Upcoming Experimental Film Events in Cork

The next week sees three exciting experimental film events happening in Cork, all featuring members of Experimental Film Society:

Sunday November 4th, 3 pm:  Rouzbeh Rashidi will be presenting the Irish premiere of HE at The Guesthouse. This unsettling experimental feature was mainly shot during Rouzbeh's residency at The Guesthouse in February this year.

Tuesday November 6th, 7pm: Michael Higgins will be presenting his feature film Concrete Walls and two short works at The Guesthouse.

Thursday November 8th, 7pm: The opening of an exhibition of new, film-based work by Michael Higgins at Cork Film Centre Gallery, Ballincollig. The opening will feature a screening of Michael's recent feature Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep. This event, which I curated, is a fringe event of Corona Cork Film Festival.

About Michael Higgins:

Michael Higgins is an experimental filmmaker living and working in Dublin City, Ireland.

Inspired by cinema and visual narrative, Michael’s work involves a range of both digital and analogue technologies, and concerns people’s perception of time and reality. In creating content, Michael acts on a single idea, be it a piece of music, an image, a character or environment. In following this initial idea through, he makes a point of being open to changes and external forces that occur throughout the various stages of production, allowing the development of the work to be self-driven. He simply assists it in materialising.

When working with film, he utilises vintage camera equipment, expired film stocks and hand processing in order to bring out the unique characteristics of celluloid subject to destruction and decay. These processes achieve unpredictable results that resonate with ideas of time past or a ‘lost time’ and also a sense of decadence linked to an apparently dying format.

MANILA SAND TRAP 'Trailer' Online

More Consecutive Impostors goodies online! A six-minute 'digest' of the performance The Consecutive Impostors and their good friend McCarthy gave at the Guesthouse, Cork, some weeks back, edited by Consecutive Impostor Collado:

http://vimeo.com/52339330 

PS: The puking noises are real and unsimulated.

operationrewrite.net

Operation Rewrite, the ongoing project by The Consecutive Impostors (Esperanza Collado and me), now has a beautiful new website, entirely designed and created by Consecutive Impostor Collado. (You can see her in the still above, photographed while working on the website, using her specially customised software...)

The Consecutive Impostors are currently hatching a plan to invade Barcelona in January. More updates on that as it unfolds. More generally, we are still intending to invent cinema before the end of the 20th century.

'Hunter's Moon' This Weekend

Hunter's Moon, Leitrim's festival of "psych, drone, experimental and more: music, film and art" kicks off tomorrow. Although unfortunately I won't make it this year, my experience at it in 2011 was memorable and I have no doubt that this year's edition will be as great: great acts, great place, great vibe, great people... 

The experimental film section contains work by Vicky Langan & me, as well as by Rouzbeh Rashidi, Michael Higgins and Vivienne Dick. The list of live performances includes acts that've really impressed me when I've caught them elsewhere: Wölfbait, Luxury Mollusc,  First Blood Part II, Woven Skull...  

The End of a Successful Screening...

The aftermath of last Saturday's Black Sun Cinema screening of Lithuanian films at Triskel Christchurch Cinema. 

Left to right: Alan Lambert (filmmaker, Solus Film Collective), Vicky Langan (Black Sun), Vidmantas Purlys (Lithuanian Ambassador to Ireland), Me (apparently without arms), Julius Ziz (filmmaker, guest of honour).

A big thank you to all who came along and all who helped. An especially Big Thank You to Chris O'Neill of Triskel Christchurch Cinema.

Le Cain Short 'Playing Support' to Carax in Cork

In Advance, a video I made last year, will play before screenings of Leos Carax's Holy Motors at the Triskel Christchurch Cinema in Cork this week. Carax's film is the new release I'm most looking forward to seeing this year. His Pola X remains my favourite feature of the '90s.

For full details of screenings:
http://triskelartscentre.ie/events/2229/holy-motors/

and check out Carax's 1997 short Sans Titre here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_qb2tRdCJQ

Holy Motors

Kôji Wakamatsu (1936 – 2012)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbRkcZa03ZA&feature=relmfu

Next Saturday...

http://blacksuncork.tumblr.com/

Poster by Rouzbeh Rashidi.

Six of the Rest on Vimeo

The latest batch of six of my works has been uploaded to Vimeo. This is part of an ongoing project to upload six pieces every month. October's videos are:

Evening Ascent (2010)
Making a Home (2007)
Rendezvous (2006)
Habits of a Lifetime (2012, made as 'Humphrey Esterhase')
Strange Attractor (2012)
Dirt (2012, made with Vicky Langan and also available at her Vimeo page)
 

Consecutive Impostors Podcast

In which Consecutive Impostor Le Cain attempts to interview Consecutive Impostor Collado about her films The Gas Thus Cuts In Bits and The Illuminating Gas. But her gaseous preoccupations seem to have spiralled into a new level of intensity...

http://vimeo.com/51128614

The Consecutive Impostors at Work and Play

Images from The Consecutive Impostors' performance Manila Sand Trap at The Guesthouse last Sunday:

October BLACK SUN CINEMA

Black Sun Cinema presents

A Programme of Lithuanian Experimental Film

in association with Tinklai International Short Film Festival, Lithuania, and Solus Film Collective, Dublin

Saturday 20 October 2012, 8.45pm,
Triskel Christchurch Cinema, Tobin St., Cork
blacksuncork.tumblr.com

Black Sun Cinema, in partnership with Triskel Christchurch, is proud to present a retrospective programme of Lithuanian experimental shorts from the ‘90s. These films, very rarely screened in Ireland, provide an eye-opening snapshot of a distinctive independent film culture in the process of defining itself.

