Light Movement 33: Claes Söderquist

Light Movement 33: Claes Söderquist
Friday 5th October 2018, 8pm - WOLF STUDIO Berlin 
event on facebook

CLAES SÖDERQUIST (se) [films+talk]

 

LANDSCAPE (LANDSKAP) (1985-1987)

Light Movement returns this month in a different venue to usual, and a very special guest. As part of a mini tour of northen Europe organised by curators from Cinema Parentese Brussels and Walden Magazine Stockholm, Swedish avantgarde veteran Claes Söderquist will will join us in person in Berlin.

Claes Söderquist (b 1939) is a prominent figure of Swedish experimental film whose visually appealing and personal films revolve around slow cinematic reflections on architecture, landscape, strata, time and space. With influences from and interests in Land-Art, minimalist music (like Charlemagne Palestine) and structural film processes, Söderquist's dystopian and desolate scenery is sometimes reminiscent of the films by Michael Snow and Larry Gottheim.
As a film curator, Söderquist has made several comprehensive exhibitions at Moderna Museet in Stockholm: “'The Pleasure Dome', American Experimental Film 1939-1979” (1980, in collaboration with Jonas Mekas), “Nordic Film” (1983), West German Experimental Film” (1985, in collaboration with Birgit Hein) and Swedish Avantgarde Film 1924-1990” (1991, touring program in US in collaboration with Jonas Mekas and Anthology Film Archives, New York).

In the presence of Claes Söderquist.  



P R O G R A M :
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INTRODUCTION
by Martin Grennberger (Walden Magazine) and Daniel A. Swarthnas (Cinema Parenthèse)

 I FRACK (IN TIXEDO)
1964 | 16mm | b&w | sound (no dialogue) | 11'19
In Söderquist's first film In Tuxedo, playfulness and improvisation are combined with absurd humor. An artist steps into an empty studio and begins assembling objects into a tree-like sculpture. The sculpture is adorned with small white paper clouds, puppets and undefinable items; all the while, the studio fills up with new things: a suitcase, a mirror and formal attire. The artist, now wearing a top hat and tuxedo, paints the paper clouds and the wall in a frenzy of activity, ending with his sitting exhausted in a corner surrounded by the mess he has created. The growing chaos, the various layers of narrative and the free improvisational music, which was improvised and recorded live during a viewing of the final film cut, interact in counterpoint. (Daniel A. Swarthnas)

UTFLYKT: OPUS 2 (EXCURSION: OPUS 2)
1965 | 16mm | b&w | sound (no dialogue) | 9'17
In the prologue of Excursion:Opus 2, the camera sweeps over nearly unidentifiable details on a sleeping man's body, mixed with discontinuous images of the morning routines of two people and their preparation for an excursion. Subtle sounds of wind blowing are orchestrated with squalling, inarticulate  cries and sounds of birds and croaks of birds and frogs. The couple cycle through a dense forest, climb amongst ferns, and kiss to tones of classical music (without being overtly obvious or romantic) alloyed with birdsong, which gradually distorts into more psychedelic and ghastly noise. Close-ups of the romantic couple, camera shots that follow the cyclists' rush through the woods, and the couple struggling through the dense and almost unreal vegetation of bush and tangled pine, are woven together in an intense montage of dream-like and unworldly atmosphere. (Daniel A. Swarthnas)


LE GÉNIE CIVIL
Claes söderquist & Jan håfström
1967 | 16mm | b&w | sound (no dialogue) | 11'13
Le génie civil consists of numerous etchings and photogravure prints from an engineering journal, illustrating the advancement of industrialism in the late 1800's. The filmed illustrations are allowed to speak for themselves as still images during a prolonged cinematic time, a kind of viewing time. In a reciprocal and dense interaction with sounds from trains, rain, thunder, a ticking clock and organ music, the material is brought to life and the narrative of the film slowly emerges. Because the images in Le génie civil are taken out of their original context and placed in another time and space, they link the past with an ongoing present. (Daniel A. Swarthnas)

EPITAPH (EPITAF)
1981 | 16mm | b&w/color | sound (no dialogue) | 27'00
In Epitaph, landscape has partly taken the place of man. The film can be described as a psychodrama about loss and of the expanding toil of memory. Here a recurring space is strongly reminiscent of the setting of Michael Snow’s structuralist classic Wavelength (1967) – a film that has significantly influenced Söderquist. It constitutes a place for recovery that serves as a foil for the mythical, poetical shards and fragments of memory that are repeated through the film. A man lies naked on a sarcophagus-like concrete foundation, later to be covered by a white piece of cloth; the second part shows a blurred, naked woman looking out towards an area of deforestation. The movie ends with an image of a steppe, creating an anxious framework. Epitaph is, in Söderquist's own words, a film "about people and things heading for annihilation". (Martin Grennberger)

LANDSCAPE (LANDSKAP)
1985-1987 | 16mm | color | sound (no dialogue) | 36'00
Landscape is Söderquist's first minimalistic film. Together with Passages – Portrait of a city (2001) and Labyrinth (2013), it forms a trilogy exploring space by means of the landscape and the city. The slow camera shots show the inertia of nature and the temporality of thoughtfulness. The film is cut in motion to give a coherent structure of movement, a kind of course of events, through a multifaceted landscape of rich ferns, swaying treetops, winding roots alternated with reflections in a rippling stream. Landscape is a focused and tightly formed panorama, whose masterly projection of natural sound and cyclical construction are manifested in seasonal color and light variations and in flowing water. (Daniel A. Swarthnas)

