The Experimenta Seminar is an intensive series of workshops organised by LUX for Experimenta, the artist’s moving image section of the BFI London Film Festival 2014 and led by filmmaker Ed Webb-Ingall. The Seminar will respond to and actively engage with the Experimenta programme of the London Film Festival in relation to the participants’ own practices. It will be structured around five, three-hour long meetings every morning from Wednesday 15th October to Sunday 19th October (10am-1pm) at the BFI Southbank, where the group will be joined by artists and programmers showings work within the festival, who will be invited to reflect upon their own work and actively participate in the sessions. Seminar participants will also attend the Experimenta festival screenings, and draw upon and interrogate their responses to these – extending from themes, issues, curatorial premises and the festival’s structure itself to individual works as they relate to a developing, ongoing conversation around contemporary moving image practices.
The Experimenta Seminars are for artists, curators, writers, researchers, students and others engaged with moving image within their own practice. Participants will be expected to attend every seminar and to fully contribute in determining the course through a combination of open, critical response and self-reflection. Seminar fees include free entry to all London Film Festival 2014 Experimenta screenings at the BFI Southbank from Wednesday 15th – Sunday 19th October (16 screenings in total see below for details). Please note it does not include entry to other festival screenings or Experimenta screenings before the 15th October.
For questions about the seminar please email [email protected]
Ed Webb-Ingall is a filmmaker with an interest in exploring practices and forms of collaboration. He works with groups, using modes of collective filmmaking as a means to investigate themes of identity, history, politics and representation
The Experimenta Seminar is supported by Arts Council England
SCREENINGS INCLUDED IN THE EXPERIMENTA SEMINAR
THE INEXTINGUISHABLE FIRE: HARUN FAROCKI 1944–2014
As a tribute to the late great German filmmaker Harun Farocki, we present the UK premiere of his most recent film series Parallel I–IV, a powerful meditation of post-cinematic image-making in video games alongside one of his earliest films, the agitprop classic, Inextinguishable Fire. —Benjamin Cook
Presented by Erika Balsom, lecturer in Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King’s College London and author of Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art.
INEXTINGUISHABLE FIRE Dir. Harun Farocki, Germany 1969, 25 min.
“When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you’ll shut your eyes. You’ll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you’ll close them to the memory. And then you’ll close your eyes to the facts.”
PARALLEL I–IV Dir. Harun Farocki, Germany 2012–14, 43 min.
Cinema’s onscreen worlds have always borne an indexical bond to the real. What happens when computer-generated video game images usurp film as the predominant medium of visual world-making? How does one’s relation to onscreen heroes shift when we no longer identify with real bodies? Harun Farocki’s four-part Parallel I–IV (2012–14) takes up these questions, tracing how, in just over 30 years, video games have developed from two-dimensional schematics to photorealistic environments.
WED 15 OCT 8:45 PM BFI NFT2
TRIBUTE TO MARIA KLONARIS 1950–2014
Maria Klonaris’ and Katerina Thomadaki’s Super 8 groundbreaking investigation into the uncanny as the repressed feminine unconscious. A major piece of French experimental cinema restored and transferred into 35mm by the Archives françaises du film. Screened in tribute to the late Maria Klonaris.
UNHEIMLICH I: SECRET DIALOGUE Dir./Prod. Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki, with Elia Akrivou, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki, Production Company A.S.T.A.R.T.I., France 1977–79, 70 min., silent
The late Maria Klonaris, who sadly passed away earlier in the year, with co-author Katerina Thomadaki, was responsible for some of the most radical feminist and transgender films and art ever created. Of Greek origin but based in Paris, Klonaris and Thomadaki were founders of the Cinema of the Body, a profound investigative practice into gender and bodily identity. In tribute to Maria and their work together, we present Unheimlich I: Secret Dialogue. Restored and transferred from Super8 to 35mm, the film takes the Freudian concept of the uncanny generated by an inexplicable strangeness to expose the reappearance of the repressed feminine unconscious through splitting, doubling and mirroring the cinematic image to question the boundaries of the real. —Helen de Witt
The screening will be introduced by writer and lecturer Cecile Chich, with a presentation by Katerina Thomadaki. They will be in conversation with Experimenta programmer Helen de Witt following the screening. Restored from Super 8 into 35mm by the Archives Françaises du Film/CNC under the supervision of Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki and with the support of the Athens-based J.F. Costopoulos Foundation.
