The cinema of Galician director Lois Patiño is characterised by a desire to elicit a transformative response from his audience. From his experimental documentary Coast of Death (2013) and its follow-up Red Moon Tide (2020) to his short films like The Sower of Stars (2022), Patiño manipulates cinematic language by using techniques like distancing and deceleration to reframe the landscape as a sublime force. His latest work Samsara - its title a reference to the Buddhist cycle of death and reincarnation - takes this approach to new, uncharted territories. The film opens in the temples of Luang Prabang in Laos, where a young man reads the Bardo Thodol (also known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead) to an elderly woman. Patiño then dramatises the transmigration of her soul from Laos, into the body of a newborn goat in Tanzania with a daring 15-minute interlude, in which he invites the viewer to join him on a voyage through the afterlife.

On behalf of ALT/KINO, Patrick Gamble spoke to Patiño about Samsara, his fascination with the afterlife, and his search for new, sensorial experiences.

ALT/KINO: There’s a moment in the middle of Samsara where you ask the audience to close their eyes and submit to a succession of pulsating lights and disorientating sounds. Where did the idea for this sequence come from?

Lois Patiño: I’m always looking for different ways to reflect the invisible in cinema. I come from a contemporary art background and both my parents are painters, so I’ve always approached cinema as an art form where you can be innovative. When I make films the first thing I do is decide what element of cinematic language I can use to help me bring a different experience to the viewer, then one day I had this idea about making a film you could watch with your eyes closed. I knew I didn’t want to make an experimental film, I thought the strength of this idea would be to situate it within a narrative, but I wasn’t sure how. Then I discovered the Bardo Thodol and realised I could use this idea to depict the Buddhist concept of reincarnation. I’ve always been interested in how different cultures view the afterlife, so it felt like the perfect fit.

A/K: Was there anything in particular that inspired you when constructing this sequence?

LP: There’s this American artist called James Turrell whose work I admire. He makes these immersive environments using light and space. There’s this one piece I saw of his called Breathing Light which I loved. When you watch it, it feels like the light is actually breathing. It would fade in and out, as if it was inhaling and exhaling. I was also influenced by a sound artist called Francisco López. He had a piece in Madrid, where he gave the audience a mask that forced them to focus on the sounds he had created. Then of course there’s Derek Jarman’s Blue, and Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine which was described as the first art object to be seen with the eyes closed. It was basically this lamp with holes in it that produced a flickering sensation. I wanted to create something that felt like a combination of these pieces. An immersive sound and light experience. Some people have said to me that they didn’t feel comfortable closing their eyes during this sequence, but I like this contradiction of having an introspective experience in a room full of strangers. It’s a kind of collective meditation, but in the cinema.

A/K: I liked how your use of drones in the afterlife sequence evoke everything from religious ceremonies to the rushing of maternal blood in the womb. Could you tell us a little bit about how you approached the sound design for the film?

LP: For the Bardo sequence I asked my sound designer Xabier Erkizia - this amazing artist and sound theorist - to divide the experience into two parts. For the first, we more or less followed the sounds described in the Bardo Thodol; so, you hear storms, wind and thunder. I wanted to create a physical experience, and really liked the vibrations created by these repetitive sounds. Then for the second part I asked him to introduce sounds that evoke images from different parts of the world. If you listen closely, you can hear a conversation between a young Italian girl and her grandfather, and a woman cooking in Timor, speaking in a lost language. Basically, Xabier hid all these sounds he’d collected throughout his career into the mix, then we used 5.1 surround sound, to make them emerge from different corners of the theatre. I wanted it to sound as if all these places were trying to tempt the soul to come and reincarnate there.

A/K: Your two previous feature films, Coast of Death and Red Moon Tide both focused on the coastal landscape of Galicia, where you’re from, but with Samara you shot in the temples of Luang Prabang in Laos and Zanzibar in Tanzania. Were you ever worried about misrepresenting these communities?

LP: Of course. As a white European man, it’s important that I try and understand these cultures as best as I can. So, we consulted with lots of different people and tried to keep the dialogue as natural as possible by allowing a lot of improvisation. However, I also think it’s important that our cinema screens aren’t monopolised by Western stories and that we try to preserve different ways of living throughout the world. With this film I wanted to celebrate the diversity of our world and allow the audience to experience it from different perspectives.

A/K: Another interesting aspect of the film is that you used two different directors of photography to shoot the sections in Laos and Tanzania. Mauro Herce and filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland. Could you tell us a little bit more about that decision?

LP: Well, since the film speaks about reincarnation, I knew that the perspective needed to change. I’m friends with both Mauro and Jessica, and since women aren’t allowed in the temples in Laos, Mauro had to shoot the first section. However, I always wanted Jessica for the second half because we arrive in Zanzibar after this ethereal middle section, and I wanted this part of the film to feel more tangible. This is the first film Jessica has shot for someone else, but if you’ve watched her films you’ll know that they’re very tactile. They often focus on hands and surfaces, plus she loves animals! So, she was perfect.

A/K: Talking of animals, why did you choose a baby goat as the site for the soul to reincarnate?

LP: [Laughs] It was a decision I made very early on. I Knew I wanted to change the perspective radically from the first half, and that this point of view should be an innocent one. I chose a goat as I thought it reflected my distance from this community, but also because I wanted the audience to consider the way we treat animals, and to think about how animals experience the world around us. For me this is not a film about Laos, or Tanzania it’s about something else, something that sits between these two cultures.

Samsara is now in UK cinemas courtesy of Curzon and available via Curzon Home Cinema.

Patrick Gamble is a writer on film and culture, whose work has featured on Hyperallergic, BFI, Calvert Journal and Kinoscope. Further links to his writing can be found at patrickgamble.contently.com.

Originally published on ALT/KINO on 26 January, 2024.

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When Daniel Kasman covered the Locarno Festival on Notebook in 2017 he hit upon a great way of engaging with standout work. In his introduction, he explained that he would be “looking for specific images, moments, techniques, qualities or scenes…that grabbed me and have lingered past and beyond the next movie seen, whose characters, story and images have already begun to overwrite those that came just before.” This seemed like a great way to engage with the creative work in a milieu like a festival - to concentrate on that which lingers rather than attempting to highlight everything. As such, we’ve shamelessly pilfered this very technique for the ALT/KINO festival reports.

On this occasion, Patrick Gamble went in search of memorable ideas and moments from this year’s edition of 25FPS.

The hidden meaning of wet dreams in Rushnan Jaleel’s The Angel of Forms.

An attempt to chart the dreams of the mythological water nymph Ondine, Rushnan Jaleel’s debut is a mesmerising collage of aqueous images. Composed of nocturnal shots of water sourced from various locations, the film is almost entirely consumed by dark negative spaces, with the viewer’s eye drawn to the few salient bursts of colour that seep into the frame. Sounds, images, faces, thoughts, ghostly landscapes are all reflected on the water’s surface, and the viewer is always on the hunt to rescue them from falling into oblivion. An aquatic pareidolia, The Angel of Forms makes for a profound viewing experience, but relies entirely on the viewer’s willingness to dive into their subconscious and confront what’s lurking below the surface.

The architecture of grief in Brecht De Cock’s artifacts of you, artifacts of me.

In Brecht De Cock’s expanded animation, grief becomes a house with no windows or doors and no way of turning back the clock. Created in response to the sudden and unexpected loss of his father, De Cock uses a combination of photogrammetry, 3D animation, live-action footage and digital effects to bring to life the memories of that evening, and how it felt returning to his childhood home. The result is an intensely personal film that feels like a horror movie with all the horror drained from it. A nightmarish scenario transformed into a dreamlike mist of images, De Cock ultimately fails to re-animate the night his father died with any form of clarity, but in the process he has created a poignant portrait of the intrusive waves of thought that sweep in out of nowhere when you lose a loved one.

The human desire to leave a mark in Siegfried A. Fruhauf’s Cave Painting.

As far as we know, humans are the only species on the planet who feel the need to accumulate memory outside their brains. From cave paintings to cinema, art has long been used as a way to observe, remember and to say; “I exist”. This desire to leave a mark on the world is explored in Siegfried Fruhauf’s latest, a mesmerising spelunking expedition through time; taking the audience from the dawn of human self-consciousness to the death of celluloid. There’s a peculiar magic to Fruhauf’s work, and the way he stitches images of cave paintings together to create the illusion of movement has an incantatory effect; no more so than when we see the first outline of a human hand. The scientist Jacob Bronowski believes that these handprints were an attempt by our ancestors to say “’This is my mark. This is man,” and when the first of these human hands emerges from the screen it feels like witnessing the precise moment the modern human mind was born

Capitalist realism in Total Refusal’s Hardly Working.

An ethnographic exploration of the working lives of NPCs (non-player characters) in the 2018 Western game Red Dead Redemption 2, Total Refusal’s latest work explores the corrupt mechanics of capitalism by revealing the extent to which attitudes to work have become ingrained in our culture. From a carpenter who hammers over 100 nails into the same pier across an 11-hour workday, to the street sweeper who meticulously brushes the same stretch of path, the film depicts how the relentless rhythms and mind-crushingly repetitive nature of work have been replicated in the games we play, with these NPCs trapped in an infinite loop of labour performance. By revealing how games like Red Dead Redemption reinforce the basic capitalist method of production and exchange, Hardly Working demonstrates how work has become a tool for maintaining social order. However, the film offers a glimmer of hope through the often unintentionally funny glitches that occur in open world games, and hints at how idleness could become a new form of rebellion.

The absence of images in Abigail He’s Measuring 500 Feet.

A 14 minute film, consisting of a single reel of blank celluloid unspooling until it reaches its final frame, Abigail He’s Measuring 500 Feet initially feels like some kind of cruel prank. Indeed, if it wasn’t for the sound of the projector whirling in the background, you’d be mistaken for thinking that an error had occurred. However, He’s work often explores the interchangeable relationships between presence and absence and the film’s lack of images is intentional. Engaging with the mechanics of cinema, the sound of the film running past the projector’s bulb makes it feel like being in an elevator slowly descending down a mineshaft towards the centre of the Earth and, as we sit in the dark we’re forced to reconsider our perception of cinema and reflect on the significance of the images we are shown. When we reach the conclusion of the reel and find ourselves presented with the piercing light of the projector it’s hard not to think about Hollis Frampton’s performance piece ‘A Lecture,’ in which the avant-garde filmmaker explored the conflict between representation and illumination. During the performance, Frampton describes the white rectangle of light offered by the projector as “containing everything”, with He’s latest ultimately an opportunity to ponder not what cinema represents, but what it chooses to exclude.

How to construct a fairer household in Jessi Ali Lin and Hsin-Yu Chen’s Semiotics of the Home

Completed as part of a series of video projects at RAIR Philly, a non-profit arts organisation situated within a construction and demolition recycling centre in northeast Philadelphia, Jessi Ali Lin and Hsin-Yu Chen’s Semiotics of the Home is a light-hearted play on Martha Rosler’s ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen’. In 1975, Rosler set out to critique the commodification of traditional female roles in modern society with a parody of television cooking shows, but instead of taking centre stage themselves, the pair film construction machinery as it performs domestic chores like cooking, cleaning and hoovering. Some of these performances are genuinely funny, like a forklift truck ironing a shirt or a bulldozer listening to music. Meanwhile others, like the cracking of eggs by an excavator are fuelled by an unspoken rage. Reframing the domestic space by turning their camera on the machines used to construct it, the pair cleverly draw attention to the gendered nature of domestic work and encourage us to reconsider the invisible labour that occurs in the spaces we call home.

Staring at the sun in Yannick Mosimann’s Sunspots

As children, we’re taught to never stare directly at the sun, but that’s almost impossible in Yannick Mosimann’s latest. We observe as 16mm shots of the solar surface interact with images of the earth below to create an otherworldly landscape. These effigies of a dying sun, overlapping images of a burning planet, shot on eroding film stock are accompanied by the roar of volcanoes and sounds recorded by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). In fact, Sunspots feels as much like an act of scientific inquiry as it does an intricately choreographed attempt to draw out the Earth’s poetic force, with these sounds conjuring everything about the landscape that is beyond our visual perception. Taking an interplanetary perspective of the present and inviting us to question the ethics that drive our current moment, Sunspots goes some way to recreating the ineffable condition of living in a time in which apocalyptic precarity feels inevitable.

The 2023 edition of 25FPS ran from 27-30 September

Patrick Gamble is a writer on film and culture, whose work has featured on Hyperallergic, BFI, Calvert Journal and Kinoscope. Further links to his writing can be found at patrickgamble.contently.com.

Originally published on ALT/KINO on 24 November, 2023.

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Edwin Rostron has been creating and sharing striking experimental animations for well over two decades now. Not only has he brought exceptional animated moving image work to screens as the mind behind Edge of Frame, but his own treasure trove of films is filled with mesmeric formulations and unforgettable imagery. Films like Visions of the Invertebrate (2011), Our Selves Unknown (2014), and The Asphodel Phases (2013-19) have screened internationally from Ann Arbor to Helsinki, from Barcelona to Montreal.

On the occasion of a joint exhibition called I’m Here But I’m Not a Cat, organised in collaboration with Daniel & Clara, Adonia Bouchehri, and Duncan Poulton, ALT/KINO sat down with Edwin to discuss his work.

ALT/KINO: I’m keen to hear from each of you about the concept for this exhibition. Perhaps, folding in a bit of background about your own practice, could you speak about why this idea was interesting to you, and how the notion of going beyond on-screen work is giving you something different?

