Expanded Cinema: History, Society, Technology (Symposium)
London Central Saint Martins
Wednesday 22 April 2009

Building on the conference "Expanded Cinema: Activating the Space of Reception" at Tate Modern (17-19 April 2009) this seminar will explore the social, historical and technological connections underpinning expanded cinema. The symposium will be followed by a programme of Australian film video and multi-projection curated by Sue.k.

Speakers: William Raban (London College of Communication), Lawrence Daressa (California Newsreel), Lauren A. Wright (The London Consortium), David Erol Fresko Jnr (Stanford University), Chris Sams (London College of Communication), Rebecca Ross (Central St Martins & Harvard), Adam Kossoff (Wolverhampton).

Please note that the Expanded Cinema Archive Video Library will be available to the public in the Tate Modern Starr Auditorium Foyer from 17-22 April 2009.

Seminar Programme:

10.30 am
Session one will address the technological changes of avant-garde as well as mainstream forms of cinematic presentation and production and their effects on historical and contemporary interpretations of Expanded Cinema. 20-30 min illustrated papers will be followed by Q+A with the audience.

David Erol Fresko Jnr (Stanford University)
‘Multiple-Image Composition in the Age Before Griffith’

Chris Sams (London College of Communication)
‘Expanded Archive: Kubrick, Manovich, Kittler’

Rebecca Ross (Central St Martins & Harvard)
‘All Above: Henri Giard's Ballon Captif at the 1867 Exposition d'Universelle’

Adam Kossoff (Wolverhampton)
‘The Aesthetics of Technics’

1 pm - Lunch Break

2 pm
Session two will look at the shifting social context of expanded cinema; a live form that seeks to situate and activate the spectator in many ways. 20-30 min illustrated papers will be followed by Q+A with the audience.

Lawrence Daressa (California Newsreel)
‘Expanded Cinema as ‘Social Change Media’: California Newsreel since 1968’

Lauren A Wright (The London Consortium)
‘Present: Context and Spectatorship in Expanded Cinema’

William Raban (London College of Communication)
‘Structural Film: Expanded Cinema and Reflexivity’

4.30 pm - Drinks Reception

6.30 pm - FRACTURED LIGHT
This programme of recent experimental film and video from Australia includes single and multi-screen work by Tobias Dundas, sue.k., Madeline Quirk, David Brian Short and Richard Tuohy. Curated by sue.k. Presented in association with cogcollective.


at

Innovations Centre Conference Room
Central St Martins College of Art and Design, Southampton Row, London,
WC1B 4AP
Nearest Tube: Holborn

This event is free but places are limited.
To book, email Duncan White

www.studycollection.co.uk
www.rewind.ac.uk/expanded/Narrative/Home.html

Garden Pieces
London BFI Southbank
14-28 April 2009

From flowers to trees, backyards to gardeners’ gardens, this series of three programmes of archive and artists’ films presents a rare opportunity to see, experience and reflect on the garden. With works from Kenneth Anger, Ute Aurand & Baerbel Freund, Bruce Baillie, Robert Beavers, Stan Brakhage, Rose Lowder, Marie Menken, Percy Smith, John Smith & Ian Bourn, and Margaret Tait amongst others. Curated and introduced by Peter Todd.

Tuesday 14 April 2009, at 6.20pm
Garden Pieces

The shape of flowers – filmed in 1910 by Percy Smith, and in 1999 by John Smith & Ian Bourn – cradle this programme. In between we study a pigeon in a tree, see a garden from the viewpoint of a cat, experience the fountains of the Villa D’Este, are taught How to dig, feel flora and nature projected on to the screen direct in Mothlight, realise the Japanese concept of time/space through the zen garden of Ryoan-Ji, and more.

- Percy E Smith, Birth of a Flower, 1910.
- Bruce Baillie, All My Life, 1966.
- Guy Sherwin, Flight, 1988.
- Anthea Kennedy & Ian Wiblin, Elegy, 2001.
- Kenneth Anger, Eaux D’Artifice, 1954.
- Jack Ellitt, How To Dig, 1941.
- Peter Todd, For You, 2000.
- Margaret Tait, Garden Pieces, 1998.
- Stan Brakhage, Mothlight, 1963.
- Percy Stow & Cecil Hepworth, Alice in Wonderland, 1903.
- Takahiko Iimura, MA: Space/Time in the Garen of Ryona-Ji, 1989.
- John Smith & Ian Bourn, The Kiss, 1999.