THURS 16 OCT 6:30 PM BFI NFT3
WHEN YOU FALL INTO A TRANCE
Dir./Prod./Scr. Emily Wardill
Production Company Slalom Motion Pictures
UK-Belgium 2014, 72 min.
How can we be objective about ourselves? Emily Wardill’s delicate narrative of interconnections explores the mysterious relationship of mind and body. Neuroscientist Dominique is treating Simon, who suffers from the loss of his proprioception – his sense of the relative position of his body parts. Her daughter Tony is a synchronised swimmer, perfectly in control of her own body as a way of running away from her mind. Dominique met her lover Hugo on a dating website. He claims to be a US spy. Is it a lie or his fantasy? From different perspectives, all these figures exemplify an interior alienation that distorts their cognition of their respective worlds. —Helen de Witt
+ SPECTRUM REVERSE SPECTRUM Dir. Margaret Honda, USA 2014, 20 min.
A 70mm total immersion into the emergence of filmic colour and space that is a therapeutic treat for body and mind.
THURS 16 OCT 9:00 PM BFI NFT1
THIS ILLUMINATED WORLD IS FULL OF STUPID MEN
A selection of films in which the changing state of the world – and questions about how we might try to understand and visualise the complexity of its narrative – are explored in bold, speculative terms. —William Fowler
THIS ILLUMINATED WORLD IS FULL OF STUPID MEN Dir. Andrew Kötting and Eden Kötting, UK 2014, 9 min.
Eden Kötting draws bright images on transparent glass, whilst talking with her dad about the world and the people who run it.
MARS GARDEN Dir. Lewis Klahr, USA 2014, 5 min.
Muscular, patriarchal images of comic book superheroes from yesteryear are illuminated on a light box and juxtaposed with tactile skill.
TRANSCALAR INVESTMENT VEHICLES Dir./Scr. Hilary Koob-Sassen, Production Company The Errorists, UK-Germany 2014, 50 min.
This fragmented post-apocalyptic narrative utilises live action, song and mind-bending animation to explore the uncertain aftermath of a cataclysmic investment crisis.
DARK LIGHT Dir. John Smith, UK 2014, 4 min.
Reflecting on past political problems and the state of the world as it was provides no tools or means for envisioning the future.
FRI 17 OCT 2:00 PM BFI NFT3
OCCUPIED TERRITORIES
The world we live in is full of strange and hidden things. These films teach us to look anew at what’s in front of our eyes, to dissect the built environment, examine the landscape and experience how the moving image constructs the objects of our gaze. —Helen de Witt
SONS OF UNLESS AND CHILDREN OF ALMOST Dir. Phil Coy, UK 2014, 3 min.
Abstracted animated gifs occupy the screen space structured in patterns that lead to a dramatic climax.
45 7 BROADWAY Dir. Tomonari Nishikawa, USA 2013, 5 min.
Black and white over-lapping images of Times Square printed onto coloured paper to crate a throbbing image of the city.
RONSE Dir. Robbrecht Desmet, Belgium-Netherlands 2013, 12 min.
The Flemish city captured with the precision of a Flemish genre painting though taut editing and framing that invites us to examine every detail.
BÉTON BRUT Dir. Timothy Smith, UK 2014, 5 min.
London’s brutalist architecture reveals its complex structural and multi-textured beauty.
WOTRUBA Dir. Thomas Drachen, Austria 2014, 16 min.
Vienna’s unique Church of the Most Holy Trinity, a walk-in sculpture by architect Fritz Wotruba, is reconstructed into a new narrative through the assemblage of photographs.
THE TAKE-UP Dir. Patrick Tarrant, UK 2014, 11 min.
A demonstration of ‘light bending’ as a single take and variable speed flicker effect animated an architectural environment.
BLINDER Dir. David Leister, UK 2014, 6 min.
The 16mm image of domestic blinds also forms the optical soundtrack, making the contained domestic environment dazzle.