Edwin Rostron: I think the idea for the exhibition came out of realising, as a group, that although our practices are quite different in many ways, there are also significant things that connect us - particularly at this time. This seems to centre on expanding our moving image practices into more physical works. I’ve directed my work towards animation for quite a long time. Since I started making animations, which was over 25 years ago, it’s been like a place for me to put all my work in drawing, collage, or other media. Partly of course because I was excited by the form and partly, I guess, because screening films is more straightforward than showing work in exhibitions, and I was really mainly concerned with making rather than showing. Then around 2017-18 it started to feel increasingly arbitrary to just do that - to have everything end up only as a short film. I started to think about showing my animation alongside my drawings and paintings to reframe the context for my animation work. And around the same time we started the discussions which ultimately led to this exhibition. I have shown work in a few exhibitions over the years but I had my first solo exhibition last year [at Deptford Contemporary], where I showed a lot of drawings and paintings alongside some animation, and which I approached with a lot more focus. The experience of putting it all together and conversations around it all really clarified that, for me, the way I exhibit my work is really another stage of making it.

A/K: Has this different way you’re now thinking about the endpoint of your work had a noticeable impact on your practice. Do you think it’s changed your process?

ER: Even before the pandemic I remember thinking that it felt increasingly futile to only send stuff to festivals, that I was never going to find that completely satisfying. I think that connects to starting to make more paintings and drawings, but I also just really wanted to develop my painting more anyway. To me animation feels like a space where there is still lots of new and interesting stuff you could do - not that I’m necessarily doing it! - but for a long time painting seemed overwhelming, maybe too difficult to even broach, because of the whole history of painting, and my lack of knowledge and ability just seemed abundantly obvious. With animation, I was like: “It’s worth a try... I can have a go.” I felt less like that with painting, more inhibited. And it’s not like that’s really changed completely now, but it’s more like I feel like I can try and find my own way with it, which maybe I didn’t before. Maybe I can embrace the failure more easily too! And after making animations for 25 years, it was also just really appealing for me to try and do something new. I had ‘used paint’ in several films and painted into my drawings on paper quite a bit too, but the big thing for me was moving to painting on board - and making a painting that is primarily ‘a painting’, not something that might always be an ingredient in a film. It seems like quite a simple shift, but for me it’s quite a different mindset. Maybe when you paint for an animation you are really actually animating - or filmmaking - rather than ‘painting’? I guess there aren’t such clear boundaries between these things. But as soon as I started painting for no other reason than to make a painting, I realised what a totally different process it is to animation, but also even to drawing. It’s just very compelling as a process too, and with a new medium you make quite dramatic leaps or shifts quite frequently, and you progress in a very different way to when you’ve been doing something for 20-odd years. More fraught but more exciting maybe!

A/K: Coming on to the exhibition, then, I wanted to ask you about some of the work that you’re showing. One of the things that really struck me upon seeing your paintings was the figures and faces. They’re motifs that are hugely prevalent across your work - your short films often feature faces. I wondered if you could just speak a little bit about what you find interesting in doing them and also, maybe, whether you’ve approached them differently in the context of these paintings as opposed to your line drawn compositions for animation.

ER: I always drew a lot as a child - drawing was always a big part of my life and I have just tried to carry on doing it as much as I can. I suppose I’ve always drawn in a more automatic, playful, doodley kind of way than ‘proper’ observational drawing, and instinctively and somewhat predictably I have always drawn faces and figures as a starting point, moving to abstract or deface or embellish them as I go on. I guess faces are an obvious thing that just come out for many people when they draw. It’s a kind of compulsive thing for me, and I have tried to stop myself from doing it, because I’m aware it can seem a bit obvious and limited. But that doesn’t usually work so on the whole I try to embrace it, or at least accept it. I guess when I started painting, I primarily wanted to develop and progress my painting first and foremost, so I just went with the subject that came out most naturally - heads and faces - as a basic structure that I didn’t have to think about. I thought maybe let’s just really overdo it and try to get it out my system - but I’m still working on that.

I would say, they’re not based on anybody else. I don’t think they’re to do with other people. I can call them portraits, but they’re not really portraits of any real people. I think they are much more to do with me and the moment that I do them in. An expression of something, some energy or whatever unconscious things are going on in and around me. For me, the face is just a kind of template form, something to start from, but the thing that I always find really bizarre and interesting is that the difference between a line of one angle or another, or a colour in a certain place, when you’re doing a face, is the difference between one complete identity and another. They do seem to have specific identities, to me. I guess I want them to have presence. So, that weird jump between it being abstract and something that you can connect with in the most direct way - there’s nothing that you connect with more than a face, really - is endlessly interesting to me.

A/K: But there are also these other tree forms in the exhibition’s paintings, right?

ER: Yes, after having continued with these faces - which I think I may be doomed to always do - I was looking for other forms that felt as instinctive and engaging as a face. For quite a while I did paintings of grids, which worked well, because it was like nothing and everything - as with a face - completely meaningless and yet there’s the potential to have all the meaning you could possibly want within it. Then I struck upon this other form, which was like a tree, but also an explosion. I went to the recent Cezanne exhibition at the Tate, and I think I engaged with his work in a completely different way than I may have once done because I had started painting quite a lot myself. I saw this particular painting of a bouquet of flowers [Grand Bouquet of Flowers, c.1892–5], and it had quite a big effect on me. It did hit me like an explosion and it kind of looked like one too. Later I was messing about in the studio and had got a postcard of the painting. I just sort of took the line structure from within the painting and started to use that as a basic form. Then I just got really into it; the initial excitement of seeing the painting was still in me, and the actual shape just started to work - to get me into some new interesting places.

A/K: You mentioned automatic drawing a moment ago and that is what your animations often feel like. Do you think that fundamental desire to, as it were, let the drawing reveal itself is the reason that you are attracted to geometric patterns and these visual templates?

ER: Exactly, yes. Like painting a grid, my drawn geometric animations are kind of meaningless and yet you find all sorts of connections or ways of thinking about them that come and go as you work - but it’s completely fluid - like the animations end up being themselves. I guess it’s important to me that they stay open - for me as I’m working and then in the end for the viewer. Making them, you have to be engaged and so you may temporarily assign lots of meaning to certain things, but it never really holds. It’s just this thing that ultimately resists being about anything fixed. Within the animations it becomes about the movement or the animation itself, some aspect of the process in motion. In the painting, it becomes about something other than just the subject. I suppose it’s about having a kind of living feeling about it, some kind of autonomous life of its own. I think there’s a connection between reducing my materials - to just a pencil, or just markers, or whatever - and reducing my subject to just a face or just a grid. It stops you making decisions, or choices, in a way that totally allows you to let go and get to something else. You’re not thinking about the thing as a thing. You’re able to let whatever energy is inside you at that moment, and wants to come out through your work, happen. It’s sort of a convenient structure, really; the more you’ve got to, like, decide things consciously, the harder it is to let that happen.

A/K: I’ve heard you mention before how you use the thinness of the cheap paper, and the resulting seeping through of marker ink, as part of your method. Obviously, we think of automatic drawing as producing a still image - we think of letting your hand do its own thing. Can you speak a little bit about the process of automatic animating?

ER: Yeah, sure. Normally, if I’m working with hand-drawn animation, I’m re-tracing the previous drawing, but bit by bit changing it into another position or shape. My work is fundamentally improvisational so I am usually not entirely sure where it’s going more than a few seconds ahead but usually I do have a small step ahead in mind. At some point I wondered what would happen if I were to let the drawing find its own direction and shape over time, by just re-tracing with no conscious intention, no end shape or position at all. I wondered if an overall direction would emerge, and what new shapes would form? This resulted in a different kind of end result, and some of my recent work oscillates between this aimless, hovering metamorphosis, and the more guided changes from one form into another distinct form. A lot of my creative practice is to do with levels of control, and losing control. With automatic drawing it’s the same thing; you’re drawing a line but then you might let it go somewhere else, then you might do something wild, you don’t know what’s going to happen next and you must deal with that and make sense of it. The same with painting to an extent. It’s like a game where you’re just constantly setting up problems for yourself to deal with and create the next problem. And then in an animation the film itself can show this actually happening.

With most of my drawn animations I’ve used a light box, tracing from one piece of paper to another over the top. During the pandemic, I was making many tiny micro animations, which became my film Fragments. One of those longer fragments is where I started this ink-bleeding thing. I’d been drawing and painting on these cheap A6 pads with really thin, smooth plain paper. There’s something about this paper that just works really, really well for me - whatever pens or paint I’m using. I think it’s partly because - psychologically - they’re the same pads that I have things like shopping lists and random notes on, so the stakes are very low. The pads seem just like part of my everyday life rather than existing in some separate ‘art’ zone. Anyway, I noticed that when I used certain marker pens on them, it would bleed through to the next sheet, so on the next page you get this kind of reference mark of the previous thing, cutting out the need for a light box. It was just a way of animating that I’d not come across before. You can just animate with the notebook and pen - a limitation of means which inherently attracts me. Also, the ink creates this kind of smudging effect because each drawing has the ink bleed from the previous drawing on it which I like as well.

A/K: The last thing I want to ask you about - which comes to mind because I love the way you use it to upset the linear temporality of Jam Sandwich, which is part of the exhibition - are loops and repetitions, which are forms that recur across your animation work.

ER: I think there’s a few things on that topic. For a while I have been exploring quicker ways of making animation. For a long time I was only making drawn animations, usually with 12 separate drawings for each second of the entire film. Obviously, that just takes a very, very long time to do. If that’s the way you want to work - and sometimes it is the way I want to work, it can be extremely rewarding in many ways - that’s great. But I wanted to make more work, I wanted to make quicker more spontaneous work, and partly as a result I got into this new way of working using my phone as a camera; and just using a few images - often one or two - and activating them in different ways through the camera and editing to create a sense of movement - animation - from the most minimal of ingredients. It was spontaneous, and physical, and raw and so quick that I could make them before I even knew I had made them - which is like the way I draw. To get it out before you can even think about it. I guess then the looping repetition comes from trying to just hold those tiny sequences on screen for a while. To me they seem to be somewhere in between a film and a still image - like movement and stasis at the same time. These works, which form most of my film Fragments, then started to affect the way I was thinking about the earlier more traditional kind of drawn animation I was doing, and so ideas of loops, shorter works and repetition started to feed into that way of working too, as in the three screen piece Jam Sandwich in this show.

This piece is an experiment in making drawn animation specifically for a gallery context, so it’s meant to be part of an environment - on small screens on the wall with my paintings, and amongst other works by other people - not the only thing going on in the space. I also wanted them to have the feeling of being continuous and ongoing, and the looping is integral to that; always changing yet always the same somehow. The three animations are also based around recurring heads and faces, alternating with abstract compositions, which meander in and out of each other. They are completely improvised and utilise the ‘automatic’ animation approach we discussed earlier a bit too, but in order to make them continuously loop I did then have to ‘consciously’ bring the final drawings back to match the original one. I haven’t done the best job of making them loop, and perhaps that’s partly because of my instinctive feelings about a lot of animation being quite slick these days. But also I think that animating for a long time has also made me particularly interested in the idea of discontinuity too. I do feel like the flaws in my work are central somehow - the way the animations speed up, slow down, jar slightly - gives them their own particular life and personality that is completely specific to themselves.

I’m Here But I’m Not a Cat runs from 22 Sep - 1 Oct at SET Kensington.

Screenings of moving image work by the artists take place at Close-Up Film Centre on 23 September.

We have also conducted interviews with Adonia Bouchehri, Daniel & Clara, and Duncan Poulton.

Originally published on ALT/KINO on 15 October, 2023.

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Duncan Poulton’s process is one often defined by using a vast archive of material to create vibrant collages – in both still and moving image form – that wrestle with the complexities and contradictions of contemporary digital life. His solo debut exhibition, Factory Reset, took place at SET Lewisham in 2022 and he has elsewhere seen work presented and screened around the UK as well as in the USA, Germany, and Southeast Asia.

On the occasion of a joint exhibition called I’m Here But I’m Not a Cat, organized in collaboration with Daniel & Clara, Adonia Bouchehri, and Edwin Rostron, ALT/KINO sat down with Duncan to discuss his work.

ALT/KINO: What was the driver behind this exhibition, for you? This idea of moving beyond screen-based work is interesting and I’d be intrigued to hear your thoughts on the genesis of the exhibition and why it appealed?

Duncan Poulton: So, I think the others formulated it in their minds because they’d been chatting on Zoom from 2020. I knew them all separately and Adonia came to a solo show that I had at in London in 2022 and said they felt like I’d be a good person to be in the mix for this upcoming show. That solo show was called Factory Reset and was a lot about the interplay with screens; it was looking at moments where you’re haunted by technology. For instance, during peak lockdown I was having nightmares that I was still on Zoom when I was in bed, or I saw my friend mistake a notepad for an iPad and was trying to use touch screen on a piece of paper. They were these moments where your behaviour is a response to the fact that you’re so saturated by technology, like a form of muscle memory or Pavlovian response. For a while I’ve been thinking of I’m Here But I’m Not a Cat as being about our relationship with technology, but the work we include in it is not “techie” work per se. I’ve always had an uneasiness about this, as I feel I sit somewhere between different disciplines like photography, painting, new media, and perhaps don’t feel at home in any of them. I make work that is kind of about technology, but it’s just the context, the background; I’ve accepted that this is the world I live within - this hyper-saturation, overload visual culture, an evaporation of the truth of digital images. I don’t like harping on about those things because I can feel like I talk about it too much [laughs]... and that everyone probably knows already - or maybe they don’t think about it as much as me. Anyway, I take all of that as a given and then I’m trying to make something more felt. I have this very habitual gathering - “e-hoarding” practice, as I call it - where I’m just hoovering up all this material from the internet, from charity shops, from car boot sales. It all goes into my archive and then I allow myself to improvise within that. The approach I take to making still collage works is quite painterly - fragments, offcuts and samples from this found material enter the work in a way a painter might dip their brush into a particular colour. So, to answer the question, I suppose the theme of the show is this interplay between being stuck in a screen-based existence and going out and being able to make and experience stuff, and this inseparable looping between those two states. The works I’m showing display this more intuitive sensibility, a tactility and play with a range of digital materials. Quite a few of them include digital painting techniques within them, scans of paper objects and traces of other forms of mark-making like graffiti. There is always this elusive, illusory trompe l’oeil confusion - confusing the viewer. But this set of works have a more tactile, archival feeling, as if they’re made from real material objects.

