Season's Greetings

Wishing all and sundry a most festive season. Over and out from Close Watch until '13.

The Consecutive Impostors (+ McCarthy) in Barcelona

The above picture is a flash forward to January 2013. It shows John McCarthy locking his door in preparation for his departure to Barcelona. His mission there is to join The Consecutive Impostors for their new Operation Rewrite performance, Threaded Cocktail. Consecutive Impostor Collado will also be presenting her Gas Works films. High calibre delirium for all.

The occasion for all this is the Exquisite Collage Festival, an event exploring the crossover of film and collage, taking place at Xcentric. Xcentric is the cinema of the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona and one of the most impressive venues for experimental cinema in Europe. The Festival also includes screenings of short films by, amongst others, Stan Brakhage, Jeff Keen, Larry Jordan, Robert Breer, John Latham, Stan Vanderbeek and Martha Colburn, as well as Vera Chytilová's classic feature Daisies.  

For more information:

http://www.cccb.org/xcentric/en/sessio-the_gas_works_screenings_performance_a-42508

We are very grateful to Culture Ireland for their support of this event.

Rouzbeh Rashidi Feature Films Online

News in of some first-rate Christmas viewing! EFS chief and dizzyingly prolific experimental filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi has uploaded the first eleven of his feature films for online viewing. Lock the doors, fire up the computer and slip into one of the most distinctive visions in contemporary filmmaking. 

The videos are unlisted, but linked from here:

http://rouzbehrashidi.com/news/?p=2774

X-muss Viewing

Six more of my works have appeared on Vimeo, as part of my project of uploading six videos every month. They are:

Monologue (2010)
Light / Sound (2010, made with Vicky Langan and also available on her Vimeo page)
Bouquet (2010)
The Soldeck Cycle (2010)
Soltan Karl: The Super-8 Works (2010)
Afternoons With Johnny (2008)

Non-Plastique

The new edition of the fanzine Non-Plastique features interviews with me and with Vicky Langan. This issue, the work of Willie, one of the main men behind the Hunter's Moon Festival and the wonderful band Woven Skull, basically consists of a series of interviews with music people about film and film people about music. Also amongst those interviewed are First Blood Part II and Vivienne Dick.  A good read.

Extreme Rituals Stills

Here are some images by Zoë Valls of Vicky Langan's performance at the recent Extreme Rituals festival, in which I participated.

An Extreme Ritual

I've just returned from Bristol, England, where I've been attending 'Extreme Rituals: A Schimpfluch Carnival'. This weekend of noise and performance devoted to the legacy of the Swiss performance group Schimpfluch was a truly magnificent event: energising and, to use a grossly over-used word (which I very seldom use!), inspiring. It will be a long time before Rudolf Eb.er's performance, in particular, fades from my mind...

It also saw my collaboration with Vicky Langan take off in an unexpected direction, as she invited me to partner with her on stage in the characteristically raw and intense performance she had devised for the festival. This visceral exploration of  people's need to emotionally (and sometimes phsyically) devour one another proved to be among the most extreme of the weekend's 'rituals', and both Vicky and I are still nursing aches and bruises from it. A privileged experience...