'Extreme Rituals' Documentation Online

A video of Vicky Langan's performance at the 'Extreme Rituals' festival in Bristol last month is now online. I partner her in this one!

The documentation is by videographer extraordinaire Moju. It can be seen here:

 http://vimeo.com/58294913

(The above photo was taken later during the festival by Zoe Valls...)

Launch of LEVE Vinyl Release

Tomorrow night MUSAC (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y Léon) will be hosting the launch of a limited edition record compiled and produced by the Artistic Association LEVE, a space for cultural production in rural Spain founded by Rafael Martinez del Pozo and Esperanza Collado. The pieces on this disc were recorded in and around the remote village of Castro de Cepeda where LEVE is located, including its recording studio. 

This place was also the site of the first Operation Rewrite exhibition and the location for my video Background (2011). The record includes a sound piece I made from the soundtrack of that work. It also features tracks by Esperanza Collado, Rafael Martinez del Pozo and experimental filmmaker Laida Lertxundi, as well as by Matrimonio, Lorena Álvarez, Roldán, and Las Hermanas Diego. 

For those who read Spanish, full information can be found here:

http://musac.es/index.php?ref=155700

Here's wishing them all good luck with it!

THREADED COCKTAIL Documentation

Here are some images from The Consecutive Impostors' recent performance, Threaded Cocktail, in Xcentric, Barcelona...

New Rashidi / Le Cain Film Wrapped

Today, principal photography wrapped on a new 'duet' by Rouzbeh Rashidi and myself, a follow up to our Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days (2012). We've given this new experimental feature film the title Weird Weird Movie Kids Do Not Watch The Movie. The above photograph, snapped by Rouzbeh, shows me directing wonderful Cork-based actress Eadaoin O'Donaghue, who plays three roles in my section of the film. The exotic looking location is, in fact, Cobh's Sirius Arts Centre. We are deeply grateful to Sirius Arts Centre for their kind cooperation, without which this project would not have been possible.   

TV Spot for Consecutive Impostors

A brief interview with The Consecutive Impostors, as well as some documentation of our recent performance at Xcentric in Barcelona, has been featured on the Catalan TV show La Xarxa Tendencies. We can be found at about the 4.25 mark in this clip:

http://blocstv.laxarxa.com/laxarxatendencies/2013/01/23/cinema-collage-les-set-vides-del-sete-art/

New Work from EFS Members Screening at Plugd Records, Cork

A programme of works by Rouzbeh Rashidi, Dean Kavangh, Vicky Langan and myself that have not been previously screened publicly will be presented at Plugd Records, Cork, this Friday night at 21.30.

Here's the blurb:

This programme of contemporary experimental film features new work by Irish-based members of Experimental Film Society.

Experimental Film Society supports and promotes works by a dozen filmmakers scattered across the globe, whose films are distinguished by an uncompromising devotion to personal, experimental cinema. It was founded and is run by Dublin-based Iranian filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi.

http://www.experimentalfilmsociety.com/

WÖLFLINGE 12/4/’12 (Vicky Langan & Maximilian Le Cain, 7 mins, 2012)

Since 2010, Cork-based sound/performance artist Vicky Langan (Wölflinge) and experimental filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain have been working together in a creative audio-visual partnership built on the strikingly fitting match between Langan’s magnetic, often troublingly intense presence as a performer and Le Cain’s distinctively jarring, disruptive visual rhythms. Wölflinge 12/4/’12 is the record of a typically visceral performance Langan gave at Triskel Christchurch last year.

SOUND FROM THE VALLEY FLOOR (Dean Kavanagh, 25 mins, 2012)

Dean Kavanagh is an independent avant-garde filmmaker based in Wicklow. He favours 'visual stories' which radically reduce conventional narrative elements. These haunting, visually hypnotic works focus on private rituals and mysterious journeys to or from ‘home', to or from memory. Shot mainly in Cork, Sound From the Valley Floor introduces a strain of bizarre humour into Kavanagh’s poetic evocation of displacement.

AREAS OF SYMPATHY (Maximilian Le Cain, 40 mins, 2013)

Areas of Sympathy, Le Cain’s latest solo work, is a visually raw collage of home movies, performance documentation and found footage that knits together into a frustrating but highly exhilarating series of abandoned science fiction / thriller narratives without beginning or end. The memory of an old movie partially watched late at night while more than half asleep…

HOMO SAPIENS PROJECT 139 (Rouzbeh Rashidi, 16 mins, 2013)

The prolific and influential Rouzbeh Rashidi has been working on the ongoing Homo Sapiens Project since 2011. This series of short films is a laboratory for experimenting with cinematic forms. A ‘notebook’, sometimes an oblique ‘diary’, the films produced range from cryptic, often darkly surreal film diaries to impressionistic portraits of places and people, from found footage séances to semi-documentary monologues. Formally, they encompass everything from highly composed and distantly framed meditations to frenetically flickering plunges into the textural substance of moving images. HSP 139 was made as a response to Le Cain’s Areas of Sympathy.

Non-Plastique Available

The new edition of the fanzine Non-Plastique, which I described here, is now available for purchase:

http://nonplastiquefanzine.bigcartel.com/product/non-plastique-number-10

It features interviews with, amongst many others, Vicky Langan and me.

Support Dean Kavanagh

Last year, I wrote an article about Dean Kavanagh, one of the great and most underappreciated filmmaking talents at work in Ireland today. This is how it began:

Dean Kavanagh is Irish cinema's best-kept secret. Although still in his early twenties, this solitary cinematic poet can already boast of a prolific body of short films, 26 to date, that displays both a personal sensibility and a precision of technique developed far in advance of what most filmmakers have achieved with a lifetime of work behind them. Based in a small town in Co. Wicklow, working alone, without budgets and with casts more often than not drawn from his family, Kavanagh is a melancholy visionary of brooding isolation. His obscure narratives tend to focus either on the private rituals of home life or mysterious journeys to or from ‘home', to or from memory. Memory seems to be the essence of his cinema, or, more specifically, the flimsiness of the divide between the intensity of the impression of a given moment and its memory, with the mechanics of image-making providing the solution in which these two states are dissolved. His is unquestionably a cinema of contemplation: places, objects, faces, atmospheres and their immediate emotional charge are his stock in trade. Rather than telling stories in any traditional sense, his best films generate a slow, throbbing ache that invades and haunts his viewers. His world is rainswept, claustrophobic, fixated on details, with even his urban images steeped in rural gloom. As for the faces, Kavanagh is a cinematic portraitist whose close-ups have a depth, patience and searching power equal to any created by Philippe Garrel in the ‘80s. Like Garrel's, Kavanagh's films are ‘sad and proud of it'.

Dean has launched a Fundit campaign to make a new feature, A Harbour Town. If you care about cinema as art and poetry, please donate generously:

http://www.fundit.ie/project/a-harbour-town-----feature-film 

Films of 2012

Cautionary note: if you watch as many weird films as I did in 2012, you might end up looking something like this recent portrait of me...

I listed some of the best of them in the Senses of Cinema end of year poll:

http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/65/2012-world-poll-part-two/#20

First & Last...

At 11.30 last night, I finished editing what can be considered either my last video of 2012 or my first of 2013...

Areas of Sympathy, starring Esperanza Collado and John McCarthy, is a 40-minute collage of home movies, performance documentation and found footage that knits together into a frustrating series of abandoned science fiction / thriller narratives without beginning or end. The memory of an old movie partially watched late at night while more than half asleep. This often visually intense concatanation of broken promises was finished on VHS.

Here are some stills: