Experimental Cinema

Carte Blanche: Ken Jacobs
May 2–5, 2013
MoMA
11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019|

As one of the founding fathers of American experimental cinema, Ken Jacobs’s impact cannot be overstated. He is a pioneer who, after more than 50 years as a filmmaker, remains as innovative and productive as ever. Correction: at 80 years old he’s more productive than ever, having enthusiastically embraced digital filmmaking. Enormously influential as both a teacher and a font of radical filmmaking ideas, he has prepared several generations of teachers, writers, filmmakers, and discerning audience members to actively engage, with an equal amount of open-minded awe and healthy skepticism, with a media-saturated world. A frequent guest at the Museum—and the subject of a 1996 MoMA retrospective—Jacobs continues to surprise us with amazing inventions that mine the unlimited possibilities of creating with light and moving images. For this installment of MoMA’s Carte Blanche screening series, Jacobs presents films from MoMA’s collection that have influenced and inspired him, alongside selections of his own work—film prints, electronic media pieces, Nervous Magic Lantern performances—that represent key moments in his artistic life. The series also includes the world premiere of Jacobs’s four-part Joys of Waiting for the Broadway Bus cycle of digital works.

All film notes were written by Ken Jacobs, unless otherwise noted.

Balagan presents... Vicious Circle
Tuesday, April 23 2013, 19:30h
Brattle Theatre
40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Mixing a number of rarely juxtaposed genres, Balagan takes a 360-degree look at cyclical structure and circular form. We are happy to present three locally-based artists and filmmakers: Nicolas Brynolfson, Santiago Gil and Julie Miller; as well as an audiovisual performance by NY-based artist Thomas Dexter and a 1970s' experimental film by Japanese avantgardist Toshio Matsumoto.

Festival du Nouveau Cinéma 2013
Call for submissions

Each year, the Festival du nouveau cinéma presents around 300 feature and short films, interactive works and performances from over 50 countries during 11 days of festivities, and offers over $30,000 in cash and services to the winners of the national and international competition.

Today, the Festival is looking for films, interactive works and performances for its 42nd edition which will run from October 9 to 20, 2013 in Montréal !

Send us your works before June 15, 2013 to maybe be part of the Festival this year! Early bird rate before April 30, 2013 !

To see the 2012 Awards List, click here.

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.

Sonic Acts: The Dark Universe
February 21-24, Amsterdam

The 2013 edition of Sonic Acts, the festival that explores the 'developments at the intersection of art, music and science', begins tomorrow (February 21-24) in Amsterdam. Titled The Dark Universe, this fifteenth edition comes filled with music and expanded cinema performances, including Makino Takashi's latest [2012]3D, William Raban's 1977 performance Wave Formations or Rose Kallal's 16mm abstract work Apeiron. Several screenings and installations include showings of works by Bruce Conner, Peter Tscherkassky, Aldo Tambellini, Joost Rekveld, Jürgen Reble and Nenad Popov & Klara Ravat, among others.

For further details, you can browse the full programme in the Sonic Acts website.

Unconscious Archives #7
Tuesday 26th February, 19h
Apiary Studios, 458 Hackney Road, London, E2 9EG

Unconscious Archives returns with folly and foray into oceanographic plundering, cataclysmic foley and crowd sourced emotions. Alex MacKenzie (Canada) presents a special extended dual 16mm live film and sound work exquisitely capturing the marine environments of the Canadian coastline present and past using a veritable feast of techniques including hand cranked cameras and camerless film. Adam Bohman unleashes a creeping array of apprehensive noise from household items and made instruments. Erica Scourti brings us two video works capturing her unflinching desire to ascribe human attributes to media generated debris. UA is back at the Apiary! If you haven?t had a chance to check out this funky independent warehouse venue in East London - now here's your chance!

Xcèntric: The Gas Works Screenings & Threaded Cocktails performance
Viernes, 11 de enero, 18:30h
Xcèntric CCCB, Montalegre, 5, 08001 Barcelona

The Gas Works abarcan una serie de películas únicas concebidas como performances inestables de luz sónica. Realizadas y proyectadas a mano, su autora -Esperanza Collado- las describe como “collages efímeros en movimiento o esculturas de luz gaseosa en las que el cine es descarrilado y objeto de pespunte.” El proyecto explora aspectos performativos de la proyección mecánica, como la plasticidad del espacio lumínico, la lectura del sonido óptico y las micro-estructuras del intervalo.

