LFF Experimenta 2015

“Sitting through Blasted is a little like having your face rammed into an overflowing ash tray, just for starters, and then having your whole head held down in a bucket of offal.” —Extract from review of Blasted by Paul Taylor in The Independent, 1995

That was necessary because, for example, shots that were used to construct a sequence may have been filmed under varied light conditions or on various types or qualities of film stock. The women who posed for China Girl shots were assisting in the completion of painstaking, workaday tasks. Each of the color-control images became part of one original, master print that a lab worker made from camera negative. The print was then copied – as many times as necessary to meet demand for that film, worldwide – and on each reel that woman’s image went out to potentially thousands of theaters: The woman made her way from anonymous isolation in a particular film lab out into the film world, still in anonymity — because, of course, film-lab workers did not place the image on film-reel leaders for general exhibition.”

Oh, and did we see bodies. The series of shorts, prefaced by a short documentary on the brothers by Rosa von Praunheim, indicate a clear departure from the sci-fi-inspired parody of his earlier films with George. However, they are certainly still silly and campy. Now, his subjects mainly consist of young, hunky California surfer boys with personalities reminiscent of Ethan Kraft from Lizzie McGuire waxing poetically about their own existence. Shot with a camcorder and featuring Powerpoint-esque scene transitions and an occasional splash of Comic Sans, these delightfully odd and mostly-male character studies focus more on the physical form than any narrative arc. Visual highlights included a guy insisting he’ll be a better person while philosophically holding a coffee cup, a nude man painted messily with black streaks roaming around a living room like a feral animal interspersed with trippy fractal patterns, and a ten-minute sequence of a sculpted guy with long blonde hair and clothes much too small for him conducting janitorial work (and no, that’s not a euphemism—or is it?).

Photos from the BFI Education screening of Experimenta shorts, with work by Jenna Collins, Peter Todd and Paul Bush shown. The Education department also held a workshop Experimental Filmmaking, or How to Make Still Objects Move (Without Touching Them) with filmmaker James Holcombe. 

Peter Tscherkassky: They were supplied by friends. One gave me some pornographic material, and from another I got the nudist film that I ended up using for the opening sequence and footage you see throughout the film with the searching for the sleeping girl. And I had a print from Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963), where the lady is eating the oysters. I never go to archives. Basically, I’m a lazy person. People ask me, “Would you like to have…?” Friends sometimes send me links when an interesting 35mm print shows up on eBay. Prints have gotten quite expensive. It used it be like when I got The Entity for $50, the transportation from the United States to Austria was more expensive than the print itself. Nowadays, you have to expect to pay something like 200 euros for a single good print. The days when you just bought it because it was so cheap are over. People send me things from time to time, mainly film prints that are about to be destroyed for whatever reason. Slip it out the back door to Vienna!

I am also very much committed to revisiting the undervalued (and mostly underpaid) contribution of women to the history of labor and technology. It was through this research that I came across the women who hand-colored and hand-stenciled early color films at the turn of the century. This in turn led me to explore the history of Natalie Kalmus. She was the color consultant for Technicolor (and wife of Technicolor inventor Herbert Kalmus), and worked on most of the classic films we associate with hyper-saturated Technicolor. She also wrote about composing color scores for narrative films, much like a piece of music. Sadly, none of her scores survive, but this concept of a “color score” really appealed to me. Intriguingly, the Bell & Howell color-correction machine used punched paper tape to encode the color sequence, much like the perforated paper familiar from pianolas or the punched cards of early computers. I have made works featuring both of these and found the idea of color data stored in punched tape highly resonant with a musical score, and tangentially connected to earlier inventions such as Rimington or Wilfred’s Color Organs.

I really enjoyed the introduction of The Sharpest Point, animation at the end of cinema', where Steve Reinke thinks through some of these things (like his work also), and there is actually quite a lot of animation going on in Someone Who Isn't me; the sun, the text, and the image of the ocean which is taken from Google Earth, an image which starts of lens based from the satellite but by the time you get to travelling over the surface of the ocean, or sitting underneath it you are dealing with an algorithm that is being produced by your presence.

“Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952) by Frantz Fanon is a sociological study of the psychology of the racism and dehumanization inherent in situations of colonial domination. I came across Fanon's work during my BA nearly 15 years ago and I felt like a world that I could only faintly see had been opened to me. Fanon's ideas helped me to strengthen and articulate my own position, not just in terms of my artistic practice, but also a young Black male of Ghanaian heritage.”

Owen Land, Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles Etc.,1965

“The montage sequence from the conspiracy thriller starring Warren Beatty The Parallax View (1974) by Alan J. Pakula. Nice commentary on the sequence here.

“In terms of process I thought also of Trisha Brown's Set & Reset - Version 1 (1983, in the classic video by James Byrne where the camera was within the dance) because with these new screen gestures—that a child seems to learn almost completely intuitively—I wanted to focus on them as the driving choreography for the film and its movement. I am also a fan of Robert Bresson and his process and As far as I know borrows both from his closed focus on hand gestures and his use of actors as ‘models,’ rather than the traditional central narrative characters of cinema. Both were key points of reference. 

“Something else has happened in the last ten years with the introduction of touchscreens and cameras on smartphones: the image’s surface is no longer sacred. Instead it invites you to tap it, touch it, rub up against and make gestures with it. Gestures in cinema and its relationship to language have been theorized by Rachel Moore’s writing on Béla Balázs in Savage Theory (the chapter ‘Close Contact’) but these new intimate gestures with the surface of the screen in public space are a new territory, perhaps largely untheorised, and I wanted to work with that.”

“Building Judith Butler’s politics of grief and Donna Haraway’s post-humanist discourse of universality, I will argue that “identification with suffering itself” could constitute a form of political solidarity which is established independently from and at an instance beyond or anterior to language. If we identify with the “suffering itself” we are identifying with the purely “evental,” i.e., with the sheer experience (of subjection to pain) which is a pre-linguistic category. The “suffering itself” is but a taking-place of pain and/or of trauma. Put in Laruellian parlance, it is the “lived” par-excellence. Thus pain is the real in the Laruellian as well as in the Lacanian sense of the word. The figures of Christ in Donna Haraway and Oedipus in Sophocles’ tragedies will be discussed as non-humanist models of political universalism.”

A group of poems by Joanna Margaret Paul which was given to Rachel Shearer as inspiration for her film, which incidentally lends itself to the Experimenta programme title 'I am an open window'.

“More than all, Angelo Lives demonstrates the artist’s fixation with the way he sees his environment and the connections he forges in his head, the way an artist works (highlighted in the studio scene, watching an artist at work). His associations take us through a tangled web that links religion with voyage and discovery—the plotting of old men in Spanish bar of holy wars, lost ghosts, forgotten religions, cultural histories—in an enigmatic collection of visuals, thoughts, and sounds.”

“I probably wouldn’t have brought my Bolex to Haiti if I hadn’t seen Leah Gordon’s portraits of Kanaval. Besides the aesthetic value of her photography, there is a complicity with her subjects that prevents the images from sinking to easy exoticism.”