This Radiant World: Recent and Retrospective Experimental Films is a four-program series of exceptional experimental films from the last few years, complemented by several newly restored and preserved retrospective works. Many of the films comment directly or indirectly on the anxieties and uncertainty of the past two years; others serve as joyful and playful counterpoints. Together, they demonstrate the continuing richness of experimental cinema, the history of which is exemplified by this selection of lesser-known works that are overdue for rediscovery and reappraisal.
EFEA is a community-led film festival taking place in May 2022 in the heart of East Anglia. The festival will showcase the very best experimental moving-image works from the region as well as internationally. We are looking for works that actively subvert cinematic conventions and use filmic language to abstractly delve into the many realms of human experience.
The OBSKURA Festival is an event that questions contemporary practices related to film, on an international scale. Developed by LABO K, a collective of artists, filmmakers and photographers who work with celluloid film, this second edition will take place over three days with screenings, workshops, performances, masterclasses and exhibitions. An invitation to watch together films that manage to clear unexpected territories of the cinema.
Vienna-based artist Johann Lurf is fascinated by image production and exhibition technologies, and his filmmaking practice is a diverse and thrillingly engaging demonstration of those passions. Across his eclectic body of truly inventive films, he employs an acute awareness of the possibilities for magic and revelation to be found in the interplay of real and filmic space. The elemental qualities of the moving image are activated via his conceptual and technical artistry and the medium itself always plays an active role. The result is an expanded adventure of cinema that involves the viewer in a thoughtful exploration of perspective and time.
In his second diary film, Mekas reflects on his life through footage shot across three distinct moments, largely structured around his time in America and Lithuania. In an intensely personal manner, Mekas uses voiceover and text to share memories on his initial arrival in America from Lithuania 1950–1953, filmed on his Bolex camera.
Rotten Love Redux tips its hat to the days of theatrical porn-going with a celebration of tactility, eroticism and utter decay. The program features 16mm porn and erotic films, each which incorporates decomposed or manipulated film stock in its depiction of erotic femme bodies. Working with both found and original footage, the filmmakers in this program employ a wide range of analog techniques—soaking, solarization, painting, scratching, burning—to alter celluloid’s chemical make-up and add a material element to the onlooker’s gaze.
The films of Jerome Hiler (1943) blend a beauteous celebration of the sensual world with a deep sense of introspection and solitude. They are occasions for reflection and meditation, on light, landscape, time and the motions of consciousness. Hiler's encounter with the films of Nathaniel Dorsky, Marie Menken, Gregory Markopoulos and Stan Brakhage deeply affected his own artistic path.