Much of the programme highlights a tendency towards personal, poetic and formally adventurous approaches to documentary reality. The wordless, powerfully bleak yet pictorially exquisite rural worlds evoked in The Window (Julius Ziz, 1989) and Earth of the Blind (Audrius Stonys, 1992) will appeal to admirers of Bela Tarr, while Ten Minutes Before the Flight of Icarus (Arunas Matelis, 1991) offers a charmingly quirky glimpse of an urban neighbourhood in upheaval. The Black Box (Algimantas Maceina, 1994) confronts personal and national history more directly, albeit in a visually radical fashion.

Contrasting with the rest of the programme, the selection of hand-painted, hand-scratched films by artist August Varkalis plunges into visual abstraction: ecstatic, fast-paced cascades of pure cinema that make for intoxicating viewing.

Black Sun is delighted to announce that renowned Lithuanian filmmaker Julius Ziz will be present to introduce the screening.

The Window (Julius Ziz, 1989)
The Black Box (Algimantas Maceina, 1994)
Ten Minutes Before the Flight of Icarus (Arunas Matelis, 1991)
Earth of the Blind (Audrius Stonys, 1992)
Abstract films by August Varkalis (1995-2002)

New Operation Rewrite Performance in Cork This Weekend

The Consecutive Impostors are back in town! Esperanza Collado and I will be presenting a brand new Operation Rewrite performance, Manila Sand Trap, at The Guesthouse, Cork this weekend. It will feature a special guest appearance by John McCarthy. Here's the blurb:

The Guesthouse invites you to Sunday Lunch with our artist in residence Esperanza Collado, Sunday 7th at 3pm.

The Consecutive Impostors' Operation Rewrite is a collaborative project by Spanish artist Esperanza Collado and Cork-based filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain. It began in 2011 as an on-line video project that quickly expanded into a series of works of multidisciplinary nature that explore the workings of the cut, suspension, and interruption as fundamental associative principles of cinema and (both its) consecutive (and preceding) matters. The performance piece Manila Sand Trap has been developed at The Guesthouse in Cork during Esperanza's residency stay.

The Sunday Lunch event is made possible through the generosity of its guests and host chefs, thanks to all who have donated to the kitchen larder for the previous events.

For this event please bring some olive oil, butter, Maldon salt or filter coffee etc

BYO wine or beer...........see you at the table!

http://www.theguesthouse.ie/

PUBLIC ENEMY @ La Furia Umana

A brief appreciation I wrote of the stunning final scene of The Public Enemy (1931) is now online at La Furia Umana. This is part of a wonderful dossier on Wellman compiled by David Phelps and Gina Telaroli, and also featuring texts by, amongst others, J. Hoberman, Bertrand Tavernier and Kent Jones.

'Landscapes of Stillness' in English

 Collage by Rouzbeh Rashidi

'Landscapes of Stillness', Italian critic Gianluca Pulsoni's text on Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days, has now been translated into English. Here it is in its entirety:


Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days is an interesting work from a vital scene in recent European film production and research: Ireland. More specifically, it is a remarkable result achieved by its authors, the Iranian Rouzbeh Rashidi and the Irish Maximilian Le Cain: the former, founder of Experimental Film Society (EFS) and filmmaker; the latter, film critic, editor of Cork Film Centre’s journal Experimental Conversations, and, also, filmmaker.

Produced with the support of The Guesthouse, Cork, and announced by a trailer available on Vimeo, it is a four hour feature film, composed of two parts of the same length. It consists of a chain of potential and floating micro-narratives centring on different human figures, their actions, interplays and relations. These are framed and juxtaposed in dreamlike imagery as a continuum that is also defined through a very precise soundtrack which isolates, models, and abstracts the realism of the shooting, and through a rhythmical editing which often outlines and sometimes stresses a sort of binary language, between intensities (underlying visual patterns) and discontinuities (regular cuts as punctuation marks).

Let’s say Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days implies a cultural effort which seems to suggest theoretical ambitions quite close to a phenomenological approach. Like singular entomologists of movement, Rashidi and Le Cain search and record the ‘appearances of stillness’ by re-framing its degree zero in life, underlying possible kinetic representations or signs: landscape. As rectangle, as painting, as scheme, it is the ‘field’ where time and space collapse their boundaries and it seems the ‘key’ they use to open their gates of perception. Just like in poetry. As a matter of fact, what we notice visually through these segments is the framework of a fascinating and absolutely personal landscape which binds and hybridizes figures and environments in configuring or simply unfolding geometric and abstract forces, thus to define a viewpoint by which all the places the authors filmed throughout Cork (buildings, harbor, countryside and so forth) give a progressive anti-naturalistic impression of reality, maybe unwittingly influenced by cues from some famous visual arts movements (Minimalism, Hyperrealism, even Suprematism), and enacted by scattered gestures, temporary postures and anonymous poses. ‘Everything looks like its stationary’: that’s the immediate impression the staging gives; ‘but in different ways’: that’s what I would add to the in-depth expression their observation reveals. Here, Rashidi and Le Cain emphasize nothing more than a certain materialism of the elements involved, instead of the traditional staging: image, sound, acting, editing; all these phases autonomously resonate in their own volumes, tones, variations, rhythms; all these aspects mold an open structure, a work in progress, roundly evoked in the second part, Still Days.

Artistic experiment and possible manifesto, it is through interesting work on the arresting and the fluctuation of particular cinematic dynamics that this movie seems to achieve nothing less than a surprising series of landscapes of stillness.