FROM A TO B Dir. Julia Dogra-Brazell, UK 2014, 1 min.
A brief moment of life flies past, filmed in flickers in front of Andy Warhol’s Empire State Building.
DOG PEOPLE Dir. Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy, Germany 2014, 25 min.
Set in the future, this is the bizarre history of a colonial Admiral and the brutality he inflicted on the mythical Dog People as he searched for South American gold.
MONSTERS Dir. Toby Tatum, UK 2014, 3 min.
If you look carefully, monsters of the prehistoric past will emerge from the landscape around you.
FRI 17 OCT 4:00 PM BFI NFT3
MATERIAL EVIDENCE, A MAJOR/MINOR HISTORY
Three works that interrogate media representation and the subjectivity of images in the writing of cultural and political histories, ranging from the Mumbai terrorist attacks and French community television to histories of the radical left in 1970s Bangladesh. —Benjamin Cook
THE UNRELIABLE NARRATOR Dir. Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, UK 2014, 17 min.
In Mumbai, terrorists play into the hands of Bollywood filmmakers rushing to register epic film titles. As narrators continue to hijack rhetoric of cultural and political discourse to rupture, an absurd ventriloquist act is exposed.
NEAR REAL TIME Dir. Gail Pickering, UK-France 2014, 29 min.
Drawn from the only remaining recordings of live broadcasts by a 1970s community television channel, this source of social realism provides an antagonistic space for Pickering to address the subjectivity of the televisual image itself, to question what a community might look like as much as to produce an imaginary of the collective.
AFSAN’S LONG DAY (THE YOUNG MAN WAS, PART 2) Dir. Naeem Mohaiemen, Bangladesh-USA 2014, 39 min.
Exploring the role of the radical left in 1970s Bangladesh through a series of inter-connected vignettes, which draw on Jean-Paul Sartre, Joschka Fischer and the Red Army Faction.
FRI 17 OCT 6:30 PM BFI NFT3
LETTERS TO MAX
Dir./Prod./Scr. Eric Baudelaire
With Maxim Gvinjia
Production Company Poulet-Malassis
France 2014, 103 min.
When filmmaker Eric Baudelaire posted a letter to ‘Maxim Gvinjia, former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sukhum, Republic of Abkhazia,’ he expected it to be returned immediately with a ‘destination unknown’ notice. To his surprise, ten weeks later he received a phone call from Max saying that he had received the letter but could not reply on paper as the post office in Abkhazia could not handle international mail. So begins a playful exchange of letters and developing friendship between Eric and Max that chronicles the story of the contested state of Abhkazia, which seceded from Georgia during the civil war in 1992-1993 and remains recognised by just a handful of countries. In a year when questions of self-determined statehood are in the forefront of our minds, Letters to Max is a timely meditation on the paradox of a country, both as a physical and legal space, and how new nations might be imagined into existence. —Benjamin Cook
FRI 17 OCT 8:45 PM BFI NFT3
HAUNTED SPACE
People and histories linger here, embedded in homes, houses and places, long after their departure, creating new psychic fictions and enigmatic truths. —William Fowler
3 CHURCH WALK Dir. Emily Richardson, UK 2014, 23 min.
Richardson stalks the abandoned Suffolk house of deceased modernist architect H.T. Cadbury Brown. Aural textures gleaned from personal possessions and materials soundtrack the mysterious structure.
CALL OF THE NORTH Dir. Ruth Maclennan, UK-Russia 2014, 23 min.
Overlapping stories about a peoples’ relationship to the land and the traumatic past are evoked in this immersive film shot in Karelia, on the Arctic Circle.
LISTENING TO THE SPACE IN MY ROOM Dir. Robert Beavers, Switzerland-Germany-USA 2013, 20 min.
Beavers composes from fragments, constructing a beguiling sensual space. A beautiful house and its two occupants are glimpsed and yet never truly seen or known.
THE DARK, KRYSTAL Dir. Michael Robinson, USA 2013, 10 min.
Surrealistic mythic space and archetypal motifs are opened-up and then deconstructed in this extraordinary collage of lurid moments from the TV series Dynasty.
