Brave New World: The Films of Barbara Hammer
April 4-7 2013
TIFF Bell Lightbox
Reitman Square, 350 King Street West, Toronto, Ontario

In recent years, the pioneering experimental filmmaker and lesbian activist Barbara Hammer has been feted with retrospectives at London's Tate Modern, New York's Museum of Modern Art and Paris' Jeu de Paume, amongst others. Brave New World: The Films of Barbara Hammer is a fitting and overdue tribute to an artist who has explored a wide range of styles and subjects over her prolific forty-five-year career.  

Born at the tail end of the Depression to parents heading west to Los Angeles in search of a better life, Hammer is the consummate American pioneer. Her life and films reflect both a peripatetic sense of place (Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, along with some European jaunts), and also a firm sense of inner discovery and the mastery that comes from a creative adaptation of what one discovers along the way. Through her personal filmmaking, she has always allowed her life-story (told most entertainingly in her recent autobiography, Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life) to reveal itself in her work. Her films become an artistic record of, among other things, coming out as a lesbian during feminism’s second wave, fighting the politics of acceptance in the eighties and a successful fight against ovarian cancer in the first decade of the 21st Century. From her very first Super 8 psychodramatic self-portraits, to her mid-eighties experiments with the abstract possibilities of the optical printer, to her later documentaries that attempt to trace a queer artistic lineage through the political and artistic turmoil of the early twentieth century, Hammer has displayed a stylistic polyvalence which, combined with her generosity as an artist, teacher and community activist, has influenced generations of students, filmmakers and artists. 

Peter Kubelka presents Monument Film
Tuesday April 9 2013, 18:30h
BFI Southbank
Belvedere Road, South Bank, SE1 8XT London

The Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka has been a vital and uncompromising force in cinema for more than half a century. In a body of work that lasts not much more than an hour in total, he condenses and articulates the essential qualities of analogue cinema, distinguishing film as an autonomous artform. His 1960 film Arnulf Rainer, composed only of the purest elements of light and darkness, sound and silence, remains one of the most radical achievements in film history. In response to that earlier work, his new film Antiphon was revealed in 2012 as part of Monument Film, a powerful testament to the entire medium. With two 35mm projectors situated in the auditorium, each film is screened individually, then combined as double projections, both side-by-side and superimposed upon each other. Throughout this extraordinary projection event, Peter Kubelka will discuss his theories, explaining the differences between film and digital media, and articulating his belief in the survival of cinema.

Monument Film
Lecture screening with double 35mm projection
Peter Kubelka | Austria 1960/2012 | c.90 min

Curated by Mark Webber. Presented with the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum, London.

Tickets: £11 / £8.50 concessions (BFI Members pay £1.50 less)

This performance was originally scheduled for the 56th BFI London Film Festival last October. Audience members with tickets for the original event should contact the BFI Box Office on 020 7928 3232 for an exchange.

PoetryFilm Equinox
Circles, Cycles, Sequences, Planets, Patterns
Wednesday March 20 2013, 19:30h
Charlotte Street Hotel Cinema (located downstairs)
15-17 Charlotte Street, London WIT 1RJ

A special one-off PoetryFilm event celebrating the Equinox with a bespoke programme of experimental short films, poetry readings and music performances exploring circles, cycles, sequences, planets and patterns.

Tickets £10 , available in advance only (will not be available on the door). Visit http://poetryfilm.eventbrite.co.uk

Entry will be by stating your name. Full programme follows.

Studio Two Three: "Foraged Footage" Event
Deadline: March 29 2013 (postmark)

The Studio Two Three Film + Video Series is now accepting submissions for our "Foraged Footage" event. We are seeking submissions for found footage films and videos. This includes all walks of found footage work, including internet videos, mashups, montage compilations, you name it!

We are seeking short videos, under 10 minutes in length. This is a call for student work as well as established film and video makers, please email with any questions.

The Event will be held on April 25 from 7-9pm, in Richmond, Virginia, USA.

15th Festival des cinémas différents et expérimentaux de Paris
October 15th-20th 2013
Deadline: May 31, 2013

This year, the festival will take place in autumn, from October 15th until the 20th. The call for entries is now open. We aim to carry on what was initiated in the previous years in order to give visibility to a wide spectrum of current experiments in cinema.

All formats and duration accepted films and videos made in 2012-2013 only film submission deadline: May 31st 2013. Formats for the preselection: digital file (link to a web platform). All films in a language other than french or english must be subtitled in french or english. Information and entry forms are online at: www.cjcinema.org

This year, in parallel to the films in competition, the «Focus» program will address the use of archival images as traces, materials and collective histories of moving images.

