Saturday, April 22, 2017

EFS @ UP Film Institute, Philippines


A programme of Experimental Film Society will be screening at UP Film Institute Film Studio, Quezon City on 27th April 2017 at 17:30. It will be as part the Pelikula Obskura programme organised by Kino Punch Magazine.

Carcass Programme: Relics (2017 / 86 mins / Ireland / 2K)

Created by: Jann Clavadetscher, Michael Higgins, Dean Kavanagh, Vicky Langan & Maximilian Le Cain, Atoosa Pour Hosseini & Rouzbeh Rashidi.

“Pieced together like a cinematic Frankenstein’s monsters, Carcass Programme: Relics is an experimental feature film that has been created from shots and sequences reworked from films from the archive of the Experimental Film Society.”

Address: UP Film Institute Film Studio, Media Center Building, Ylanan Street, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines.

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

SELF DECAPITATION Premiere @ Guesthouse, Cork


Self Decapitation (2017, 65 mins) is a Janus-headed self-portrait by Rouzbeh Rashidi and Maximilian Le Cain in which death and desire each take possession of this film in two parts. The ambiguities of inhabiting a human body are conjured by way of film technology in its faults, faulty memories and false promises. There is no escape from its haunting – except perhaps to haunt it in turn…

It will premiere at The Guesthouse, 10 Chapel St., Cork on Tuesday 25th at 8 pm.

Monday, April 17, 2017

EFS @ Bogotá Experimental Film Festival


Rouzbeh Rashidi will be at the Bogotá Experimental Film Festival (May 2nd-9th) to present his feature Trailers and a programme of Experimental Film Society shorts including two of mine: Hotel La Mirage (2010) and the Vicky Langan collaboration Contact (2011). Full details here.

Friday, April 14, 2017

Toshio Matsumoto 1932 - 2017


Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Chris O'Neill Short Films @ Triskel, Cork


This Saturday, Cork audiences will have the welcome (and, I would say, overdue) opportunity to see a full programme of short films by Chris O'Neill, one of Ireland's most intriguing, cinematically sophisticated and tantalizingly elusive filmmakers. Having seen all of these films at one point or another over the years, they struck me as being part of an incomplete puzzle: hints at an emerging and distinctive cinematic sensibility that hadn't quite revealed itself. And at a first glance they do seem like a disparate bunch, ranging from full-on structuralist experimentation to found footage conjuring to the most oblique of documentaries to mumblecore to music video to glossy narrative. Looking at these titles listed as a programme, however, it suddenly seems the puzzle has completed itself and Chris has finally revealed himself.

What is most impressive about the films as a group is the coherence that soon becomes apparent, the way Chris makes all these works personal. This is not simply a matter of tossing in some superficially self-indulgent thematic or iconographic tokens to 'sign' an otherwise anonymous work. Rather, each film is an engagement with a different set of filmmaking rules which Chris approaches with craftsmanlike humility and yet always finds a way to tackle with a lucid formal precision that is, in fact, always structuralist and experimental. Each film is an inquiry into a form of cinema and an organic vessel into which his preoccupations can quietly seep. There are two significant poles to his work. The first is a reflection on the moving image apparatus and the act of watching film. The second is an obsession with portraiture, specifically of women. The two overlap significantly, of course. The first can be traced from It'll Always Be 11.16, an elegy for a closed down cinema, through his two Scorsese found footage works, especially the magnificent Saint Francis Didn't Run Numbers, which focus on what we miss in every shot when we watch a film, through Tony & Bill, a re-imagining of Balch/Burrough's identity swapping routine in the form of a shot-by-shot remake with a female cast, and perhaps culminating in Raquel Times Ten in which a video portrait is seen in process of poignant technological decomposition through being repeated with increasing degrees of VHS visual noise and degradation. This technique is again used in the music video Almost Perfect, another series of video portraits under attack from VHS decomposition and the melancholy just-five-minutes-ago becoming-memory quality that VHS has now acquired. Raquel is an uncompromising example of minimalist experimental cinema at its most severe; Almost Perfect is a music video, a type of filmmaking often despised as the most commercial and superficial. With an ordinary filmmaker, one might be suspicious of the relationship between these works: the former the product of a dilettante, the latter of someone all too willing to sell out and trivialize his ostensibly more serious endeavors. It is testament to Chris' very unusual capacity to own any genre he takes on that each of the two films feels equally powerful, equally personal and equally serious as an investigation of form.                    

