomer, but by saying that, people could get some kind of handle on the kind of work it might be.

But even Experimenta, and your weekend within it, aren’t pretending to be a kind of survey of this year’s artists’ experimental film are they?

Aren’t they? There are certain restrictions, such as a requirement for UK premieres – which I think it’s a completely obsolete concept – but outside of that, we try to present something like a survey.

Well, within Experimenta there seem to be some quite straightforward films, while people like Shirin Neshat, Kutlug Ataman and Andrew Kötting are outside the Experimenta strand.

I never know what’s in the festival programme until I get the brochure, apart from what I do. So I’m also struggling with the idea that there are these other artists making feature films – and what that means in relation to the people that I show within this concentrated weekend.

It seems a little surprising that there aren’t those curatorial discussions going on within the Festival. I guess it’s hard to deliver a Festival and have space for that as well.

They give me total freedom really to do what I want, which is great, but sometimes I’m not sure how it fits in with everything else. In the beginning, I did fight for this aspect of the programme to have a separate identity, and the Festival resisted. It may be they were right in the end.

That approach gets you an audience, doesn’t it? Because your audience knows where to go, and when to go there. There is this weekend and there is this grouping of work, a particular kind of work.

But what always surprises me is that it’s not very predictable as to who actually comes. I don’t see the faces that I might expect to see at an avant-garde screening. That is a great thing – the Festival effect of bringing in a different audience.

I’ve definitely thought there were people who are from other parts the Festival as it were.

I think that’s good, and it’s not like they leave after ten minutes when they realise they’re in the wrong film. They seem to cope with what’s being put in front of them. I hope they come to other films throughout the year, that this is not just their one attempt.

Hollis Frampton looks like a highlight of the programme.

It’s the one thing that everybody’s talking to me about, and I’m not too sure why because it’s old stuff. These seven films that make up Hapax Legomena were conceived by Frampton to be a single combined film, or parts of the same film. It’s rare that we would get a chance to see them all together, and since the films have recently been preserved,  we can show them in new prints. That will be a nice change from the ropey copies we’re used to looking at.

We can read the books that tell us what films are classics and where they’re important, but it’s good now and then to actually face up to films and make up our own minds. So this is London’s opportunity to make up its own mind about Hollis Frampton.

And a highlight, for me anyway, would be Gustav Deutsch.  That’s quite an easy sell isn’t it – to people who haven’t encountered avant-garde film before?

You would think so … because it’s about sex.

I was thinking of archive and cinema as much as sex!

Deutsch often works with what you might call ‘found footage’, but it’s not really ‘found’ because he works very hard to discover it in various archives. This film is basically about the creation of the earth and the battle of the sexes, told entirely through images from, maybe, the first four decades of cinema, including material from the Imperial War Museum and the Kinsey Institute.

And the rest of the programme – is it a good year for the avant-garde?

It’s not a bad year, though for various reasons I have fewer screenings than previously. There’s still quite a few things to discover.
I’m a big fan of Mara Mattuschka,  and I’ve shown most of her recent work. I’m not at all interested in dance on film, dance on camera, but she’s been working with the Liquid Loft troupe in Vienna, who are quite, I guess, ‘avant-garde’ in dance terms.

Mara’s made four films with them, and the latest is Burning Palace, which also approaches an adult theme. The performers are pretty amazing in the way that they contort themselves, and Mara brings something extra special in the way that she films and edits their performances.

And what’s the state of the British avant-garde?

I don’t know if there’s an avant-garde as such, though there are people working in that tradition. I don’t know what to call it anymore, in the past few years the field has become wide open. There are still a lot of people working with film and video in interesting ways. I don’t think we need to worry over that too much do we?

I think people working in that tradition are making sense in other contexts or to other contexts now as well. Karen Mirza and Brad Butler are in your programme, and they work within a broader art context too.

They do, and they also have a gallery exhibition open at the moment. You can think of the architecture of the cinema as traditional, and maybe this is boring for those that are attracted by the bright lights of the art world, but the cinema is still the best place to watch a film that has a beginning, a middle and an end.  

Artists moving image is everywhere at the moment, but it’s still not very often shown in a theatre, and for me that’s one of the most important things about this part of the festival.

Catch Mark Webber’s Artists’ Film and Video programme at the London Film Festival on 24-25 October.

FILM IST. a girl & a gun, Gustav Deutsch

Dates: 24-25 October 2009 | Location: BFI Southbank, London

At this year’s London Film Festival, Mark Webber presents a varied selection of international artists’ film and video works ranging from the contemporary ethnography of Mirza/Butler to Jim Trainor’s witty, naïve animation of ancient civilisations. Gustav Deutsch introduces FILM IST. a girl & a gun, a battle of the sexes told through footage from early cinema, and a special event featuring new prints of films by Hollis Frampton complements the recent publication of his collected writings.

Established filmmakers Lewis Klahr, Mara Mattuschka and Matthias Müller are shown alongside younger artists Paul Abbott, Jana Debus, and Laida Lertxundi, who are screening in the festival for the first time. Continuous installations by Laure Prouvost and Victor Alimpiev will be presented in the BFI Southbank Studio.

Elsewhere in the festival, look for new features by Johan Grimonperez, Andrew Kötting, Ken McMullen and Sam Taylor-Wood, preservations of The Savage Eye and Far From Vietnam and the rediscovery of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno.

For more details visit the Secret Cinema website or visit the BFI Southbank for tickets.