Upcoming event: Films selected by Vivienne Dick

In connection with her current exhibition at IMMA, 93% Stardust, Vivienne Dick presents a personal selection of films that inspire her work. The films chosen for this programme are about anarchic moments, about being alive to music, to rhythm, and the value of staring into space. In an era obsessed with targets and prescriptive living, the value of daydreaming and dawdling is often overlooked. This programme serves as a reminder of the important role played by chance interaction and sheer nerve in creativity.

Featuring works by Len Lye, Helen Levitt, Masha Godovannaya, Vivienne Dick, D.A. Pennebaker, Moira Tierney, Bev Zalcock & Sara Chambers, Sarah Pucill and Chantal Akerman, this exhilarating programme foregrounds films that relate to the street, the domestic and the unconscious.

This screening will be introduced by Vivienne Dick.

Upcoming event: port | river | city (17 – 29 September 2017)

port | river | city takes the form of a unique programme of screenings and site-specific moving image installations curated by Alice Butler & Daniel Fitzpatrick of aemi and artist Cliona Harmey. Over the course of three weeks in September, the project traces a journey along the River Liffey from Dublin Port’s most eastern point at Poolbeg Lighthouse on the Great South Wall into its inner city and now invisible waterways, offering new possibilities for engagement with Dublin’s port and its history.

port | river | city takes place from 17th – 29th September, 2017

Featured artists include Vanessa Daws, Fiona McDonald, Pat Collins & Sharon Whooley, Gabriel Gee, Cliona Harmey, Peter Hutton, Alice Lyons, Dan Shipsides, Moira Sweeney & William Raban.

Further information will soon be available at portrivercity.ie

Screening: Films by Peggy Ahwesh & Julie Murray

This programme examines the distinct and overlapping interests of two acclaimed filmmakers, both of whom will be in attendance for the screening. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Peggy Ahwesh and Julie Murray at Temple Bar Gallery+Studios.

Click below for full event info:

‘Screening X’ Curated by Peter Taylor

aemi presents ‘Screening X’ curated by Peter Taylor, Director of Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival
Irish Film Institute, Saturday 27th May 2017, 13.30

On May 27th at 13.30 we are thrilled to welcome Peter Taylor, Director of Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival to present ‘Screening X’, a programme comprising three works; Kevin Jerome Everson’s award-winning Ears, Nose and Throat (2016), Camilo Restrepo’s spell-binding Cilaos (2016) and One.Two.Three (2016), a film created by Vincent Meessen for the Belgian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. Peter was last in Dublin to present a fantastic programme as part of PLASTIK Festival of Artists’ Moving Image 2015 and we are delighted to welcome him back for ‘Screening X’, Berwick Festival’s purposefully ambiguous theme for last year. Peter will be in attendance and will introduce the programme and will participate in a discussion about this exciting selection of works after the screening. We also want to highlight that Berwick Festival is currently open for submissions, deadline is June 1st – please click here for details.

Tickets for the screening can be booked directly on the IFI website

aemi @ PLASTIK Festival 2017

SUNDAY 26 MARCH 8:30 PM
Venue: Irish Film Institute

Over the course of its history there have been many that have looked to cinema for the access it gives to a more plastic appreciation of time. In 1923 Elia Faure celebrated cinema for the ways it made of time ‘an instrument’-

“in the cinema time clearly becomes necessary for us […] we play with it at our ease. We can speed it up. We can slow it down. We can suppress it. Indeed I feel it as being formerly part of myself, as enclosed alive, with the very space which it measures and which measures it, within the walls of my brain.”
​
Faure dreamed in 1923 of an ‘art of cineplastics’ and, though we’re likely not there yet, many years later Peter Kubelka would talk about how cinema’s unique combining of ‘artefact’ and ‘event’ allows us access to the plastic properties of time. Like many others Kubelka felt the medium of film had a privileged role in this regard, a notion borne out by works like Bruce Conner’s Crossroads (screening here from a 35mm print). With a variety of different media forms, obsolete or otherwise, now at our disposal, we can test rather than accept film’s privileged role in this regard, particularly when looking at the artefacts of digital media made visible in a work like Soda_Jerk’s The Time that Remains or the traces of VHS scans that continue to haunt the works included here by The Duvet Brothers and John Scarlett Davis.