CONVERSATION
between Claes Söderquist, Daniel A. Swarthnas and Martin Grennberger

In collaboration with Cinema Parenthèse (Bryssels Belgium), Filmform – the art film & video archive (Stockholm Sweden), and Walden Magazine (Stockholm, Sweden)

EPITAPH (EPITAF) (1981)

Light Movement 33: Claes Söderquist
Friday 5th October 2018, 8pm

Wolf Studio
Wildenbruchstraße 6  
12045 Berlin

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Light Movement 32: Joanna Margaret Paul

Light Movement 32
Sunday 22nd July 2018, doors 8.00pm / start time 8:30pm, Spektrum Berlin
event on facebook

Through a Different Lens: Film Work by Joanna Margaret Paul

Introduced by Peter Todd

"All my films, poems, paintings play more or less between inner and outer events" - Joanna Margaret Paul

Joanna Margaret Paul (1955-2003) was a New Zealand artist who pioneered interdisciplinary practice, working prolifically across the mediums of film, poetry and painting. Often shot and edited in camera, her film work chronicled motherhood and domestic life (Task, Napkins), the worn traces of urban settlement (Port Chalmers Cycle) and the persistent presence of the natural world. Other works such as Sisterhood portrayed the life of other female artists identified with the 1970s womens movement in New Zealand.

Curated by Peter Todd, Through a Different Lens/Film Work by Joanna Margaret Paul is the first collection of Joanna Margaret Paul’s moving image work to make Paul’s work available to an international audience. In Todd’s accompanying essay he places her work in the lineage of film-makers Margaret Tait and Robert Bresson, and painter Frances Hodgkins.
The program contains 13 works shot in the 1970s that have been transferred from 8mm and 16mm film to high definition video.

‘Paul’s films were made in relative artistic isolation from avant-garde film discourse in the mid-1970s, but are rooted in an acute feminist politics that focuses on concerns of shared female social spaces and everyday domestic situations.’ —Frieze

P R O G R A M :

Napkins (1975)
Jillian Dressing (1976)
Task (1982)
Sisterhood (1975)
Seacliff (1975)
Body/House (1975)
Motorway (1971)
Barrys Bay 2 (1975)
Children Imogen (1975)
Aberhart’s House (1976)
Port Chalmers Cycle (1972)
Thorndon (1975)

Napkins (1975)

Peter Todd is a film-maker and curator based in London. He was co-editor of Subjects & Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader (LUX, 2004), which gathered together new essays on Orcadian film-poet Margaret Tait's work, interviews, reprints of key poems, a story and texts as well as a detailed filmography, a chronology, a bibliography, and resources. Peter Todd currently works for the British Film Institute. An essay by Peter Todd on the work of Joanna Paul can be found here.


Through A Different Lens / Film Work by Joanna Margaret Paul curated by Peter Todd. Commissioned by CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand with the assistance of the estate of Joanna Margaret Paul and Robert Heald Gallery.

all images courtesy of Estate of Joanna Margaret Paul & CIRCUIT New Zealand
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Light Movement 32: Joanna Margaret Paul
Sunday 24th June 2018, doors 8.00pm / start time 8:30pm

Spektrum,
Bürknerstraße 12,
12047 Berlin
U8 Schönleinstr.

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Light Movement 31: STAN BRAKHAGE: A CELEBRATION

Light Movement 31
Sunday 24th June 2018, doors 8.00pm / start time 8:30pm, Spektrum Berlin
> fB event


STAN BRAKHAGE: A CELEBRATION
An Illustrated Talk by Suranjan Ganguly
Director, Brakhage Center.

The Dante Quartet (1987)

Suranjan Ganguly will present an illustrated* talk on the work of Stan Brakhage (1933-2003), widely regarded as one of the most innovative filmmakers in the history of experimental cinema who changed the way we see and think about film.

Light Movement 30: Robert Todd

Light Movement 30

Sunday 3rd June 2018, doors 8pm / start time 8:30pm, Spektrum Berlin

> facebook event page

 

Robert Todd

Spring Songs (2017)

We are delighted to welcome Robert Todd in person to present a delicate selection of his recent films on 16mm at Spektrum.
 
A lyrical filmmaker as well as a sound and visual artist, Robert Todd continually produces short works that resist categorization. In the past twenty years he has produced a large body of short-to-medium format films that have been exhibited internationally at a wide variety of venues and festivals including the Media City Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Le Rencontres Internationale, Black Maria Film Festival, Nouveau Cinema in Montreal, Cinematheque Ontario, the Harvard Film Archive, Pacific Film Archive, the Paris Biennial, Slamdance Film Festival, and others. His films have won numerous festival prizes, grants, and artist’s awards. He teaches film production at Emerson College in Boston.

P R O G R A M :

APPROACHING FALL, October 2016, 16mm, 13min20sec, colour, sound

We approach the fall. We follow the lines of life into darkness, in hope of dawn.

