Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Films by Rashidi / Le Cain & Alan Lambert @ Filmbase, Wednesday 7th


A Double Bill of New Irish Experimental Feature Films

World Premiere of Rouzbeh Rashidi & Maximilian Le Cain’s
Weird Weird Movie Kids Do Not Watch The Movie

Alan Lambert’s The End Of The Earth Is My Home
presented for the first time with a live score by European Sensoria Band

Filmbase, Curved Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2,
Wednesday August 7th, 7pm, €7 

Full details here.


Sunday, July 28, 2013

What's Next? Part 2


Photo: Michael Higgins

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Black Sun Saturday


Here's the appropriately unsettling poster designed by Rouzbeh Rashidi for the Black Sun Cinema screening coming up this Saturday 27th of shorts by Evgeny Yufit and Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik. (Screening details and programme notes here.) This event was featured in The Cork News last week, who concluded:

Many, if not most, will find these films hard to watch and probably quite offensive but if you want to see the cinematic envelope pushed close to its limit and have a strong stomach then you should definitely do your best to check them out on Saturday July 27th at 2.30pm at the Triskel Christchurch Cinema. Tickets available from www.triskelartscentre.ie


Saturday 27th also marks the last ever Black Sun live music event. Richard Youngs (hailed by The Quietus as "THE iconic figure of the modern UK underground") is joined by Áine O'Dwyer and Black Sun curator Vicky Langan for what promises to be an exceptional evening. So, if you're in Cork this Saturday, join us for both events and make it a Black Sun Saturday.

    

Saturday, July 20, 2013

STRANGE ATTRACTOR at Hilltown


 As a late addition to the Hilltown New Music Festival in Co. Westmeath, my video Strange Attractor will be screening throughout the weekend.

Strange Attractor features footage of the group of that name performing in Cork last year. Those of us not lucky enough to be at Hilltown can watch it here:

https://vimeo.com/50632434

Visual Music Screening at Sample Studios

I'm looking forward to an event coming up in Cork next week that will be of much interest to those who are either already experimental film fans or who are keen to learn more about its forms and history:

Black Sun, Cork, in association with Sample Studios & the Avant Festival, presents:

VISUAL MUSIC

A programme of short experimental film, spanning almost 100 years, exploring the intermedia collision of musical structures & abstract visual imagery, ranging from experiments in synchronising montage & hand-painted animation with music, to silent, geometric, synaesthetic works that seek to use rhythmic movement to create a ‘music for the eye’ comparable to the sensual effects that sound has for the ear.

Keefe Murphy (Limerick Experimental Film Society) will present the selection of works.

Tuesday 23rd July, 8pm

The Amphitheatre on 3rd Floor, Sample Studios, Former Government Buildings Sullivan’s Quay, Cork

Admission is Free.

Friday, July 19, 2013

Dean Kavanagh's A HARBOUR TOWN Completed


In an article I wrote last year about Dean Kavanagh's films, I called him 'Irish cinema's best kept secret'. His brand new feature film, A Harbour Town,  adds overwhelming urgency to the need to get that 'secret' out there. In this extraordinary, utterly idiosyncratic new masterpiece, Dean has surpassed even the finest of his short films. An uncomfortable, elusive work that gets right under the skin, A Harbour Town blurs the boundaries between banal details of daily life and the weirdness of our unconscious, often tactile perception of them. An unsettling experience to be sure, one that it's very hard not to carry back into 'real life' (a condition this film constantly interrogates) after viewing. This new movie consolidates Dean's status as undoubtedly the most unique and mysterious filmmaker in Ireland. And, to my mind, one of the most fascinating anywhere. 

Thursday, July 18, 2013

World (Re)View of 'AN OYSTER'

'[Curator Sarah] Iremonger gave filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain free reign to make pieces for the show. She was delighted with the results “After watching his film, I went out and I found him and I said, ‘Max, that’s the most solipsistic, depressing, navel-gazing piece of work I’ve seen in my entire life’, and he said, ‘that’s great.’ Literally, the oyster inside the shell, hiding away.”'