SAT 17 OCT 1:45 PM BFI NFT3
SUBJECTIVE DOCUMENTS
A series of films in which the artist filmmaker performs and interacts with spontaneous situations, capturing in keen detail the iconography and rhythm of daily life, at work and leisure. —Benjamin Cook
PYRAMID Dir. Margaret Salmon, UK 2014, 17 min.
A meditation on Abraham Maslow’s theory of the hierarchy of human needs, filmed through the rhythms and choreography of middle class southern England.
TENDER FEET Dir. Fern Silva, USA 2013, 10 min.
Shot on the road in the southwest, leading up to the not quite so cataclysmic and transformative events anticipated to take place around December 21, 2012 as predicted in the Mayan Calendar.
NOON DAY DISPENSARY Dir. Priya Sen, India 2014, 27 min.
Vérité documentary of a day in the life of a government-run, free dispensary in the Savda-Ghevra, Delhi’s most recent resettlement colony.
FE26 Dir. Kevin Jerome Everson, USA 2014, 7 min.
Two gentlemen making a living hustling metal in Cleveland, Ohio.
SOUND THAT Dir. Kevin Jerome Everson, USA 2014, 12 min.
Employees of the Cleveland Water Department on the hunt for leaks in the infrastructure in Cuyahoga County.
SAT 18 OCT 4:00 PM BFI NFT3
MEDITATIONS FROM OUR LADY OF THE ANGELS: Restorations of the Los Angeles Avant-Garde from the Academy Film Archive
Preservationist Mark Toscano will present a specially-curated selection of restored Los Angeles artists’ films from the Academy Film Archive.
The diversity of this programme—comprising animation, conceptual and performative pieces, diaristic work, abstraction, and more—has a deliberate purpose: there is no single, quintessential Los Angeles artists’ film style, form, or tendency. —Mark Toscano
INVOCATION Dir. Amy Halpern, USA 1982, 16mm colour 24fps, silent, 2 min.
Academy Preservation world premiere. Gesturing hands emerge from the darkness, readying us for the cinematic experience.
PROJECTION INSTRUCTIONS Dir. Morgan Fisher, USA 1976, 16mm b-w, sound, 4 min.
Regrettably, the labour of projectionists is usually only considered by the audience when they ‘screw up’. This film offers an alternative opportunity.
VENUSVILLE Dir. Fred Worden and Chris Langdon, USA 1973, 16mm colour, sound, 10 min.
No montage, no human subjects, minimal visual content, and the artists basically pissing on the fourth wall by calling attention in every way possible to the artifice of what they’re doing.
AETHER Dir. Daina Krumins, USA 1972, 16mm colour, sound, 5 min.
A sci-fi/occult/psychedelic performance film set to an original soundtrack by Rhys Chatham.
OUR LADY OF THE ANGELS PART 1: ENTRANCE ENTRANCE Dir. Chris Regan, USA 1976, 16mm b-w, sound, 15 min.
Academy Preservation world premiere. The inevitable subjectivity and diaristic potential of landscape is foregrounded in this semi-structuralist work of weird poetic beauty.
SQUIRT GUN/STEP PRINT Dir. Pat O’Neill, USA 1998, 35mm 1.37 colour, silent, 3 min.
A squirt gun filled with developer was used to create the images, whereas a step printer was used to give them an articulate temporal form.
COREOPSIS Dir. Pat O’Neill, USA 1998, 35mm 1.37 colour 24fps, silent, 6 min.
Academy Preservation world premiere. Automatic drawings were executed by scratching on celluloid, which was then printed with a pre-determined rhythmic structure to suggest a sort of trembling vitality/decay.
HAND HELD DAY Dir. Gary Beydler, USA 1975, 16mm colour 24fps, silent, 6 min.
An entire Arizona day in six minutes of Kodachrome, breathtakingly contained in a small mirror held in the filmmaker’s hand.
PERMUTATIONS Dir. John Whitney, USA 1968, 16mm colour, sound, 8 min.
Academy Preservation world premiere. An utterly formative computer animation classic, Permutations is an early apotheosis of John Whitney’s deep- and far-reaching ideas about image, motion, and the complementarity of music and visual art.