A/K: Can you explain a little bit about your “e-hoarding” practice?

DP: I suppose the whole “e-hoarding” thing started when I was on my BA at Brighton. I was trying to buy a camcorder, and I’m very indecisive, so I was looking at a lot of reviews which led me to this online subgenre of unboxing videos on YouTube. At the same time, I was also watching quite a few older appropriation filmmakers and was at a fork in the road where I could try re-cutting old cinema - like quite a lot of people had already done - or go down this YouTube rabbit hole of unboxing videos. I ended up doing that, and it was, kind of, the origin of this creative period. From then on, I got quite obsessed with this notion of the hyper-contemporary, the internet as a repository of mostly banal, unseen things. It felt like really fertile ground, something to respond to. The foundation of everything I do is this collecting. During lockdown it got pretty crazy in terms of the number of files I was saving - when life was nearly all online - but since I’ve been able to go out again, it’s been more paper and scanned materials and objects. I guess it’s almost like I’ve made my own internet, through this archive, by gathering things from 2015 until now. It’s around 40,000 image files within that archive, now - plus however many found footage and sound clips I’ve amassed. It’s gone on for that long at this point, it’s become this self-portrait in the form of storage, where I find that things quite often recur – things that seem really obscure but I’ll realise I’d made the same search before, 2 years previous or something. So as much as I try to escape my ‘filter bubble’ or the confines of my personal algorithm profile, its there to be seen, amongst these disparate files.

A/K: Are you ever collecting with intention - in the sense that you’re aiming towards something with the images and collecting with that end product already in mind - or do you collect and then find connections within the archive?

DP: I think the latter, really. I’ll generally have found some image or piece of footage that’s sticking in my head and that will act as an anchor point. So, with the still images, I’ll throw that into Photoshop and then just start letting other things from the archive be magnetised towards that image. Quite often I’ll be working at night and have been working on the same images for hours - and that anchor will then depart, and it might sow the seeds of two other works that I then work on simultaneously. So, I’m trying to let these subconscious imaginative processes occur - I’m not normally thinking “right, I need a beach ball for this,” it’s getting into this strange flow state in the wee hours of the night and letting accidents occur. Things tend to come together just at the point they’re seeming to collapse or be going nowhere.

A/K: It’s interesting to hear you describe a flow state in the context of a practice in which you’re wrangling such a huge archive of material. Are you dipping back into the archive for specific things you feel that you need? How is that working?

DP: Well, I’m two-screening [laughs]. I’ve got my archive up on the big screen and the edit on the laptop screen - so everything is always present at the same time. Quite often I’m heavily editing one single image, because I’m interested in how far I can go with it - erasing it, inverting it, filtering, stuff like that. I’m poking at the limits of the image, stretching it and pulling it apart. Then, when I get bored of doing that, I’ll start scrolling again and drop in, maybe, five other images. Especially in the works that will be in this show there’s a lot of very quick and aggressive erasing of images, often using the magic wand tool on Photoshop which picks up lots of similar colours but it will leave these horrible, blocky edges and digital artefacts. I tend to keep those imperfections in, to retain the aggression of the decision-making. How do I know when to stop? Usually when I have to go to bed [laughs].

A/K: You mentioned it briefly earlier, but I wandered if you could give a bit of context regarding your feelings about digital culture - oversaturated media landscapes, the non-existent truth of images. I’m interested particularly in how those feelings feed into the work that you’re making.

DP: Yeah, sure. I suppose, even since starting that method of working in 2015, the landscape has changed so much. I’m quite drawn to this notion of the last person to know everything. I think there’s a book called that, about the polymath Thomas Young. But just thinking about that in relation to today, and the total impossibility of even comprehending all the world’s uploads in one hour - it’s so exponential. I think my works give you something like the intense feeling of that disorientation and conflation of many different things, textures, and ideas - that it’s impossible to live in the contemporary world without. I feel like it’s really drawn out an apathy; it’s gone beyond the point where people feel that they need to be particularly worried about the origins of an image, almost. Now it’s going to become even more extreme with AI-generated images entering the flow and undermining whatever thread of authentic truth, or “proof”, that photography was associated with. The constructs and assumptions around images are being totally destabilized. It’s a very awkward and strange moment to be living through, for everyone. So, within an online landscape built on dwindling attention spans and proliferating content, for me the challenge becomes trying to find some new form of beauty, or a different mode of seeing, born from the excess of information.

A/K: That’s fascinating to hear you talk about. It’s almost like you’ve gone past the stage where you’re trying to make art as a prophylactic against that situation - which is often the reflex response, forcing critical faculties back upon us by undermining our expectations of image authenticity - and instead are trying to find meaning in the world beyond those questions.

DP: [Laughs] Yeah... part of me just thinks about the generations that are coming up. If you were born after the advent of easily available AI-generative software, your outlook is going to be crazily different to even me, born in the 90s. At 30, would I already start to feel like a stick-in-the-mud for trying to hold on to some reverence of “aura” or do you just have to respond to this situation that we’re in? Maybe I’ll feel different about that in the future, it’s a really changeable area, conceptually and ethically, that we’re all trying to grapple with. The situation has often morphed again by the time you think you’ve got a shape of it.

A/K: It’s quite different to hear someone who has those anxieties, but then is able to shelve them to some degree in the work that you produce. I suppose, as well as distancing yourself from that typical response to those concerns, you’re also embracing what you’re actually anxious about. Do you feel that by doing that you’re able to process, to some extent, those anxieties?

DP: Yes, probably. I mean, they say all art is a form of therapy, don’t they? I’ve always been interested in YouTube in relation to that, that every experience you could have has been had, and commented upon (and probably monetised) by someone else. Especially because I used to suffer from insomnia quite a lot, I became quite interested in this idea that I was looking at so many YouTube videos that maybe they were a surrogate for my dreams, or an internet dreamscape, doing the job of populating my imaginary. Over the years, it’s been interesting allowing that machinic influence on the mind, or to allow the human and the machine to become more and more intermingled. As time goes on I tend to approach this more pragmatically and think about what is actually happening, right now, in the larger culture (e.g. the mass uptake of something like ChatGPT), and, how can I involve, respond to or reflect it in my work, rather than ponder on it from afar or years after the fact.

A/K: I wondered about how you decide on the placement of certain materials into certain forms - in particular, I’m thinking of when your moving image works feature still images from your archive. Given your movement between moving and still work seems quite fluid, how do you decide which register you want to work in when you’re pulling from the same overall set of materials?

DP: I quite like adopting the aesthetics and tropes of certain formats. Like in my film If you’re watching this now then this is for you (2022), which I made with Sally Beets who did the writing and voiceover, she made a note of all these TikTok video titles and rearranged them to form a poem that gives a sense of the anxiety those kind of apps can induce. So, that one is a TikTok-inspired format, and is one minute long. Going further back, my film Content Anxiety (2019) was more of a take on the YouTube format. That work has quite a few disparate, collaged images overlapping in the centre of the frame and then each one of these YouTuber voices that you can hear has their own looping animated icon in the corner of the screen, like branding. That film is a lot about self-branding and the worries people have around their relevance online, so everyone had their own little brand symbol which reflected what they were talking about. Back to the question, though; I think increasingly there’s quite a fluidity between the formats I work in. When I have a solo show, I like making these immersive ‘image worlds’. So, in my show Factory Reset in 2022, some of the original images from my archive were shown as stickers on the wall, but then appeared in the collages and then would also appear in video work. I quite like these recurring motifs across different formats, where the works come together to form a system of interrelations or linkages, for the viewer to bounce between.

A/K: I guess the TikTok and YouTube influences of those two video works are quite evident to the viewer without you having to explain that. Do you find yourself using influences or modes like that with your still work in the same way?

DP: Quite a lot of the works in the Factory Reset show were made in lockdown, so I was thinking about the prevalent media of that time; apps, websites, games. I used to play a lot of fantasy RPG games growing up, and you have these cursors that are swords, or hands, or a gauntlet - so I was kind of using that influence but also Google Docs, where you have many floating cursors on the same screen that represent different users. I quite liked reflecting on collage as a medium and having these floating, pixelated tooltip icons on the surface as if to represent multiple different editors, as if there were 20 people re-editing the work. Other collages appear to be screens - so they might have the edge of a monitor or seemingly clickable buttons, or layers of scratches, dust or grime - but then they’ll also have a torn piece of paper, or they’ll seem to have a pane of glass compressing them. So, there are a couple of real world and digital formats that inform that, but they’re all a mixed together, undermining and complicating what we think we’re looking at.

A/K: From the work that you’re showing in this exhibition, it appears that there is a mixture of digital and physical collage - are you going into specific pieces saying ‘this will be a digital work’ and ‘this will be physical’?

DP: I’m trying at the moment to get to grips with how to be a real-world human [laughs]. Because nearly everything originated on the screen, I just find Photoshop such a powerful tool - the freedom of resizing, filtering, cutting things away so quickly, reversing things - but I’m trying to introduce physical collage more. Sometimes, though, it can feel kind of arbitrary, because I’m making a whole layer on Photoshop and then shipping it off to a printer, getting it back and then having to hand cut things. The show in 2022 had more of this papier mâché effect and was done with stickers and aerosol paint, combining those kinds of things - I want to get more into that in future.

A/K: Going back to something you just spoke about a moment ago, and the idea of these immersive installations. How do feel about your moving image work when plays in a cinema space, like it will in the screening accompanying this exhibition?

DP: I find it kind of funny to bring a YouTube video by some teenager from five years ago - when the original videos might have even been deleted by now, the user might have forgotten that they uploaded it - and then present it in this esteemed space of the cinema. Having this low-res and casually captured digital material on a big screen provokes a certain response in audiences, and I enjoy playing with the humour of that. I like the idea that the “throwaway” can be studied and dissected, and that it might tell us more about the world we’re living in that we first expect. There are quite a lot of artists that make moving image and are very particular about how they want the work to be shown, but I feel it’d be fairly rich for me to be that picky, considering the origin of the material. So, for me, it’s about reaching audiences as much as possible, by whatever means - for me the work can be a portable thing, adapting to different contexts and environments. It has to exist in the flow.

I’m Here But I’m Not a Cat runs from 22 Sep - 1 Oct at SET Kensington.

Screenings of moving image work by the artists take place at Close-Up Film Centre on 23 September.

We have also conducted interviews with Adonia Bouchehri, Daniel & Clara, and Edwin Rostron.

Originally published on ALT/KINO on 15 October, 2023.

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Often describing themselves as two people but one artist, duo Daniel & Clara have been creating together since meeting in 2010. Since that time, they have made an array of works in a variety of forms across moving image, photography, and the written word – with a particular interest of recent works being the complicated and sometimes uneasy relationship between humanity and the natural world. Their work has shown from Southend to Tokyo, from Rio to Norwich – as well as through the letterboxes of curious subscribers across the land (including our ed.!).

On the occasion of a joint exhibition called I’m Here But I’m Not a Cat, organized in collaboration with Adonia Bouchehri, Edwin Rostron and Duncan Poulton, ALT/KINO sat down with Daniel & Clara to discuss his work.

ALT/KINO: I wanted to begin by asking you about the origins of the exhibition and the impetus that you’ve all felt to - as it’s partly been framed - expand beyond the screen. So, what was the general idea with I’m Here But I’m Not a Cat and what it is that you, in particular, hope to get out of it.

Daniel & Clara: We met Adonia, Edwin, and Duncan at the Moving Image Salon, which was an event we started in London in 2019 showing artist moving image and experimental film. Then when in that weird spring of 2020, we were all confined to our homes, like everyone else, zoom became the primary way we stayed connected. So, we started having regular get-togethers with fellow artists to share what we were working on and to discuss our creative explorations and through these conversations, we discovered that even though we were all working in different ways, with different media and aesthetics, there were lots of interesting underlying threads that connected our work.

So, we started digging into these connections and thought that it would be really interesting to extend these conversations into a group exhibition. We are all artists who have a strong background in moving image and one of the other key things that was coming up for us all was this desire to start making more installation work, more sculptural work, and physical things that exist outside of the screen. Because of the lockdowns our time spent on screens was intensified so this was definitely a factor, but we’d all been moving towards making non-screen work anyway, the lockdown months were a kind of tipping point that helped us move into a new phase of our work.

A/K: How does that transition to more physical media feel in comparison to making your screen work? I guess I’m wondering what the differences are in terms of what you get out of the experience of constructing that work in this newer context.

D&C: Our work is often about creating experiences to be present and become conscious of being here in this moment, both for us as the makers but also for the viewer. This has always been there in our films and when we look back at them now, we can see that they were, in many ways, always dealing with physicality – images and sounds that cause physical sensations in the viewer, images that want to break free from the screen. We started working together in 2010 but our work only began to escape the frame in 2016, at first with expanded cinema performances, then in 2018 with mail art, and then the polaroids and photographs. This year we’ve started to make sculptural works too.

Visiting Avebury stone circle for the first time was a key moment in our understanding of how to move from immaterial art to art objects. What we got from Avebury is that it works like a film, it is not just a thing, it is an experience that unfolds in time. Coming from a moving image background, time and narrative are central to our thinking so our non-screen works also carry these. Our mail art projects for example exist in series that take place over a year, each one consisting of 12 letters sent monthly. What we like about them is that they are these physical objects that come from our hands directly to yours and they create a narrative experience that you participate in, they become a part of your life – entering your personal space and inner world.

The polaroids also work with time and space in a fascinating way, they are images that are also objects that materialise in the place where the photo is taken.

A/K: Yeah, that’s a fascinating aspect of landscape Polaroid photography, in particular, isn’t it. It’s not just a picture of a place, it’s also a picture that is of that place. It somehow makes the object and the image connected in more than a physical sense. It works both ways at the same time.

D&C: Polaroids are magical objects that physically appear moments after you have taken them, they don’t have the instantaneous nature of digital pictures, they have a delayed reaction, the image manifests like an echo. As the images emerge from the flat blue field, the moment of the shutter click recedes away from us in time – in this sense polaroids are motion pictures, they make us aware of the passing of time.

They are also interesting because they are unique objects. Digital pictures exist in an ethereal zone and can be duplicated hundreds or thousands of times, but polaroids are unique beings, they live in the hands, and they really do live, the chemical process of life forms before our eyes.

The process is so mysterious, we know in theory how the chemistry works but it’s beyond our comprehension of that explanation. This is something that is of essential interest to us, this idea of an unknowable mystery. We are drawn to things we can’t understand, like the great prehistoric man-made Silbury Hill. We don’t know why Silbury Hill was built. We know that it was created over four thousand years ago, but we don’t really know why it was made and how it was used. We love that we’ll never know, it just sits there through time as this impressive presence working on us, burrowing into our imaginations.

There’s so much in life that we don’t understand – we all go around thinking we’ve got the answers, that we know how things work, but actually most things are out of our grasp. As a project, our whole body of work – not just the Avebury project, but everything we do – is about that experience of edging up to the precipice of knowing and peering over the edge and saying: ‘Wow. We exist.

What a miracle. It’s terrifying and beautiful and amazing.’

A/K: One of the things I wanted to ask you about was the way that you convey experience - and what you just described then that terror and wonder feels very pertinent to that part of the conversation. There’s a sense of unease that permeates your work and it often feels bound up in this subjective experiential mode which, I suppose, comes through in things like your letters as well as moving image stuff. I wondered what the process is like for you both in trying to construct these experiences for others that are - to me at least - so obviously internal, in the first instance, for yourselves.

D&C: We are interested in the nature of reality and how we make sense of our existence, how we organise the chaotic material of our lives into meanings – in our work this plays out as an investigation into the subjective experience, using ourselves as human barometers responding to the world. The work though isn’t really about us – what those personal experiences become is the material for an experience for the viewer. We are not interested in telling anyone what to think or feel but to create an experience for them to become conscious of the layers of their own thoughts and feelings.

This approach has no doubt come about due to us both being quite introvert and finding the world quite difficult at times; life is very stimulating and overwhelming and we’re very sensitive and easily knocked off balance. So, we’re always grappling with how we can orientate ourselves in the world and function vaguely like normal human beings.

The zone of our work is a place where the inner and outer worlds collide, it’s a place of uncertainty, at times unease, where cause and effect can become dislocated, and the rules of reality get a little shaky. This is because we are paying attention to the subtle shifts in our thoughts and feelings, realising that reality isn’t a fixed thing – it’s a belief system that we are all participating in and constructing.

A/K: It’s really interesting to me that you’re able to carry the kinds of dissonances you’re talking about - the unease and the uncanniness - over from your video work to other work, like letters. The sensations you create feel so rooted in the structures of the moving image. Does it feel different to try to channel that into different kinds of work?

D&C: Cinema is our first language, but the performances, photography, letters, and sculptures that we’re now making – all of that is probably still cinema. It is like there are cracks in the fabric of our cinematic universe and it is leaking radiation out into the world and infecting everything we do.

We always had this idea that the way a film works is that we project it onto the screen, then it projects itself into the mind of the viewer, then the viewer projects themselves back onto the screen. It’s a whole relationship that’s going on; it’s not just about the film, it’s what you bring to it – your thoughts, your feelings, your family history, your cultural baggage. That all comes with you when you watch a film or when you encounter a work of art. We can never escape the limits of our subjective experience. So rather than fight that, with our films we wanted to create a space to encounter all of this – we don’t make work with a message or rigid meaning but think of films as being like a landscape. A landscape doesn’t tell you what to think or feel, but it is a very specific thing, it has parameters – there are things that it is and that it’s not – but how you interpret and react to it, emotionally and intellectually, is totally subjective. We really want to make work that does the same thing; very specific but very open. It’s like a space where you encounter something beyond yourself in order to confront yourself.

A/K: Ok, and so to segue seamlessly to the work you’re showing in the exhibition: Avebury - which you’ve mentioned a couple of times previously - was a landscape that had a profound effect on you both and your work. Can you speak a little about the project in general?

D&C: We’re showing a few pieces from an ongoing body of work we call Avebury Imaginary. The first piece we made was a feature film called Notes From A Journey, which will be screening at Close-Up cinema to accompany the exhibition. The film resulted from that first visit to Avebury – we’d been travelling around the country for a couple of weeks to show our work and on the last day of the trip we visited the stones. We were in a particular moment in our lives then, we had been living abroad for a few years but felt very isolated and unsure about where we were supposed to be, about our place in the world. The work we had been making until then was very much looking inward and existed completely in an inner zone. We were not prepared for what we encountered at Avebury and we feel it’s not really something that can be put into words, you have to experience it – but what it felt like was that we suddenly found ourselves in this real, physical place that had been there for thousands of years, and it felt like an externalisation of some inner imaginary zone, like it had just fallen out of our heads into the landscape. We felt instantly the desire to move back to the UK and make work about the British landscape.

So, the whole experience was profound but very fleeting, it was almost as if we didn’t quite put our feet on the ground. The film explores this feeling of encountering something that you can’t quite grasp, the ephemerality of experiences, how they linger somewhere within you but are essentially insubstantial. In the film, we used various visual and sound techniques that disrupt linearity, causality, and clarity; inviting the viewer instead to question how they put this sensory information together to make sense of themselves and the world around them. It became not just a film about a journey but a film that is a journey in itself – a first person encounter with the mysterious, both ancient and modern.

We realise that we make a lot of work that is, in a sense, reaching back to the past, or in a dialogue with things that have happened a long time ago. But we’re not really past-oriented people; we’re interested in the fact that the past is what’s creating the present and is what’s leading on to the future. Avebury is a living landscape – if it has meaning for us now, it’s a thing of now.

A/K: I love that observation about the past creating the present. I feel as though places like Avebury seem, in some ways, to hold onto their own history within the physical space. If you go and walk the route that somebody famously walked, you feel like you’re walking in their footsteps. For somewhere like Avebury there are, of course, thousands upon thousands of years of those footsteps, and if you want to be attuned to it, they can radiate that history.

D&C: Yes, exactly. And after we finished the film, we started researching more about the history of Avebury and discovered the significance it has had for so many artists, like Paul Nash, John Piper, Derek Jarman, Bruce Lacey and more. We were surprised to discover that many of them had not only made work in response to it but that their encounters with it had also marked significant turning points in their art and life.

So, the works that followed Notes From A Journey all deal in some way with the significant impact that this place has had on us and going over the experiences in an attempt to make sense of them. Revisiting and repetition became a recurring motif, also questioning our memories. The more we engaged with this subject, the more the images became things in themselves, disorientating markers that no longer refer to an original experience or place, but to the place as it exists in our imagination.

The latest piece we made is showing for the first time in this show, and it was not made in Avebury but from memories of our previous visits. We created a model of the stone circle and Silbury Hill completely from memory, not looking at photos or maps but trying to mentally retrace our steps and create a representation of the place in 3D. We used the techniques of railway model makers and tabletop gamers, with fake grass, foam and stones made from clay – it’s a work with the hobbyist aesthetic, it speaks of obsession and how this project is not really just dealing with the place but with the idea of the place, what it is as a personal symbol of some kind of psychological centre. The piece is called Avebury Complex, which is a term that is often used to refer to the series of ancient monuments in that area, but we’re interested in the double meaning of “complex” as being both a related group of ancient sites and also in the psychoanalytical sense: ‘a related group of repressed or partly repressed emotionally significant ideas which cause psychic conflict leading to abnormal mental states or behaviour.’

I’m Here But I’m Not a Cat runs from 22 Sep - 1 Oct at SET Kensington.

Screenings of moving image work by the artists take place at Close-Up Film Centre on 23 September.

We have also conducted interviews with Adonia Bouchehri, Duncan Poulton, and Edwin Rostron.

Originally published on ALT/KINO on 15 October, 2023.

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Employing video, performance, drawing and sculpture, Adonia Bouchehri’s art has repeatedly inhabited strange worlds that float somewhere between dreams and reality. Surreal in nature, but somehow entirely grounded within their own logic, they engulf the viewer with their sensorial nature. She is a former FLAMIN fellow, and many readers will be familiar with her short film work such as Frozen (2018), Jello (2020), and Blind Yellow Sunshine (2022) which have screened at the London Film Festival, Videoex, MUTEK and beyond.

On the occasion of a joint exhibition called I’m Here But I’m Not a Cat, organised in collaboration with Daniel & Clara, Edwin Rostron, and Duncan Poulton, ALT/KINO sat down with Adonia to discuss her work.

ALT/KINO: This exhibition is framed as you all going beyond the screen that makes up your primary canvas, as it were. Could you give an idea of what your normal practice entails and how this exhibition has given you a new outlet or way of working?

Adonia Bouchehri: Sure, this exhibition actually grew out of a really long conversation we’ve been having all throughout the pandemic. We all sort of arrived at this juncture where we were engaged in creating moving image work, but - and I can speak for myself here - I felt like there were always these additional dimensions to explore. I’d find myself working with sculptures and engaging in performances, but somehow, in the end, everything got folded into a moving image work. A sculpture, which I’d create, seemed like a vestige of that broader process. So, I reached this realisation that I actually considered these as works in their own right. You know, the performative aspects would frequently find their way into the films, and that’s very much my approach. Performance carries this vitality, this sense of immediacy, which is distinct from a film - a film is something you produce and then it’s set in time. So, for me, this notion had always existed, but the crux was to make something that could provide room for these other parts that also belong to the work.

A/K: So, are all the works in this exhibition made specifically for this exhibition, or was this work that you were already doing in concert with your filmic work?

AB: The works that ended up being in the exhibition are all made for the exhibition, but they emerge from a very long-term project. I have been working on it since the beginning of 2020 - it started with me doing the FLAMIN Fellowship - and it turned out to be a project that has all these different limbs to it. That was not initially the way I had thought about the project. I was going to make one film - which is still not finished yet! [laughs] - but it has all these other elements. It just turned out to be a much more complex project, and actually saying a lot more about my practice as a whole, than I realised at the beginning. So, the project itself is quite vast in nature and ongoing, but the works that I made as part of the project are specifically for this group exhibition.

A/K: Thinking about the fact that the sculptural and performance elements are something that already exist in your work, did you find in thinking about them in a different way for this exhibition, changed how you approached any of them, or did it ultimately feel very similar to your normal practice?

AB: The approach I take is somewhat similar, but there’s also a new element introduced, in the sense that it now accommodates various modes of expression. I presented The Mind Is Wearing A Mask at the solstice event hosted by LUX London in June of this year. Although I made this performance for the exhibition, I wanted to test it before a live audience once, and it turned out to work just as I had envisioned. That was nice to see. You know exhibiting a moving image work within a gallery setting feels very different from performing live. The two experiences are incomparable; they offer entirely different dynamics. What I found particularly rewarding in this instance is that I’ve always constructed my work in a manner where different components speak to one another. It’s interesting when you create multiple films that engage in a dialogue with each other, but what also greatly interests me is when a performance, a drawing, or a collage engages in a conversation with a film. Then you have these different aspects of thinking about a certain topic, or way of engaging with a theme. I think it opens the space, and widens the scope, to think about these things more broadly.

A/K: I find that type of setup can be incredibly energising - there are one or two such installations at the Liverpool Biennial at the moment. When done well, sculptural arrangements around video work can be effective at drawing you into the on-screen piece. Do you think, based on your experience of doing this, it is something that you’d like to do more of, this expansion beyond the moving image?

AB: Absolutely. I’ve wanted to go in this direction for a while. It’s important to note, especially in the context here, that my last three films - Frozen, Jello, and Blind Yellow Sunshine - all started with objects. My process often involves coming across or creating an object, sometimes combining a found object with my own additions, and that becomes the starting point. The idea is to create a world emerging from that object. So, the question is: how can I visually and textually shape a world where the initial subjectivity I felt towards the object can also be felt by a viewer? Since around 2015, I’ve been exploring the concept of “in-between spaces’‘ - the interplay between lived reality and imagined experiences. Whether in filmmaking, performance, or sculptural installations, my aim is to carve out these in-between spaces, existing between reality and the imagined. It’s a delicate and unstable place, yet its fragility offers flexibility, allowing viewers to inhabit a space differently. This idea lies at the heart of all my work.

A/K: That’s an interesting point. Your film work is full of these really affecting and strange spaces. How have you found the challenge of thinking about that idea, when you’re going to be asking someone to inhabit a pre-existing space? Your films exist in these unreal worlds that we’re drawn into through the screen, but now we’re going to be in a gallery space. Have you tried to replicate that experience, or have you found that you won’t be able to?

AB: If this were a solo exhibition, I’d probably lean toward creating a more encompassing all-round experience. But considering it’s part of a group show the allover approach is different. As part of the exhibition, I have a performance planned. For me, that is one way to transform the gallery into this very heightened space. The performance, in a way, comes from a similar place as my films - it shares a similar origin, although its live nature gives it a distinct form. But all of my works in the show are engaged in a dialogue with one another. You have the AI-generated image of my grandfather, replicated over two thousand times, standing in a garden in Iran. Alongside this, there’s the sculpture Garden-Carpet which is situated on the floor. So, there’s obviously a conversation present, if you spend time with the work, you will pick up on that. The intention is to have this layered approach, working with different forms of thought. The incorporation of AI - something I’ve been exploring recently - holds a particular fascination in this project. It stems from my deep engagement with my mother’s memories of her childhood in Iran, where she lived until the Iranian Revolution. I’ve never been to Iran myself, but I’ve grown up with those stories and influences of course. So, Iran itself is, for me, like an in-between space. It’s something that feels incredibly close and familiar, but it’s also imagined in many ways. It’s interesting for me to work with AI on this particular project because it’s almost like “how do I touch this? How do I grasp this?” It’s been incredibly hard - that’s why I’ve been working on this project for so long - but it felt like, if I create AI images and photographic works, sculptures, videos, and drawings, maybe I can recreate a world that makes sense to me. It can be an engagement with Iran, that reflects this complexity and multilayered-ness. I think for this exhibition, the aim is to have the collage, the moving image, and the sculptural objects creating a kind of tapestry to grapple with that very slippery space.