Finally, it must be emphasized that Chris is not simply a dry formalist. What unites these films is a troubling and poetic sense of isolation and an omnipresent instability, a feeling of being cut adrift from solid ground. This is equally true of the young woman leaving her job in Receptive. Totally Receptive as of familiar images being rendered strange in St Francis as of the image itself slowly dying in Raquel. This mysterious insecurity about ones identity in the world, as human or as image, is at the heart of these films.

Screening details: http://triskelartscentre.ie/events/3407/chris-oneill-short-films/

Friday, April 07, 2017

SELF DECAPITATION: New Le Cain / Rashidi Collaboration


Self Decapitation (2017, 65 mins) is a Janus-headed self-portrait by Rouzbeh Rashidi and Maximilian Le Cain in which death and desire each take possession of this film in two parts. The ambiguities of inhabiting a human body are conjured by way of film technology in its faults, faulty memories and false promises. There is no escape from its haunting – except perhaps to haunt it in turn...

Watch this space for news of a premiere screening - coming soon!

Wednesday, April 05, 2017

LUMINOUS VOID Crowdfunding Completed

The crowd funding campaign for the book Luminous Void: Experimental Film Society Documents is now closed. Delighted to announce that it was very successful, exceeding its target. A huge and heartfelt 'thank you' to all who contributed!

Saturday, April 01, 2017

Film Panic!


EFS and two of its closest soulmates are to screen together in Portugal:
 
Film Panic Presents! A Showcase Of Contemporary Experimental & Underground Cinema in Porto   
 

21:30 | 26th April | Auditório Biblioteca Municipal Almeida Garrett Porto | Free Entry
 

Merlin The Sorcerer Dir. Jorge Núñez / 2015 / 33 mins / Spain

A short experimental film in the form of a home movie created by Merlin the sorcerer, who lives in a cabin in the woods. Dressed in a hooded robe with a long white beard, Merlin spends the day making potions and stews while remembering the young king Arthur. Jorge Núñez is an artist, filmmaker and musician based in Bilbao. Besides his film and performance work, he also runs Pantalla Fantasma, a festival of strange cinema, and is the editor of the film blog Fuerza Vital.

Short films by Ivan and Igor Buharov Total running time: 34 mins / Hungary


A selection of short films by Kornél Szilágyi and Nándor Hevesi, aka Ivan and Igor Buharov, two Hungarian artists whose long and productive collaboration manifests in the creation of experimental films, animations, documentaries, musical projects, performances and exhibitions. For this screening we present five of their short Super8 films which feature a cast of enigmatic characters engaged in a series of surreal games and personal rituals. Set against the backdrop of the Hungarian countryside, the Buharovs have created a mythic world which is equal parts dark and humorous, mysterious and subversive.

Carcass Programme: Homo Ferox / Corpus Rex Created by: Jann Clavadetscher, Émmsen Jafari, Michael Higgins, Jason Marsh, Dean Kavanagh, Vicky Langan & Maximilian Le Cain, Atoosa Pour Hosseini & Rouzbeh Rashidi / 2017 / 30 mins / Ireland

Pieced together like a cinematic Frankenstein’s monsters, Carcass Programme: Homo Ferox / Corpus Rex is an experimental short film that has been created from shots and sequences reworked from films from the archive of the Experimental Film Society, one of the most dynamic and distinctive forces in contemporary alternative cinema. “The Film is dead, long live the Film!”

More info here.