KRISTALLNACHT Dir. Chick Strand, USA 1979, 16mm b-w, sound, 7 min.
A bewitching, mysterious work of enveloping beauty, the film’s ominous title and a dedication to Anne Frank deeply inform our reading of its haunting subtext. Preserved by Pacific Film Archive and Academy Film Archive with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
I DON’T KNOW Dir. Penelope Spheeris, USA 1970, 16mm b-w, sound, 20 min.
Academy Preservation world premiere. A truly major work, I Don’t Know observes the relationship between a lesbian and a transgender man who prefers to be identified somewhere in between male and female, in an expression of personal ambiguity suggested by the film’s title. This nonfiction film – an unusual, partly staged work of semi-verité – is the first of Spheeris’s films to fully embrace what would become her characteristic documentary style: probing, intimate, uncompromising.
SAT 18 OCT 6:30 PM BFI NFT3
TOMORROW IS ALWAYS TOO LONG
Dir. Phil Collins
Prod. Sinisa Mitrovic and Angela Murray
Scr. Phil Collins and Ewan Morrison
With Mick Harden, Kate Dickie, Molly Christie
Production Company Shady Lane Productions, Commissioned by The Common Guild for Festival 2014
UK 2014, 82 min.
Commissioned by The Common Guild as part of the Commonwealth 2014 celebrations, Phil Collin’s film is both a modern day city symphony and a love letter to Glasgow. Through musical numbers, animation and a uniquely Glaswegian cable TV station, the film conjures up a distinctive vision of a city. Collins met people in maternity hospitals, schools, community groups and social clubs for the elderly, asking them to sing songs, make predictions for the future, debate the status of freedom in today’s society, guide us through the city’s most famous prison and dance like there’s no tomorrow. With animation by Matthew Robins, stellar songs from Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon, soundtrack contributions from Mogwai’s Barry Burns, local voodoo ravers Golden Teacher and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Tomorrow Is Always Too Long will take you on a trip deep into the heart of the city and beyond. —Benjamin Cook
SAT 18 OCT 9:00 PM BFI NFT3
IMITATIONS OF LIFE
The cinema lures us into intoxicating worlds of forbidden desires and dangerous places. The movies provide these artists with the raw material to strip back the image to its fundamental forms, to then build new aesthetic structures that range from the lyrical to the abstract. —Helen de Witt
URSCHRIFT Dir. Julia Dogran-Brazell, UK 2014, 3 min.
Re-filming in many formats, the film revels in the generic clichés of the 40s police procedural thriller.
NO MORE LONELY NIGHTS Dir. Fabio Scacchioli and Vincenzo Core, Italy 2013, 21 min.
A degenerated melodrama, that claws away at the high gloss of Hollywood’s classic movies to expose the raw emotional, political and aesthetic tensions that are at the heart of cinema.
THE HUMMINGBIRD WARS Dir. Janie Geiser, USA 2014, 10 min.
Seeking and grasping at what is hidden from our eyes. Haunting moments of surrealism that extract us from the everyday into a realm of magic and music.
VAMPIRE BAT DIr. Stuart Pount, UK 2014, 3 min.
F. W. Murnau’s menace is double, and triple, trouble.
THE EMBLAZONED APPARITIONS Dir. Philip Solomon, USA 2013, 6 min.
Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton treated by digital alchemy.
THE MISSION Dir. David Leister, UK 2014, 3 min.
The action of Mission Impossible, refilmed, replayed and repeated to abstraction.
SEA OF VAPOURS Dir. Sylvia Schedelbauer, Germany 2014, 15 min.
Manipulations of archival footage, cut to match the lunar cycle, bring together inner and outer space through projecting the imagination on the landscape.
WERESHEGLANSPEARTHERE Dir. Sebastien Buerkner, UK 2014, 5 min.
Exquisite shapes, colours and movement articulate an endless digital arena.
ODESSA CRASH TEST Dir. Norbert Pfaffenbicher, Austria 2014, 6 min.
Isolated from the rest of the action, this time the pram from Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin really crashes to the bottom.
ERIGONE’S DAUGHTER Dir. Lewis Klahr, USA 2014, 15 min.
