Experimenta 2013

Seven films by the late, lamented Japanese artist rebel showcasing his thunderous potential.

BFI Southbank, NFT3 Oct 20, 2013 9:00 PM

A dynamo whose thunderous potential was cut short by his premature death, Japanese moving-image artist Stom Sogo (1975-2012) remains a romantic rebel. His body of aggressively beautiful work, fashioning multiple electrified layers of strobing imagery through re-photography, his primary technique, revelled in optic and aural jolts as much as attempting a sincere connection with the viewer.

“[A] movie’s reality should be as nasty and fucked up as possible, so we want to get fuck out of the theater and hope for something better in life…. I try not to have a message or even word in my movie. But I usually have some sick stories behind each of the movies. Those are just mental eye candy that it taste sweet first, seizure second.” – Stom Sogo

Anyway, the interview finally started at night of the Saturday. We were so

wired and wasted by all the all the, all, the.

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(Within my present memory of creation of past,) Andy asks "Do I consider the filmmakers who present their work out the form of ‘film

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screening’ as just another kind of filmmaker or do they differ from the category?"

"They must still be a filmmaker who sucks shit and shoots it out."

In some reality, movie is way cooler than art. Just the problem here is that

a movie director shouldn’t be acting like a rock star, worse a filmmaker

shouldn’t be acting like a pseudo intellectual composer on a stage of a

place like Lincoln Center. That’s bad. They should at least sit down and let

you know that they are responsible of the shit you sat through. If they are

smart, they shouldn’t exist. They should fucking hide from this reality. Like

YA PRIVATE SKY (Stom Sogo, 2001)

from AnthologyFilmArchives

Women Looking at Other Women

an interview with filmmaker Bette Gordon and Karyn Kay

BOMB 2/Winter 1982, FILM

Karyn Kay Who said, “Where there is struggle there is narrative?”

Bette Gordon Peter Wollen, I think.

KK Initially I loved Hollywood, and I loved it for all the problems, and then I loved experimental work for all the other problems, and now what I’m interested in is merging the two sets into a conjunction of problems and a more complex film practice. I think someone like Yvonne Rainer’s work is very important because she mixes politics with theoretical issues and experimentation in narrative form, not making a straight replica of traditional narrative. Also, George Landow has been an important influence on 16mm experimentation with narrative and cinematic structures.

BG Then, what you’re saying, and I agree, is that playing with the narrative, as well as telling a story is more interesting than a straightforward replication of what Hollywood does anyway, or the simple story with beginning, middle and end.

KK Or the simple experimentation. Besides Hollywood isn’t or hasn’t always been a “simple story.” Look, for example, at Ophuls, Sirk, Sternberg.

BG I’m very interested in narrative, but I don’t have a desire to reproduce Hollywood because nobody can do it like “they” do I.

For the last five years Anthology Film Archives has focused on preserving works by filmmakers who became active or came to fruition during the years 1975-1990. This sampler programme represents an eclectic array of artists who were largely active in New York City. Films preserved with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. —-Andrew Lampert AN ALGORITHM Dir Bette Gordon. USA 1977. 10min. 16mm. A visually stunning kinetic rhythm produced by looped footage (mathematical curves) in and out of phase with each other.

AN ALGORITHM  Bette Gordon 1977

Let Your Light Shine, a programme of work including Jodie’s new film and performance, Dusty Stacks of Mom is screened on Saturday 19th October. Could you describe the main ideas and inspirations behind your work?

My work re-imagines material detritus and ignites the kinetic-potential of everyday objects as a way to prod at the strange role decoration plays in our daily lives. As I told someone recently: mostly I’m inspired by why the majority of normal people despise contemporary art and how imagery oscillates between worlds of obscure and mainstream consumption. I’m also inspired by how technology simultaneously enhances and ruins the world.

Dusty Stacks of Mom

Animation plays an increasingly crucial role within cinema, as well as music videos, advertising and other commercial contexts. How does your work relate to what could be called the mainstream applications of animation?

I think my work questions the role of abstract animation in mainstream applications of moving images and calls attention to how this type of imagery functions in both the foreground and background of our collective consciousness. Animation has always played a large role in all forms of cinema, but the mainstream has always reserved a special place for abstract animation, specifically in advertising. (Let's not forget that a classic experimental animation, A Colour Box by Len Lye, is also an advertisement for the post office). I'm interested in how both sensation and narration play a role in the common perception of abstract animation. The common person may feel uncomfortable when watching an abstract film if narrative/cinematic expectations aren't met, yet this type of imagery can elicit enough joy to, say, sell a pair of shoes or something. Uncanny!

A Colour Box (1936) by Len Lye

Dusty Stacks of Mom is described as a ‘film and performance’. Have you always incorporated performance within your work or is this a new direction for you?

I have incorporated performative elements in other films, like Rad Plaid, Glitch Envy, The Saddest Song in the World, and The Future is Bright. I also perform in my musical animation  Yard Work is Hard Work. I grew up training in the performing arts, so this feels pretty natural. I enjoy blurring the boundaries between the theatrical and the cinematic, and I also like to find celebrate the practice of gathering in a room together to watch something. In a world full of multiples, I seek to create a one-of-a-kind experience for the spectator.

Yard Work is Hard Work, Jodie Mack Are you working on any other new projects or films at the moment?

The Realist (preview)

by Scott Stark

Stephen Sutcliffe Transformations (detail) 2005

Art Now Lightbox: Stephen Sutcliffe

Stephen Sutcliffe’s two films take poems as their starting points. Transformations is based on the Thomas Hardy poem of the same title. Hardy draws attention to the cycles of death and rebirth that are ever present in the countryside. He describes a man his grandfather knew and his wife, and a ‘fair girl’, who, in a process of organic renewal, have been transformed into trees and flowers:

…they are not underground But as nerves and veins abound In the growths of upper air…

Come to the Edge uses a recording of the poet Christopher Logue reciting a poem originally written in 1968:

Come to the edge. We might fall. Come to the edge. It’s too high! COME TO THE EDGE! And they came, and we pushed, And they flew.

FRIEZE April 2009 His work recalls a line from the classic film noir Out of the Past (1947), uttered by the duped hero: ‘I could see the picture in the frame, but not the frame around the picture.’ However, his use of disconcerting white flashes, employed ‘to throw the viewer off balance and out of the image’, also intensifies the fleeting and illusory qualities of each picture. Perhaps Buerkner’s installation could be seen as reflecting the ‘ever-more fractured subjectivity’ that theorist Anne Friedberg describes as a consequence of Internet and digital technologies.

His notion is that the work supports a situation in which the viewer is both maker and spectator, conscious and unconscious: ‘You can look in and look out from these two worlds’. More interesting than this, though, is the confrontation that occurs when the viewer looks out of this virtual environment through the two windows that have been cut in the white fabric. The specificity of the venue is more than a foil for Buerkner’s installation – it anchors his work to a site of real engagement.