Setting Up For The ESF Screening Last Week...

Photos by Rouzbeh Rashidi

Black Sun Change of Start Time

An update for readers in Cork and intending to come to Saturday's Black Sun gig: due to circumstances beyond our control, we're starting a little later. Things are kicking off at 9pm, with the film screening taking place in Plugd Records (in Triskel). After that, we'll be moving downstairs to the TDC space for the live acts.

Serbian Underground Cinema @ Black Sun This Saturday

Black Sun returns to the Triskel, Cork, on Saturday 31st March and this promises to be a very special edition. The live acts, curated as always by Vicky Langan, are artist/composer John Wiese, Irish band Wölfbait, and the consistently unmissable combination of First Blood Part II & Wölflinge herself.

The film which I've selected to screen is a piercing cry of defiance swelling up from an astonishing and all-but-unknown zone of film history. Miroslav-Bata Petrović and Julijana Terek’s Personal Discipline (1983), without doubt the rarest film Black Sun has yet presented, is a product of the early ‘80s Serbian underground. Throbbing with punk attitude, it details a private ritual enacted by writer/performer Terek spilling onto the street in an irresistible upsurge of self-assertion in the face of repressive societal indifference. The pounding rhythms of Petrović’s aggressive editing combine with Terek’s beguiling concentration to create an experience liable to leave the viewer gasping for breath... We are delighted to be giving Personal Discipline its Irish premiere!

A big thank you to Vassily Bourikas for leading us to this work in his amazing retrospective of underground film from the former Yugoslavia at the 2009 Thessaloniki International Film Festival.

vickylangan.com

Partner-in-crime Vicky Langan has launched a new website to showcase her many marvellous activities. Full of striking images and videos, it gives an extensive overview of her history as a performer. Check it out!

http://www.vickylangan.com/

EFS Screening in Cork

On Tuesday March 20th, Rouzbeh Rashidi will be in Cork to present a programme of Experimental Film Society short films, including the public premiere of my Super-8 performance The End of The Universe as Red. This will take place at 8pm at Sample Studios, Sullivan's Quay, Cork.

The line-up in full:

1_The Decision (2011) - By Bahar Samadi / 9 Min / France

2_Partizan (2012) - By Kamyar Kordestani / 6:30 Min / Iran

3_Ashes to Ashes (2012) - By Hamid Shams Javi / 6:30 Min / Iran

4_Snowed Under (2010) - Michael Higgins / 3 Min / Ireland

5_Chapter 2 First Date (2011) - Michael Higgins / 7 Min / Ireland

6_Merry Christmas Farmer Brown (2011) - Michael Higgins / 4:30 Min / Ireland

7_Horses (2011) - Esperanza Collado / 2 Min / Spain

8_F (2008) - Dean Kavanagh / 6:30 Min / Ireland

9_M (2010) - Dean Kavanagh / 6:30 Min / Ireland

10_Early Hours of the Morning (2009) - Dean Kavanagh / 7:30 Min / Ireland

11_Homo Sapiens Project (5) (2011) – Rouzbeh Rashidi / 7 Min / Ireland

12_Homo Sapiens Project (9) (2011) – Rouzbeh Rashidi / 11 Min / Ireland

13_Hotel La Mirage (2010) - Maximilian Le Cain / 5:30 Min / Ireland

14_The End of the Universe as Red (2012) (Super-8 only, sound on tape) - Maximilian Le Cain / 10 Min / Ireland

Abel Ferrera (and others) á Lucca

Gérard Courant's diary film Abel Ferrara á Lucca (2010), which chiefly documents the great American filmmaker's public appearances at the 2010 Lucca Film Festival, has been posted on Youtube. Donal Foreman and I are amongst the cast, with Gérard devoting several minutes to a particularly idyllic wander around the town that we shared with him and some other friends.

(An)Other Irish Cinema & Friends @ University of the Philippines Film Institute

On March 26th, The University of the Philippines Film Institute will host two programmes of recent Irish experimental film.