A/K: This feels like the perfect time to ask about AI. We’ve curated several screenings of work made with algorithms and AI its always fascinating to hear how and why artists began using AI. In particular, your two pieces that use it - the one that appears in the exhibition, Ghassem (2023), and your forthcoming short, Only Machines can see the egg (2023) - effectively use the AI as a tool of resurrection. That idea is much more overt in the short, where ghosts are reflecting on the fact that they are no longer bodily beings, but I wondered what about AI drew you to that usage of it and how you find working with it.

AB: I’ve been really interested in the idea of working with something that I don’t have complete control over in terms of the image. I do have some influence, as I worked with Stable Diffusion for both films and there are prompts involved, but there’s a limit to it, and it retains its own independent character to a certain extent. It’s also trainable. I had to train it to get it closer to my desired output because, initially, it was quite off the mark. Nevertheless, it guides you and introduces its own changes to the project as you navigate through it. When I started working on this film, I didn’t have a predetermined idea in mind. I found myself collaborating with an AI, which felt like partnering with a distinct intelligence not of human origin. This differed greatly from, let’s say, working with CGI, where you systematically construct elements step by step. With the AI collaboration, there’s an otherness to it that’s a bit elusive. However, there are challenges and biases involved. For example, as I was recreating an image of my grandfather situated in a Persian garden in Iran, the background showed many people engaged in prayer and religious symbols. When you search for ‘Iran’, you’re bombarded with this peculiar imagery that you don’t necessarily feel would happen the other way around.

While working on my forthcoming film Only Machines can See the Egg, which also involved an AI, I engaged in long conversations with Chat GPT about the project. It’s worth noting that none of the film’s content was actually written by Chat GPT; all of it originated from me. I did consider that approach initially, but eventually, it wasn’t yielding the desired outcomes. Instead, I employed Chat GPT to discuss the film and its nature. This led to extended conversations, some lasting hours, which were almost comparable to conversations with a real person. It immerses you in a completely different mindset; the ground beneath you shifts as you interact with something so markedly different. The rug is pulled from under your feet because you’re dealing with something that is very different. I think it really changed the way I thought during this period. There are four key concepts that I keep circling back to, concepts that interest me in my work: the interplay between reality, imagination, consciousness, and memory. They’re intricately interconnected, not easily separable, and all of them find a place within the context of AI. Take consciousness, for example. Granted, we’re not entirely sure about its presence in AI yet - we wouldn’t claim AI has consciousness at this point - but how does engaging with AI in this way affect my own consciousness? I find that aspect incredibly fascinating. And in response to your point about resurrection, yes, I find the idea of resurrecting something from the past and rekindling a dialogue with someone who’s no longer alive very intriguing. It carries an almost unsettling quality, reviving someone through AI; it’s a challenging process, particularly when dealing with a family member. However, it’s also very interesting how this process can reshape our perception of time.

A/K: The piece with your grandfather I find curious because people who have left us are typically only available to us as reconstructions of our own memory. Of course, there are other biases - as you’ve mentioned - but it’s fascinating to consider them being recreated outside of the influence of all the baggage that you bring to that person’s memory.

The most obvious distinction between your two AI films is that one is a narrative piece, and narrative was something else I wanted to touch on. Your films are typically built around surreal narratives; I wondered about your general thoughts on storytelling in the artists’ moving image space and, more specifically, what your approach was to bringing that element of your practice into the exhibition context.

AB: Storytelling is interesting to me because it’s a way to pull the viewer into a different world. I’m interested in world-building, creating an environment where you can exist in a way that’s different from everyday life, where your body relates to it in a different way. Working with story is a compelling way to achieve that. It also allows me to say things that I might not be able to express otherwise. I write a lot; I enjoy working with the written word in combination with images. It’s almost like working within an immersive installation context. I actually sometimes consider my films as immersive installations. Someone once told me: ‘it’s like I was in there.’ That’s exactly what I want to evoke with my films. With a single-channel video, there are limitations, of course, but that sensation is what I’m interested in creating. If you take away the story - if you have my films without that element - you might not have that kind of bodily connection to the work. That doesn’t mean that I believe you need narrative to have a sensory or bodily reaction to a work. Just in the case of some of my filmic work, I’m interested in creating that reaction by intertwining language and image into a sort of textual tapestry. Narrative is a debated topic in art. I come from a visual arts background, and I would say that my thought processes emerge from that context, but for me, words, language, and storytelling are also material. They don’t just exist on some abstract level; they also create sensations and feelings, much like images do. Importantly, language also has the capacity to create images. I’m very interested in that relationship between images crafted by language and the perceived visual image you take in with your vision. How do I create sensations with images? How do I create sensations with words? What happens if I work with the relationship between the two? These are questions that I’m really interested in. Another concept I haven’t mentioned is Foucault’s concept of heterotopias as other spaces. I like to think about filmmaking - at least for me personally, not universally - as a heterotopic exercise or activity. These films then create these other spaces that emerge from lived experience in relation to imagined and remembered spaces. They’re kind of these marginal spaces, and I want people to experience them to some degree. I think this form of writing that I use - it’s quite poetic often - is a way to open up the space for someone who’s not me.

A/K: And I guess the performance would be the point at which you get the ability to use language and narrative to kind of create sensations with the exhibition space?

AB: The performance would be that, but I also think that the topic of the garden and the carpet are strong, historic elements that emerged out of each other. The Persian carpet is very much a representation, in many ways, of the Persian garden. Foucault speaks about the Persian garden and the Persian carpet in terms of heterotopias. So, I think if you watch the AI-generated video of my grandfather and then you see the sculpture Garden-Carpet, and even if you haven’t seen the performance, I believe there is narrative there - if you look for it. In the case of my films, it’s narrative condensed and I would say, with the installation pieces, its narrative stretched out. You must look harder. That’s something I’m generally interested in. I work in a very layered way, so there are different ways to relate to it. You can go all the way down and look at the relationship between the garden and the carpet and heterotopias and there is this philosophical undertone. You can have that, but you can also disregard that and just have your own textural relation to the glass, the carpet, the garden. That’s just as valid. I like having this choice for the viewer to look at it in different ways - I quite like to have that openness.

I’m Here But I’m Not a Cat runs from 22 Sep - 1 Oct at SET Kensington.

Screenings of moving image work by the artists take place at Close-Up Film Centre on 23 September.

We have also conducted interviews with Daniel & Clara, Duncan Poulton, and Edwin Rostron.

Originally published on ALT/KINO on 15 October, 2023.

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Since 2014 Courtney Stephens has amassed a body of experimental and non-fiction film work, including the 2020 documentary feature The American Sector (co-directed with Pacho Velez), steeped in, among many things, the expansive possibilities of the archive. Weaving together women-made travelogues from the first half of the 20th Century, her newest feature, Terra Femme, simultaneously acknowledges the socio-historical precedence of these women’s movements, and holds a critical lens to their relationship to empire.

On behalf of ALT/KINO, Chris Cassingham sat down with Stephens ahead of a live performance-screening of Terra Femme at Bertha DocHouse on 15 August for a wide-ranging conversation about the historic record, presence, emancipation, and what traveling around the world with this film has meant to her.

ALT/KINO: Early on in Terra Femme you make allusions to the way in which the travelogues, and their makers, lack an agenda. They’re seemingly free from the crushing weight of social and political import; “outside the flow of historic time” is how you characterized the footage of a Bahamian window display by Carry Wagner. When you were looking at these films early on in the process, what about the footage led you to this interpretation?

Courtney Stephens: I think this is exactly what I found perplexing about these films from the start, this loitering tendency in some sections. We can’t really call them home movies because they document an unknown world rather than things that live within the domestic sphere. But you also can’t really call the material documentary footage either since they have a tenuous relationship to spectatorship. They’re more like visual autobiographies. But I was also thinking about their relationship to tourism, and I was very attuned to what these filmmakers chose to spend their time, their precious film, on; an interesting tree or someone selling vegetables or other women carrying their babies or whatever – often things that wouldn’t be in the guide book and people who didn’t make it into newsreels, most likely. So I was interested in the trifecta of film, filmmaker, and film subject all falling outside the historic record and instead taking the shape of something more personally resonant to the makers.

A/K: That sort of brings me to the end of the film, where you’re revealing this more sinister way that the films are reflective of the colonial project. Why was it important to you to strike a balance between these two conflicting ideas?

CS: Great question - yes this was what was so complex about the material: here is some person’s private impressions, with all the space afforded for exploration inside of that - but this frame is also not accidental. The filmmaker’s mobility. The Western painting tradition that informs her frame. The person on the other side of the camera and their occupied homeland which now receives a steady flow of Western travelers.

It’s interesting that you call it a balance because to me it’s irreconcilable. I remember a producer asking me early on why the film isn’t formulated around the idea of female trailblazers. “What you’re making is so sad.” (That was the end of my commercial hopes for this film! [laughs]). But then, I don’t know that I’d use the word sinister. The films are not propagandistic, they are determined by a kind of larger machine, and then these women are also there in their private lives. It’s me dragging them into the light to ask questions about public life and privilege and things.

A/K: This film is a reminder of the unfortunate reality that a lot of people, especially women, in archives remain anonymous without much of a chance to become known. I was trying to think about the ways in which that idea runs through your other films, and Mating Games and Ida, Western Exile came to mind. Tying these ideas to your reference to Ursula le Guin’s “She Unnames Them“ at the end of Terra Femme, I thought it was a beautiful way to think about and even complicate this issue of the push and pull of anonymity, known-ness, presence and absence. Could you relate these films together and talk about your intentions in making the women in them known, however you may interpret what that means?

CS: Yes, I thought so much about this, and I think something that really changed for me as I spent time with this material, was the question of the status of the unnamed, which really goes back to the question of what and who count in the historical record, and then the anonymous wave of humanity past, which is most of our female ancestors. It’s interesting you bring up Mating Games, a film I made with KJ Relth about beauty pageants and public exhibitionism on LA beaches in the 1960s. I mean that film is really all about the surface of things, I wonder if we can think of being visible as a way of being known, exactly. Perhaps, it’s often that visibility provides a mask.

A/K: You talk about an archive of sensation in the film, which seems like the kind of intervention we might have to take within the archive to right some of these wrongs in the historical record. Could this be tied into some questions you raise early in the film about the differences between men and women, and whether or not “women” can be a transcendent category. Do you see this archive of sensation as inherently gendered, and has your thinking related to these questions changed over the years you’ve spent with this film?

CS: I guess the project is being made under the banner of binary gender – “these are the films women made” – that’s the rubric so I can’t escape it, but I am very wary of claims about how women see things. There is a passage in the film about a google alert I set for “female gaze” and the different results I get. More to the point, for me, has been that my own feelings about my own gender remain somewhat unresolved, and if that category wasn’t active and vexed for me I don’t know that I would have been motivated to make this film. Sensation is a nice way to think about an approach to gender that is responsive as opposed to closed. I guess I like to think about the word woman being tied to a larger category of secondary perspectives, something that is more about a relation to the idea of a neutral mode.

I mention this le Guin story about Eve unnaming the animals in Eden and the fantasy that the unnaming is tied to a kind of hidden power in anonymity, in refusal. It’s more powerful to name than to unname, or so we’ve always been taught.

A/K: This brings me to another thing I wanted to talk about in the context of all your films, which is the idea of emancipation. From the woman in Ida, Western Exile preparing for a trip out West, to the young women in Mating Games breaking free temporarily from the performance of womanhood to everything we’ve been talking about in Terra Femme, it’s evident through everything you’ve made. What role does the idea of emancipation play in your own thinking when you’re doing a new project?

CS: I’m not sure I feel very emancipated.

A/K: Well if anything your films do explore the limits of it as well, I guess.

CS: Maybe it’s less about emancipation as a place you arrive than a place that you imagine. Emancipation, liberation, freedom, they are laden words. For a lot of feminists in the 70s language, as in the le Guin story, really was a category of release - so women dropped their father’s name. I do see liberating, magical properties in words. I had this great critical theory professor in college who said when we think of using the word “seminal” to consider replacing it with “germinal.”

A/K: You mention the origins of Terra Femme early on in the film coming from a diagnosis that might limit your future mobility. And later you talk about struggling to marry your own travel footage with the archival footage we see. Do you see your live performance of the film’s narration as an attempt to bring yourself back into the film?

CS: Maybe! I think it was necessary to anchor the film, even if I offer relatively little about it, in a desire to travel that comes from a different place than leisure travel might. It remains pretty unresolved but I wanted to suggest that travel is also maybe a vector of understanding one’s fate - a place where maybe we get to participate in our own unnaming, maybe.

A/K: Could you describe your experiences traveling with the film for the past couple of years, maybe what kind of things you find you’re still gaining from the performances?

CS: Well, I feel incredibly fortunate to get to do it, and I think it’s been very interesting to move through the film so many times. It manages to not feel like an old work but like something that I get to complete each time. It always, from the beginning, seemed like the material should be modular, and feels more like a dialogue audience. Earlier iterations of the film were less formed and we would actually kind of discuss the footage together. It almost became a workshopping process and I’m really grateful for it.

A/K: This discussion around performance has reminded me of when we first were in touch about a film you acted in, Topology of Sirens, all those months ago, and you said, essentially, “just a heads up, I’ve never seen the movie and I don’t know if I really want to.” How do you differentiate between the trepidation you felt about watching yourself perform on screen and the feelings you get from performing this narration for Terra Femme live?

