Still from ekleipsis (Tran, T. Kim-Trang, 1998), part of the Blindness Series, 1992-2006. Courtesy the artist and the Video Data Bank.

The Blindness Series is Los Angeles-based artist Tran, T. Kim-Trang’s expansive, fourteen-years-in-the-making tour de force on vision and its metaphors. Comprised of eight videos, the series draws upon notions of blindness to explore broader political and cultural themes of identity, sexuality, society, and technology. This evening, to celebrate the Video Data Bank’s release of The Blindness Series in a new DVD box-set, Tran will present five works from the cycle, including a provocative documentary on hysterical blindness and the Cambodian civil war (ekleipsis, 1998); an essay on cosmetic eyelid surgery (operculum, 1993); and a meditation on the phenomenon of word blindness (alexia, 2000). “We are invited to approach these works with all our senses,” writes scholar Laura Marks. “The Blindness Series, crankily, and finally tenderly, gives us our eyes back.” Tran, T. Kim-Trang, 1992-2006, USA, Beta SP video, ca. 82 min (plus discussion).

TRAN, T. KIM-TRANG (b. 1966, Saigon, Vietnam) emigrated to the U.S. in 1975. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and has been producing experimental videos since the early 1990s. Her work has been exhibited internationally and nationally in solo and group screenings, including at the Museum of Modern Art, the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. Tran is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, having been awarded a Creative Capital grant, a Getty Mid-Career Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship. Tran also collaborates with Karl Mihail on a project known as Gene Genies Worldwide© (www.genegenies.com). Their conceptual and public artworks on genetic engineering have exhibited at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria; Exit Art, New York; the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York and elsewhere in the United States. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Scripps College.

- Silent Works presents five films, both 16mm and 35mm, including the installation works Two Sweeps (1979) and Let's Make A Sandwich (1978) presented as continuous loops; plus Screen (1969), Squirtgun/Stepprint (1998) and Coreopsis (1998).
- Five Films centers in his 16mm films from the 70s, with Sidewinder's Delta (1976), Saugus Series (1974), Down Wind (1973), Foregrounds (1979) and Runs Good (1970).
- Trouble includes the 35mm works Trouble In The Image (1996), Horizontal Boundaries (2008) and the 16mm short film Runs Good (1970).
- And last, but not least, Starting to go bad contains three recent digital works, Starting To Go Bad (2009), I Open The Window (2009) and I Put Out My Hands (2009).

NTSC, Region free, 30US$ each, available in his website's store.

Film Samuel Beckett | Alan Schneider 1964 | 17 mins | B&W | 16mm

A man carefully blots out all external reality. A philosophical principle prevails -George Berkeley’s Esse est percipi- while the film contains elements of comedy.

Emigton Joe Comerford 1965 | 10 mins | B&W | Digibeta, Shot on 16mm

An elliptical narrative with an injection of perverted Irish humour.

Un Peu Moins (A Little Less) Donal O’Ceilleachair | Konstantin Bojanov 2006 | 6 mins | B&W and Colour | DV, Shot on Super8

Somewhere between innocence and eroticism, between geography and stasis.

She Had Her Gun All Ready Vivienne Dick 1978 | 22 mins | Colour | 16mm

This film noir/melodrama set in the Lower East Side is a study of women’s anger and hatred of women at the crucial moment of overpowering identification and obsessional thraldom.
Performances by Lydia Lunch and Pat Place.

Saint Francis Didn’t Run Numbers Christopher O’Neill 2009 | 4 mins | Colour | DV

Excavates new and surprising spaces from a famous American film of the ‘70s, abstracting a silent, hidden universe from the bustle of narrativity. — Maximilian Le Cain

Sister Mary Or Mary The Junkie Christopher O’Neill 2010 | 2 mins | Colour | DV

One figure is seen in three distinctive images, which have been manipulated and isolated to illustrate a different meaning to its original source material.

After & Before Barry Ronan 2009 | 2 mins | Colour | DV

Superimposition of landscapes shot as an expressionistic canvas with Brakhagean reminiscences.

Making A Home Maximilian Le Cain 2007 | 10 mins | B&W and Colour | DV

A ‘thinking space’ full of possible discoveries dwelling for and from internal desires using the mystery implied by the given architectural space, which fails.

Film From The Sea Alan Lambert 2000 | Variable duration | Colour | 35mm

A strip of corroded 35mm film found washed up on a beach in Valencia, Spain, in 1996.

Programme Notes
On the impossibility of writing about this programme

Since there is no worthwhile commercial cinema in Ireland, all great Irish films come from experimental cinema.

Maximilian Le Cain in Experimental Conversations.

I N V I S I B I L I T Y :

In 1969 Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of a circular form of reasoning that implied entrapment in circumstances of one’s own design.

Beckett’s Film (1964): the best film you never saw in your life, or, as Gilles Deleuze put it, the greatest Irish film.

Beckett’s film can be seen as the tale of George Berkeley who has had enough of being perceived and of perceiving. The role, which could only have been taken by Buster Keaton, is that of Berkeley, or rather it is the passage from one Irishman to another.

The attempt to communicate through silence is no deprivation. All depends on the nature of this silence - not a cancelling, static silence, but verbal ‘mutism’. Beckett doesn’t verbalize chaos; he summons it: chaos cannot be depicted but visualized.

I M P O S S I B I L I T I E S :

Inexistence
of Irish cinema industry,
of Irish experimental cinema,
of thematic concerns common to these works,
of Irishness as a main feature present in these works,
of linking threads connecting Irish experimental films,
of formal concerns perceived as common to these works,
of linking thread connecting the works on this programme

?

P O S S I B I L I T I E S :

When Bob Quinn was born, S. Beckett was 29 y.o.
When V. Dick was born, Bob Quinn was 15 y.o.

When F. Daly was born, V. Dick was 11 y.o.
When P. Jolley was born, F. Daly was 3 y.o.

When D. O’Ceilleachair was born, P. Jolley was 4 y.o.
When A. Lambert was born, D. O’Ceilleachair was 2 y.o.

When C. O’Neill was born, A. Lambert was 6 y.o.
M. Le Cain was born, C. O’Neill was 3 y.o.

When B. Ronan was born,
M. Le Cain was 7 y.o.

The festival will feature two thematic evenings of performances, installations and screenings: Night Vision will explore 'the dynamics between visibility and invisibility, light and darkness, seeing the night and seeing in the night', with performances by Paul Clipson & William Fowler Collins, Phantom Limb & Earth's Hypnagogia and Pieter Geenen; Surface Tension will investigate 'the folds and fissures between perception and conscience, experience and meaning' with performances by Dominique Petitgand, Karen Mirza, Brad Butler & David Cunningham and Paul Abbott with Seymour Wright & Ross Lambert. The section 'Artist in focus' will invite filmmakers Morgan Fisher, David Gatten and David O'Reilly to present a partial retrospective of their work and a 'carte blanche' programme. Morgan Fisher will also give a master class on the 23rd.

Read the festival's programme for full details.