Garden Pieces was originally produced in conjunction with the exhibition Other People’s Gardens at Bridport Art Centre curated by Judith Frost, and was first shown at The Lux Cinema in 2001 before touring. With thanks to BFI programme unit, BFI collections, LUX, and ACE).
Total running time approximately 100 mins.


Monday 20 April 2009, at 8.40pm
Trees Plants Flowers – Lives

A portrait of the garden, designed in Potsdam-Bornim in 1910 by gardener and philosopher of nature Karl Poerster, and filmed at monthly intervals to show how it changes over the year, provides a core for a programme in which to experience landscapes including the Hudson River, Mont Ventoux, and fleeting views of flowers in daily life: in an Orkney garden, a London back garden, in Mexico, and also a plane tree viewed from a window. With masterpieces of 16mm filmmaking from Bruce Baillie and Margaret Tait.

- Olivier Bougnot, Tronco Luxurioso, 1992.
- Marcelle Thirache, L’Arbre Bleu, 2001.
- Peter Hutton, Landscape (for Manon), 1986-87.
- Pathe Freres, The Flower Fairy, c1911-13.
- Ute Aurand & Baerbel Freund, Im Garten, 2002.
- Stan Brakhage, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1981.
- Peter Todd, An Office Worker Thinks of Their Love, and Home, 2003.
- Margaret Tait, Portrait of Ga,1952.
- Ute Aurand & Baerbel Freund, Fur Frau Foerster, 2002.
- Bruce Baillie, Valentin de las Sierras, 1967.
- Rose Lowder, Quiproquo, 1992.

Trees Plants Flowers - Lives accompanied the exhibition Tempered Ground at the Museum of Garden History, curated by Danielle Arnaud, Jordan Kaplan, and Philip Norman in 2004. With thanks to ACE).
Total running time approximately 100 mins.


Tuesday 28 April 2009, at 6.20pm
Glimpse Of The Garden

‘Without those who love me and whom I love, these small film could not have existed.’ Marie Menken’s words speak of the work of many film makers and equally of the close relationships with the garden we experience with Anne Charlotte Robertson in reel 80 of her five year 8mm diary (on video), with organic and natural gardening in France in the most recent BOUQUETS of Rose Lowder, and the house and garden of Robert Beavers’ mother. We end with a Navajo medicine man collecting plants.

- Marie Menken, Glimpse of the Garden, 1957.
- Anne Charlotte Robertson, Emily Died, 1997.
- Rose Lowder, Bouquets 21-30, 2001-05.
- Robert Beavers, Pitcher of Coloured Light, 2007.
- Maxine and Maryjane Tsoi. The Spirit of the Navajo, 1966.

Total running time approximately 100 mins.

City Symphonies
Sunday 29th March / Ha'penny Bridge Inn (upstairs) / 4pm / Doors: 5 Euro

Jean Vigo's "À Propos De Nice" (1930)

"In this film, by showing certain basic aspects of a city, a way of life is put on trial... the last gasps of a society so lost in its escapism that it sickens you and makes you sympathetic to a revolutionary solution." Jean Vigo described the film in an address to the Groupement des Spectateurs d'Avant-Garde. ‘À Propos de Nice’ is a 1930 silent short film directed by Jean Vigo and photographed by Boris Kaufman. The film depicts life in Nice, France by documenting the people in the city, their daily routines, a carnival and social inequalities. A propos de Nice constructs around the central motif of the carnival a savage, frenetic vision of a superficial society in a state of putrefaction. As bold in its formal experimentation as it is in its gleefully morbid fascination with ugliness, the grotesque humour of its portraits of the holidaymakers that swarm over the Promenade des Anglais (sometimes suggestively intercut with shots of animals!) is brutally undercut by images of distressing poverty. The uneasy atmosphere of indolence and boredom boiling over into lustful frenzy while willfully ignoring the encroaching sense of death and decay that surround it makes this Vigo's darkest film. A propos de Nice limits itself to the death dance of caricatures, caricatures all the more startling for being stolen from life with a hidden camera. What is already present in A propos de Nice is Vigo's ability to capture the natural beauty of a real, non-studio setting and spontaneously elaborate on the impression, transforming the commonplace into the magical. His eye for atmosphere and detail would grow from film to film, but from the outset it was rooted in a documentary practice that simultaneously transcended the documentary."
(Le Cain, Maximilian, Senses of Cinema )