SCREENING PROGRAMME:

Soda_Jerk The Time That Remains (2012) 2-channel digital video / 12 min
Duvet Brothers Pillow Talks (1984) SD Video / 1 min
Duvet Brothers Untitled (1984) SD Video / 1 min
John Scarlett Davis Curtain (198-) SD Video / 17 min​
Bruce Conner Crossroads (1976) 35 mm / 36 min
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Run time: 67 minutes

Independent Frames curated by Herb Shellenberger

We’re very excited to announce this programme of experimental animation curated and presented in person by Herb Shellenberger on Thursday 23rd February at the Irish Film Institute.

For more information see http://ifi.ie/film/ifi-aemi-projections/ or click the event below

Collaboration with The Douglas Hyde Gallery

Delighted our next event is in association with The Douglas Hyde Gallery:

The Douglas Hyde Gallery, in association with aemi (Artists’ and Experimental Moving Image), present a programme of 16mm short-film screenings by Stan Brakhage and Carolee Schneemann.

The films will be followed with a performance by feminist D.I.Y punk band Sissy.

For more information see:
http://www.douglashydegallery.com/events/#/dissolutions-films-by-stan-brakhagecarolee-schneemann-with-a-performance-by-sissy/

Lewis Klahr in conversation with Orla Mc Hardy

aemi is delighted to announce that, following the screening of Sixty Six at the Irish Film Institute on Tuesday June 28th at 6.30pm, avant-garde filmmaker Lewis Klahr will take part in a conversation about his new film with visual artist and filmmaker Orla Mc Hardy at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios at 8.15pm

Tuesday 28 June 2016

6.30pm | Screening at IFI | For more information and to book your tickets click here.
8.15pm | Discussion at TBG+S | Free admission, all welcome. Book your free ticket here. 

A short clip from Sixty Six

The Films of Experimental Film Society

This is an extract from a larger text about the three part Collectivism programme as a whole. To read the text on the first chapter in the programme please click here and to read the text on the second chapter click here

an “imperfect cinema must above all show the process which generates the problems. It is thus the opposite of a cinema principally dedicated to celebrating results, the opposite of a self-sufficient and contemplative cinema, the opposite of a cinema which “beautifully illustrates” ideas or concepts which we already possess.” – Espinosa, 1969.

“the cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language. This art, although blessed with an enormous potential, is an easy prey to prejudice; it cannot go on for ever ploughing the same field of realism and social fantasy which has been bequeathed to it by the popular novel. It can tackle any subject, any genre. The most philosophical meditations on human production, psychology, metaphysics, ideas, and passions lie well within its province. I will even go so far as to say that contemporary ideas and philosophies of life are such that only the cinema can do justice to them.” – Astruc, 1948

The realms of possibility and pluralism Alexander Astruc and Julio García Espinosa once sought out in cinema are fully evident in a group of recent works by members of the Experimental Film Society, which make up the third and final part of the ‘Collectivism’ programme. Generally speaking, each EFS work is produced as part of a collective of like-minded artists but attributed to a single figure. In most if not all cases the filmmaker controls every aspect of production from concept through to post-production. However, it is impossible to ignore the collaborative aspect of EFS, a feature that becomes discernible in the way in which members frequently appear in each other’s work, an expression of unequivocal support in each other’s practices. In practice this goes beyond support to become something else entirely, an internal process of shared provocation in which each filmmaker pushes the other to delve deeper, to look beyond. Each of the works shown in the third Collectivism programme demonstrates a shared, reciprocal interest in provocation, using the cinema to dauntlessly probe at what others routinely and systematically avoid, to wonder about the very nature of cinema, our peculiar drive to generate images as well as the meanings they imbue for an audience.

