Saturday, August 24, 2019

LEVE. Cerca de aqui


I am delighted to have contributed to this beautiful book and exhibition published by LEVE which took place at ‘Centro de Arte José Guerrero de la Diputación de Granada’ back in June.

LEVE is an art association founded in 2010 to create and offer a space for production in a natural environment of rural Leon, in northern Spain. Annually, they edit sound publications on 10″ 45rpm vinyl conceptually inscribed in the idea of environment and field recording. The sound editions gather together sound works made by invited artists according to a set of rules related to site-specificity and time of recording. They invite artists to stay for short periods in a tiny village called Castro de Cepeda (León, Spain) to produce their sound works. They have built the sound studio Grabaciones de campo in this place. Occasionally, the works are recorded following specially made scores or instructions.

The resulting sound editions are silk-screen printed by hand and lack gaps between tracks. They are conceived for uninterrupted hearings of 10 mins approx (the duration of each vinyl side).

Rouzbeh Rashidi and I made field-recordings and texts for this fantastic project. Thanks to Esperanza Collado and Rafael Martinez Del Pozo for inviting us.

Thursday, August 15, 2019

EFS @ Coletivo 111 @ Cinemateca de Curitiba


Two programmes of Experimental Film Society films will be screening at Cinemateca de Curitiba in Brazil on 27th and 28th of September 2019. This project is kindly organised and presented by Coletivo 111, which is an art collective led by filmmakers working in independent experimental cinema circuit in the southern part of Brazil.

More info HERE & HERE

Programme One:

Phantom Islands (2018) By Rouzbeh Rashidi / 86mins / Ireland

Programme Two:

1_Bogna Kirchoff By Chris O’Neill (2019) / 6mins / Ireland

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

3_Olive (2019) By Michael Higgins / 11mins / Greece – Ireland

4_Brine Twice Daily (2015) By Vicky Langan / Maximilian Le Cain / 20mins / Ireland

5_The Underworld (2019) By Jann Clavadetscher / 17mins / Ireland

6_Antler (2018) By Atoosa Pour Hosseini / 15mins / Ireland

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

EFS @ Culture Night, Waterford


Two Experimental Film Society collaborative feature films, Jean Speck (1860-1933) (2011) by Rouzbeh Rashidi & Jann Clavadetscher and Weird Weird Movie Kids Do Not Watch The Movie (2013) by Maximilian Le Cain & Rouzbeh Rashidi will be screening at Central Cinema as part of the 2019 Culture Night in Waterford on Friday, 20th September from 20:00-23:00. The event is organised and presented by Frank Whelan.

Facebook Event HERE
Address: 123a Parade Quay, Waterford, Ireland X91 HH50

Monday, August 12, 2019

PERSONAL GROWTH @ Sirius Arts Centre in Cork Film Festival


Big news from Vicky Langan and me! A new film about to be launched...

PERSONAL GROWTH
at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh
as part of Cork Film Festival

Date(s) - 09/11/2019 - 20/12/2019
10:00 - 17:00

Opens Saturday 09 November, 1.30pm (Artist’s Talk, Screening & Q&A) Followed by drinks reception at 1.30pm

Continues until Friday 20 December 2019.

Personal Growth is a new Super-8 film work by Vicky Langan and Maximilian Le Cain. Over the course of their decade-long filmmaking collaboration, Langan and Le Cain have created an intimate, distinctive universe built on a striking match between Langanʼs magnetic, often troubling and intense presence as a performer and Le Cainʼs hypnotically disruptive visual rhythms. 

Personal Growth is a new Super-8 film work, an enigmatic, fragmented piece that could have been filmed at any point in the past sixty years. It conveys the haunting charge of a privately made home movie of great significance to its creators but unsettlingly mysterious to viewers. Its grainy, black and white texture vividly renders the elemental coastal seascapes where it was filmed. Langan & Le Cain appear as a couple who inhabit this wild terrain as if it were a domestic arena. 

Langan’s work operates across several overlapping fields, chiefly performance, sound, and film. She both embraces and projects vulnerability, offering an intimate territory loaded with personal symbolism and unguarded emotion. In opening herself emotionally, she creates warm yet discomforting rituals that at once embrace the viewer and remain resolutely private, exploring the limits of what can be shared between people and what must remain mysterious. Le Cainʼs filmmaking proposes a personal relationship with cinema as a site of haunting. Accepted visual and storytelling codes are encouraged to collapse into a more personalised system that approaches moving imagery as an experiential construct open to possession by multiple claims of memory and interpretation.

Langan / Le Cain are based in Cork. They are affiliated with Experimental Film Society, a company dedicated to the creation of uncompromisingly personal, formally challenging filmmaking. Based in Dublin, it has succeeded in forging a new and radically alternative Irish cinema. Through its distribution, their films have been widely screened at international venues and festival

Langan & Le Cain have made sixteen moving image works together. Their Arts Council funded feature film Inside (2017) was exhibited at TULCA Festival of Visual Arts; VISUAL as part of Carlow Arts Festival; and screened at The Luminous Void Experimental Film Festival, Dublin. Retrospectives of their film work have taken place at The Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival; the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris; and at Microscope Gallery, New York. They also collaborate on live performances involving projection. Double-Blind, the most recent of these, premiered at the 2018 Cork Midsummer Festival. In 2016, Langan and Le Cain both attended the MA course in Art & Process at Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork, and subsequently participated in the exhibition slips, speaks at 12 Star Gallery, London that drew on the work of selected CCAD MA graduates. 

This event will begin with an artists’ talk, followed by the first screening and Q&A, starting at 1.30pm, in Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, as part of Cork Film Festival. All welcome. Admission free.


Friday, August 02, 2019

EFS @ Rudina Art Fair, Hvar Island, Croatia


A programme of Experimental Film Society films will be screening at Rudina Art Fair as part of Galerija Šolyard #1 event organised by Picture On The Fridge in Hvar Island, Croatia on  Sunday, 11th August 2019.

Facebook Event HERE

The Programme:

1_Bogna Kirchoff By Chris O’Neill (2019) / 6mins / Ireland

Bogna Kirchoff takes imagery from a 1970s espionage thriller and warps the imagery into a surreal abstract film focussing on one supporting female character.

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_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.

4_Brine Twice Daily (2015) By Vicky Langan / Maximilian Le Cain / 20mins / Ireland

Brine Twice Daily is a film that came from the sea, from the depths, and it never truly escapes its salt-encrusted origins. A bizarre romance that is at once an absurd comedy, a horror/adventure B-movie, a cryptic home video and a fading seaside postcard stuffed into a bottle and cast adrift on the ocean, Brine Twice Daily marks a new departure in the Langan/Le Cain filmmaking partnership.

5_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.

6_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: 77mins