To read more of this report in The Irish Examiner by Tina Darb O'Sullivan on the exhibition World View of an Oyster, follow this link...

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

WEIRD WEIRD MOVIE... & TEOTEIMH at Filmbase

A Double Bill of New Irish Experimental Feature Films

World Premiere of Rouzbeh Rashidi & Maximilian Le Cain’s
Weird Weird Movie Kids Do Not Watch The Movie

Alan Lambert’s The End Of The Earth Is My Home
presented for the first time with a live score by European Sensoria Band

Filmbase, Curved Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2,
Wednesday August 7th, 7pm, €7


Weird Weird Movie Kids Do Not Watch The Movie is the latest collaboration between Rouzbeh Rashidi and Maximilian Le Cain. This hypnotic, visually and sonically immersive exploration of a haunted space unfolds in two parts. In the first, a woman (Eadaoin O’Donoghue) dissolves her identity into the ghostly resonances she finds in the rooms and corridors of a sprawling, atmospheric seaside basement property. In the second, a man (Rashidi), existing in a parallel dimension of the same space, pursues a bizarre and perverse amorous obsession.


Set in a futuristic Asia of the mind, The End Of The Earth Is My Home is a trippy, visually audacious modern fantasy that takes inspiration from the Asian Monkey King stories and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as well as the writer/director’s own travel experiences. Although rooted in a sci-fi thriller premise, TEOTEIMH is more a sensory experience than a narrative. This special presentation of the film with live accompaniment by European Sensoria Band is therefore an ideal way of experiencing Lambert’s pulsing kaleidoscsope of shifting visual and sonic rhythms, one of the few films to explore the visionary potential of science fiction beyond the boundaries of traditional storytelling. Its international cast is headed by Junshi Murakami, Dominique Monot and Mona Gamil.

This mind-warping programme is compelling evidence of a strain of visionary experimental filmmaking currently thriving beneath the surface of contemporary Irish cinema.

For more information on the directors:

Rouzebh Rashidi- rouzbehrashidi.com
Maximilian Le Cain- maximilianlecain.com
Alan Lambert- metaldragon.net

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

What's Next?



 Photo: Rouzbeh Rashidi

Tuesday, July 09, 2013

'Necro' Movies at Black Sun Cinema


Black Sun Cinema presents

Jörg Buttgereit’s NEKROMANTIK

& 3 Necrorealist Films by EVGENY YUFIT

Triskel Christchurch Cinema

Saturday 27th July, 2.30pm

in partnership with Cork Film Centre

Part of The Avant Festival

Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/426322847481947/

Death is the subject of Black Sun Cinema’s most confrontational programme to date. Death or, more precisely, the subversive energy and perverse eroticism of the abject. Two extreme, taboo-busting visions from ‘80s underground cinema will be exhumed for a very rare big-screen presentation in partnership with Triskel Christchurch Cinema and Cork Film Centre this July 27th. Three raw and utterly berserk short films by Evgeny Yufit, founding figure of the Russian art movement necrorealism, will be paired up with Jörg Buttgereit’s notorious and much-banned feature Nekromantik, cinema’s most iconic meditation on necrophilia.

Werewolf Orderlies (Sanitary-oborotny, Evgeny Yufit, 1984, 5 mins)
Woodcutter (Lesorub, Evgeny Yufit, 1985, 6 mins)
Spring (Vesna, Evgeny Yufit, 1987, 10 mins)

This trio of early films by Evgeny Yufit is a crash course in the energy and aesthetics of necrorealism. This movement began as a despairingly slapstick, punk-like reaction to the hopelessness of life in the final years of Soviet Russia:

