Presentation @ CRITICAL FORUM CORK

In partnership with aemi and Critical Forum Dublin, Critical Forum Cork is a new initiative for 2019. It is a discussion group for artists, critics and curators who have an investment in the future of the moving image. It is a space for criticality and debate in a mutually supportive environment and in dialogue Critical Forum groups in Dublin and across the UK.

The forum will take place once every two months at the Glucksman Gallery in Cork and is supported by LUX and aemi, a platform that supports & exhibits artist and experimental moving image in Ireland. Michael Holly and I are the current moderators.

This Friday, March 1st we will have our inaugural meeting. Aoife Desmond and I will be giving the first presentations:

Aoife Desmond is a Cork based artist who works with film, performance and other media. She also writes, lectures, curates and works collaboratively. aoifedesmond.com

Aoife will present a performative interaction/investigation into the work of Maya Deren, Maya Deren is well known for her experimental film works such as 'Meshes of the Afternoon' which explore a fusion of dance and film ‘choreocinema’ and continue a Surrealist interest in fragmentations of identity and the unconscious. This interaction will focus particularly on her film ’Divine Horsemen’ an atypical work edited and screened after her death that acts as a record of her immersion and ethnographic study into Voodoo dance rituals on the island of Haiti. 

Maximilian Le Cain is a Cork-based experimental filmmaker and writer. He often makes films with Vicky Langan and is affiliated with Experimental Film Society.  experimentalfilmsociety.com

Max will present an introduction to the ‘cinematic parenthesis’ of Italian theatre maker and provocateur Carmelo Bene. Although hailed by Gillles Deleuze and other influential writers as a major contribution to modern cinema, Bene’s radically experimental film work remains underappreciated. This presentation will argue for the uniqueness of these films and explain how they remain an unexploded timebomb in film aesthetics even a half-century after they were made.  

Vicky Langan and I are looking forward to the first of a series of interactions with the students at Limerick School of Art & Design this year.

Langan/Le Cain lecture, screenings and Q&A 
at Limerick School of Art and Design

Wed 20.02.19    From 9.30am    
(All students are welcome to attend)

Double-Blind in EFS @ Muestra Internacional de Cine Experimental, Ecuador

The Langan / Le Cain film Double-Blind will screen as part of a programme of Experimental Film Society films at the second edition of Muestra Internacional de Cine Experimental at Cinemateca Nacional del Ecuador Ulises Estrella in Quito, 6th-13th February 2019. This edition of the festival is dedicated to the memory of the great Jonas Mekas.

1_Raquel Times Ten By Chris O’Neill (2017) / 10mins / Ireland

This portrait of actress Raquel Nave is at once a structuralist formal exercise and an emotionally engaging meditation on memory and decay. The deterioration of a VHS image as it is copied and recopied evokes distance and a breakdown of intimacy.

2_ Homo Sapiens Project (161-170) (2013) By Rouzbeh Rashidi / 8mins / Ireland

Rashidi’s Homo Sapiens Project (HSP) is an ongoing series of personal film experiments that range from cryptic film diaries and oneiric sketches to fully polished features. Installments 161-170 link a formally aggressive repurposing of Hollywood reels with an idiosyncratic appreciation of the wonder of science fiction.

3_Ghoul (2018) By Michael Higgins / 8mins  / Ireland

The ghosts of a man and his dog haunt a rural Irish field in this claustrophobically atmospheric plunge into unsettling nocturnal textures. Higgins’ penchant for immersive explorations of the sensory overlap between the materiality of the filmed image and its contents has never been more compellingly expressed.

4_Olive (2019) By Michael Higgins / 11mins / Greece – Ireland

Although clearly filmed in our time, Olive uses the scratchy beauty of hand-processed celluloid to help evoke a mood of ancient ritual. A group of people gathered in the remote countryside are absorbed into frames that often resemble the hand tinted colours and decaying textures of unrestored early cinema. Cinema is made to haunt the present like a ghostly vision from the past.

5_Double Blind (2018) By Vicky Langan / Maximilian Le Cain / 36mins / Ireland

Filmmaking duo Langan & Le Cain embrace the mood and iconography of classic Gothic literature and cinema to their raw, mysterious and often erotically charged universe. Two isolated storybook characters wander through the remains of a shattered B-movie found abandoned half-edited on a mouldy VHS tape.

6_The Underworld (2019) By Jann Clavadetscher / 17mins / Ireland

This hallucinatory trip through the psychedelic recesses of science fiction begins in the flickering bowels of the earth. An explorer played by Cillian Roche undergoes a bizarre mutation in which cinema itself might possibly play a part. Clavadetcsher’s gorgeous 16mm colours and dazzlingly intense editing are underscored by a characteristic lightness of touch.

7_Antler (2018) By Atoosa Pour Hosseini / 15mins / Ireland

Pour Hosseini’s work with Super-8 conjures a mysterious territory that exists between memory, subjective perception and the objective materiality of the filmed image. Antler pushes deeper into this realm, seamlessly combining archival footage of animals and reptiles in their habitats with newly filmed material of the artist and an assistant at work in a botanical garden.

Total running time: 105mins