PLAYING IN TRAFFIC, July 2017, 16mm, 6min40sec colour, silent

Three parts of The City – overlapping in Play. Rotterdam:

This film contains both unity and distance, a space to come together as we stand (and walk) apart, a reflection 
of our fragmented worlds that seem to overlap, a shared illusion of community, here rendered harmoniously.

SPRING SONGS, April 2017, 16mm, 13min30sec, colour, silent

Five rolls through Spring

(pause)

MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH, July 2017, 16mm, 12min45sec, B&W, silent

Entering the envelope of life, and floating within its many layers.

FANTASIES, September 2017, 16mm 13min, colour+B&W, sound

Warmth in the foreground, in the shadow of ice. An homage to the fantastic, provided by others in art and life.

Matters of Life and Death (2017)

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Light Movement 30: Robert Todd

Sunday 3rd June 2018, doors 8pm / start time 8:30pm

Spektrum,

Bürknerstraße 12,

12047 Berlin

U8 Schönleinstr.

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light-movement.blogspot.de

Light Movement 29: SPRING PORTRAITS

Light Movement 29
Saturday 21st April 2018, 8pm, Spektrum
facebook event

SPRING PORTRAITS

Ute Aurand
Clara Bausch
Robert Beavers
Alix Blevins
James Edmonds
Helga Fanderl
Jeannette Muñoz
Margaret Tait
Jeff Weber

Ute Aurand - Lisa (2017)

The program Spring Portraits groups together filmmakers who at times deal loosely with the theme of portraits - either of people, places, atmospheres, and who mostly also have, in some way, a connection to the city of Berlin. Some are long established names, others are making their first film - what is important is that they share some sensibility - and a belief in films power as a medium to transcend mere representation whilst simultaneously capturing something of life's fleeting moments.

*all films will be shown on film

Helga Fanderl - Portrait (1992)

P R O G R A M  :

Alix Blevins - Looking out in, 2018, super8, 3min, b/w, silent

James Edmonds - Seasons Patterns (winter reel), 2017, super8, 3.5min, b/w, silent

Helga Fanderl - Portrait (1992) / Teetrinken (1993) / Roter Vorhang (1998), 6min, super8, colour, silent

Ute Aurand - LISA, 2017, 16mm, 4.5min, colour, sound

Margaret Tait - A Portrait of Ga, 1952, 16mm, 5min, colour, sound

Robert Beavers - First Weeks, 2014, 16mm, 4min, colour, silent

(pause)

Jeff Weber - Meditations On The Cross (2015 / 2016) / The Faras Gallery (2018), ca.5min, 16mm, b/w, silent

Clara Bausch - Wald, 2017, 16mm, 6min, colour, sound

Jeannette Muñoz - ENVÍO 24, 2010, 16mm, 3min, b/w, silent

James Edmonds - A Return, 2018, 16mm, 6min, colour, sound

Ute Aurand - Schweigend ins Gespräch vertieft, 1980, 16mm, 8min, colour+b/w sound

total ca.54min

Margaret Tait - A Portrait of Ga (1952)

Program details:

Alix Blevins - Looking out in, 2018, super8, 3min, b/w, silent
searching through fragments of darkness & light, siſting through discontinuous moments in a contained space. shot and edited on hand processed super8.

James Edmonds - Seasons Patterns (winter reel), 2017, super8, 3.5min, b/w, silent
The series Seasons Patterns consists of single rolls of super8, one for each season, exposed between 2016 and 2017. Leitmotifs, physical and ephemeral, providing some unity within each season, as a reflection on its atmosphere and passing presence.

Helga Fanderl - Portrait (1992, 3min25) / Teetrinken (1993, 1min30) / Roter Vorhang (1998, 1min), total 6min, super8, colour, silent
Portrait, Teetrinken and Roter Vorhang  (Portrait, Tea Time and Red Curtain) have been shot in different spaces and years. Combining the three individual Super 8 films Helga Fanderl creates an intimate triptych depicting a tender relationship.

Ute Aurand - LISA, 2017, 16mm, 4.5min, colour, sound
A portrait of my Japanese friend Risa (Lisa) Tamaru, filmed in Berlin and Yokohama. It's the sixth film in a series of short portraits of close women friends and my two godchildren. Filming portraits allows me to emphasize private gestures and moments beyond narration and documentation.

Margaret Tait - A Portrait of Ga, 1952, 16mm, 5min, colour, sound
The 'Ga' of the title refers to the film maker's mother. The film gathers together this elderly lady's everyday actions to offer an abstract insight into her life.
Tait described this film as follows: 'My mother seemed a good subject for a portrait, (she was there), and I thought it offered a chance to do a sort of 'abstract film', in the sense that it didn't have what you might call 'the grammar of film'. It's mostly discontinuous shots linked just by subject, in one case by colour, only rarely by movement'.