- The Gas Thus Cuts in Bits (Esperanza Collado, 2012, 16mm and Super16, colour and b&w, optical sound, 8min. 40sec.)
- The Illuminating Gas (Esperanza Collado, 2012, 16mm and Super16, colour and b&w, optical sound, 9min 6sec.)

Operation Rewrite es la colaboración artística de The Consecutive Impostors (Esperanza Collado y Maximilian Le Cain), en la que exploran las operaciones cinemáticas del corte y la interrupción a través de varias disciplinas. Sus performances, inquietantes y humorísticas, muestran a los artistas como figuras 'científicas' realizando una serie de acciones con proyecciones y sonidos elaborados, sueños reconstruidos, y objetos domésticos. Colabora John McCarthy, realizador de teatro irlandés.

Patrocinado por Culture Ireland.

Witness: Palestine, a film performance by Barbara Hammer
Sunday, December 16, approximately mid-afternoon
Performance Tent, Courtyard PS1 MoMA
22-25 Jackson Ave., Long Island City, New York 11101

In her most recent project Witness: Palestine the established artist and filmmaker Barbara Hammer integrates film practices into social spaces sharing the voices of men and women she met on the first LGBTQ Solidarity Tour of Palestine in January, 2012. How could she allow others a similar experience?  This is one of the most important questions the artist raises with this work. Upon seeing Intellettuale, 1975, by Fabio Mauri who projected the Pasolini film (The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, 1964) on Pasolini himself, she found her clue. By inviting the reader/audience into the work to produce it, instead of enforcing a predetermined reading, Hammer privileges the intelligence and integrity of the participant.

Directors Lounge Screening
Guillaume Cailleau: Bolex, Loves and Other Measures
16mm and Live Super-8 Performance
Thursday, November 29th 2012, 21h
Z-Bar, Bergstraße 2, 10115 Berlin-Mitte

Guillaume Cailleau bridges conceptual working methods with playful references to the avant-garde. This playful mix of forms, expanded cinema, experiments with human perception, and poetic compositions makes the viewing experience very enjoyable for its richness. His sincerity, combined with a joyful wink of the artist's eye add to this impression. Explorations - or games - with color separation, the basics of color photography, are as much part his artistic arsenal as the lyric beauty of rich black and white contrast of high-con film combined associatively on an optical printer.

The artist will perform live, and will be available for Q&A.

Independent Film Show 2012
Thursday November 8th - Sunday November 11th 2012
Fondazione Morra (palazzo Ruffo di Bagnara, Piazza Dante, 89 - Napoli)

Thursday 8 november at 19:30h
- White film by Inal Sherip - les Frères Lumière Prize set up by European Academy of Arts
- Matthias Müller & Christoph Girardet curated by Matthias Müller

Friday 9 November at 19:30h
- Le premier cercle de Light Cone curated by Emmanuel Lefrant
- Ex-Machina expanded cinema performance by Les Nominoë

Saturday 10 November at 19:30h
- Collection Vivante curated by Emmanuel Lefrant
- Zoo[trope] expanded cinema performance by Les Nominoë

Sunday 11 November at 19:30h
- Cinema Inside Out curated by Karel Doing
- Darkloupe audio-visual performance by Karel Doing & Michal Osows

The inexhaustible passion for film frames and the compositional processes of these minute particles in significant structures unites artists, film/video-makers and musicians, represented in the Independent Film Show 12th edition involved in the materialization of visionary and poetic interactive sensory experiences to suggest and amplify new and unexpected relations.

The first program reveals the incredible creative potential achieved through the selective collecting of images and the brilliant assembly of these immobile and ethereal fragments in imaginative and introspective pathways into the macro cosmos. The films Alpsee (1994) and Phantom (2001), realized by Matthias Müller experimenting with various analogue techniques of filming and composition, illustrate through his distinctive visual vocabulary the transition into childhood, the tensions and moments of calm addressed, and painful educational development. Together with Christoph Girardet, chapters # 4 Why Don’t You Love Me? and # 5 Bedroom of Phoenix Tapes (1999) and the films Locomotive (2008) and Meteor (2011) explore a wide variety of cinematic representations in search of established codes and surprising digressions, reinforcing their creative energy, vitality and emotion.