Experiments: Celluloid Traces

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Rating: 

Average: 3.5 (28 votes)

We embrace our nostalgia for all things analogue in this varied programme of experiments, indulging us with the crackling aesthetic of Super 8 alongside found footage from the archives and the fuzziness of early VHS. The projector itself becomes performance as we present work from Bea Haut as a live 16mm piece with audience participation, and watch out for exciting new work by artists David Leister, Lucy Harris, Stuart Pound, Jessica Sarah Rinland, Mark Jenkin, Emmaalouise Smith and Stuart Moore.

Part of: London Short Film Festival 2017

Programme:
- Pending (Bea Haut 7 mins)
Pending is a 100ft length of film formed into a ‘living loop’ by the audience, before being taken up and played out by the projector. This interlacing creates a sympathetic film which conjoins the audience, the artist and the subject in an act of duration and suspension.

- Model Village (Lucy Harris 4 mins)
The mysterious past of a model village is explored via a re-discovered photo album, post cards, sound and field recordings. Are we the observer or is it us who are being observed?

- Silent House (David Leister 3 mins)
Actions sometime speak louder than words in this cryptic re-appropriation of 16mm footage. A film where you need to read between the sight lines.

- 1960 :: Movie :: Still (Stuart Pound 2 mins)
This video contrasts the moving and the still image: a sequence taken from the iconic film L'Avventura made in 1960 by Michelangelo Antonioni with Monica Vitti, with a soundtrack of a train trundling at night through the Carpathian mountains towards Bucharest.

- Moving Across Opposite Directions (Guli Silberstein 6 mins)
A chance meeting with a travel companion, gave birth to this meditative work, where layers of movement and sound are overlapped and glitched. Going anywhere and nowhere at once, it's a reflection on time and space and what is in-between.

- Dear Marianne (Mark Jenkin 6 mins)
“I was hungry for the coast again and took a bus down along the R675, getting off to walk a while between Annestown and Dungarvan. The cliffs are imperious here and look just like home…” A Cornishman’s travels in Ireland, through the counties of Wexford, Waterford and Cork in search of the familiar. Shot on Super 8 colour reversal film stock and produced according to the rules of the Silent Landscape Dancing Grain 13 Film Manifesto.

- 31 Days (Stuart Moore 4 mins)
A triptych of film moments re-creates memories from a collection of thirty one clips, one selected each day during March 2016 from the artist's personal Super 8 archive.

- The Peregrine (Oliver Eglin 3 mins)
Based on J.A.Baker’s book of the same name, The Peregrine is a meditation on the tale of a misanthropic falcon enthusiast as he navigates the British countryside in pursuit of his game. Relocating the narrative to the cold and desolate winter valleys of the Brecon Beacons in Wales, The Peregrine is the Romantic tale of one man’s solitude and his deliberate retreat into the natural realm.

- And Yet, They Still Look To The Sky (Emmaalouise Smith 5 mins)
"And yet, they still look to the sky..." is a short experimental film delving into the philosophy of personal memory and reminiscence, projecting narrative through a mixed medium landscape made up from 16mm handmade animation and Super 8. The audio and visual projections collide, focussing on the leading lady ('Princess Julia', a renown London DJ and Fashion blogger) leaving a raw and otherworldly atmosphere reflecting the baron celluloid on-screen. Like looking into a long, lost photograph album, "And yet," aims to explore the meaning of loneliness and personal belonging in society.

- The Road To Zennor (Mark Jenkin 2 mins)
"The curious joy in the warm passing of time is most acute in the long shadows of the end of the line autumn coming stillness..." The Road to Zennor is hand-processed super 8 journey from the hills to the sea, and an ode to the Kodak film emulsion Ektachrome

- Widows (Susu Laroche 4 mins)
Mourning Mafia widows bury their shared husband at sea. Featuring New Noveta (Keira Fox + Ellen Freed). Original sound by Astrid Gnosis.

- The Lady With The Long Brown Hair (Mark Jenkin 1 mins)
An old man muses on the plausibility of a memory...in a maize field in Brittany. Super 8 black & white reversal film and micro audio cassette. Featuring Morgan Ansell, Mary Woodvine & John Woodvine.

