Thursday, January 29, 2015

Cloud of Skin: It's a Wrap!


Shooting is now fully completed on my upcoming feature Cloud of Skin!

A big thank you to everyone who helped in any way to bring this project to where it is now. Special thanks to co-producers Dean Kavanagh and Rouzbeh Rashidi: what a team!

Post production is about to commence in earnest with me working on editing the picture and the wonderful Karen Power creating a soundscape to envelop it in. All going well, in six to eight months the film will be ready for screening.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

nitrate nocturne


My old friend the poet, filmmaker and sometime actor Ed Cashman (veteran of many of earlier films) blew me away this morning by suddenly presenting me with the following. Aside from anything else, I consider it the finest written account in existence of the tormented workings of my filmmaking. Thank you, Ed.


nitrate nocturne

for Maximilian Le Cain

evanescence thickens
branches of crow's feet
synapses
lamppost effulgence
vaporises
on thingly reverberations
sveltness of Homo Rapiens-
  
quaking plexus
flickers to an eyebeam
disperses
kingdoms of necessity
molten quiver
on mortared phrenology
of stone tubers
earwitnesses
moulder of noisebloom
clack clacking tar whiff
river-murk squawk -

creaturely blinks of amber
diesel grime breath
footfalls to slow seepage
of nascent lifeworlds -
vulnerable not victim -
slipknot
careworn speculators
worded flattening
of daybright labour -

magic hour
ignitions duration
birthmarks
an engine thrum
fleet of traces-
stray retriever padding along
oxidising pith
shuffle of a crooked flame
in the cut of longcoat
a bounding someone
jab of index -

hazard is not risking
pathbreaking crevices
adventuring
gauzy membranes of light
lunar dilation
september chase of leaf
islanded frames
fictive in their becoming grain

playful fidelity to sprocketed love
these spectral
incendiary tongues
flicker
dispersive beams
through scratched incandescence
leader to black
of skulled housing -

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

67-69-Take 5

 
I've just finished a new short, 67-69-Take 5, a science fiction video diary starring Michael Higgins and dedicated to the Pantalla Fantasma Festival.

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Manifesto


Rouzbeh Rashidi has issued a statement, written with input from Dean Kavanagh and me, that stands as a manifesto for our thinking about cinema.

It can be read here.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Group Enema!

Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln
Und die andern sind im Licht
Und man siehet die im Lichte
Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht
Smelly fun from Cinema Cyanide with a new release!

Saturday, January 17, 2015

HSP 191-199

Rouzbeh Rashidi has just completed episodes 191-199 of his ongoing Homo Sapiens Project series. These episodes - all brief, sinister and utterly surreal films - were made in collaboration with Dean Kavanagh and me.

Friday, January 16, 2015

MONOLOGUE in Iceland

Last year, Monologue (2010) played at the Eastern Edge Gallery in St. John's, Canada as part of the Wade In project. I was pleased to discover that it also played as part of the Icelandic stage of this project earlier this month in Reykjavik. Details here

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Coming Soon: WSB


The Films of William S. Burroughs & Antony Balch
Coming to Triskel Christchurch Cinema, Cork, February 25th
More details soon...

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

New CLOUD OF SKIN Trailer

New poster art and a brand new trailer by Rouzbeh Rashidi for Cloud of Skin!

https://vimeo.com/116666620

PF4 Coming Next Week!

Saturday, January 10, 2015

Cloud of Skin: Additional Scenes

 
Just finished shooting three days of additional scenes for my upcoming feature Cloud of Skin starring Dean Kavanagh. Some frame grabs can be seen here.

Wednesday, January 07, 2015

The Max Map


Maximilian Le Cain - A Visual Atlas is a photo-montage by Rouzbeh Rashidi comprised of stills from some of my earlier work. This is an extension of his piece on me in the recent edition of La Furia Umana


Tuesday, January 06, 2015

Fergus Daly's End of Year Favourite Film List


"Max Le Cain, Dean Kavanagh and Rouzbeh Rashidi continued to prove how much they’ve raised the bar for filmmaking in Ireland." 

Humbling words from Fergus Daly in Senses of Cinema.  Read more here:

Sunday, January 04, 2015

Cloud of Skin ‘Making Of’ Featurette

Post production is now underway on my upcoming feature Cloud of Skin. Later this week, additional scenes will be shot for it. Dean Kavanagh and I have made this short documentary to give some insight into the creative processes behind this film:

https://vimeo.com/115921728

Saturday, January 03, 2015

Ten Years In The Sun

Just three days into 2015 and I've already seen what I'm certain will prove the most unusual, impressive, disconcerting and utterly demented film of the year. I'm referring to Rouzbeh Rashidi's just-completed Ten Years In The Sun, in which I play a small role.

If HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind represented the pinnacle of Rouzbeh's art, Ten Years seems to plunge viewers into its ripe, magnificent decadence. Strange to say, but it seems more than anything to be like a Rashidi version of a science fiction blockbuster epic, most specifically like the first installment of a big Hollywood franchise. A two-and-a-half hour running time, spectacle galore, numerous sinister characters and plots portentously introduced but left unresolved... Of course being a Rashidi film, the incoherence and oddness of this sense of non-completion is not plastered over but cranked up to the highest degree of fragmentation. It has been building up through a number of his recent films- Terrors Of The Mind, Forbidden Symmetries, Investigating The Murder Case Of Ms. XY- and now it has erupted with full force: a sense of vast cosmic chaos, randomness and terror. The result is a sensory onslaught that destroys any sense of narrative development, that allows for a dizzyingly reckless catalogue of dead ends and invasions by footage and techniques that can seem utterly alien to one another. (The scene towards the end when Jann Clavadetscher, naked and made up as a primitive man, is cast into a broiling series of psychedelic landscapes and skies really gives Kubrick's famous 'stargate' sequence from 2001 a run for its money- and on zero budget!) But, as the film develops, it becomes apparent that these are not digressions because there is no line to digress from in this work comprised of audio-visual satellites circling the void at its heart. And yet a very human sense of wistfulness also emerges that prevents this experience from becoming cold or detached.

Ten Years In The Sun is dedicated to Buñuel and Monteiro. Frankly, it's hard to imagine either of these formally ascetic masters approving of such a trippy approach to cinema. However, Rashidi is not misleading us in indicating this lineage. And the connection is not fundamentally the sex fetish vignettes that sprinkle the film. Rather, it is the chasm between the absurdity of small gestures, rituals and tokens of elegance set against the savagery of existence. The immediate difference is that Buñuel and Monteiro's films existed within and were contained by the world. Rashidi's seems to be taking place in a universe that has already exploded and now contains only traumatised fragments of behaviour, narrative and technology, all isolated, unstable and lacking the tools to interact. The crust of an external objective reality is no more. There is only tormented interiority and distant annihilating vastness. And the carriers of these symptoms are precisely presented modes of (mainly moving) imagery and its attendant technology. A very 21st century hell...

Friday, January 02, 2015

EFS @ Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (III): Le Cain Solo Screening



An upcoming screening in Dublin! Here's the blurb:
Tuesday 17th February 2015 | 6pm
(NB: NOT Monday 2nd February as previously advertised)

Studio 6 | Free admission, all welcome.

The third of six bi-monthly Experimental Film Society (EFS) screenings, taking place at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios under the Studio 6 Open programme, foregrounds the work of Irish-based EFS member Maximilian Le Cain.

The first half of the programme is a special presentation of Le Cain’s Super-8 film work, here assembled under the title Image Turned Down and projected on celluloid. Intensely materialist and experiential, his approach to working with Super-8 radicalises the relationship between sound, image and the spectator’s body, often suppressing and withholding imagery to place the viewer in an immersive, sonically charged void. The sound for this screening is by Cinema Cyanide, the noise project formed by Le Cain and fellow EFS members Rouzbeh Rashidi and Dean Kavanagh. And the star of these films is sound/performance artist Vicky Langan, who collaborates regularly with Le Cain.

This is followed by the public premiere of the video Now Then: Notebook of a Decade (1997-2008). This lyrical and intense collage of the first ten years of Le Cain’s work with moving image uses portraits, video notes and chunks of broken narrative to conjure a turbulent inner universe. Le Cain has described this video as a spectacular ‘ruin’, alive with ghosts.

For more information on Maximilian Le Cain, please visit: maximilianlecain.com

Image Turned Down (2010-2014) Super-8 / Ireland & Greece / 20 minutes
Now Then: Notebook of a Decade (1997-2008) / Ireland / 49 minutes

EFS is a not-for-profit entity that promotes, archives and sometimes produces work by a dozen filmmakers operating in several different countries. Although each member has a distinctive vision, they are united by an uncompromising devotion to personal, experimental cinema. They have in common an exploratory approach to filmmaking where films emerge from the interplay of sound, image and atmosphere rather than traditional storytelling techniques. EFS was founded by Dublin-based filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi, who continues to curate and run the organization.

More info:

Experimental Film Society Website
Experimental Film Society Facebook