Fifty years of experimental filmmaking:
FILMnight with David Rimmer
Wednesday, March 27th, 2013, 20h
WORM, Boomgaardsstraat 71, 3011 XA Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Organized by Filmwerkplaats, a DIY film lab community at the artist-run venue WORM in Rotterdam, The Netherlands

We are delighted to announce an evening with David Rimmer. He will talk about his work and show a broad selection of his films and videos.

David Rimmer is recognised as one of the most important experimental filmmakers working today. Recipient of the Canadian Governor General’s Award in 2011, Rimmer has produced over 50 films ranging from purely experimental forms, documentary, hand-painted animation as well as a number of immersive dance and music videos. His work has been screened at many prestigious festivals around the world, and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the National Gallery of Canada and many more.

Programme:
- Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper (1970, 8min, 16mm)
- Surfacing on the Thames (1970, 10min, 16mm)
- As Seen on TV (1986, 14min 16mm)
- Divine Mannequin (1989, 7min, video to film transfer)
- Bricolage (1984, 11min, 16mm)
- Canadian Pacific 1 (1974, 10min, 16mm)
- Real Italian Pizza (1971, 10min, 16mm)
- Seashore (1971, 10min, silent, 16mm)
- Tiger (1994, 5min, 35mm)
- The Dance (1970, 5min, 16mm)
- Digital Psyche (2007, 12min, hand-painted film transferred to video)
- Padayatra - a walking meditation (2005, 12min, hand-painted film transferred to video)
- Eye for an Eye (2003, 12min, hand-painted film transferred to video)

More information and tickets: http://www.worm.org/home/view/event/5995

Back To Landscape
As part of the 1st International Festival Of Short Movies About Painting Arts "Erarta MOTION PICTURES"
Saturday, March 30 2013, 20h
Erarta Museum
Line 29th, 2 Vasilyevsky island, Saint-Petersburg 199106, Russia

Curated by Xavier G.Puerto

After the appearance of Giorgione’s “La Tempesta” in 1506, the importance of landscape grew. It occupied the centre of compositions and became a key topic of consideration for the history of painting in recent centuries, reaching its pinnacle with the German proto-Romantic movement “Sturm und Drang” and the British painters of the 19th Century.

But this huge popularity prompted a use and abuse of the topic, and tastes changed with the arrival of the Novecento (20th.). The new art of the century, cinematography, made its final bet on fiction, setting landscape to a decorative function. When painting, its original and main field of action, underwent the rise of abstraction, it seemed the last nail in the coffin for what was now considered a kitsch topic. While some masters of cinema tried to place landscape at the centre of discussion their championing wasn’t enough for a seventh art which focused its attention on new techniques.

Right at the turn of the second millennium, with a wide development of different techniques and methods in filmmaking, stunning new special effects technologies, and the possibility of creating worlds from nowhere, artists have paradoxically decided to return to an ancient means of expressing themselves - not as the topic of their works in an intellectual manner but in transforming, manipulating, and retouching nature with new tools, taking the landscape as a concept for demonstrating all their capacities, and providing a new interpretation of a historic issue.

Take a seat, a program of more than an hour will bring us in a soft and rough trip. “Back to Landscape”, through different pieces, sees filmmakers employing unusual lenses, coordinated choreographies, barely real environments or new perspectives, considering whether landscape or cityscape a free field for experimentation and a testing place for new techniques and formal innovation.

Oporto apresenta #30: From the Age of Recklessness
Saturday, March 23 2013, 22:30h
Oporto, Salvador Correia de Sá, 42, 2 frente, 1200-399 Lisboa

"From the Age of Recklessness" by Klaus Wyborny
16 mm film transfered to video, color, sound, 70', 1994

Oporto is finally presenting the seventy-minute-long autobiographical film by Klaus Wyborny. In this film the film-maker, a former quantum physicist, talks about memory and traveling along with history and geometry, all seen from his adventurous past relationships. The film is an eternal flow of memories presented alongside a cocktail of extremely dry humor and melancholia. Wyborny approaches film as a scientific experiment in fiction and truth, and his goal is to capture (with a special camera device) the untenable flux of life in order to trigger the untenable flow of memories.