Robert Beavers - First Weeks, 2014, 16mm, 4min, colour, silent
“Call them spontaneous or occasional films. I did not know if I would show this publicly when I filmed. The gift was Luke Fowler suggesting that I film his and Corin’s first child, Liath, while I visited them in Glasgow. The images are left in the order of filming, and the editing is only a few excisions.” (RB)

Robert Beavers - First Weeks (2014)

 

Jeff Weber - Test Reel for Meditations on the Cross (2015) / The Faras Gallery (2018), ca.5min, 16mm, b/w, silent

Test Reel for Meditations on the Cross

I made this this test reel in anticipation of the animation film “Meditations on the Cross”, using the drawings of artist Snejanka Mihaylova that emerged during our collaboration for the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Leipzig in 2015. I was looking for a possibility to document these in an adequate way and it occured to me to use 16mm film as it also keeps intact the chronological order in which they have been drawn. Subsequently I started to multiply the frames per drawing, at the end ranging from 1-6 frames, in order to be able to refer to the test film to make a decision for the frame-rate of the final film.

The Faras Gallery / Cathedral

This film was made in the first days of march (2018) in the Faras Gallery at the Polish National Museum in Warsaw, using both rooms, IV and VI, that present a collection of early Christian wall paintings together with architectural elements from the Faras Cathedral, in the former Lower Nubian city of Faras.

Clara Bausch - Wald, 2017, 16mm, 6min, colour, sound 
Wald shows the camera travel-panning over pieces of shrubbery on the edge of the woods. Over time, the viewer realizes that the pan travels through different seasons and different weather conditions and what started as a meditation on nature on a winter day becomes more complex as the story time unfolds, breaking the perception of continuity editing. The city and the relation of the city dweller to surrounding nature, become the primary story.

Jeannette Muñoz - ENVÍO 24, 2010, 16mm, 3min, b/w, silent
ENVÍOS is film that leaves film behind in order to become the emerging space of what has been, of what is and could be.
ENVÍOS are dffering spaces that cohabit.
ENVÍOS are sequences, incidents, occurrences, fragments, moments, glimpses.
ENVÍOS don't have objects nor subjects, and are of heterogeneous provenance and motivations.
They are capable of meeting and coexisting only within the small and singular.
ENVÍOS inhabit the intimate and public at once. They have been realized with and/or for a person and will be presented in public.

James Edmonds - A Return, 2018, 16mm, 6min, colour, sound
To return again. To re-align is the object of these visits, perhaps. Geography of origin becoming catalyst for an inner re-alignment with the secret, private, unspoken work of one’s being. 
Peering into layers, sliding planes of windows and time, the fragmentary gesture of the dance.
A series of rapid contrasts, a synthesis of elemental and everyday experience.
Structures shift and intermingle, two worlds become one.

Ute Aurand - Schweigend ins Gespräch vertieft, 1980, 16mm, 8min, colour+b/w sound
"Aurand’s first film, Schweigend ins Gespräch vertieft (Deeply Absorbed in Silent Conversation, 1980), establishes the intimacy of her style even as it creates a quiet interiority that disappears from her more celebratory later work. From its opening title, a reverse title card that flips to the correct reading, the film is about mirrors and reflections. The central character walks out of her front door and looks down at her reflection in a puddle on the street. Her subjectivity is constantly revealed in her surroundings. Her cast shadow and reflection appear along the cobblestones, on the hood of a car, in mirrors, in mylar that is ripped apart and a puddle that drains before our eyes. In this remarkably direct film, she permutates a series of possible reflective moments, attempting to see herself more clearly as she reveals herself to us."
(Chris Kennedy, 2009, In Present Tense: Films of Ute Aurand)

Clara Bausch - Wald, 2017

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with many thanks to all the filmmakers 
special thanks to Ute Aurand, Robert Beavers and Helga Fanderl

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Light Movement 29: SPRING PORTRAITS
Saturday 21st April 2018, 8pm

Spektrum,
Bürknerstraße 12,
12047 Berlin

U8 Schönleinstr.

facebook.com/lightmovementseries
light-movement.blogspot.de

Light Movement 28: Sylvia Schedelbauer

Light Movement 28
Sunday 25th March 2018, 8pm, Spektrum
facebook event

Sylvia Schedelbauer

 

Wishing Well (2018)

Born in Tokyo Sylvia Schedelbauer first moved to Berlin in 1993, where she has been based since. She studied at the University of Arts Berlin (with Katharina Sieverding). Her films negotiate the space between broader historical narratives and personal, psychological realms mainly through poetic manipulations of found and archival footage.

"Schedelbauer’s films reveal the world in a perpetually unsettled state of flux and traverses into liminal zones where time and space collapse." (James Hansen, Women to Watch, Cleo - Journal of Film and Feminism)

"The videos of Sylvia Schedelbauer reinvent the found-footage genre through their dense layers of imagery that narrate memory as an elusive object. (...) her visual material is harvested from an archive of ephemeral films housed in San Francisco—a nomadic artistic existence that manifests itself in her work through themes of migration, hidden histories and inherited rebelliousness." (Chris Kennedy, program notes, TIFF Cinematheque)

Selected screenings include the Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, London Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Robert Flaherty International Film Seminar and the Stan Brakhage Symposium. Awards include the VG Bildkunst Award, the German Film Critics’ Award and the Gus Van Sant Award for Best Experimental Film.