- Soramimi (Daisy Dickinson & Julia Laird 4 mins)
Soramimi taps in to the rhythms of the forest. Channelling the positive and negative energies through the red and blue masks and eventually creating an abstract piece of ritualistic occurrence. All shot on Super 8 in the mountains of Japan.

- The Flight Of An Ostrich (Jessica Sarah Rinland 4 mins)
The ostrich is incapable of doing the one thing birds are famous for: they can not fly. They compensate by having the largest eyes and by being the fastest birds on land. A chin-down, shy eight-year-old girl watches an educational video about ostriches, grasps an opportunity and flies in the face of her peer group.

- Artefacts From An Imagined Documentary (Proposed): Three (Duncan Ganley 4 mins)
A researcher is lost in a winter’s fog with only a Sat Nav as a guide. With his destination always seemingly just ahead, he is interrupted by a cryptic phone call. 'artefacts… :three' is the third in a suite of experimental films, that begin to explore the collision of histories of the moving image pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, a reclusive film director and the researcher himself, through the territory of south-east England.

- Obsolete & Discontinued (Here's Something For You To Play With) (Helen Nias 2 mins)
Mostly shot using a Sony Video8 Handycam, this film celebrates the novelty and complications of using obsolete analogue technology. In the background prints of a TV, created on expired photographic paper for collaborative project 'Obsolete & Discontinued', slowly reveal themselves. Collaged on top are a succession of video clips depicting the process of getting old analogue video kit to work.

- The Essential Cornishman (Mark Jenkin 6 mins)
Possibly the final trip for a cove fisherman, steaming out from a village in the teeth of aggressive re-branding. Hand-processed Super 8 reversal film & compact audio cassette. An audio-visual stream of consciousness. Entirely unedited, in terms of writing, performance and visuals. A homage to the spontaneous prose of The Beats, from the mythical Cornish west.

- The Rules Of The Game (Julia Dogra-Brazell 3 mins)
A meditation on time, perception and the moving image fashioned from two seemingly disconnected narrative sources. Half enunciated words and phrases from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper – a cautionary tale on the perils and extravagances of seeing and being seen – qualify extracts from the filmmaker’s own correspondence on film and photography that forms the auditory foreground to this film. Gilman’s short story was published at the start of photography’s ascendancy and just three years before the arrival of the first moving image made for projection.

- Memory Lane (Alberto Varet Pascual 4 mins)
From the future, a memory in the form of a poem evokes a happy childhood before a turbulent war. This memory comes in the shape of a space trip that links the present (words) and the past (still photos) through the war (moving image), creating an audiovisual experience that binds the viewer to a mysterious place where adulthood (consciousness), adolescence (cinema) and childhood (photo and music) live together in a permanent tension.

- Batum (Kamila Kuc 9 mins)
Batum takes as its starting point the experience of near drowning in the Black Sea of Batumi, Georgia. As such, the film is induced with a desire for an auto-ethnographical self-interrogation. Images that feature in the film are a constellation of personal and prosthetic memories, acquired through historical and cultural knowledge as exemplified by the poems of Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Stalin, among other cultural tropes.

- To Be A Ghost (Stuart Pound 2 mins)
A ghost actor haunts his screen life and is haunted by it, to the clicking of a projector. What you see is, to the left, scraps of film under a microscope, with sprocket holes, oily colour and accumulated fluff and dust. To the right, the text of a poem in the ghost’s voice.

- Overthrow (Matty Groves 4 mins)
During World War 2, an executioner gets second thoughts about shooting a prisoner. A music video for the band Gothic Chicken.

Venue: 

Institute of Contemporary Arts - London, Reino Unido

Dates: 

Sunday, January 8, 2017 - 14:00 to Monday, January 9, 2017 - 13:55

Category: 

Dates: 

Sunday, January 8, 2017 - 14:00 to Monday, January 9, 2017 - 13:55
  • The Mall
    SW1Y 5AH   London
    Reino Unido
    51° 30' 22.8456" N, 0° 7' 51.3516" W