Xcèntric: Visions of the Body I
Sunday, March 17 2013, 18:30h
Xcèntric CCCB, Montalegre, 5, 08001 Barcelona

The cinema always establishes a relation between the filmed body and the machine that films. The camera captures the light and the duration that envelope the body and, at the same time, the filmed body enters into a process of staging of itself that the camera records. In most cases, this body appears “disembodied”, at the service of a narrative, but there are films, like the ones shown in these sessions, that restore its materiality, bringing flesh to light, allowing gestures to just be themselves. These are works that show us the body’s intimate relationship with itself, with the camera and the other, and the tactile sensation of this experience as an inherent condition of the cinema. Certain imperfections that we see in the images of one of Brakhage’s first great films, Flesh of Morning, speak to us of the most immediate aspects of the body and its carnal obsessions. Beavers’s films, Winged Dialogue and Plan of Brussels, full of lyrical visions of narcissistic, erotic imagination, use psychodrama to show us a divided body: the I and the other. Based on a novel by Balzac, in Himself as Herself Markopoulos portrays a hermaphrodite body, its movements, postures and gestures or expressions, a study of a highly stylized inner landscape that takes Bresson’s ideals to their ultimate conclusions.

- Flesh of Morning (Stan Brakhage, 1956/1985, 16 mm, 25 min)
- Winged Dialogue (Robert Beavers, 1967/2000, 16 mm, 3 min)
- Plan of Brussels (Robert Beavers, 1968/2000, 16 mm, 18 min)
- Himself as Herself (Gregory Markopoulos, 1967, 16 mm, color, 60 min)

The work of Pere Portabella (Figueras, 1927) stands at the crossroads of art, film and politics. Close to the surrealist sensibility and conceptualism (he produced Viridiana by Luis Buñuel in 1962, among his colleagues are Brossa and Carles Santos), he has created since the late sixties one of the most unique filmographies of Spanish cinema, alternating with his political activity as a parliamentarian and senator. In his films, Portabella uses strategies of estrangement and dislocation that both formally bypass censorship as to enhance the expressive range of works, leading to fascinating symbolizations.

A meditation on (im)mortality, mediated by a lifetime of images.

"A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face." - J.L. Borges

Balagan presents... DIY Dystopia
Thursday March 14, 2013 19:30h
Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street in Cambridge, MA USA

With the natural world teetering on the brink of multilateral catastrophe, a group of analog filmmakers have taken matters into their own hands. Through direct contact with the medium – lifting and reassembling images on the film strip – adhering waste matter to celluloid – leaving emulsion to languish in the landfill – the artists interpret physical processes that ravage our land. Their grave methods yield results of unexpected poetry, vibrancy and beauty.

Attendees of this show will also receive a special, locally-produced, collaborative zine, made available through the Papercut Zine Library!

Moving Image Review & Art Journal
Call for papers
Deadline: 12th July 2013

The Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ) is the first peer-reviewed publication devoted to artists’ film and video, and its contexts. It is published twice a year in print by Intellect Books in collaboration with the University of the Arts London. MIRAJ offers a widely distributed international forum for debates surrounding all forms of artists’ moving image and media artworks.

The editors invite contributions from art historians and critics, film and media scholars, curators, and, not least, practitioners. We seek pieces that offer theories of the present moment but also writings that propose historical re-readings. We welcome essays that:

• re-view canonical works and texts, or identify ruptures in the standard histories of artists’ film and video;
• discuss the development of media arts, including the history of imaging technologies, as a strand within the history of art;
• address issues of the ontology and medium-specificity of film, video and new media, or the entanglement of the moving image in a ‘post-medium condition’;
• attempt to account for the rise of projected and screen-based images in contemporary art, and the social, technological, or political-economic effects of this proliferation;
• investigate interconnections between moving images and still images; the role of sound; the televisual; and the interaction of the moving image with other elements including technology, human presence and the installation environment;
• analyse para-cinematic or extra-cinematic works to discover what these tell us about cinematic properties such as temporal progression or spectatorial immersion or mimetic representation;
• explore issues of subjectivity and spectatorship;
• investigate the spread of moving images beyond the classical spaces of the cinema and galleries, across multiple institutions, sites and delivery platforms;
• consider the diverse uses of the moving image in art: from political activism to pure sensory and aesthetic pleasure, from reportage to documentary testimony, from performativity to social networking;
• suggest new methods of theorizing and writing the moving image.