The first of two Unconscious Archive events with the title The Perfect Medium is the Wrong Message was presented at Café OTO, Dalston, to a packed house. The evening, curated by Sally Golding and James Holcombe, comprised a mixture of Hallowe’en themed performances by Aura Satz, Sally Golding, Malcolm LeGrice, Amy Dickson and ‘Sir Gideon Vein’. Perhaps one way to discuss the work shown is in terms of ‘Paracinema’ a term first coined by the US filmmaker Ken Jacobs and more recently developed and theorised by the critic and teacher Jonathan Walley in relation to work made by the filmmakers Anthony McCall and Tony Conrad in the 1970s. Walley proposes a kind of ‘cinema’ based around the fundamentals of light and time, and not necessarily those components such as celluloid, which have usually been considered indispensible to what we understand cinema to be. The other linking themes were fire, deployed in two of the works, and screens, which functioned as interrupted and uninterrupted surfaces, and as veils.

The purest para-cinematic work of the evening was Amy Dickson’s Light Time, in which she creates a time-based event by lighting candles placed in five rows of five behind a dark thermochromic screen. The candles are lit one by one then extinguished. The duration is variable, as are the effects, in which areas of the screen lighten as they are heated by the candles. The flicker of the candle flames is visible as well as the whitened areas, such that different speeds of movement and change are simultaneously visible: the candles flicker at ‘normal speed’, while the heated areas change slowly, taking longer to return to black after the candle has been extinguished than they take to whiten when they are lit. The areas at the top of the screen are larger, presumably because the heat rising from below increases the effect. A third temporal element is Dickson’s performance itself, which is ultimately limited by the time it takes to light and extinguish the candles, but which usually takes longer than this. The complex mix of temporalities recalls some of David Hall’s TV Interruptions (1971), in which time-lapse, real time and static elements are effectively  co-present.

Amy Dickson: Light Time.

Malcolm LeGrice’s Horror Film 1 (1971) could also be said to be para-cinematic. Like Tony Conrad’s Pickled 3M 150 (1974), for which Conrad pickled some 16mm film, and Anthony McCall’s Long Film for Ambient Light (1975), a work consisting of an empty room lit by daylight in the day and electric light at night, it references cinema while vigorously opposing its technical-industrial norms. Three projectors are used, but they carry loops of pure colours, that is, minimally ‘filmic’ material. Thus there are no images as such, but LeGrice’s interactions with the projections bring performance, pulsating light, colour and sound (of the projectors) into dramatic conjunction, focused on the screen as multi-coloured shadow-play. Most of the elements of narrative cinema are present; projectors, film, an actor, a performance, time, sound and a structure with a beginning middle and end, yet the end result is as unlike a conventional movie as it’s possible to imagine. Horror Film 1 remains one of LeGrice’s simplest, most elegant and dramatic works in a series of meta-cinematic studies that he made through the late 1960s and early 70s.

Malcolm LeGrice: two moments from Horror Film 1

In Sally Golding’s Face of An Other faces and torsos are precisely projected onto the artist’s face and body to produce what at times looks like a kind of virtual veil, while at other moments seems to transform the artist’s face in more or less grotesque ways. The illusionism of the work has been transformed in a more complex and abstract way in her more recent performances, where the image is pulverised by the use of strobe light and other elements that supplement the projected images.

Sally Golding: Face of An Other

Aura Satz’s film-performance Sound Seam combined extreme close up images of records being cut on a cutting lathe, with a collage of ghostly recorded voices. At the side of the screen Satz manipulated a hand-cranked 78 rpm record player on which was placed a glass box containing a candle. The work wove rotational graphic images with the flickering of real fire and whispered voices to generate a range of ethereal effects.

Aura Satz: Sound Seam.