The first will be of work by (An)Other Irish Cinema- Foreman, Rashidi, Langan/Le Cain. The second will be of work curated by (A)OIC:

http://filminstitute.upd.edu.ph/?p=1363

Here's the full programme:

Programme 1: (An)Other Irish Cinema

1_Indwell Extinction of Hawks in Remoteness (Rouzbeh Rashidi, 2012) 61 mins
2_Monologue (Maximilian Le Cain, 2010) 3 mins
3_Next (Maximilian Le Cain, 2010) 7 mins
4_Lullaby (Vicky Langan/Maximilian Le Cain, 2011) 20 mins
5_Refuge (Donal Foreman, 2010) 10 mins
6_You're Only What I See Sometimes (Donal Foreman, 2008) 9 mins
7_Repeat (Donal Foreman, 2009) 12 mins

Programme 2: Friends of '(An)Other Irish Cinema'

1_Concrete Walls (Michael Higgins, 2011) 60 mins
2_Horses (Esperanza Collado, 2011) 2 mins
3_Light From An Old Town (Dean Kavanagh, 2011) 18 mins
4_Poor Edward (Dean Kavanagh, 2009) 12 mins
5_ЧОП (Jann Clavadetscher, 2011) 10 mins
6_St. Francis Didn't Run Numbers (Chris O'Neill, 2009) 2 mins
7_Sister Mary or Mary the Junkie (Chris O'Neill, 2010) 3 mins
8_Film From The Sea (Alan Lambert, 1999-2011) 5 mins

Luther Price's GREEN @ Black Sun on Thursday 8th

A new edition of Black Sun, Cork's regular weirdo/outer limits music/film event, is happening this Thursday, March 8th, at Plugd Records, located in the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork. The live acts, curated as always by Vicky Langan, are Mike Gangloff, Yawning Chasm and Brigid Power Ryce.

The film screening, which I programmed, will be of Luther Price's Green (1988). It's one of my favourite films and by a filmmaker whose work I've been wanting to show in Cork ever since discovering it. Coincidentally, Price is getting quite a bit of exposure this week. Take a glance at this rave write up by Tom McCormack of his contribution to the current Whitney Biennial:

http://altscreen.com/03/01/2012/whitney-biennial-2012/

And then have a peek at this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLjBW09BiiY&feature=player_embedded

Here are the programme notes for this screening:

Luther Price’s films are distinguished by a raw, jarring and sometimes shocking intimacy that stems equally from their inextricably linked form and their content. The Boston-based Price’s work, which spans three decades and includes sculpture, music and performance as well as film, dwells in, picks at and sometimes even soothes wounds, physical, emotional and psychic. The emphasis on the materiality of the Super-8 and 16mm film he works with reflects this: roughly spliced and frequently altered, the film strips he projects are themselves ‘wounded’. Using both original images, sometimes shot to pastiche the memory of 8mm home movies, and found footage, his morbidly camp iconography generates a decayed, oppressive beauty that is as oddly moving as it is impossible to forget. His embracing of extreme, especially sexual, imagery has won him considerable notoriety, but the emotional depths of his often visionary work are undeniable. And even if affliction and isolation are his subjects, he is not without a sense of humour.

Black Sun is proud to present one of his most searing films, Green (36 mins, 1988). As Gary Morris wrote in Bright Lights Film Journal: “at first glance [it] appears to be a simple formalist study: the still close-up image of a dead starling... But Price himself shows up in one of his most bizarre and powerful guises — as a partially masked drag queen, standing like a statue in what appears to be entropy (the title, suggesting life, is clearly ironic), in a scary wig and heavy gown, holding an ice cream that gradually melts in his hand.. The mysterious queen he portrays is being strangled by her own permanent smile and the impossibly rigid pose she must assume in the film’s empty, dead world. The image is at once campy and shocking and poignant…”

Rouzbeh Rashidi's HE Completed

Rouzbeh Rashidi's Arts Council backed experimental feature film HE (2012) starring James Devereaux is now finished. This dream-like film explores the theme of suicide through a very abstract audio visual approach. The production began in September 2011 in Dublin and finished in February 2012 in Cork during Rouzbeh's residency at The Guesthouse. I appear in a small role as a decidedly dodgey character and John McCarthy is very striking in a larger supporting part.

Here is the trailer for this very unusual and unsettling film:

http://vimeo.com/37311936

Meanwhile, Rouzbeh and I are labouring away editing our joint feature project, Persistancies of Sadness & Still Days.