What we encounter here is a cinema of enquiry, a cinema which is discovered in the process of its becoming. This rules out any pre-formed objective or agenda but it also helps account for the group’s intimidating prolificacy (in a two year period Rouzbeh Rashidi produced fourteen feature-length or close to feature-length works, to say nothing of the ongoing series of shorter ‘Homo Sapiens Project’ works which he has taken to numbering). Through the works of EFS, cinema remains in a state of productive instability. Here, cinema can function as a sketchbook- a way of exploring some of the possible lives of an idea. This is what we encounter for example in Rashidi’s visceral and abrasive Homo Sapiens Project (161-170) in which he takes apart and reassembles a 35mm trailer for Brain De Palma’s little-loved The Black Dahlia (2006). This interaction with a seemingly alien Hollywood film culture also surfaces in Michael Higgins’ Funnel Web Family, a foreboding and sinister inspection of domesticity in which music and soundbites from Jack Arnold’s Tarantula (1955) make a fitting albeit unexpected coda.

The avant-garde has always described both a mode of practice and a realm of speculative philosophy and the works of EFS find a shared sensibility with the realm of science-fiction, an ever-present aspect of many of the films included here. In Funnel Web Family Higgins shoots using baby monitors and by doing so grants us access to queasy scenes of everyday domesticity which are both familiar and otherworldly. The highly creative uses of technology we see here and in Jann Clavadetscher’s use of CCTV in Controle No 6 remind us of some of the more mundane uses to which the moving-image is put, but the concerns driving a work like Funnel Web Family are more deeply felt and personal, the unsettling power of the film rooted not in the ways in which it makes us voyeurs but in the way it seems to tap into an acutely felt fear of familial responsibility. It is ultimately more Eraserhead than 1984.

While Funnel Web Family reminds us of the staggering invasion of privacy made possible by surveillance cameras, Controle No.6 uses similar technology to create something curiously reminiscent of a silent era comedy. In this way, both filmmakers find distinct means of subverting the way in which the camera has so rampantly been co-opted as an instrument for scrutiny and control. Shot entirely on CCTV cameras over a period working at a suburban chain cinema Clavadetscher’s Controle No 6 is no budget filmmaking in the truest sense (we arguably also have to factor in all the work Clavadetcher was not doing while he was doing this). Shot over a period of many weeks, Jann surreptitiously and gradually performed his film, at first for nobody in empty car parks and lifts, only later going back to comb through these tapes in an attempt to retrieve the material that makes up the film. With movie star looks and an affection for body comedy, Jann could be situated as the Harold Lloyd of the group, as unlikely as that sounds. Lloyd serves as a model here for a naturally physical performer, but also for the ways in which Clavadetscher gracefully skips over what would otherwise be impossibly restrictive conditions in which to make a film.

The works produced by EFS have a raw immediacy that is a product of the charged, instinctive way in which the group functions, certainly the case with Dean Kavanagh’s Friends with Johnny Kline, a fearless work made up entirely of archive material in which innocuous, familiar images of public or communal life are set in opposition to illicit sequences that delve into the realm of the private, the sexual, the calamitous, and the criminal. In every instance there appears to be a degree of heightened performance for the camera, as though appearing to be human is nearly always an act, regardless of context. Kavanagh’s is the angriest of the works included in the programme, its emotional register sits close to the surface. It is impossible to shake off the history of institutional abuse in the film’s use of archival material but what the film really seems to be kick against however is the notion that sexual desire, whatever shape it takes, is something shameful, something that needs to be hidden.

Dean frequently obscures his images or has objects pass in front of them so it comes to feel like we are looking through a keyhole, or peering from inside Dorothy Vallens’ closet¹. As with each of the works in this programme, he seems to be feeling around in the darkest recesses of what cinema can be. Cinema is rediscovered here as a more fully heterogeneous space, a space which “can contain all galaxies and forms of life, even ones we can sense but can’t fully comprehend” and the works shown here continue to make visible and engage cinema’s plastic nature, its wider worlds of possibility. Nothing is fixed or stable here and many of the works take a variety of forms, with aspects of HSP (161-170) likely to resurface again in Rashidi’s upcoming feature Trailers. Rashidi’s film feels like a form of archaeology, he returns to 35mm material as artefact, and what he uncovers there is a great realm of projected possibility, not only what the artefact is but the furthest realms of what the artefact could have been. Foregrounding discarded, depreciated or flea market-sourced media, collected and re-used without any sense of mawkishness or nostalgia, Rashidi produces a structuralism which transcends any impassive or non-emotive qualities associated with the genre.

