Thursday, July 29, 2010

Black August Sun



Tuesday August 3rd, 8pm, The Pavilion, Cork.

Another Black Sun darkens the horizon... The latest edition of Vicky Langan's 'weirdo / outer limits music + film' event features the live acts Mark Durgan (Putrifier), Michael Prime (Organium, Morphogenesis) and The Quiet Club. These are, as always, curated by Vicky.

The film programme is selected by me. What follows are the programme notes I put together for it:

This projection of the haunting, penumbral Stricnina (Italy, 1969, 7 mins) brings the work of legendary Italian underground filmmaker maudit Piero Bargellini to Irish audiences for the first time. According to Bargellini, this silent, richly atmospheric short traces a dog’s “voyage into death – the transfiguration – the images that return, only to disappear from memory, emerge from the recollections in a purifying vortex that takes them back to their essence. It’s the gradual breaking down of the image into form and then into colours and then into light and finally it’s the beginning: the vibration that is the matrix of sound, of light, of life…”

San Francisco filmmaker David Sherman's lyrically nightmarish yet darkly soothing Tuning the Sleeping Machine (USA, 1996, 12 mins) continues the mood of oneiric inner voyaging. In so doing, it manages to reclaim for celluloid the televised impression of antique horror films. As critic Brian Frye describes it: “Fragments of unidentified and yet strangely familiar films, pregnant with allusion and implication, drift into one another, obscured by the haze of rephotography, electricity and the residue of (al)chemical formulae, renamed time and memory. Tuning the Sleeping Machine resurrects the cinema projected on the unconscious…”

Ivan Zulueta's masterpiece A Mal Gam A (Spain, 1976, 35 mins) remains one of the most important Spanish experimental films ever made, a visionary 8mm tour de force of overflowing subjectivity trippily reconfiguring private space. It stars the director ‘Jim Self’ as a man alone in his apartment, interacting with the objects and surfaces that surround him as the spatial and tactile collapse in on each other with a vividness only Zulueta could conjure.

The late Zulueta, who died last December, is a seminal figure in Spanish avant-garde cinema, but remains criminally neglected abroad. His ‘pop’ sensibility and early access to the ‘60s American underground placed him in a different universe to the repressive Spain of the Franco regime- and in the vanguard of that country’s cultural renaissance after its fall. Although his career was tragically derailed by drugs in the early ‘80s, by that time he had created an impressive body of short films and the astonishing cult classic feature Arrebato (1979).

Monday, July 26, 2010

Over the past few days...


...the first (An)Other Irish Cinema screenings took place in The Exchange, Dublin.


We emerged smiling!

(Photos taken by Dean Kavanagh)

More atmopsheric photos of the event, taken by Rouzbeh, can be seen here

Saturday, July 17, 2010

(AN)OTHER IRISH CINEMA Trailer Online

This trailer, put together by Rouzbeh Rashidi, gives a wonderfully accurate and concise snapshot of the three sensibilities that make up this programme:

http://vimeo.com/13397087

Friday, July 09, 2010

First (AN)OTHER IRISH CINEMA Screenings


The first (An)Other Irish Cinema screenings will take place at The Exchange in Dublin's Temple Bar later this month. Each filmmaker will have one evening devoted to his work:

Donal Foreman: Thursday, July 22nd, 8 pm
Rouzbeh Rashidi: Friday, July 23rd, 8 pm
Maximilian Le Cain: Sunday, July 25th, 8 pm

There will be a public discussion with the filmmakers on the Friday, immediately before Rouzbeh Rashidi's programme.

My programme will be identical to the one I showed at The Basement Project Space some weeks back:

Hushed Light
Everybody's Favourite Disease
Smudge
Light / Sound
(with Vicky Langan)
Next
The Mongolian Barbecue
Private Report
The Hamilton Cell


For more details and directions to the venue, please visit our Facebook.

Thursday, July 08, 2010

DEPARTURE for Shanghai

Point of Departure will be shown as part of the exhibition 'Postcards From The Celtic Tiger' in the Xuhui Arts Museum in Shanghai between July 21st and 31st. This show, curated by Peggy Sue Amison and Chris Hurley, is billed simply as 'an exhibition of contemporary Irish photography and video'.

Artists featured: Martin Cregg, Jennifer Cunningham, Mark Curran, David Farrell, Sean Hillen, Maurice Galway, Sarah Iremonger, Maximilian Le Cain, Danny McCarthy, Sandra Minchin, Ciara Moore, Harry Moore, Richard Mosse, Jackie Nickerson, Ailbhe Ni Bhriain, Eoin O'Conaill.

Wednesday, July 07, 2010

(An)Other Irish Cinema

'(An)Other Irish Cinema' is a new project involving fellow filmmakers Donal Foreman, Rouzbeh Rashidi and myself. We've grouped ourselves together under this label to create a platform for joint screenings showcasing our work and, in so doing, hopefully proposing the possibility of an/other filmmaking culture in Ireland. Although our films are very different, we're united by several important common factors. We've all made a large number of very low budget films on our own initiatives, prioritising creative freedom over economic concerns. We're all intensely engaged with the history of non-mainstream cinemas. And we're all committed to formal exploration and experimentation in our work.

For further details of this initiative, please visit our new blog:

http://anotheririshcinema.blogspot.com/


Details of our first Dublin screenings will be announced very soon, watch this space!