Sea of Vapors (2014)

P R O G R A M

Sounding Glass
2011, digital, 10:00 min, b&w, sound
A man in a forest is subject to a flood of impressions; rhythmic waves of images and sounds give form to his introspection.
Selected Music by Thomas Carnacki

False Friends
2007, digital, 4:50 min, b&w, sound
A montage of mid-century found footage: mysterious strands are obsessively braided to create a poetic reflection about an anxious interplay of memory and projection.
Selected Music by Violet

Way Fare
2009, 6:30 min, digital, b&w, sound
A layered tone poem of found images and woven soundscapes renders a shifting psychogram; a nomadic passage across spaces in and out of time.
Selected Music by Giuseppe Iacono & Violet

Sea of Vapors
2014, digital, 15 min, b&w, sound
A cascade of images cut frame by frame flow into an allegory of the lunar cycle.
With Linda Scobie, Photography Cyrus Tabar, Selected Music by Jeff Surak

Remote Intimacy
2007/2008, digital, 14:30 min, b&w/colour
Stream of consciousness with fictitious and found stories and a personal reference.
"Remote Intimacy is a found-footage montage which combines many types of archival documentary footage (including home movies, educational films, and newsreels), with a seemingly personal narrative, blending various individual recollections with literary texts. Beginning with an account of a recurring dream, the film is a poetic amplification of Memory, and with its associative narrative structure I hope to open up a space for reflection on issues of cultural dislocation." (S.S)
Selected Music by Violet

Wishing Well
2018, digital, 13 min, colour, sound
Gushing colors. A time disjointed, yet synchronous.
A transcendent turn, a quest for agency, a reunion with currents of the forest.
"The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for." J. Campbell
Selected Music by Jeff Surak

False Friends (2007)

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Light Movement 28: Sylvia Schedelbauer
Sunday 25th March 2018, 8pm

Spektrum,
Bürknerstraße 12,
12047 Berlin

U8 Schönleinstr.

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light-movement.blogspot.de

Light Movement 27: Luke Fowler

Light Movement 27
Tuesday 13th February, 8:30pm Spektrum
facebook event

 

Luke Fowler

 

David (2009)

Over the past 15 years, British artist, filmmaker and musician Luke Fowler has developed a practice that is, at the same time, singular and collaborative, poetic and political, structural and documentary, archival and deeply human. With an emphasis on communities of people, outward thinkers and the history of the left, his 16mm films tell the stories of alternative movements in Britain, from psychiatry to photography to music to education. Working with archival materials, his own 16mm footage, and sound recordings made in collaboration with sound artists such as Lee Patterson and Eric La Casa, Fowler has constructed complex portraits of psychiatrist R.D. Laing, experimental composer Cornelius Cardew, Marxist historian E.P. Thompson and reclusive environmentalist Bogman Palmjaguar. Whilst some of his early films – such as Pilgrimage from Scattered Points (2006) – dealt with music and musicians as subjects, in later works, most notably A Grammar for Listening (2009), sound itself becomes a key concern. Sound as process but also sound as a possibility for approaching filmmaking practice from a more acknowledged collective position. For Fowler’s work, the social and artistic relationship with an individual, and how such a relationship is built up into a collaboration, are essential.

Oscillating between a tradition that reaches back to filmmakers such as Gregory Markopoulos, Warren Sonbert and Robert Beavers – on whom P. Adams Sitney has written the filmmaker is “a hands craftsman, focusing the lens, pushing a filter across the plane of vision, making a splice” – and a collaborative, almost communal approach to artistic creation, Fowler’s own influences draw equally from experimental music, British Free cinema and American avant-garde film.
(text: Maria Palacios Cruz, Courtisane Festival)

For Christian  (2016)

P R O G R A M :

Tenement Film (Anna / Lester / David)  2009, 16mm, 9min (3X3min), colour, sound
Abbeyview Film  2008, 16mm, 9min, colour, silent
For Christian  2016, 16mm, 6min 47sec, colour, sound
Advance The Uknown  2008-9, 16mm, 5min, colour, silent

A Grammar For Listening Part I  2009, 16mm, 22min, colour, sound

A Grammar For Listening Part I  (2009)

TENEMENT FILM (ANNA / LESTER / DAVID)
uk / 2009 / colour / sound / 16mm / 24fps / 3X3’00 (9’00)
As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand.
The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. Entitled, Anna, Helen, David and Lester, they are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow. Composers: Lee Patterson (anna) Taku Unami (David) and Charles Curtis (lester)

AN ABBEYVIEW FILM
uk / 2008 / colour / silent / 16mm / 24fps / 9’00
Commissioned by Abbeyview artist in residence (2007-2008) Nicola Atkinson Davidson as part of regeneration funding for a deprived housing estate in Dumfermline , Scotland. Rather than choosing a clear stance in relation to the subject of a deprived area, Fowler offers a contingent, at times contradictory, poetic snapshot of a community. The film resists traditional documentary and cinematic representation of housing estates, striving instead to build an aesthetic of ambivalence and hope.

