SLOW TAPE in Brighton

Paul Wilson (Bolide) and Hobo Sonn will be projecting my video Slow Tape while they perform at Silent Sounds, a new moving-image-with-live-accompaniment evening at Coachwerks, Brighton, UK.  

That's happening at 7pm on April 5th. For more information: http://www.coachwerks.org.uk/

Bill Mousoulis Films @ Black Sun

Mike Gangloff will be performing at this April's Black Sun on Wednesday, April 3rd at 8pm in Plugd Records, Triskel Arts Centre, Cork.

There will also be a programme of of Super-8 films by Bill Mousoulis, a legend of the Melbourne independent film scene who has created over a hundred works since the early ‘80s. Filmmaker, critic, founder of the journal Senses of Cinema, and passionate advocate personal filmmaking, Mousoulis has been hailed by Australia’s preeminent film critic Adrian Martin in glowing terms:

Can there be any doubt that (for the Super-8 world, but more generally for Australian independent film-making) Bill Mousoulis is a visionary? Tireless worker for the small movie at large, and ceaseless creator of his own contribution to cinema, he has come into this world, I believe, to inspire us… A romantic, a mystic, an artist inspired by the muse, a free spirit …I happen to think that Bill’s work is simultaneously naive (in all the best senses) and extremely sophisticated. You surely don’t have to look twice to be convinced that he is, after all, the Bresson of Super-8 … Bill’s movies aim high, and they convince you of their right to aim that high…

Cork audiences will have the rare opportunity of seeing a selection of Mousulis’ short works from the ‘80s and ‘90s, films in which he conjures witty, poetic and often soulful cinematic gems from his immediate surroundings, often with the help of an inspired ear for popular music.

For more information on Bill Mousoulis, visit his website: http://innersense.com.au/
 
In A Lonely Place (4 mins, 1982)
The Green Door (5 mins, 1986)
Vale (3 mins, 1994)
How To Use Your Camera (7 mins, 1996)
Still (7 mins, 1986)
The Shadows (5 mins, 1996)

Vicky Langan Interview in 'The Wire'

The April issue of The Wire contains a terrific interview with Vicky Langan by Daniel Spicer.  It gives a very good account of her approach to performance, and fills readers in on her background and breakthroughs. Also, there are some great photographs, including one of this "nonsensically sensual" artist taking a big bite out of my back as part of a performance she did last year...   

EFS Screening at Ormston House, Limerick

Experimental Film Society HQ issued the following announcement this evening: 

Experimental Film Society Screening Tuesday 26 March, 7.30pm Admission Free

ORMSTON HOUSE 9-10 Patrick Street, Limerick, Ireland

Ormston House, Limerick, will be presenting a programme of work by the international filmmaking group Experimental Film Society. Founded in Iran but now run from Ireland, EFS is an independent, not-for-profit entity that archives and promotes films and videos by more than a dozen filmmakers scattered across the globe; filmmakers whose works are distinguished by an uncompromising devotion to personal, experimental cinema. 

There are no strictly defined rules governing EFS films, but most of them share some general characteristics: formally adventurous works made in complete creative freedom, often on very low budgets; an exploratory, non-script-based approach to filmmaking; abstract plots favouring the poetic immediacy of the interaction of sound and image over traditional storytelling: exploring the limits of cinema itself. EFS was founded and is run by Dublin-based Iranian filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi. 

Rouzbeh Rashidi - shown above in Homo Sapiens Project (29) - and Maximilian Le Cain will be attending and be available for discussion with the audience afterwards.

For more information on Experimental Film Society: HERE

For an interview with Rashidi discussing EFS in depth: HERE

More info on Ormston House

List of the films:

1_Away by Michael Higgins 5mins 2011 Ireland.

2_The Gardener by Michael Higgins 4mins 2010 Ireland.

3_Hotel by Michael Higgins 1min 2010 Ireland.

4_Painting by Michael Higgins 5mins 2011 Ireland.

5_Horses by Esperanza Collado 2mins 2011 Spain.

6_Lights From An Old Town by Dean Kavanagh 17mins 2011 Ireland.

7_Homo Sapiens Project (29) by Rouzbeh Rashidi 12mins 2011 Ireland.

8_Based On Decay by Jason Marsh 14mins 2012 U.K.

9_Background by Maximilian Le Cain 20mins 2011 Spain and Ireland.

10_Dirt by Vicky Langan & Maximilian Le Cain 12mins 2012 Ireland.

Total: 92mins

Recent Uploads

Although I'm uploading my works to Vimeo at a more sporadic rate than last year, videos are still appearing there every so often.

Over the past weeks, three more have become available:

Lullaby (made with Vicky Langan)
Smudge
This Video is Still Here

Black Sun is Back! Saul Levine Screening...

This Friday, March 8th, Black Sun will be returning to Plugd Records, Triskel, Cork!

The live acts, curated as always by Vicky Langan, are Richard Dawson and Raising Holy Sparks. For more on that: https://www.facebook.com/blacksuncork

The evening's film is one I've been very keen to programme as part of a Black Sun evening ever since I began with Black Sun more than three years ago: Saul Levine's Notes of an Early Fall (1976).

Here are some programme notes:

Notes of an Early Fall (1976, 34 mins) is a classic of personal filmmaking by Saul Levine, a man hailed as ‘the king of Super-8’. Film diary and film poem in one, it collages images taken from daily life and surroundings into a throbbing yet subtle meditation on claustrophobia and a sense of entrapment. The distinctive rhythms of camera movement and editing cause this raw, tactile work to breathe and react with a vividly individualistic force. Every frame attests to the handmade nature of the work, the material fragility and luminous vitality of Super-8 in the grasp of a poet.

Saul Levine is not only a maker but also a respected advocate of avant-garde film and video. Based in Boston, he is currently a professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he has taught for over 30 years and programmed the longstanding MassArt Film Society. He is noted for his dedication to social change and personal self-expression.

“There's something naggingly incomplete about the cinema of Saul Levine. No slight intended. Really, such a quality is intrinsic to the appeal of his films, those fluttering transmissions of stream-of-consciousness nostalgia. This is rough draft cinema, work perpetually in progress… His films scream and stretch at the seams. Splices announce themselves loudly and proudly, rudely even. The mark of the maker is evident… [The films] seem to begin and end in the middle, as though we were leaping into them mid-stream, mid-sentence, mid-thought. If there is a structural integrity, an organizing principle, it is an inherently emotional one... They churn like the endless flood of human memory.” (A. A. Dowd, In Review Online)