Living Film comprised an evening of single and double screen films, a film and food happening by Victoria Schmidt  and a peep show performance by Birgitta Hosea. The evening, held at No.w.here in Bethnal Green on October 16th, was curated by Karel Doing and Vicky Smith, and the title has at least two meanings; the first pertaining to the fact that film is still with us, and the second because the work comprised either live elements, or, as in the case of most of the single screen films, imagery created with body fluids. Animal-mineral film –gelatin, silver and celluloid- mingled with blood, hair, fire and saliva. The forensic nature of the film image, a tiny patch of matter magnified hundreds of times, clashes with film’s kinesis to produce unique, unexpected, medium-specific hybrid forms. In the case of Thorsten Fleisch’s Blutrauch (1999), swirls of blood periodically coalesce into explosive, crab-like forms, while Patti Gaal-Holmes’ Blutrauch: die ende der Geschichte, remakes Fleisch’s film in menstrual blood, resulting in a more globular, sticky image, so much so that the projector jammed a few times, testifying to the fact that we were watching original material, not a print, in the manner exemplified by Emma Hart’s Skin Film (2005-7), a work that no longer exists because microbes in the skin flakes that form the image have eaten that image into invisibility. Vicky Smith’s 16mm film Noisy Licking and Spitting (2013) was particularly alive with eruptive living material, ending with dramatically bubbling saliva forms. Cathy Rogers’ Rosemary Again and Again (unsplit Standard 8 presented as 16mm, 2013) is a deceptively simple work made by wrapping film around a rosemary bush and exposing it to light. This crude process generates complex layers of depth and shallowness. A knowledge of how the work was made in no way reduces it to an illustration of the process. On the contrary, it offers a way into what at first appears to be a chaotic jumble of lines, streaks and patches of light, but which on careful viewing can be seen to capture a complex of variable interactions between bush and filmstrip. At the end of the evening a dry reprise was provided by James Holcombe and Asnan Adams’ Hair in the Gate (2013), in which the hairs pushed into the gate briefly caught fire before being extinguished.

In between these single screen works was a variety of other highlights, including George Saxon’s rediscovered early work: Blissfully Gunned Down (1980), a fragmentary, two screen film loop of his late partner falling to the ground as if shot by an imaginary gun, and in which more bangs are added the soundtrack during projection by the artist’s scratching the loops as they pass through the projector. Saxon has a body of wonderful, performance based, twin screen films that deserve a retrospective screening. A contrast to this noisy work was provided by two installed loop projections by Louisa Fairclough: Drawn up by some Breathing (2013). Both loops have no perceptible image and only a barely audible soundtrack, the exact content of which is more or less impossible to discern against the noise of the projector and other sounds. In leaning close in to the projector to hear the sound, one experiences in a very physical way the machine’s functioning, such that the work becomes about this as much as anything else. By reducing content to a minimum, Fairclough’s pair of films achieve a novel balance between projector beam and image, and projector noise and sound.

The statement by the organisers / programmers (should they be called curators?) amounts to a manifesto, in which film is reclaimed (again) as an artistic, above all experimental medium:

“We refer to Living Film with respect to the reversibility of the terms: film as object that is activated through physical contact and film as an ongoing mode of material practice… This program…focuses on the use of film as a living material. In mainstream cinema every trace of physical contact is removed from the film material, but with the disappearance of film from the industry, the medium is liberated from this armour…At stake here is not just an artistic concept or method but the formation of a strategy towards an alternative filmmaking ecology: working with cheap or out of date film stocks; bartering knowledge for materials; finding cooperative forms for using resources and equipment”.

Thorsten Fleisch: Blutrausch (16mm, 1999)

Patti Gaal-Holmes: Blutrauch die Ende der Geschichte (16mm, 2013).

Vicky Smith: Noisy Licking and Spitting (16mm, 2013)

Two frames from Cathy Rogers’ Rosemary Again and Again (unsplit Standard 8, 2012)

James Holcombe and Asnan Adams: Hair in the Gate (16mm, 2013).

George Saxon: Blisfully Gunned Down (2 x 16mm, 1980).

Two views of Louisa Fairclough’s Drawn up by some Breathing (16mm, 2013)

This year Art Licks, an organization founded in 2010 to promote the work of younger artists, curators and non-profit galleries working in various locations between Bermondsey and Hackney Wick in London, put on a three-day event to showcase the work of over 250 artists. As part of these events, the artist-run film space and laboratory, No.w.here, is running Emitters of Light, a weekend of installed film projections and displays in the lab and workshop part of their two-floor space in Bethnal Green. The event has been curated by Karen Mirza, James Holcombe and Sally Golding, all of whom work at No.w.here in various capacities.

The lab was turned into a uniquely hybrid workshop cum gallery and screening room, with films displayed on projectors, Steenbeck tables and rostrums. Visitors could look at the work, inspect equipment and talk to the organisers about No.w.here and what it has to offer, which is black and white 16mm film developing and printing facilities, cameras and editing equipment. No.w.here’s focus is on film production, though they also offer some digital facilities, but, as James Holcombe, who runs the lab and many of the courses that take place therein, points out, most people nowadays have a laptop running FCP or Premiere, rendering their offering of such facilities unnecessary. What follows is a brief review of some of the work, not a complete or systematic account of everything on display.