FOR CHRISTIAN
uk/usa / 2016 / colour / sound / 16mm / 24fps / 6’47
“For Christian” was filmed during a residency I had at Dartmouth College, New England, in spring 2013. Through Larry Polanski in the electronic music department I met the composer Christian Wolff, who had taught comparative literature at Dartmouth until 1999. For Christian features short extracts from a longer interview which covered a variety of his compositional strategies from writing text scores for non-musicians to indeterminacy, cueing and his turn in the 1970’s to writing pieces with a consciously progressive content. A week or so later I travelled out to his farm in Vermont which he runs with his wife and son and filmed my impressions there. The film is bookended by two of his dedication pieces – one for Alvin Lucier and the other for David Tudor. (LF)


ADVANCE THE UNKNOWN
uk/de / 2008-9 / colour / live sound / 16mm / 18fps / 5’00
I filmed a diary for the period just before and during the course of an exhibition, the film rushes were shown unedited and changed fortnightly. During this exceptionally bright and cold winter I moved house twice, visited friends in Berlin, recorded music, travelled by train etc.(LF)


A GRAMMAR FOR LISTENING PART I
uk / 2009 / colour / sound / 16mm / 24fps / 22’00
Over the centuries, Western culture has relentlessly attempted to classify noise, music and everyday sounds… Ordinary noises and the mundane sounds that are not perceived as either annoying or musical are of no interest.
How to create a meaningful dialogue between looking and listening? Luke Fowlers film cycle “A Grammar for Listening (parts 1-3)” attempts to address this question through the possibilities afforded by 16mm film and digital sound recording devices. In part 1, Fowler furthers his on-going dialogues with the sound artist Lee Patterson (Manchester, England).



With thanks to Lux and Gisela Capitain / Capitain Petzel gallery


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Light Movement 27: Luke Fowler
Tuesday 13th February, 8:30pm

Spektrum,
Bürknerstraße 12,
12047 Berlin

U8 Schönleinstr.

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light-movement.blogspot.de

Light Movement 26: Dore O.

Light Movement 26
Wednesday 13th December, 8pm Spektrum
event on facebook

Dore O.

curated by Masha Matzke

Alaska (1968)

Dore O.’s films seem to claim a certain uniqueness and independence from the dominant, yet diverse and irreducible currents of German experimental cinema. As the critic Dietrich Kuhlbrodt declared already in 1988: »Dore O. has become classic, and suddenly it turns out that her work has passed the various currents of time unharmed: the time of the cooperative union, the women's film, the structuralists and grammarians, the teachers of new ways of seeing ... It's time to proclaim loudly that Dore O.’s work is unique in German avant-garde film, since 'Jüm-Jüm' [...] she retains her independence also within independent film.«

The timeless originality and power of her work is all the more perceivable today, when many dogmas such as those of the political or structural film and their contemporary accusations of trivial aestheticism, have lost their hegemony. Dore O.'s concern lies in the creation of an associative, expressive and almost pre-conscious flow of images and the deliberation of their sensuality, which cannot be easily interpreted or be approached verbally and intellectually. In her painterly films one can observe the constantly renewed examination of the geometric conditions of the projection surface through a filmic reality which is experienced and captured foremost as image(s) unfolding itself in multilayered tableaus, through the counterplay of depth and surface, of planes and phantom like figures, canvas-like backgrounds, multiple frames, picture in picture. Going beyond the purely personal her work nonetheless thwarts the logics of her political and structuralist contemporaries in its intimate and personal poetics. »Dore O takes the original material for her films from her private domain, which includes far journeys through strange landscapes [...] Her films are not built on mathematical principles of structure; she creates a flow of image – multi-exposed landscapes and 1strange cut-in-image metaphors – as a poetic expression of her feelings. She works in the tradition of Brakhage in that she presents reality through the interpretation of her own emotions.« (Birgit Hein)
The program seeks to highlight these qualities, presenting her first film in collaboration with Werner Nekes, which already demonstrates both the artistic and artisanal dimension of her filmmaking and the insignificance of literal and symbolical meaning in favor of filmic qualities and perception, alongside her first solo-work ALASKA, a highly hypnotic and poetic work whose beauty, like all Dore O.’s films to come, »is located in the antechamber of language, even of consciousness.« (Dietrich Kuhlbrodt). The supple flow of images which seem chosen for either their depth or their surfaces, is further elaborated through a complex and sensual multilayering in her awarded and internationally acknowledged film KASKARA. Despite making a number of more narrative (feature length) films in the 80's and 90's, she kept returning to her interest in experimentation and in the counterplay of image and sound demonstrated by her later work THERMOMENT. (MM)

Jüm Jüm (with Werner Nekes, 1967)

P R O G R A M :

Alaska  1968, 16mm,18min,  colour, sound
Jüm Jüm (with Werner Nekes) 1967, 16mm, 10min, colour, sound

Kaskara  1974, 16mm (shown digital), 21min, colour sound
Thermoment  1998, 16mm, 7min, colour, sound

ALASKA 

(Sound by Dore O.: Violin, hair-dryer, several sounds from the Concord Sonata by Charles Ives)
»AN EMIGRATION FILM: A DREAM OF MYSELF, THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE ACT WITH SOCIETY.« (Dore O.)

»Alaska by Dore O. is a beautiful movie. This makes us suspicious. But beauty has a catch. It is only surface; hiding behind it are horror and fear. For Dore O., beauty is a part of reality. For her there exists a beauty in fear in the same way that for Genet there exists a beauty in murder. Alaska is a filmed dream, but devoid of the simplistic metaphors taken from psychoanalysis, metaphors which rationalize dreams and thus mistakenly facilitate their interpretation. Alaska is a film which cannot be interpreted, it can only be experienced.« (Klaus Badekeri, 1969, Filmkritik 5)

JÜM-JÜM (Werner Nekes, co-director.)