CS: Well that cuts right to the core of the film, right? The question of women on camera versus women behind the camera. Between physical life and interior life, between being a body or being a voice, or an eye. I did enjoy the process of acting in Topology but think I have more to offer as someone looking with the audience.

A/K: Is there any reconciliation you have to do regarding the presence you have as a person doing a live performance during the film and the ideas about anonymity and known-ness that we talked about earlier? Presumably some people in the audience will be there, in part, because they know that you are going to be there “performing”.

CS: That’s a good question, though I think sometimes people forget I’m there! Once they get into listening and watching maybe I still become more of an acousmatic voice than a theatrical presence. Also, the footage itself is so embodied - cameras hanging from the arms of individual women. And the project in its most expansive sense is about the experiential dimensions of life that go beyond what can be known at a distance, so it seems like the material deserves an embodied voice.

Terra Femme screens on 15 August 2023 at Bertha DocHouse.

You can also watch a selection of Stephens’ short films and her other feature, The American Sector, on the documentary streaming service TrueStory.film.

Chris Cassingham is a US-based curator, programmer and critic. His screening series spotlighting new American microbudget fiction and nonfiction filmmaking, Beyond Interpretation, runs at the ICA this Autumn.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Originally published on ALT/KINO on 12 August, 2023.

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In the dark times / Will there be singing? / There will be singing / Of the dark times.

– Bertolt Brecht, Svendborg Poems (1938)

72 minutes in a cinema auditorium with Nico might not be the most appealing prospect. After a cameo in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and a starring role as an aspiring dancer in a French feature called Striptease (1963), she appeared as a glamorous but lugubrious sixties starlet in Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966), as a wailing woman in Philippe Garrel’s La Cicatrice intérieure (1972), and then in a silent state of drugged-out pauperdom in Garrel’s portraits throughout the rest of the 1970s. Kent Jones describes Nico in those portraits as ‘looking like a ghost long before her death’ (in 1988). As for the five avant-garde, gothic albums she recorded after her fifteen minutes of Warholian fame, well, these were morbid too. Lester Bangs confessed to being frightened of Nico: her sounds for him summoned spectres of old girlfriends, as well as ghoulish thoughts of the abyss. After listening to her for months while researching and writing a New Yorker article, Brian Dillon said at a recent talk that he is not sure he wants to hear another Nico song ever again. Nico was not called the priestess of darkness for nothing. I imagine, though, that Nina Danino is attracted to that divine, doleful sobriquet, and the haunting that it holds. Communing with Nico through song and image in her tenebrous and tremulous new work Solitude, the filmmaker does not turn from the icon for being both an image and a voice of the void. She sanctifies her.

Danino practiced in feminist filmmaking circles during the 1980s and the 1990s as one of a handful of women associated with the London Filmmakers’ Co-op. Interested in the possibilities of écriture féminine for film, she cited Hélène Cixous and contemplated the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in early works such as Stabat Mater (1990) and “Now I am yours” (1992). Since the 1990s, Danino has continued to make film while working in academia – now in the Fine Art department at Goldsmiths, where she started teaching in 2000. Her later works reflect on feminine creativity and subjectivity in relation to Catholicism and the voice, as before. I Die of Sadness Crying for You (2021) is one example of her fascination with feminine cries that transform into transcendent songs of suffering – Solitude is another.

Solitude reprises rarefied images of an isolated Nico from Warhol’s Chelsea Girls and Garrel’s Les Hautes solitudes (1974), Un Ange passe (1975) and Le Berceau de cristal (1976). At brief intervals, these images of Nico are withdrawn, replaced with a blank screen or images of the River Thames which Danino shot on black-and-white-video during the 2020-21 lockdowns. Danino is never visible as more than a silhouette at the edge of those waters. She is, however, audible across the soundtrack, reciting fragments from seven poems and covering four of Nico’s songs in full. Woven into words by Brontë, Byron, Coleridge, Keats and Tennyson – the sort of Romantic verse Nico is said to have read in an attempt to access a certain bohemianism and to experience otherworldly visions – Danino delivers powerful vocals on ‘It Was A Pleasure Then’ (1967), ‘Frozen Warnings’ (1968), ‘Janitor of Lunacy’ (1970) and ‘Saeta’ (1981), each of which was rerecorded with professional musicians. From this immense tissue of quotation and creation, two portraits are formed: one of a hallowed Nico, and one of Danino, in devoted compassion with the troubled and troubling figure.

All of this is quite far from fashionable. Solitude venerates and sympathises with a deeply difficult woman (actually, unpalatably unlikeable), without any attempt to refashion her for contemporary mainstream feminism. Repetitions – of Garrel’s and Warhol’s films, Nico’s songs, and the Romantics’ poems – are not subversive cut-ups or appropriations but faithful renditions. And with a sombre tone, the work harks back to miserable lockdowns, while most of us are immersed in a fog of forgetting. Whatever Danino’s feminist beginnings were, I cannot picture the feminist-identifying filmgoers of today jumping for joy at such a shadowy film – so in thrall to the past, so few concessions made. Is there value in this untimeliness?

Disregard would be nothing new for Danino. Contributing in 2015 to a roundtable among women of the Co-op, she described having worked in ‘lacunae’ of the art and film worlds for decades. Set against the abstraction and iconoclasm that came to characterise the Co-op, her enshrinement of women in rapture and women in tears appeared much too emotional, personal, and representational. When the Young British Artists came to dominate galleries, she felt she had next to no chance once again: this time, too academic as well as too sincere. Danino has worked, then, ‘in an interim space’. Although this might be cause for dismay – a dearth of appreciation, a lack of funds, as many as twelve years between films – this was also beneficial for her ‘because the work remained largely unco-opted’. Solitude might be reason for sorrow; it might be a source of solace too.

Laura Mulvey and Jacqueline Rose, who wrote feminist theory contemporary to the work of women in the Co-op, both recently looked back to Marilyn Monroe as an icon who was (sometimes still is) burdened with signifying the world to us. Solitude calls on Nico to more intimate ends. Danino is concerned with expressions of ‘an inner life’ in her highly subjective films. In Solitude, she calls on Nico as an icon who is able to signify the state of being turned from the world: be it in the throes of addiction or in death, in lockdown, as a marginal artist, or – compellingly and most courageously – as a condition for creative work. How often do we dwell with these negative states that do not or cannot make an appeal to the world? Danino’s Solitude gives us valuable space to do so.

[1] Kent Jones, ‘The Films of Philippe Garrel’, Film Comment 33/3 (May-June 1997): 28.

[2] Lester Bangs, ‘Your Shadow is Scared of You: An Attempt Not to Be Frightened by Nico’ [1983] in Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader, ed. John Northland (London: Serpents Tail, 2003).

[3] Brian Dillon in conversation with Ian Penman, Foyles Charing Cross Road, London, 4 May 2023.

[4] Nina Danino, ‘Roundtable discussion: The women of the London Filmmaker’s Co-op’ [with Jean Matthee, Ruth Novaczek, Sarah Pucill and Alia Syed, chaired by María Palacios Cruz], Moving Image Review and Art Journal 4/1-2 (December 2015).

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] For Laura Mulvey, Marilyn Monroe is emblematic of the allure of the commodity and a mechanisation of the human in the twentieth century. Jacqueline Rose’s reading the Hollywood star argues was made to be a site of cathexis for post-war anguish in the United States. See Laura Mulvey, Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times (London: Reaktion, 2021); and Jacqueline Rose, Women in Dark Times (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Danino’s use of Nico comes closer to Marlene Dumas’s ‘Dead Marilyn’ (2008), which is discussed by Griselda Pollock in ‘The missing wit(h)ness: Monroe, fascinance and the unguarded intimacy of being dead’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 16/3 (2017): 265-296.

Solitude screens at BFI Southbank as part of Experimenta’s Nico Night on 19 July.

Laura Staab is a writer based in London, with specialisms in art cinema, experimental film, and women’s filmmaking. See linktr.ee/laurastaab for links to other recent writing.

Originally published on ALT/KINO on 17 July, 2023.

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“Cinema is,” Jacques Derrida memorably insists in Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance, “an art of ghosts. It’s the art of letting ghosts come back.” Charlie Shackleton’s The Afterlight is a film composed of fragments, whose cast are the souls of film history — stars of days gone by, all of whom are dead. Omar Sharif might appear next to Ruan Lingyu, Conrad Veidt alongside Barbara Windsor. It extracts from hundreds of existing works, mostly shot pre-1960, all in black and white, and of varying condition; pristinely preserved prints from 1950s Hollywood alongside scratchy, faded footage from the early decades of the century.

The narrative is loose. The film begins with characters walking alone at night through eerily empty, noirish streets, eventually converging on a bar illuminated by a neon sign: The Afterlight. Much of the film’s editing is suggestive of narrative events — scenes set at the bar, during a rainstorm, in an apartment — but there is no attempt to suggest absolute spatial continuity to the viewer. One more crucial detail: the film exists as a single 35mm print, which will deteriorate over time; edited digitally, all traces of the process were erased once the film was complete.

The Afterlight, then, takes as its starting point two conceits, the latter of which provocatively cancels out the former. First, with its cast of long-dead actors, it raises the idea of film as a haunted medium that promises its subjects immortality on the screen. Simultaneously, however, it forces us to confront the medium in its materiality — as something organic, corporeal, living — in order to remind us that cinema’s ghosts die too. Celluloid is a delicate material, subject to wear at the moment of projection, and to chemical deterioration even when stored in ideal conditions. Like a body, a film print is subject to injury, ageing, and eventually death.

***

The Afterlight belongs to an expansive genealogy of moving image works that foreground the materiality of celluloid by making the effects of time — especially decay — aesthetic experiences. Among the most well-known of such works are Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film (1962-64), a projection of a loop of transparent film leader on which the accumulated dust, dirt and damage becomes an integral part of the work itself; Peggy Ahwesh’s The Color of Love (1994), a slowed optical reprint of a kaleidoscopically degraded 8mm porn movie; and the found footage films of Bill Morrison, most notably his cine-apocalyptic feature Decasia (2002), consisting of optically reshot nitrate film in various states of chemical decomposition.

Andre Habib, writing on another found footage film composed of fragments of early cinema, Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate (1990), suggests an “imaginary of the ruin” emerging from the context of the preservationist fervour of late twentieth century film culture, coinciding with the medium’s centenary. “The film archive is a strange tomb, characterized by what it lacks, and slowly decomposing,” Habib writes, noting that “the nature of the medium and what it records now command an immediately passionate, quasi-religious response, as if it were lives that were in peril” 1 . If we think of photochemical film as something living, the image of cinema’s history as a graveyard is an apt one: according to estimates from The Film Foundation, founded in 1990 by Martin Scorsese, “half of all American films made before 1950 and more than 90 percent of films made before 1929 are lost forever” 2 .

In this context, it’s tempting to read The Afterlight — itself designed to disappear — as a rallying cry for film preservation. In an article written to coincide with The Afterlight’s premiere, however, Shackleton broadens the issue of “loss” beyond the traditional parameters. What’s really at risk of becoming lost isn’t just the individual films themselves, but the potential for a more expansive film culture — the promise dangled by the internet and streaming to “open up new audiences, and diversify cultural palates” that has proved so utterly false 3 . Shackleton’s article folds issues of decay and the “lost film” back onto issues of circulation. Physically lost films, of the kind shown being unearthed from the ground in Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016), here also come to stand for films algorithmically “buried” on streaming services or platforms like YouTube.

Access to films that exist online is often determined by algorithms that tend to privilege the new and the already-popular, and may be withdrawn at the whim of the individuals and companies who contribute to or manage these platforms. Provocatively, Shackleton doesn’t limit this issue of viewership to digital. “Even film archives,” he writes, “are filled with prints that will never be screened, films that will never be seen. Jurij Meden, a curator at the Austrian Film Museum, calls such holdings ‘living-dead surplus’ and estimates that they account for 90% of archive collections” 4.

***

Archives, Derrida tells us, are structured according to the logics of power; such forces dictate which objects are cared for and venerated, and which are shut out, silenced. Looking to the history of film, commercial and geographical factors play an especially pronounced role in what gets lost and why. The Afterlight, in its very form, serves as a poignant testament to this reality. In an interview with Shackleton, he clarified that the film comprises of footage that has “been made available commercially in some form or other,” and therefore is already mediated by invisible layers of selection:

It can be tempting when you start cross-cutting between films from different places or different times, to see the medium as this great unifying force. But I was always reminded, because of the nature of the process, quite how much bias was built into what I had to work with. … Sometimes it’s hard to believe how differently two films can look even made in the same era, based on their perceived cultural or commercial value across the decades. Some of those Hitchcock films that are in there look like they were shot yesterday, whereas a lot of the films from outside of the United States and Western Europe have been much worse preserved just because much less has been invested in exploiting them over the years.

Unlike other works that appropriate their collaged footage from fiction films — Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) and Guy Maddin’s The Green Fog (2017), for example — Shackleton’s editing emphasises not just narrative content but the material surface of the appropriated works themselves: glossy high-definition images suddenly cut to dirty, jerky frames buried under blankets of scratches and grain. A stark contrast is revealed between the former, which exudes signs of care, and the latter, where even basic information is rendered almost illegible.

The effect is augmented by the film’s soundtrack: “silences” whose crackles and hums vary hugely from clip to clip, and the intermittent use of original music composed by Jeremy Warmsley, which is also subjected to varying levels of compression, distortion, and other sonic effects that imitate the levels of damage to the image being projected at a given moment, as if this soundtrack too has been subject to archival rot.

In my interview with Shackleton, he suggested that an early question that arose was negotiating whether to attempt to passively “reflect” what has been preserved and made available, or rather to push against an inequitable archive:

Ultimately, I settled for a compromise. I realised if I just reflected truly the state of affairs the film would’ve been 90% English-language, probably 80% American, and I think it would’ve been so overwhelming that it would have read like an intentional choice. … I ended up moderating that dominance in order to express it.