[It] emerged in Leningrad in the early nineteen-eighties. This was the height of the so-called stagnation period, when unliving, undead Soviet Communist Party general secretaries succeeded one another in rapid sequence… The regime’s moribund ideology nourished the new movement, which questioned one of that ideology’s pillars – immortality… A group of young men that included artists, poets, rock musicians, and random acquaintances roamed the streets of Leningrad like a pack of wild dogs. They engaged in mock brawls in abandoned buildings and suburban commuter trains, and they would mercilessly beat a mannequin (a dummy used in forensic investigations) in front of astonished passers-by. Vigilant citizens summoned the police to stop these outrages, but the flagrant idiocy of their behavior saved the participants in these riotous actions from serious consequences on more than one occasion. Yufit was the head of this ‘pack’.” (Oleysya Turkina, Necrorealism)

When Yufit began making films, it was very much in this wild spirit:

Black-and-white silent cinema was Yufit’s main source of inspiration… These films were shot quickly, often in a single day. The plots arose spontaneously depending on the peculiarities of the landscape, the roster of participants, and suitable surroundings… They contain the energy of spontaneity and the unrestrained fantasizing of their participants on the topic of suicide, which along with their ragged avant-garde editing gained Yufit a reputation as the most uncompromising member of the cinematic underground.” (Turkina).


Nekromantik (Jörg Buttgereit, 1987, 70 mins)

This hallucinatory punk love story between a boy, a girl and a rotting corpse retains its fast won reputation as one of the most shockingly graphic low-budget horror films ever unleashed on the public. What is less often remarked on is that this ‘necro-porn-horror’ is also one of the most oddly lyrical films of its genre and one of the most personal in its experimental approach to narrative. Rather than softening its impact, these qualities succeed in making it something more unsettling than the mindlessly provocative gore-fest its detractors have often dismissed it as.

Buttgereit's distinctively alienated musings on the existential isolation of the desiring German subject, his libidinally ambiguous re-animation of the deeply repressed historical past and his highly self-reflexive plays on cinema's capacity for the dissemination and reproduction of regressive ideologies, position him not only as a horror director par excellence but a major contributor to recent cinematic art in Germany... Buttgereit is a director who engages creatively with that strand of Romantic irrationalism that has lain at the heart of German culture since long before the nation's first unification in the 1870s— an irrationalism that once manifested itself in Goethe's rendering of the Faust legend, Hoffman's tales of the Unheimlich in prose and, much later, in the horror tales of Weimar cinema. Existing somewhere between the nightmare world of the ghost train, the crazy logic of dreams and the representational strategies of avant-garde or experimental cinema, Buttgereit's films joyfully participate in this irrationality— especially through the frequent inclusion of lengthy or repeated sequences of highly perplexing viscerality.” (Linnie Blake, Kinoeye)

Please note: This film contains images that some viewers may find offensive.

Tuesday, July 02, 2013

World View of an Oyster


From the limpet to the oyster... My part of this exhibition concerns the notorious Humphrey Esterhase.

'WORLD VIEW OF AN OYSTER'
open on Thursday 4th of July at 7pm
Spectrosonic Drawing Performance by Mick O'Shea at 8pm

Town Hall Gallery, Macroom, Co. Cork
Runs 5th - 27th July 2013
Tuesday - Saturday 10.30am - 5.30pm

Artists: Helen Horgan, Maximilian Le Cain, Sarah Iremonger, Mick O'Shea

'In this thought provoking exhibition (curator) Sarah Iremonger with fellow artists Maximilian Le Cain, Helen Horgan and Mick O'Shea set out to create, interrogate and even subvert a set of "artificial" worlds, which ultimately ask us, the viewer, to consider wider ideas of order and meaning in our own worlds. This work is challenging, quirky and original but like the aforementioned mollusc, once you have worked past the outer shell you may, indeed, finds some "pearls" for reflection and enjoyment.'

Ian McDonagh, Cork County Council Arts Officer

' The disruption of the outside world, invited or otherwise, worked over until it becomes something else, is the thread of consistency in all of the distinctly internal practices included in this exhibition'.

Danyel Ferrari