Dean Kavanagh @ Black Sun, Tuesday 24th

Dean Kavanagh is the featured filmmaker in next week's intimate Black Sun event. The live acts, curated as always by Vicky Langan, are cellist Okkyung Lee and the duo of Mick O'Shea and Emil Nerstrand. It's all happening at The Guesthouse, Shandon. Due to limited space, please rsvp if you're interested in coming along. Details on how to do so can be found at: http://blacksuncork.tumblr.com/

And here are the notes about Dean Kavangh, who will be there to present his films:

 Black Sun is proud to present four films by one of Ireland’s most gifted, distinctive and experimental young filmmakers, Wicklow-based Dean Kavangh. His moody, heavily atmopsheric and hauntingly mysterious works favour quiet but piercingly intense moments of solitary emotion and contemplation over plot. Distinguished by an exceptionally poetic visual style, Kavanagh’s films obliquely engage with home, memory, mysterious journeys and moments of rupture. Since he beagn making films in 2006, he has completed over 26 shorts and is now working on his first feature. Black Sun will be screening two brief, highly formalistic early works, The Girl With The Straw Hat and On Foot (both 2008), along with two of his longer and most accomplished films, Poor Edward (2009) and The Distance (2010).

Wölflinge 12/4/'12

Vicky Langan and I have just completed Wölflinge 12/4/'12, a video built from documentation of her truly stunning performance last Thursday. As the title implies, it uses techniques similar to our earlier Wölflinge 17/11/'10 and is the second in an occasional series of such videos based on her performances.

Langan & Lunch @ Triskel Tonight

Two rather formidable ladies will be taking to the stage of the Triskel Christchurch venue here in Cork at 11 tonight in a gig that promises to be unmissable. Punk icon (and star of great films by Vivienne Dick and Richard Kern) Lydia Lunch will be supported by Cork's finest, Vicky the Wölflinge, whose performance looks set to be classic Langan. Be there at all costs!

(The discreet visuals that will be backing Vicky are my work...)

Article on Buharov Brothers in Enclave Review

An article I wrote on the Buharov Brothers in the wake of their visit to Cork last November has appeared in the fifth edition of Enclave Review, a contemporary arts reviews sheet based in Cork.

Reflections on 2011 Published in 'Lumiere'

The following text, a look back on 2011, has just appeared in the excellent Spanish journal 'Lumiere', alonsgide contributions by, amongst others, Nicole Brenez, Nathaniel Dorsky, Monte Hellman, Luc Moullet, Oriol Sánchez and Phil Solomon. Rouzbeh Rashidi very kindly lists the Dublin Operation Rewrite exhibition by Esperanza Collado and me in first place on his list of favourite films/film events of last year.

A couple of years ago, I stopped making end-of-year film lists. Cinema’s abundance overwhelmed chronology. Any attempt to summarize must include not only recent films/events and older films, but also the rich, ever-developing skein of revelations, situations and (especially collaborative) relationships that attend the overlapping activities of filmmaking, programming and writing. The division of these into blocks of twelve months makes as little sense to passing experience as claiming that The Bank Dick is older than Dharma Guns, both unquestionable masterpieces seen over the past year, or that the series of astounding and all but unscreened features made by my friend Rouzbeh Rashidi throughout 2011/’12 is less 'visible' than Copie conforme. I’m perfectly happy not to see the wood for the trees. There is no need to pursue cinema; once it has identified you, it seeks you out…

Births and rebirths of films that come to claim you. Maybe I should use this opportunity to talk about the two astonishing features by German actor Mario Mentrup that I saw through a series of chance connections in recent weeks. Or about Miroslav-Bata Petrović and Julijana Terek’s sublime cry of defiance Personal Discipline (1983), a little-known film currently burning in my brain, one I’m screening here in Cork this weekend, a modest 'rebirth' ritual… Or about ‘my’ work, the films and videos reality sees fit to allow me to make, the invaluable, enriching, often mysterious interaction with collaborators, with performer Vicky Langan, with artist Esperanza Collado, with Rouzbeh Rashidi… Films, exhibitions, performances. Cinema. Life.

But the wheel’s stopped spinning and the arrow points to 'In The Mouth of the Volcano', a retrospective of Lithuanian experimental film of the past thirty years that took place in Dublin last December. Curated by Alan Lambert and Arturas Jevdokimovas, with the participation of Julius Ziz, it was a collaboration between the Tinklai Film Festival and Dublin’s Solus collective. Over a marathon, four-hour-plus projection in the sparsely attended basement screening room at Dublin’s Filmbase, a solid block of film history formed before our eyes: Valdas Navasaitis’ The Spring, Arunas Matelis’ Ten Minutes Before the Fall of Icarus, Algimantas Maceina’s The Black Box, Audrius Stonys’ Earth of the Blind, the abstract films of August Varkalis… Great films we hadn’t heard of, altering our cinematic map. And not couched in a festival context, manifesting instead as a self-contained phenomenon of monumental surprises. With all the careless, heartbreaking generosity of truly alternative events…