Curator Herb Shellenberger explores American experimental films in the LUX collection, particularly films that are not currently in distribution in the United States. How has the LUX collection, an archive of international films and videos in active distribution, facilitated the preservation of these works that are, at this point in time, quite rare and obscure?
Barely the tip of the iceberg, the four films shown in this program have not been screened for years. Included are: a film made by writer/professor William Wees, best known for his books Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage and Light Moving in Time; a rarely-seen early film from San Francisco filmmaker/performance/conceptual artist Al Wong; Warhol Superstar Taylor Mead’s single-frame European travelogue, listed in several texts as a key film of the 1960s New American Cinema; and a psychedelic double-screen work by film historian William Moritz, an expert on experimental animation and visual music.
This screening and the research surrounding it acts as a way of thinking through works that have fallen through the cracks. An accompanying article for the LUX website will situate this project as a way to investigate artist film and video works that have been—either wrongly or perhaps entirely deservingly—unseen for decades.
Herb Shellenberger is a film curator and art historian based in London. He has curated and presented programs at Light Industry (Brooklyn), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Izolyatsia Platform for Cultural Initiatives (Ukraine) and International House Philadelphia, where he worked in the film program from 2008-2014. He was co-founder of the Philadelphia series Black Circle Cinema and is an organiser of Actual Material, a forthcoming project that will exhibit artist films and videos online. Currently studying in the LUX/Central Saint Martins MRes Art: Moving Image programme, he is writing a dissertation on embodiment in American experimental animation of the 1970s and 1980s.