A variety of films were projected on the opening night, including new and old work by Karel Doing, Peter Gidal, Maria Anastassiou, Bea Haut, Jenny Baines, Vicky Smith, Oliver Bancroft and Patrick Beveridge. Vicky Smith showed a selection of films and loops that form part of her PhD project, which is concerned with the body and film, and how bodily traces evidence performative, often reductive or negative actions, including the partial removal by hand of the film’s surface. Smith’s work has become increasingly performance-based, and in her most recent phase she has been combining actual performance, using a bicycle, with film projection. Maria Anastassiou showed Dropped Frames, a black and white film of a hand dropping an object. The work is strongly reminiscent of Richard Serra’s 1968 film Hand Catching Lead, except that here the hand drops rather than catches, and the jittery, reiterative process is complicated by the jumpy frame-line, which a-rhythmically appears and disappears in the frame. Whereas in Hand Catching Lead the idea of film as a succession of frames is figured in the pieces of lead dropping repeatedly through the frame, in Anasstasiou’s film the frame line appears literally as an essential and disruptive-constructive part of the work. The film was back projected onto a rostrum table, evoking the idea of work in progress. The viewer has to stare into the rectangle of direct, as opposed to reflected light, and this complicates the sense of the image, which looks silhouetted, even though there is detail in its front side –texture in the forearm and so on.

Coloured loops by James Holcombe, and two beautiful high contrast hand-processed films, by Bea Haut and Jenny Baines, also featured. Haut’s film, Formatting and Filmwash, showed a woman washing 16mm film in a bucket, while Baines showed Stairs, Hackney Town Hall, made in un-split Standard 8 (which, contrary to Tacita Dean’s pronouncements, is still commercially available), of the stairs outside Hackney Town Hall. The steps are orientated vertically in the frame, so that we see continuous stripes in all four of the visible Standard 8 frames, through which an object periodically rolls across the frame, a small event in an otherwise static image.

The growth in the desire of younger (and not so younger) artists to work with film is fascinating and personally gratifying for a teacher working in the context of an increased domination of video production technologies. Over the last twenty five years, more and more students have turned to video, but in the last five there has been a remarkable growth in the number wanting to work with film. A visit to No.w.here will reassure those wanting to use 16mm or Super 8, but who are worried about costs, facilities and the availability of film stocks, that film is still very much around, not as a nostalgic or fetish object, but as a viable artistic medium. The experience of seeing works in which the medium, and the technology by which it is made visible, form an integrated and coherent whole, is utterly different from watching projected video, or even video on monitors. The noise and heat also become part of the experience, to say nothing of the variety of textural qualities, which are, again, very different from the frictionless surfaces of the video image.

Vicky Smith’s Loop no.3, opening night

Bea Haut’s Formatting and Filmwash, opening night.

General view, opening night, with projector and Steenbeck table in the background.

Back of the Calder 16mm processing machine, showing chemical store in the background.

The venerable Debrie 16mm contact printer.

The JK optical printer, immortalised on phone cam.

Equipment shelf.

Vicky Smith: Loop no.3

Maria Anastassiou: Dropped Frames.

Media City Film Festival, held in Windsor, Ontario, has published an e-Book about my work, and specifically the work  I made as artist in residence at the Art Gallery of Windsor in March – April 2012, comprising an extended interview between myself and Media City’s directors, Oona Mosna and Jeremy Rigsby and essays by Al Rees and myself:

Two day conference / film programme at Queen Mary College, Mile End and at the Whitechapel Gallery.

Screening_NatureProgramme

Please click on the link below for the UCA Maidstone Students’ degree show. The event represents end of an era as this is the final graduating cohort of the Video Arts Production, formerly Time Based Media, course that has been running since 1988.

Spectrum Degree Show Invitation

My new film, Polytunnels, is premiering at Media City Film Festival, Windsor, Ontario, on May 24th:

http://mediacityfilmfestival.com/films-and-schedule-2013/

An e-publication about my work, consisting of an essay by Al Rees, an interview with Jeremy Rigsby and Oona Mosna, Media City’s directors, and an essay by myself, will also be published on the same day.

I will be showing Rings at an Analogue Recurring event at Lo and Behold, London, on 25th April.

Rings. Four 16mm black and white loops for four projectors, approx 15 minutes, silent, 2012.

Rings revisits a format I devised for a student work I made in 1974: 4 X LOOPS. Four identical loops play a repeating, one-second long animated cycle. The projectors are moved into a variety of configurations during the work’s duration, generating pulsating patterns of light and pseudo-movement. Each performance is different. This will be its fifth.

I will be talking with William English about the future of film and related issues, and playing some film-related music (and some not) on his programme on Resonance FM, on Friday 29th March from 2.30 to 3.30pm. Resonance is on 104.4 FM in London and at http://www.resonancefm.com online. William’s programmes are archived on his website at http://www.williamenglish.com