Black Sun This Saturday...

Anti-Reflex in Peru

Two of my works, The Hamilton Cell and The Mongolian Barbecue, will screen as part of 'Anti-Reflex', an extensive programme of experimental work curated by Juan Daniel F. Molero for the Lima Independiente Festival de Cine, running from the 16th to the 24th of June. This programme, apparently the first non-clandestine presentation of experimental cinema in Peru, also features work by, amongst others, Saul Levine, Ken Jacobs, Ben Russell, Laida Lertxundi, Leighton Pierce, Craig Baldwin and our very own Rouzbeh Rashidi.

For the full lineup, click here.

DARK, PLASTIC, REVERSAL @ Black Sun

The programmer programmed! No film programme as such this time, but...

My Super 8 piece Dark, Plastic, Reversal has just been added to the lineup at this Saturday's Black Sun event, which also features Bolide, Hexenverfolgung and (the most intriguing) Phil Collins Project. June 2nd at The Triskel, Cork.

As for Dark, Plastic, Reversal, it's been...

Described as "a terrorist action performed on a piece of celluloid". Maximilian Le Cain's Super-8 film/tape Dark, Plastic, Reversal envelops viewers in thick plastic darkness rythmically shattered by flashes of the scratched, slashed, scribbled-on remnants of what might once have been images. This "suicide cinema" squeezes out the basic, brutal beauty of a dying medium...

FEATHER MIRROR & OR III

Here are some photos Rouzbeh Rashidi took of The Consecutive Impostors at work and play last Thursday evening.

The first two rows are images from our new Operation Rewrite exhibition which opened on Thursday. The last two stills above and all those below are from Feather Mirror, the performance we did to mark the occasion. It featured an extraordinary 16mm film by Esperanza, 2 x S8 projections, tape recordings, feathers, eggs, tools, mirror, canvas, beer, camcorder, greenery, ironing board, clothes, needle, McCarthy, thread, film stock, consecutive impostors... Not necessarily in that order.

"The window is the mirror which I block out..."

The Consecutive Impostors Return: Operation Rewrite Exhibition in Cork

The Consecutive Impostors are back! The third in the constantly evolving and mutating series of Operation Rewrite exhibitions by Esperanza Collado and me is opening this week. It's the inaugural show in the new Cork Film Centre Gallery, located in the former Gunpowder Mills Interpretive Centre, Ballincollig, Co.Cork 

The launch is at 5pm on Thursday, May 24th. This event will include a unique film-performance by The Consecutive Impostors. The exhibition, and the Gallery itself, will be officially opened by Fionuala Sweeney, head of film with The Arts Council.

The exhibition will then run until June 16th. The Gallery opening hours are Wednesday to Saturday, 10am-5.30pm.

Operation Rewrite began in January 2011 as an online video project in which we posted a number of 45-second videos made according to a set of rules, most importantly that one-third of each video should be black screen. However, the project soon boiled over into the production of 16mm films, longer videos, installations, performances, an artist’s book, a photo-blog and a constantly evolving series of exhibitions. 

The subject of Operation Rewrite is cinematic montage, its interruptions, associations and sometimes-surprising mutations. The concept of ‘cinema’ it examines is subject to constant re-assessment, embracing perception and projection technology as much as the articulation of signs.

 

For documentation of the previous Operation Rewrite exhibition in Dublin last September:  

http://lecain.blogspot.com/2011/10/operation-rewrite-exhibition.html

Advance Word on 'Judas Steer'

Earlier this week, in the run up to Vicky Langan's 'Judas Steer' event this Saturday, Bernard Clarke (presenter of RTÉ's Nova music programme) issued this magnificent statement:

"There are some musicians who entertain us, fine; some who stimulate us, better; and then some who immerse us in something so powerful that, almost, primal emotions surface instantly; making us
ultra-defensive, or, finally open to illumination. One of the latter is Vicky Langan. So if you're in the West this coming Saturday evening and you feel like really stirring up a storm in yourself, check her
out at the Galway Arts Centre at 8pm. You may love her, hate her, be astonished, be repelled-but you will not be unmoved. Promise. In a world of bland s**te we need to treasure artists like this -even if
they burn... "

And the following interview with Vicky, in which she discusses our films, is by Charlie Mcbride in 'The Galway Advertiser':

http://www.advertiser.ie/galway/article/52073/vicky-langan-if-im-completely-honest-and-raw-it-cant-go-wrong
  