If The Afterlight is to be seen as a reflection on/of the archive — focusing less on what exists and more on how it exists in its commercially available forms — it also invites consideration of the absences that haunt it; “[e]very film archive,” writes Habib, “can be defined by its lacks, its losses” 5 .

***

In the close to his book The Death of Cinema, legendary archivist Paolo Cherchi Usai imagines the endless restoration and re-restoration of The Absolute Masterpiece® at the expense of those films that have been ignored by archives and financers: “while some festival advertises the premiere of a new version of The Absolute Masterpiece®, thousands of nitrate reels agonise on their shelves” 6 . The restoration of a few classics — or even the rediscovery of “lost masterpieces”— obscures the true scale of loss to the culture, as well as the problematic commercial agendas that motivate this work in the first place.

Elsewhere, however, Cherchi Usai acknowledges that any attempt to bring the mass of genuinely lost films to light, in all their fragile materiality, is ultimately a doomed practice anyway. The promise of film preservation as a kind of immortality is as hopeless as the claim to fix still time itself; the inevitability of decay always prevails. The implication for the role of the film archivist — and, by extension, the media-archaeologically-minded filmmaker — amounts to

a radical change of perspective … Moving image preservation will be redefined as the science of its gradual loss and the art of coping with the consequences, very much like a physician who has accepted the inevitability of death even while he continues to fight for the patient’s life. 7

The Afterlight embodies Cherchi Usai’s ambivalent view, fighting the case for the film archive — as well as inviting us to consider its biases — and at the same time suggesting an alternative ethical approach to the moving image: letting die, learning to cope with loss. For many cinema enthusiasts, the latter might seem like a fairly repugnant proposition. Screened alongside The Afterlight at its London Film Festival premiere was a restoration of the anti-fascist short Europa (1931), a film long thought to have been destroyed by the Nazis. To apply the concept of “letting die” is especially hard to stomach when issues of historical marginalisation and censorship are taken into account. But Cherchi Usai’s work — and Shackleton’s film — need not be approached so nihilistically. Rather, both merely emphasise the necessity of a dialectical approach, wherein advocacy and acceptance exist side by side.

***

For all the talk of death and decay, the film I saw at its fifth public screening in 2021 was in remarkably good shape; any damage to the print was minimal, sporadic and hardly noticeable. Since then, The Afterlight’s sole print has made its way around the world, touring film festivals and local cinemas. Ahead of the film’s next screening — its fiftieth, at the BFI Southbank for its inaugural Film On Film Festival — I spoke with Shackleton again to find out how the film had changed. Not all that much, as it turns out; the strange irony of the death of 35mm, Shackleton jokes, is that the switch to digital has resulted in the “commensurate rise in the standard of projection” — those venues still able to project celluloid really know what they’re doing.

The Afterlight is transforming, though. And it’s not just the expected wear and tear of projection, including the flurry of scratches that appear every twenty minutes or so, on either side of the reel changes. Out of practical necessity, The Afterlight was printed on colour film stock, meaning that any deeper scratches eat into the top layer of emulsion, revealing glimpses of green dye beneath the monochromatic skin. Gradually, Shackleton tells me, his black and white film is turning to colour. And there have been changes to the soundtrack, too — an abrupt and menacing bump can be heard just before the end credits.

One change in particular, however, crosses over from the conceptually interesting into the uncanny. About twenty screenings in, Shackleton was handed three frames from the film which had been clipped out by another projectionist. These frames, part of the beginning of the film’s countdown sequence, had been burned through, leaving them scarred with ominous orange-red burns. Only later did Shackleton realise, as if a joke on the part of an already especially eerie film, that the frames which had been excised bore the numbers 6-6-6. A haunted medium indeed.

[1] Andre Habib, “Ruin, Archive and the Time of Cinema: Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate,” SubStance, 35:2, (Johns Hopkins University Press: 2006) https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2006.0034, 122. Emphasis added.

[2] Terry Mikesell, “Group’s Rescue of Old Films Preserves Glimpse Into Past,” The Film Foundation, (23 Feb 2017), https://www.film-foundation.org/columbus-dispatch.

[3] Charlie Shackleton, “I made a film that’s designed to be lost — and that’s not so different from Netflix,” in The Guardian (7 Oct 2021), https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/oct/07/film-lost-netflix-the-afterlight-london-film-fesitval-digital-media.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Habib, “Ruin, Archive and the Time of Cinema,” 121.

[6] Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age (Wiltshire, The British Film Institute Press), 120.

[7] Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema, 105.

The inaugural Film on Film Festival takes place at the British Film Institute from 8-11 June 2023. Charlie Shackleton’s The Afterlight screens on 10 June.

Theo Rollason is a film writer and archivist based in London. They are particularly interested in experimental cinema, artists’ moving image, and the politics of blockbusters. More of their work can be found at theorollason.cargo.site.

Originally published on ALT/KINO on 7 June, 2023.

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Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV begins with the image of a digital butterfly, its electric blue and emerald wings flapping slowly across the screen. As the camera zooms out, we see the eponymous video artist Nam June Paik, staring intently at the butterfly bouncing across his television screen. With a mic in hand, Paik murmurs, then sings for the little creature, the sound of his voice makes the wings burst into blobs of blue and green. The artist Paik and the butterfly are having a conversation.

Communication and expression is a central subject for the artist, who grew up in Japanese-occupied Korea where he was forced to speak the coloniser’s tongue, then as an immigrant in Germany and New York, “learning to speak German and English badly.” In Amanda Kim’s documentary, we hear Paik’s writings given voice by actor Steven Yuen: “Everyday is a communication problem for me. My problem is how to communicate back.” At the heart of Paik’s art is an attempt to speak back, to hear the echo of another and return the call. Throughout the documentary, we sense Paik’s attempt to use technology to create dialogues across boundaries – national, political and personal.

Kim’s film situates Paik historically to contextualise his radical political lens that shaped his desire to speak – Paik was making art during the Vietnam War, the partition of Korea and the erection of the Berlin Wall, all while technological advances were being made in broadcast media. Often referred to as the “grandfather of video art,” Paik was one of the few video artists examining the effect of television and computers on our everyday life. Wary of the medium’s ability to manipulate its viewers, Paik says, “Television is a dictatorial medium. When the superior says something to the inferior, they can just listen and answer ‘Yes.’ Talking back is what democracy needs.” In 1969, Paik worked with the television technician Shuya Abe to invent the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer which mixes moving images, colourising and warping them into a new visual language that punctured TV’s illusory objectivity. Paik’s practice is an attempt to “talk back to the television”. The viewer, in tandem with Paik, can transform and deform TV’s images by twisting knobs and keys on the synthesiser to create new images to psychedelic effect. Although the tool helped create a new aesthetic for music videos and digital art, Paik’s tool also intended to estrange viewers from television itself by attacking the sanctity of the broadcast image. By disrupting the images, he reminded viewers that they could challenge the mass media’s representation of reality, to awaken themselves from the sedating effect of television.

The Korean-born artist died in 2006, the year that Twitter was made. Looking back to his oeuvre, you could see that Paik anticipated many of the technological debates we are having now – from creating work that imagines machine consciousness as he attempts to “humanise technology”, to his coining of the term “electronic super-highway” in 1974, which he conceptualised as a system that would link everyone on Earth together. In 1994, after his prophecy came true with the birth of the internet, Paik celebrated it with a work titled Internet Dreams, where multiple ever-changing screens immersed you in a frenzy of information overload.

With the development of AI, and debates around its creative consciousness, Paik’s work takes on new dimensions, reimagining what “becoming robot” means in the digital age. Robot K-456 (1964), one of Paik’s early works, unlike the automata of our science fiction imaginations, is no perfect fighting machine. Robot K-456 is a frail, hunched creature, endowed with cameras for eyes, a speaker for a mouth, bouncy foam breasts and a flint and sandpaper penis. It even shits beans while it moves. “My work looks whimsical but it has a profound background. I make technology ridiculous,” Paik says. As Robot K-456 hobbles down the street reciting an old speech by John F. Kennedy on loop, its beauty emerges in its idiosyncratic quirks – the limp in its left leg, the trail of white beans left in its wake, its sexual features, its broken-record mumblings that signal to the evasive nature of memory. Paik didn’t want to create a perfect robot, what made the robot seem more human was its failures.

Rather than imagining a conscious machine, free of a body and its failings, Paik exposes the chaos of being alive ­– of a body that desires, shits, and ages – his imagination of consciousness is a bodily one. Although AI researchers have primarily tried to achieve consciousness through pumping data into a network of computer circuits, Paik’s robot seems to question whether consciousness can ever be achieved without any haptic responses, without a body that experiences all the world’s sensations. The robot’s fragility was affectively dramatised twenty years later, when Paik had Robot K-456 lumber down the street as part of his 1982 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where a car ran into it in a staged accident. When a news reporter asked Paik what happened, he responded, “It is the catastrophe of technology in the twenty-first century. And we’re practising how to cope with it.”

Paik’s view of consciousness is interdependent and embodied, borrowing from Buddhist concepts of the self. In his most famous work, TV Buddha (1974), Paik poetically expresses a view of a shared consciousness. In the work, Buddha is placed opposite a TV with a camera attached above it, streaming live-action footage of the Buddha in a closed-circuit loop.

When you stand behind the Buddha, you’re suddenly startled by your own reflection in the TV, joining, disrupting and contributing to the Buddha’s image. The Buddha statue, our physical symbol of true enlightenment, recognises himself in the TV-image, looking at his own awakened state. Although his reflection in the TV is not real, the reflection represents a truth, a kernel of the Real, captured and recorded, in an eternal loop between the Buddha’s eyes, the camera and the TV. Here, Paik captures the sense of the eternal soul in Zen Buddhism, which flows in a looped ‘stream of consciousness’ or ‘mental flow’.

Yet, the TV-image is one that’s unstable, dependent on other bodies to enter its frames and disrupt its stillness, to witness the Buddha recognising himself. When we stand behind the Buddha, we see ourselves too, looking alongside him. If, within his reflection, we can see the Buddha’s understanding of truth, maybe it informs how we see ourselves too. In Buddhism, each self is a mirror set against an infinite number of mirrors, composed of all its infinite reflections of others. Paik’s TV Buddha borrows from the hall of mirrors to poignantly suggest our interconnectedness: we depend on each other to be seen and to see. The invitation of the camera to look together grasps towards a collective truth.

Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV is currently on general release in the UK courtesy of Dogwoof.

Cici Peng is a writer based in London, who has contributed to Little White Lies, gal-dem, The Quietus and The FACE. She specialises in global art cinema, experimental moving-image work, and contemporary literature.

Originally published on ALT/KINO on 31 May, 2023.

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Across video and performance, Katharine Fry’s work has regularly explored the boundaries of the body and the body as a boundary. Across various pieces she has explored the condition she refers to as ‘House Arrest’ through her own body before 2021’s Her Glass Flower House saw her reckoning with illness and recovery through the body of a doll. Returning to the milieu of the doll’s house, her 2022 film When I’m with you explores the intertwined identities of four women – Margot, Marie, Marjorie and Mother Flower – through a series of spectacular and surreal stop-motion performances that weave together the bombastically theatrical with the psychologically introspective.

On behalf of ALT/KINO, Ben Nicholson sat down with Fry to discuss When I’m with you and the processes of both conceiving of and then realising the film.

ALT/KINO: Could you explain a bit about the initial idea and how When I’m with you came into being?

Katharine Fry: I’d already made one film in the doll’s house last year. That was under a different set of circumstances - it was after I was ill and not wanting to work with my still sick-looking body - but I found that it opened up something. Then I’d just come back from being away and was in quarantine. In that same week, everything I’d applied for came back as a ‘no.’ Teaching work, a commission, funding - whatever it was, it was ‘no’, ‘no,’ ‘no.’ I was obviously quite upset and frustrated because I also had nothing to do and nowhere to go and the first thing that came to me was this ‘I’m waiting’ monologue that would eventually appear in the scene where the two Maries are reflected flicking around a room of mirrors. I stopped what I was doing and wrote that out fresh. Film director Margy Kinmonth told me about this children’s book from the 1950s by a Canadian author called Dare Wright, The Lonely Doll, so I wrote this quite sorry-for-myself monologue under the title, The Lonely Doll.

A/K: And were you imagining it taking place in the doll’s house again, at this point?

KF: At that moment, I think I thought the film would be zooming in and out, zooming between the doll in the doll’s house and me in my house and I might reanimate my performing body. And then I started casting for a new doll - which means looking online at dolls to buy. I found Margot, that was the first doll. Presumably she’s named Margo - I’m not sure that they say it - but presumably she’s named Margo for Margo Leadbetter in The Good Life. I saw her and instantly she had that kind of pressed, Lynchian housewife feel about her, and I was just knew ‘she’s the one.’

At that point I started reading stuff to start the percolation process. I start reading material not to work from it, but to both confirm hunches I already had and also put me in this space where I’ll be looking away and dreaming up my own scenes. It started with just writing quite small factual stuff that interested me as I went through, but in there already, ideas for scenes were coming up. It might have just been something quite simple, like the idea of reflective saws running up her body or the idea of ribbons as a way to find her edges. How does the body know its limits? Actually - crucially - Susie Orbach’s Bodies reframes [Donald] Winnicott’s idea of the true and the false self. This is something he relates to a primary caregivers’ attunement, or mis-attunement, to an infant. For most of us, if we’re lucky/normal, most of the time our caregiver is pretty much attuned to what we want, or need, as infants so there’s not too big a mismatch and there’s no catastrophe in the infant mind. If the caregiver is so mis-attuned that they really can’t ever recognise a need or desire - or urgency - coming from the infant, then the infant almost warps themselves, as a survival strategy, to what they see or intuit or understand the caregiver wants them to want. So at least some need is met. That constructs a false self - you could kind of break it down almost to chronic people pleasing - but you’re emptied out of agency and desires. You form this performative, false self that only works externally and nothing’s happening internally. Then there’s the idea of a sort of fragile true self that’s essentially buried or under-formed. So that started this idea of rigid bodies and floppy bodies, true bodies and false bodies. Whether a body was rigid because it was the suit of the robo-housewife or if it was a strong body of agency. Then, is the floppy one malleable and moving through its own desires or malleable because it is being moulded externally? I hadn’t quite resolved this, but I knew what was going to happen.