Dziga Vertov's "The Man With The Movie Camera" (1929)
Live music by Benedict Schlepper-Connolly (Dublin)

"I am an eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, I am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see" Dziga Vertov
"I was returning from the railroad station. In my ears, there remained chugs and bursts of steam from a departing train. Somebody cries in laughter, a whistle, the station bell, the clanking locomotive...whispers, shouts, farewells. And walking away I thought I need to find a machine not only to describe but to register, to photograph these sounds. Otherwise, one cannot organize or assemble them. They fly like time. Perhaps a camera? That records the visual. But to organize the visual world and not the audible world? Is this the answer?"- Dziga Vertov
‘The man with Movie Camera’ is a silent feature length film directed by Dziga Vertov and photographed by his brother Mikail Kaufmann. It is shot in more than one city and depicts Soveit urban life in general. Vertov says in his essay "The Man with a Movie Camera" that he was fighting "for a decisive cleaning up of film-language, for its complete separation from the language of theater and literature. For Vertov, "life as it is" means to record life as it would be without the camera present. "Life caught unawares" means to record life when surprised, and perhaps provoked, by the presence of a camera This explanation contradicts the common assumption that for Vertov "life caught unawares" meant "life caught unaware of the camera."
"We all felt...that through documentary film we could develop a new kind of art. Not only documentary art, or the art of chronicle, but rather an art based on images, the creation of an image-oriented journalism" Mikhail Kaufmann.
‘Man with a Movie Camera’ is at once a documentary, a newsreel and an experimental film. It reveals Vertov’s deep criticism of a cinema and documentary tradition tied to narrative and literary structure. He deconstructs the image by using different camera techniques slow motion, fast motion freeze frame etc. In the use of these more abstract and cinematic techniques he reveals an everyday experience. Often using hidden cameras he seeks a new cinematic truth. The images become linked by chance, rhythm and visual connections.

Peter Gidal
London Chisenhale Gallery & no.w.here
8 & 9 April 2009

Reverberations is a series of events in which moving image artists interrogate their influences.

Wednesday 8 April 2009, at 7pm
Reverberations # 3: Peter Gidal

In the third edition of the Reverberations series, presented in collaboration with Chisenhale Gallery, renowned filmmaker, writer and theorist Peter Gidal presents an event in the form of its subject: “Theatre theory for film, or not: Brecht (an interrogation/performance: a ghost trio for two).” (Gidal)

Taking the form of a multi-part dialogue in which Gidal's translations of Brecht will be spoken, Gidal will stage an interrogation of his own practice as an experimental filmmaker and theorist via Brecht's theatre theory. Without rehearsal (but with practice), Gidal will be ‘replying’ and counter-interrogating on the night.

Like Gidal’s films, and the theatre of Beckett and Brecht, the performance itself will seek a state of continual self-reflection – beginning with a screening of his most recent film Volcano (2002) and ending with Denials (1986).

at
Chisenhale Gallery
64 Chisenhale Road
London E3 5QZ

FREE admission, booking essential
Telephone: 020 8981 4518


Thursday 9 April 2009, from 10.30am-12.30pm
Peter Gidal: Reverberations Study Morning

Following on from Gidal’s performance the evening before, this unique study morning with the acclaimed filmmaker and writer will act as both an extended question and answers for his performance, and an opportunity for further discourse on the ideas raised.

Starting from the position that theory comes after practice, we will consider: what is the relationship between ideas and language? and what is theory and what is practice? Brecht’s theatre theory will be discussed in relation to Gidal’s own work as a filmmaker and writer alongside a second screening of Volcano and Denials.

It is strongly recommended that anyone wishing to attend this session also experiences the performance the night before as it will be central to the discussion. Admission to the performance is free but booking is essential. See details above.

at
no.w.here
316-318 Bethnal Green Road, London, E2 0AG
Nearest Tube: Bethnal Green

Fee: £10 members & concessions / £15 full price
Telephone: 020 7729 4494
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.