PERSISTENCIES OF SADNESS & STILL DAYS Trailer

Rouzbeh Rashidi has made this trailer for our new film:

http://rouzbehrashidi.com/news/?p=2341

DIRT to Premiere at 'Judas Steer', Galway, May 19th

Dirt, the brand new video by Vicky Langan and me, will premiere at Galway Arts Centre this Saturday, May 19th. This will be as part of 'Judas Steer', a special event focusing on Vicky's work that will feature a live performance, film screening (our Contact, Hereunder and Desk 13 will also be projected), an exhibition of 'relics and leavings' from previous performances, and a DJ set. Here's the full blurb:

Judas Steer
Vicky Langan (Wölflinge) at the Galway Arts Centre, May 19th.

8pm
Admission- 5 euro
BYOB

Vicky Langan is a Galway-born, Cork-based performer and curator whose “vulnerable, emotionally charged performances” (The Wire) have marked her out as one of the most challenging and unsettling presences on the Irish scene today. Her work is multifaceted, embracing not only various types of performance but also filmmaking and organising experimental music events.  In this event, she will be bringing these three strands of her practice back home, giving Galway audiences a rare, concentrated one-night blast of the intensity that has made her a force to be reckoned with in Cork.  

Judas Steer will feature Langan as performer, filmmaker and curator. Her solo performance project, Wölflinge, uses flesh, fluid and self-built instruments to envelop audiences in an aura of dark intimacy. In opening herself emotionally, she creates warm yet discomforting rituals that at once embrace the viewers and remain resolutely private. Not only will Langan be performing, but she will also present an exhibition of recreations, relics and leavings of past performances.

In partnership with experimental filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain, Langan has created a series of films that expand the scope of her performance activities. Le Cain’s distinctively jarring, disruptive visual rhythms have proved a strikingly fitting match to her troubling sensibility. Four Langan/Le Cain films will be screened, including the premiere of a brand new work.

No account of Langan’s accomplishments is complete without mention of Black Sun, Cork’s legendary weirdo/outer limits music event which she founded in 2009 and has curated ever since.  Her DJ set, which closes the evening, will give a powerful taste of the sort of strange sounds that have earned Black Sun its international reputation.

PERSISTENCIES OF SADNESS & STILL DAYS completed

Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days, the four hour feature film by Maximilian Le Cain and Rouzbeh Rashidi is now complete. Structured in two sections or ‘takes’ of two hours each, this dream-like, experimental project offers two complementary explorations of cinematic form that skirt around possible narratives, ducking through a series of fluctuating audio-visual categories and intensities. It stars Rashidi, John McCarthy and James Devereaux, and will be premiered in Cork, where it was mostly shot, this summer.

Saidin Salkic Films @ The Guesthouse, Tuesday 8th

 I'll be programming and presenting the two remarkable films by Saidin Salkic next Tuesday at The Guesthouse, Cork:

The Irish premiere of the two films by Australia-based Bosnian film-poet and musician Saidin Salkic will take place at The Guesthouse on May 8th. His work is extremely personal and deeply marked by the genocide he experienced as a child in the former Yugoslavia. His patient, quietly overwhelming cinematic style marks him as a unique and uncompromising talent.

The documentary Karasevdah: Srebrenica Blues has been described as ‘an artistic and emotional journey of one man who experienced the horror, tragedy and survival of the Srebinca massacre.’ A brooding meditation on loss and beauty, Karasevdah makes poetic use of landscape and voiceover to grapple with the unspeakable.

Of Salkic’s second film, Konvent, filmmaker and critic Bill Mousoulis has written: What a strange film. We see a young European man, it's the filmmaker. We see no one else. An alien in an alien land. Praying in the convent. Ready, willing, looking at the light, shaving in the mirror, gazing at the camera. It's an existential film, an experimental film. A film of reflection, of yearning. The colours are strange. The music is strange. And yet everything is beautiful. But you have to listen, you have to feel it. Look into the man's eyes, and don't be afraid if he looks straight at you. He is not afraid, to give his soul to you. And you too must give, must give a little of your heart to this strange, beautiful yearning that you see. This is cinema, in a few easy steps.  

May 8th, 7pm, The Guesthouse, Shandon, Cork