"Instructions on death avoidance and the eternal energy flow" - Alexandre Estrela

Xcèntric: Visiones del Cuerpo III: Dwoskin
Domingo 24 de marzo 2013, 18:30h
Xcèntric CCCB, Montalegre, 5, 08001 Barcelona

El cuerpo de Stephen Dwoskin (1939-2012) está enmarcado en todas sus películas, en las que delimita un espacio de filmación que hace visible su incapacidad de moverse, creando así una extensa obra fílmica en íntima proximidad con su propio cuerpo, parcialmente paralizado. Su cine, físico y visceral, está centrado en la carne, la desnudez, la ‘subjetividad corpórea’ y la obsesión voyeurística hacia el cuerpo femenino, objeto de deseo y encarnación de su pulsión escópica. Times For, su primer largometraje, es un estudio claustrofóbico sobre la sensualidad latente de cuatro mujeres y un hombre frustrado. Una metáfora sobre la intensidad de las experiencias sexuales. Jonas Mekas considera esta película como una de las más sólidas y originales obras de cine erótico.

- Times For (Stephen Dwoskin, 1970, 16 mm, 80 min.)

Dirty Looks: Tom Rhoads (Luther Price)
Tuesday, March 26 2013, 19h
The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011
Luther Price in attendance

Tom Rhoads was one of the artistic alter egos of Boston filmmaker Luther Price, whose films were recently described in the New York Times as "entrancingly delicate, implicitly violent works, [where] life, chance, obsessive art making and an intense artistic psyche... flashes before your eyes." Before his infamous film Sodom (1989), Price invented different personae, living these roles in order to execute a breadth of artistic projects. Tom Rhoads marked his first foray into filmmaking. An infantile psyche in the body of an adult, Rhoads was the vessel for some of the artist's most introspective and psychodramatic films. Working in the small-gauge Super 8 format, Rhoads' projects are visceral explorations of trauma, "home movies from hell," repetitive explosions of personal memory and familial guilt. "A nice guy," Price describes Rhoads as the kind of man, "who would buy you an ice cream cone." Tom Rhoads is dead. Long live Luther Price.

Programme:
- Green (Super 8, 30 min., 1988)
- Mr. Wonderful (Super 8, 10 min., 1988)
- Warm Broth (Super 8, 36 min., 1987/88)

Grahame Weinbren: 70 Letters
Sunday March 24th 2013, 21h
Experimental Intermedia
224 Centre Street at Grand, Third Floor, New York 10013

Grahame Weinbren will screen the latest version of his Letters project at Experimental Intermedia. Letters consists of an indeterminate number of films, each one minute in duration, and connected 'in one way or another' with a letter of the alphabet. It is a kind of test-ground for ideas about cinema, both technical and conceptual, but also for another kind of idea, the externalization of an inner life, inasmuch as that tired phrase describes anything.

Letters is 'interactive' in the dumbest sense -- the audience determines, by acclamation, which of the films will be screened next. This means that every screening is fresh and different: not only are there new films each time, but the sequence is never the same, which this casts the whole event in a different light. 'Experimental' in the sense that each screening is an experiment.

Light Industry: Two Films by Marjorie Keller
Tuesday, March 19 2013, 19:30h
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, New York 11222

Writing in Artforum in 1981, Amy Taubin praised Marjorie Keller as “perhaps the only major filmmaker that the American independent film has produced since the end of the Sixties.” At the time of her sudden death in 1994 at age 43, she would leave behind twenty-seven 8mm and 16mm films; tonight, Light Industry presents two of her most important works, Misconception and Daughters of Chaos. Built from small-gauge diary footage, both films are at once lyrical and anti-romantic, meditations on female experience that render their subjects through radically nonlinear editing and complex experiments in sound-image correspondence. Like Stan Brakhage, one of Keller's great influences, she transforms her subject matter—a birth, a wedding—from the stuff of home movies to an adventure in perception. Yet she forgoes the self-mythologizing of her predecessor, offering a more earthbound, though no less poetic, take on the subjective nature of memory.