This cut-out animated collage picks out the detail to artfully expose the types and tropes of Hollywood crime thrillers with a dadaesque dynamic.
SUN 19 OCT 1:45 PM BFI NFT3
LIFE AND THE LIGHT THAT SHINES THROUGH THE CRACKS
A series of confident poetic works where everyday life is reframed and reconsidered; its otherworldly qualities being drawn to the surface. —WIlliam Fowler
UNDER THE INFLUENCE Dir. Jack Holden, UK 2014, 9 min.
The impact of larger forces upon our perception are considered as snatches of high drama and mundane conversation are manipulated to increasingly intense psychedelic effect.
THEATRE OF THE MUNDANE Dir. Peter Samson, UK 2014, 28 min.
Within the film-frame people make their exits and entrances according to an unconscious choreography and every gesture has significance.
TIME PRESENT Dir. Alfred Guzzetti and Kurt Stallmann, USA 2013, 17 min.
The uncanny qualities of the present moment are evoked as bustling city streets slow to almost stand still and people drift by in a haze.
ROOM WINDOW SEA SKY Dir. Peter Todd, UK 2014, 3 min.
The delicate, sad portrait of a lonely room and the world outside shot with just 100ft of 16mm film by an artist rooted firmly in the moment.
ENDLESS, NAMELESS Dir. Mont Tesprateep, Thailand 2014, 23 min.
All is far from what it initially seems in this hand-processed Super 8 film, shot in the private garden of a high-ranking Thai army officer.
SUN 19 OCT 4:00 PM BFI NFT3
IN THE GAREN OF FORKED PATHS
Elusive narratives, traced from Sri Lanka to Atlantis. — Benjamin Cook
THE DRAGON IS THE FRAME Dir. Mary Helena Clark, USA 2014, 15 min.
An experimental detective film made in remembrance: keeping a diary, footnotes of film history and the puzzle of depression.
TAPROBANA Dir. Gabriel Abrantes, Portugal 2014, 24 min.
Luís Vaz de Camões, Portuguese poet and national hero, lives in exile in Taprobana (Sri Lanka) and works on the only thing that matters to him: the Portuguese epic poem The Lusiads
NIGHT NOON Dir. Shambhavi Kaul, Mexico-USA 2014, 11 min.
Unmoving rock collapsed to ocean, geology’s ‘thrust and fold’ becomes the unlikely habitat for two actors’ shadowy encounters with sand, waves, night, desert, dread, calm, trepidation and escape.
ATLANTIS Dir. Ben Russell, Malta 2014, 23 min.
A documentary portrait of Utopia, loosely framed by Plato’s invocation of the lost continent of Atlantis in 360 BC and its re-resurrection via a 1970s science fiction pulp novel.
WE HAD THE EXPERIENCE BUT MISSED THE MEANING Dir. Laida Lertxundi, USA 2014, 8 min.
Crossing desert and sea, screen and page, between Los Angeles and San Diego, and a moment in a story by Adolfo Bioy Casares.
SUN 19 OCT 6:45 PM BFI NFT3
PAREIDOLIA, FOLLOWING THE LEADS
Dizzying verbal and visual connections between seemingly disparate and unconnected elements, ranging from internet scams to a children’s adaptation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” are explored in this group of smart first-person films. —Benjamin Cook
MUTATIS MUTANDIS Dir. Kathryn Elkin, UK 2014, 13 min.
A dexterous verbal enactment of slippages between voice, body and object, with objects functioning as stand-ins for multiple ideas and body parts.
HOW TO MAKE MONEY RELIGIOUSLY Dir. Laure Prouvost, UK-USA 2014, 18 min.
Employing the persuasive syntax of internet scams, this is a multi-layered investigation into systems of communication, interpretation and how one remembers a story.
RIB GETS IN THE WAY (FINAL THOUGHTS, SERIES THREE) Dir./Prod./Scr. Steve Reinke, USA-Canada 2014, 52 min.
This personal essay film wryly considers a wide-range of topics, from mortality, the body and the archive, to the embodiment of a life’s work.
SUN 19 OCT 9:00 PM BFI NFT3
