Following on from a late night screening of psychedelic experimental shorts at last year’s festival this programme looks at three key figures from three different generations all innovating approaches to the film form.
Mary Helena Clark makes trance-like explorations that are closely attuned to the specific properties of film. Peter Tscherkassky is a darkroom based filmmaker relying on optical printers to create dizzying explorations of genre and history. Paul Sharits is a towering figure occasionally bypassing the image altogether for a cinema of pure affect.
FILM INFO:
Paul Sharits, Ray Gun Virus, 1966, U.S.A., 14 minutes
Mary Helena Clark, Sound Over Water, 2009, U.S.A., 6 minutes
Peter Tscherkassky, L’Arrivée, 1998, Austria, 3 minutes
Paul Sharits, PIECE MANDALA/END WAR, 1966, U.S.A., 5 minutes
Peter Tscherkassky, Outer Space, 1999, Austria, 10 minutes
Mary Helena Clark, The Dragon is the Frame, 2014, U.S.A., 15 minutes
Total running time: 53 minutes
Paul Sharits / Ray Gun Virus / 1966 / 16mm / 14 mins
“RAY GUN VIRUS is a work in which no images appear yet one can get pure identity on film. … projected film itself makes the viewer aware of where he stands. RAY GUN VIRUS is not so-called ‘Psychedelic Cinema’ but even more and goes beyond it through Sharits’ bright clarification of the media.” – Takahiko Iimura
Mary Helena Clark / Sound Over Water / 2009 / 16mm / 6 mins
Blue sky and blue sea meet on emulsion.
Peter Tscherkassky / L’Arrivée / 1998 / 16mm / 3 mins
White screen. Tabula rasa. Panavision. L’ARRIVÉE, like the pure light of the projection, like the white of the surface awaiting the director’s imprint, illuminates the viewer.
Paul Sharits / PIECE MANDALA / END WAR / 1966 / 16mm / 5 mins
Blank color frequencies space out and optically feed into black and white images of one lovemaking act which is seen simultaneously from both sides of its space and both ends of its time.
Peter Tscherkassky / Outer Space / 1999 / 16mm / 10 mins
A young woman, night, an American feature film. She enters a house, a dark corridor, a thriller. While she forces her way into an unknown space together with the viewer, the cinematographic image-producing processes go off the rails. The rooms telescope into each other, become blurred, while the crackling of the cuts and the background noise – the sound of the film material itself – becomes louder and more penetrating.
Mary Helena Clark / The Dragon is the Frame / 2014 / 16mm / 14 mins
An experimental detective film made in remembrance: keeping a diary, footnotes of film history, and the puzzle of depression.
BIOS
MARY HELENA CLARK
Mary Helena Clark is an artist and filmmaker based in Queens, New York. Mary Helena CLARK (1983, USA) makes films and videos in which she explores narrative figures of speech, the materiality of film and the painting technique trompe l’oeil. She aims to make trance-like, transparent films. Clark’s work has been screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Wexner Art Center and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.
PAUL SHARITS
Trained as a graphic artist and a painter, Paul Sharits became an avant-garde filmmaker noted for manipulating the film stock itself to create a variety of fascinating, abstract light and colorplays when projected on the screen. Fans hail the effects hallucinogenic, while his detractors find them garish. Sharits is also known for establishing experimental film groups at prominent universities, including one at the University of Indiana where he studied. He later taught and developed an undergraduate film program at Antioch College. Between 1973 and 1992, Sharits taught at the Center for Media Study at the State University of New York. His films can be seen in various U.S. and European museums, film centers, and libraries.
PETER TSCHERKASSKY
Tscherkassky was born in 1958 in Vienna. From 1977 to 1979, he studied journalism and political science at the University of Vienna. In January 1978 he attended a five-day lecture series by P. Adams Sitney at the Austrian Film Museum : this was his first encounter with avant-garde film. In 1979, he began studying philosophy at the Free University Berlin and at the University of Vienna. He then acquired a Super-8 equipment and in December 1979, started the shooting of ‘Kreuzritter’. He would go to the cinema “Arsenal“ for the weekly program, usually compiled by Alf Bold. At the same time, he was keen on music of the 20th century (John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, John Zorn and many others), and especially in contemporary electronic music (Pierre Henry, Bernard Parmegiani, Michel Chion, etc.). In 1982 he became a founding member of the newly constituted Austria Filmmakers Cooperative, and resigned in 1993. In 1985/1986 he wrote the dissertation “Film + Art: Toward a Critical Aesthetics of Cinematography” at the Vienna Institute of Philosophy. He was awarded a PhD in philosophy in 1986. In May 2002 the CinemaScope trilogy is presented at the Cannes Film Festival in the series “Quinzaine des réalisateurs”. In parallel, he started in 1984 a curatorial work with presentation of the two-part program “überBlick – Super-8-Filme aus Österreich” at Kutscherhaus, Berlin. From 1987 to 1991 he curated programs and retrospectives of Austrian avant-garde film in Berlin, Lucerne, Lisbon, Karlsruhe, Skövde (Sweden), Hannover, Strasbourg, Budapest, Warsaw and Kremsir (CSFR). He conceived and curated with Martin Arnold in 1990 the symposium and festival “Im Off der Geschichte” at the Stadtkino Wien (avant-garde films from the UK, Germany and Austria) and in 1993, the retrospective “Austrian Avant-Garde Film from Kubelka to the Present“ in Berlin, among other exhibitions. He edited the book “Peter Kubelka” with Gabriele Jutz in 1995. From 1989 to 2002, he taught artistic filmmaking at the Linz University of Arts and Industrial Design. Since 1998 he teaches “Audiovisual Communication/Film” at the Vienna University of Applied Art. The common point of his diverse production dwells in the structural critic of the conventions that rule narrative cinema.