Stationary shots of a woman (Dore O.) swinging in a swing in front of a brightly colored painting of a stylized phallus edited in a succession of jump-cuts strictly synched to the rhythm of the sound and forming the minimal fimic unit of four frames. Moving either parallel or perpendicular to the painting, the swinging movement is abbreviated, repeated, lengthened. Midway through the film the rhythm of the cutting just about quadruples and it becomes an illustration of Nekes’ theory of the ‘kine’, the minimal filmic unit of four frames.

»He [Werner Nekes] once told me that he wanted to make films in which the audience would have no points of reference for what they saw. He wanted to put them into the position of being like children again, so that they could see in a fresh and uninhibited way without the intellectual pattern, the filters and the pseudoisms. So in his film JUM-JUM (1967), made with Dore O., he uses the fixed camera and a simple movement--a girl on a swing, seen in profile. The movement develops by fragmentation. [...] In jüm-jüm the girl on the swing flies up, hesitates, goes up and up and back and embarks ' on further rhythms. Our normal visual association to the swing and the simple arc is broken. The girl on the swing turns into a staccato movement, a light/colour symbol of movement. We become detached from the girl and can see only visual rhythms.« (Stephen Dwoskin, Film Is, 1975. In: filmmakers cooperative catalogue No. 7)

KASKARA
(Sound: Anthony Moore; with: Werner Nekes)
»A BALANCE OF ENCLOSED BEINGS IN DIVIDED SPACES. The sliding of facades and rooms, like scenery, through various axes, in various levels of multiple exposure together with entrances and exits of a person. Landscape exists only as a view through windows and doors. Individual shots stand in opposition to each other, modify themselves, or dissolve altogether into other pictures. Side by side with erupting pictures, images that collide and pile up, there are fragments of spaces/rooms and time sequences, attraction, fusion and repulsion of the various halves of the film image, with the purpose of creating a sensual topology. These are the main formal elements of the chosen film language. One picture devours the next.« (Dore O.) 


THERMOMENT
For "Endo-Heat" and "Thermoment", Dore O. filmed the clarinetist Eckard Koltermann with a thermal imaging camera, translating the thermal regions of the inside of the body into visual music music. Visual-thermo composition in analogy to a musical composition.

DORE O.
Born in 1946, Mühlheim on the Ruhr, Germany. Was trained as a textile engineer in Krefeld. Ended her formal education in 1967. In addition to being a filmmaker, she is also a self-taught painter who has exhibited internationally, and has produced a variety of books, objects and photos. 1976 married Werner Nekes. First experiences with film as an actor, costume/set designer for Nekes’ films. Her first film JÜM-JÜM in collaboration with him. Between 1966 and 1986 she remained an actor, costume/set designer, camerawoman for many of his films. Along with Nekes she was one of the founding members of the Hamburg Film Co-op, an attempt at distribution of experimental film modelled on the American film co-ops, initiated through a series of independent screenings of “the other cinema” initially called “Filmschau der Festivalaußenseiter” (“Screening of festival-outsiders”) in 1968, later “Hamburger Filmschau”. Failing to conciliate their political and aesthetic stances, the Hamburg Co-op eventually split up in 1974. While the audience and Festivals, according to Ingo Petzke, clearly favoured political films, the experimental film almost became of no public interest. From those who have started in the 60s only a diminishing group of obstinate avant-gardists, among them Dore O., remained with experimental film after the mid 70s. As the first awarded female filmmaker Dore O. won the First prize at the 5th International Experimental-Film Competition in Knokke (Belgium) for her film KASKARA as well as the Critic’s Prize for the best film of the year in 1974-75. Her filmic work was part of documenta 5 in 1972 and documenta 6 in 1977.

more infomation: http://www.dore-o-nekes.de




TEXT: Masha Matzke

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Light Movement 26: Dore O.
Wednesday 13th December, 8pm

Spektrum,
Bürknerstraße 12,
12047 Berlin

U8 Schönleinstr.

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Light Movement 25: Snow and Ice Data

Light Movement 25
Monday 23rd October, 7:30pm Spektrum
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snow and ice data
a night of experimental films curated by joe steele
an offering by the colloquium ‘Film in the Present Tense’, RE:MI/ LaborBerlin co-presented with Light-Movement

Erin Espelie, Kurt Kren, Saul Levine, JODI.org, Joann Elam / Andrea Polli, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Kelly Sears, Elizabeth Bouk & Wenhua Shi, Robert Todd, Richard Tuohy, Christin Turner, Steina Vasulka

Erin Espelie - The Sea Seeks it's Own Level (2013)

Thinking' in the primitive state (pre-organic) is the effecting of shapes, as
in the crystal. - In our thinking the essential thing is the fitting of the new
material into the old schemata (= Procrustean bed), making it alike. (1885)

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,/ […]
My Crop of corne is but a field of tares, (1586)