Maximilian Le Cain and Vicky Langan’s collaboratively made Brine Twice Daily (which reads like a productive misunderstanding of Niall O’Flaherty’s ‘bathe twice daily’)² feels like another work that was discovered rather than conceived, its final shape as much of a surprise to the filmmakers as it is for the viewer. The film appears to announce itself as an exercise in transgression, but slowly reveals itself as a form of portraiture, a warmly felt love story – a platonic love story but a love story nonetheless- and like all great love stories, its joys are tempered by frustration and self-doubt, love as an act of self-immolation.

Moving beyond a purely conceptual realm, these films are what happens when experience is allowed to overtake expectation. This also rules out the possibility of failure as each film exists in an indeterminate state of becoming. They also retain their capacity to upset the continuum, to disrupt the seeming stability of our current condition and perhaps no film in the programme better captures that state of fragility than Atoosa Pour Hosseini’s Clandestine, in which the porous nature of analogue film is used to play with different moods, states and temporalities. Along with Rouzbeh’s work, Clandestine is the film that is perhaps most at one with existing in what seems to be some forgotten aspect of cinema’s projected futures. The onscreen space of Pour Hosseini’s film suggests a space-time that is continuous with our own but also altogether foreign. It directly evokes the many worlds of possibility cinema suggests, and through it the apparent solidity of our own existence is rendered fractious and plastic.

1. The closet that held Kyle Mc Lachlan in Blue Velvet
2. O’Flaherty was the front man for Sultans of Ping which is already a very purposeful bastardisation of Dire Straits ‘Sultans of Swing’.

Collectivism Part 2

this is an extract from a larger text about the three part Collectivism programme as a whole. To read the text on the first chapter in the programme please click here

In aemi’s second collectivism programme, comprising a wide-ranging selection of works all produced in the last decade, the collective materialises in a different form, re-situating the current limits and capacity of cinema as a political apparatus. The programme opens with Mountain Fire Personnel (2015) a film by Alex Tyson (b.1985), an American artist based in Los Angeles who works with video, film and sound. Mountain Fire Personnel, which screened on Vdrome last year accompanied by an interview led by Herb Shellenberger (see http://www.vdrome.org/tyson.html), is an experimental documentary describing the impacts of a 2013 wildfire in the San Jacinto Mountains in Southern California. While tackling very different subjects there is, in one respect at least, a conspicuous similarity in the approaches taken by Tyson and Negro. Although Mountain Fire Personnel includes Tyson’s own footage of California State Prisoners working alongside firemen around an Aerial Tramway station in Palm Springs, a good portion of the film is made up of material from numerous on-line and media sources- GoPro sequences from firefighters and paramedics, radio reports, satellite imagery, extracts from a tourist DVD and a great deal of amateur documentation shot and narrated by a medley of local citizens, a kind of crowd-sourced collectivism that has been adopted as a technique of sorts by artists engaged with the moving-image. While the footage Tyson acquires is not familiar to audiences in the way that the ten films that Negro uses are, it is striking that in amassing this material, he too is devising his own collective, a collective his film both absorbs and is absorbed within.

The idea of an event or a catastrophe generating a sense of community is compounded by the method Tyson employs in making the film – it builds up a multidimensional portrait of the event as it affects a much wider range of people and places than Tyson could have covered in working with his own footage exclusively. As he describes: ‘My footage was narrow in that it was only one snapshot of a particular area and timeframe. The other media helped illustrate the scale of the fire, which was huge (27,531 acres / 11,141 ha). All these different sources enabled me to organize the film chronologically and spatially beyond my own direct experience, and to construct something that appears linear with elements that are not. The found media was also more journalistic in nature compared to mine, which was strictly observational. So my editing approach became democratic. It felt like I was putting together a compilation of sorts—like one of those supercuts you come across while surfing YouTube.’¹