Keller also produced a substantial body of writings, including a book on the role of childhood in the work of Brakhage, Jean Cocteau, and Joseph Cornell, as well as notes towards a proposed study of women’s experimental cinema that would have charted a trajectory from pioneers like Germaine Dulac, Maya Deren, and Carolee Schneemann through to a younger generation represented by Peggy Ahwesh, Su Friedrich, and Leslie Thornton, among others. In addition to her achievements as an artist and critic, Keller played a crucial role in the Collective for Living Cinema, serving on its board of directors and editing the Collective’s publications Idiolects and Motion Picture. She engaged in the evolving debates around feminism, film, and the avant-garde that ran from the 70s through the 90s, vigorously defending a tradition of highly personal, formally rigorous work that some had rejected as irredeemably masculinist, while at the same time subjecting that tradition to a nuanced critique through her own scholarship and filmmaking. Though highly skeptical of the ways in which feminist film studies had, ironically, come to ignore some of the considerable accomplishments by women in the American avant-garde, Keller was nevertheless one of the key figures of her era to synthesize theory and practice at the most advanced level.

Xcèntric: Visiones del Cuerpo II: Sonbert/Herbert
Jueves 21 de marzo 2013, 20h
Xcèntric CCCB, Montalegre, 5, 08001 Barcelona

Uno de los temas más recurrentes en el trabajo de Warren Sonbert es el amor entre parejas (la dinámica de la comunicación, el idilio y el deseo). The Bad and the Beautiful, uno de sus primeros trabajos en color con una banda sonora de música pop, muestra los rituales privados de jóvenes de la escena artística neoyorquina de los sesenta. De manera elegíaca, retrata parejas y la belleza de la gente en la intimidad, en sus cuartos o en la calle, relajados con amigos, abrazados, acostados o esperando a su amante. El cineasta y pintor James Herbert —más conocido por los vídeos musicales que realizó para el grupo musical R.E.M.— explora la fragilidad del cuerpo humano a través de las propiedades formales más básicas del cine: la luz y la textura. Porch Glider, un film sin sonido y en color, es un estudio meditativo y sensual de parejas de adolescentes desnudos en el jardín, en el porche y entre las muchas habitaciones de una vieja casa rural del Sur de los Estados Unidos. Así, a partir de diferentes estrategias fílmicas, Sonbert y Herbert nos presentan unos cuerpos concretos vinculados a la gestualidad y al contexto histórico de finales de los años sesenta.

- The Bad and the Beautiful (Warren Sonbert, 1967, 16 mm, 34 min)
- Porch Glider (James Herbert, 1970, silent, 35mm, 25 min)

Magic Lantern Presents: Print/Process
16mm Films by J.J. Murphy, Phil Solomon, and Karl Kels
Wednesday March 20, 2013, 20h
95 Empire Black Box Theater, Providence, RI, USA

Film, tape and digital video are all subsets of cinema, much like oils, acrylic, egg tempera, spraypaint and watercolor are all included under the heading of painting. Nevertheless, while sharing the predominant qualities of what we generically call "cinema," each material has its own specific aesthetic materiality that is perhaps best revealed in the event of its own failure or deterioration. The video image becomes filled with horizontal lines of interference or static noise; digital images break down into smears of pixels and stuttering motion; similarly, film has its own special form of visual decay. In 1974, J.J. Murphy re-photographed the same minute of footage fifty times; the product of this experiment was Print Generation, a supremely structuralist work that plays at the cinema's limits of abstraction and representation both on the levels of image and sound. Rarely screened and long available only in the most faded of 16mm prints, Print Generation is shown here in a new, immaculate restoration that brings the alchemical of play of Murphy's film back to life. *Print Generation* is complemented by two other works that engage directly with the theme of generation and decay: the enigmatic *Secret Garden* by American filmmaker Phil Solomon, and *Starlings*, an early work by Austrian filmmaker/documentarian Karl Kels. Like the car dredged up from the marsh at the end of Hitchcock's *Psycho*, these pieces put film's materiality on display as a field of potentiality from which a figurative image, like the return of the repressed, may or may not emerge.

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.