Joe Steele (PhD student at University of Colorado Boulder, Member AgX Collective, MDes Harvard University ‘16) will present his current research involving the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder and the Map Library, Herbarium, and the special collections of CU Boulder’s library. As part of beginning this research, Joe has programmed a group of experimental and personal films called “Snow and Ice Data”that takes a more reflexive tone toward thinking about the glacial and snow/ ice/ weather. This will be presented at Spektrum in Berlin as part of LaborBerlin’s Film in the Present Tense Colloquium in October 2017. The final form of this research will be an exhibition emerging from the artist’s response to the collection and the dialogues with archivists, scientists, and curators. Objects of most interest are William O. Field’s photographs and fieldbooks of glaciers in Alaska, aerial photography (which will be turned into shapes/ 3D models by the artist), glass plate negatives from the late 19th century, 8mm films, and prints and cabinet card photographs of glaciologists, workers, animals, and glacial erratics.





program I         Chinook/ Foehn

 
Morgen (tomorrow) Elizabeth Bouk & Wenhua Shi, color, sound 03:43. 2017

Blizzard of ’79  Joann Elam. Digital transfer of 8mm color, silent. 1979 (image) paired with“Round Mountain”from Sonic Antarctica. Andrea Polli. Gruenrekorder. 2009 Courtesy of the artist

The Sea Seeks Its Own Level  Erin Espelie. 2013, 5:00, color, sound, Super 8 film mastered to HD digital video

Going to Work  Anne Charlotte Robertson. 7:00   Super 8 Color Sound transferred to HD digital video. 1981

Ice  Robert Todd. 16mm b/w, sound. 10:00. 2014
 

 
~brief intermission~




program II        Weather--Shapes & Rhythms
 

What happens to the Mountain  Christin Turner. Color, Sound 35mm. HD Digital Video. 12:00 2016

Untitled-game_spawn  JODI.org. 1996-2001, sound, CD-ROM. 03:02

Untitled [object]  Steina Vasulka. 2007 Color, sound HD digital video.

Tropical Depression  Kelly Sears. 02:40. B/W, sound. HD digital video 2012
 
Die Nacht  Elizabeth Bouk & Wenhua Shi. Color, sound. 02:42. 2017

LIGHT LICKS Pardes: Night Time is the Right Time  Saul Levine. Super 8 transferred to HD Digital video. Color, silent. 4:02 2014

Flyscreen  Richard Tuohy. 16mm with optical sound. 08:00. 2010
 
3/60 Baüme im Herbst (Trees in Autumn)  Kurt Kren. b/w 16mm with hand-painted optical sound. 1960

 
(TRT approx.. 1 hr. 15 min)
 



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Thanks to: LaborBerlin, Goethe-Institut Boston, AgX Film Collective, Harvard Film Archive, and the University of Colorado at Boulder, CMCI/DCMP



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Light Movement 25: Snow and Ice Data
Monday 23rd October, 7:30pm

Spektrum,
Bürknerstraße 12,
12047 Berlin

U8 Schönleinstr.

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light-movement.blogspot.de

Light Movement 24: Giuseppe Boccassini

Light Movement 24
Thursday 12th October, 8pm Spektrum
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Giuseppe Boccassini

Debris (2017)

We are delighted to welcome Giuseppe Boccassini - a filmmaker working with found and archival footage to work a visual language to surreal affect. In a manner that suggests films inner breathing, as if it had a consciousness, or the media dreaming of itself, these images circulate and pulsate in reflection of their own problematic being.

Light Movement 23: OPEN DOORS

Light Movement 23
Sunday 23rd July 2017, 8pm, Spektrum Berlin
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OPEN DOORS    curated by Ute Aurand (Berlin) and Peter Todd (London)

Every year or two Ute Aurand and Peter Todd meet up to continue a filmic conversation. OPEN DOORS is their third program curated together. A film by the Scottish filmmaker Margaret Tait is often shown as a reference to how Aurand and Todd's joint interest in her work first brought them together. In OPEN DOORS they have selected films in which the filmmakers' observations and feelings become visible beyond obvious narratives.

P R O G R A M :

Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo    Margaret Tait, 1955, 6.5min, 16mm

Room Window Sea Sky    Peter Todd, 2014, 3min, 16mm, silent
Among The Eucalyptuses    Robert Beavers, 2017, 4min, 16mm, silent
For you    Peter Todd, 2000, 2mins, silent
Venedig Dezember 2011    Renate Sami, 2012, 4,5min, colour, digital
Napkins    Joanna Margaret Paul, 1975, 3,5mins, S8 to digital file, silent
Elegy    Anthea Kennedy, Ian Wiblin, 2001, 3min, digital

Mädchen/Girls    Helga Fanderl, 1995, 2 min, S8, silent
Philipp's 60th Birthday    Ute Aurand, 2014, 5,5min, 16mm
Envios 26 Jeannette Munoz, 2013, 6min, 16mm, silent
Four Diamonds    Ute Aurand, 2016, 4.5min, 16mm


Thanks to Circuit, LUX, The Estate of Joanna Margaret Paul, Alex Pirie and The Estate of Margaret Tait.





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Light Movement 23: OPEN DOORS

Sunday 23rd July 2017, 8pm

Spektrum,

Bürknerstraße 12,

12047 Berlin

U8 Schönleinstr.

facebook.com/lightmovementseries

light-movement.blogspot.de