Tyson’s gathering of material to convey the magnitude of the fire acknowledges a useful tension between what can be achieved by a larger entity and the individual. Another important aspect of Mountain Fire Personnel that resonates here is Tyson’s own personal experience while making the film. He describes how he happened to arrive at the Aerial Tramway with a group of TV journalists and, being mistaken for one of them, is able to travel by cable car to the mountain station where firemen and State Prisoners have set up a makeshift camp while battling the fire. Long after the journalists leaves, Tyson stays on, befriending a couple of the prison guards, eating with them and filming this large group roaming the smoke-filled landscape and living together in close quarters. These sequences depict an enforced collective, a tight-knit group, out in the wild but under constant surveillance. They also capture Tyson’s more precarious position within this group, a position we can see from the lingering stares in the direction of the camera. The camera’s gaze is returned and we are viewed at least with curiosity if not suspicion.

Captivity is also at the centre of Iowa-based filmmaker Kelly Gallagher’s experimental cut-out animation Pen Up The Pigs (2014) in which she draws out connections between the history of slavery in America and present-day institutionalised racism and mass incarceration. Gallagher is interested in, as she describes, ‘exploring, or détourning ideas of feminine imagery and then subverting them with intense militancy’. Her films feature flowers, gunshots and glitter in equal exuberant abundance.² A surprising formal structure is discernible through Pen Up The Pigs, firstly in the way the film is divided into three acts but also in its use of sections from Paganini’s 24 Caprices for Solo Violin but this only serves to amp up the politics on display, politics that are explored through quotes and speeches given by pivotal figures from the Black Liberation Movement including Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, Fred Hampton and George Jackson.

In Africa I (2010), a silent black and white 11-minute film from filmmaker Shinkan Tamaki, we shift gears, moving from the explicitly political to the more perceptual and abstract. Here Tamaki, a member of the Japanese [+] collective – alongside Rei Hayama whose film Inaudible Footsteps (2015) follows on directly afterwards – seeks to ‘lead the audience’s perception to change naturally and sometimes drastically.’³ Shot on 16mm, Africa I is a study of movement made up of a four-second, irregularly edited loop of a slowly walking elephant. Focussing in entirely on the animal’s richly textured skin, the slow motion gradually becomes hypnotic in effect and the subject is transformed from the material to the epic. In Inaudible Footsteps, Rei Hayama considers the idea of aimlessness en masse by evoking the energy and urgency of a drove of horses on the run in short, analogous passages that, in every instance, resist both narrative and resolution.

The concept of a persistently elusive ending also pervades in Ana Vaz’ Sacris Pulso (2008), the closing work in the second programme. Against the soundtrack of a menacing pulse that echoes the footsteps in Hayama’s film, finality is always out of reach: empty, tenebrous passageways curve from left to right without leading us anywhere and the figure of an elegantly dressed woman is filmed from below never quite making it to the top of the set of steps she is climbing. As in Inaudible Footsteps, linearity is supplanted by something more cyclical and borrowing a diverse range of material, including extracts from the film Brasiliários (1985) and super 8mm home movie footage, Vaz, as Oana Chivoiu points out, ‘invites us to think about the relative and fragile boundaries between the personal and the collective, the private and the public, and ultimately the self and the other.’⁴ In dream-like passages of whispered prayer, amongst talk of a ‘landscape of insomnia’, Vaz considers the significance and peril of a deeply receptive collective memory.

1. Tyson, Alex in conversation with Herb Schellenberger, Vdrome, 2015, http://www.vdrome.org/tyson.html
2. Gallagher, Kelly in conversation with Kelsey Velez, Incite!, published Dec 18th, 2015, http://www.incite-online.net/gallagher.html
3. Tamaki, Shinkan, http://shinkantamaki.net/about/
4. Chivoiu, Oana, Toward an Aesthetic of Displacement in Ana Vaz’ Sacris Pulso, Cinémathèque Annotations on Film, Issue 68, September 2013, http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/cteq/toward-an-aesthetic-of-displacement-in-ana-vazs-sacris-pulso/