A/K: So, this begins the notion of these various iterations of the self?

KF: Well, ok, so the gold in The Guardian is the below the line comments. I read all the problem pages and I read all the comments. One man wrote in about his work colleague who told him that long ago she had created a second person called Marjorie, who was responsible for all her dark thoughts and actions. Marjorie is my maternal grandmother’s name and so I thought ‘let’s have some Marjorie.’ Etymologically, Margot and Marjorie are actually the same name, so I really liked this and was already beginning to feel like I was setting up a play with different aspects and how separate these characters really were.

A/K: I wanted to ask you about meaning in your film and how you feel about being asked to explain - particularly to viewers - the meaning behind the various elements and the way you weave in your influences.

KF: I don’t mind being asked. I really like hearing people’s wild speculation and if it in any way touches on what I came from that’s great. Some people ask quite specific questions and I sort of don’t mind offering what things do for me, I don’t mind telling my stories about it. However, I also don’t want to suggest that my stories are in any way final to me, or that the story started before I had the image - you know, quite often I set things up and make images and make scenes and then think ‘oh, yeah, I kind of think that’s what’s going on.’ I don’t stop myself by asking those questions or worrying about those questions. So yeah, I suppose I don’t mind sharing some idea of what it means for me, but I also like the idea that people have space for their interpretation.

A/K: It’s interesting. Sometimes it can feel as though audiences are really keen to be told some definitive meaning.

KF: If they’re anxious, yeah, but then students will ask, ‘what was your motivation? What was your intention?’ My response is that I’m anti-motivation, I’m anti-intention. I’m against this idea that something is hammered into shape before you do it - because why on earth would you do it?

A/K: I suppose, given that, I wanted to ask you about “House Arrest” which I’ve seen framed both as a body of work and as a concept. Do you see there to be a discrete set of films that fall within it? Or is it more of an idea that’s underpinning many facets of your work?

KF: I never think that you can pin a neat theoretical platform under any work, nor stick it neatly on top, to explain it - but people really like to. “House Arrest” is the name of my practice-based PhD and I struggled for a really long time to have any notion of what the hell I was really doing. So, I literally looked at my work, and saw that for 15 years a figure has been turning up in a house, doing stuff, and I hadn’t resolved this. So, my question was ‘why does this figure keep recurring in this house?’ My answer: ‘she’s under house arrest’ and that was just an instant answer. Then I went on a journey through psychoanalytic theory and the time-based work of other artists to flesh out this idea of a subject whose desire is compressed by the boundary of their skin - a skin onto which social normative expectations are projected. This desire to explode the body or search for wholeness is a very common thread - whether it’s in romantic language of seeking out your other half, or the return to a big bang or a primordial something, or oneness and nirvana in various religions and spiritual practices. We have this idea that there’s something that’s going to complete me outside of me, and if I could just get out of me, I would be there. But then also there is an anxiety of ‘if I explode, where do I go?’ and that’s why I talk about “House Arrest” as the condition of an ambivalent subject that can never resolve itself. So, there is a degree to which I can choose to read aspects - the meeting between a self and an “other”, the surface of a body – or nuances of “House Arrest” through every work. You could also make other stories about them, though. It’s a useful tool but it’s not the only tool.

A/K: When you came to the point of putting a certain label on it, or suggesting a framework for it to be read, do you feel that it changed the way you approached new work? Do you ever feel that you have to continue exploring it or that work needs to fit into it? I suppose that is maybe a broader question about commercial, institutional, or audience pressures - funding, commissions - and how you go about navigating that.

KF: That’s a great question on lots of counts. No one has funded or commissioned any of my work, other than one performance series I made in 2008. So, although the Barbican said ‘make it’ they certainly didn’t commission When I’m with you. The first outline for Her Glass Flower House was actually for a Film and Video Umbrella commission that I didn’t get. When I was shooting Her Glass Flower House, I had written this synopsis and so I did look at it as a frame, but I said ‘I’m not beholden to that. I don’t even have a contract with myself that that’s what I have to make - so don’t worry about it.’ I think that quite early on, the Barbican wanted some blurb about the film that I hadn’t made. It was funny, they told me they were glad I didn’t mention before the screening that I had still been writing the script a few days beforehand. I was like, ‘I kind of did tell you - I said I had a month to do the sound and the sound technically is the script. I trust myself to get it done, but it would probably scare other people. I don’t really feel under any constraints, though.

The new film that I’m going to be making based at The Museum of the Home kind of picks up stuff, I guess, but it’s also just picking up things that I feel are urgent. I’m starting with what images are coming to mind. I remember describing one of these sequences with a mother and daughter and flowers being planted in a chair - it’s like a whole world that unfolds between the two of them just with these objects. I described it to the collections manager and said that, at that moment, I didn’t really know what it meant and was fine with that. I say that just to explain how things go. I will have a certainty about a sequence of images and if I have to worry about that, I’ll worry about it months from now. Right now, I’m just saying that that’s the sequence.

A/K: You spoke just then about the different stages of this work and obviously you had your ideas of scenes, then shot them all. So, you’re then coming to the point where you edit it, and then you write it?

KF: Actually, I guess I essentially did make an after-the-fact storyboard for the first time. I had 50 pieces of paper that corresponded to what I shot, and I cleared a table and started laying them out in an order and started editing them in that order. I think there was only one scene that didn’t make the cut - I thought it was the wrong side of cringy - but other than that, that was pretty much the visual edit. Some of it is stop-motion, some of it is live action - so it demands different ways of editing it. Any camerawork in it is post-production stuff; figuring out how I’m going to pan and move the frame. Then I got Ned Cartwright, the composer. I think I had about 40 minutes of the visual edit done, and I wanted him to start thinking about a score for the opening sequence with the windows. So, he would go away and work on that and then later we had some time in my studio, we had some time in a recording studio. Some bits of script I had already written - I’d written Marjorie’s “luxury” sequence and I’d written the “I’m waiting” monologue. I was really nervous about bad writing, so I decided the only way to avoid bad writing was to not over-write it and to not over-wring it in multiple drafts. It felt like I had sort of steeped myself enough in my initial research and through my own world-making that I could say, ‘there’s just 30 seconds here; what’s being said in these 30 seconds?’ and then I wrote the words, recorded the words, put the words on. It was brutally quick.

A/K: Is that your usual order even when you’re not working with the dolls?

KF: Yeah, exactly. Generally, other than Creepers, what I’m doing when it’s me and an object or me in an environment, I’ve started with a hunch - with an action and an object - often I get to the point where I think I’m going to shoot it and that action is actually physically impossible. So, then I’m like, ‘okay, I’ve got these hours, I guess I’ll do something.’ So, I just do stuff until I’m able to look back on the footage and have a feeling about something, there’s probably enough there that when I put this on a timeline, something good is going to happen. Then I set the visual edit. But yeah, writing words usually comes last.

A/K: You briefly mentioned your new film a minute ago and while it’s a bit of a cliche final question, as you brought it up, I feel like it’s permissible here to ask you about. What can you tell us about what you’re currently working on and how it came about?

KF: I was awarded a DYCP [Developing Your Creative Practice] grant from the Arts Council and that gives me a starting budget. I’ve never worked with a crew before. I’ve never worked with a producer or a Director of Photography - I’ve never done any normal film stuff and I’d like to. In one way, it can satisfy the larger scale of ideas I’d like to try and also, I can try to understand what happens to me in that process. Everything I do in my work, I do fine. It’s all fine, it all works and what comes out is pretty good, but I’m aware there are people with very specific skills and those honed skills are much better than mine. But is that better? Is that difference going to give me something? I don’t know and I’d like to find out.

I’ve been talking to the Museum of the Home since my last exhibition with Danielle Arnaud Gallery. I’m going to be shooting in the two almshouses there that mirror each other as footprints. It will be live action, one set in the 1730s and one in the 1830s. I also have full permission to go through their entire collection and do what I want as long as the object can handle being handled. Because I’ve not worked with a crew in this way, I literally need someone to tell me this is how many people you will need on set, this is how much it costs per day to have them there, this is how many days we’re going to shoot something. My own parameters for my work are just like ‘when’s the screening? It’s got to be done by the screening.’ This is going to be about mother-daughter intergenerational dynamics, playing across three generations. There will be a bit of period specificity but more like the ghosts of objects - some objects in the room will shift to suggest something’s changed or a costume might change. It’s called The Fur Chest. There will be a fur chest and the things that come out of the chest will act as catalysts for changes in the scene. The daughter is going to be bedridden, attached to a spinning wheel by her feet that her mother’s going to control in one generation. Whether each daughter is truly ill, beset by a phantom illness, or subject to her mother’s control will be open to shifting interpretation. Their interactions, using objects from the museum’s collections, will focus on the daughter’s feet as a metaphor for developing or restricting autonomy. The daughters don’t speak, using doll’s house furniture to communicate their desires in stop-motion sequences. They manipulate wooden feet in the daytime to secretly dance at night.

Here I’m interested in family structures, in behaviours that repeat across generations, from epigenetic trauma to using your parents’ words. My characters are containers of memories and feelings that don’t belong to them. As each daughter becomes a mother, a dysfunctional dynamic is transmitted and transformed across generations, showing how a chain of containers is made. cross the generations, silent interactions between mother and daughter will be loaded with conflicting desires and unmet needs. Each struggle to find a voice, body or story that fits them, until the last daughter finds a separate identity from her mother’s.

I dreamt up the bones of The Fur Chest in the 20 minutes it took me to walk home from the Museum after my first visit to the collections store where I saw an incredible fur-coated trunk from the 1700s. Since then, I’ve been pulling all of the strange and the unusual out of the archives and playing them across my body and through the almshouses, imagining scenes as I go. I’m in heaven!

When I’m with you screens at The Museum of the Home on Thursday 20 followed by a discussion and then plays on a loop throughout Friday 21 April 2023.

Ben Nicholson is a writer and curator specialising in non-fiction, experimental film, and artists’ moving image. He is the founder and editor/curator of ALT/KINO.

Originally published on ALT/KINO on 17 April, 2023.

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Two circular labyrinths sit side-by-side, each with seven silver balls that roll around three inner rings and a central circle. As a hand rocks the wooden toy back and forth, back and forth, the fourteen shiny little spheres more often elude the centre than fall into it. So commences the hieroglyphic, hypnotic Double Labyrinthe (1975-76), recently released on DVD by RE:VOIR. In the film, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki each create a portrait of the other, transforming the camera into an intimate medium through which a reciprocal gaze between two women can take place.

Klonaris and Thomadaki met in the 1960s, when both were girls at the same school in Athens. It was the immediate blossoming of ‘a common vision’ and ‘an intense mental kinship’, the two remarked fifty years later. It was ‘an encounter for life’. [1] After emigrating to the fifth arrondissement of Paris in the mid-1970s, the duo continued to collaborate for four decades, until Klonaris’s death in 2014. Working in the interstices of film, installation, and performance, as well as writing theoretical texts, the artists exploded the theme of subjectivity into so many constellations to be explored without end.

Similarly fascinated by the shadowy sides of the self, Double Labyrinthe hints towards the three epic cycles that came afterwards: the Unheimlich (1977-82), the Hermaphrodite (1982-90) and the Angel (1985-2013). Although less well-known in Britain than in France, filmgoers here might be familiar with Klonaris and Thomadaki from the second instalment in the Unheimlich cycle, Astarti (1980), a restoration of which screened at the London Film Festival in 2019. Double Labyrinthe is similarly mythopoetic. Against a black background – inky anytime, anywhere – the fifty-minute film mobilises an archetypal dichotomy of femininity across the bodies of the two Greek women.

Maria first films Katerina, then Katerina films Maria. All that is alluring and luminous is associated with sylph-like Katerina and that which is dark and demonic is attached to lion-maned Maria. Among the things summoned for each portrait, Katerina’s materials tend to be white, translucent, or granular (cellophane and lace, powder and rice), while Maria’s materials tend to be black, opaque, reflective or refractive (leather gloves, mirror and tin foil, a glass of water). Katerina: daffodils and daisies. Maria: bloodied goat head, rubber stamps that mark, sharp metallic objects that jab and cut. Without a doubt, the film risks a reiteration of the simplistic binaries that carve women into two: active or passive, light or shadow, and so on. Even when a colour, for instance, echoes across the two portraits, it is distorted to carry opposite connotations. On the body of Katerina, red is seduction, a liquid that trickles from the mouth and trails between the breasts. In the hands of Maria, it is a thick string she wraps around her entire head – red changes to become the very colour of go away. Katerina: the part of menstruation when everything is arousing. Maria: when all you now want is to be alone and for your body to disappear.

On the RE:VOIR DVD, Double Labyrinthe is accompanied by three other portraits of a smaller scale (none more than six minutes) and a black-and-white film of the action performance La Torture (1976), in which Klonaris and Thomadaki dissected the violence of the 1967-74 Greek dictatorship as part of a performance group called COLLECTIF 010. Flash Passion (1970) is an early portrait of Katerina by Maria in Athens; between the opening images that move from sea to shore and the following ones of Katerina at a window and in a mirror, it is as if Maya Deren were all of a sudden alive and filming in Hellenic shades of gold and blue. 3.VII.1973 (1971) is a portrait by Katerina of her maternal grandmother, posthumously titled with the date of her death; in extreme close-ups, Katerina tenderly likens the wispy white hair and wrinkles of her foremother to floral-embossed fabrics, lilac and lace.

My favourite is Smoking (1975). Filmed around the time of Double Labyrinthe and against a black background again, this sensual portrait of Maria by Katerina feels like apocrypha to that text – a piece that would not fit. Smoking is not just what Maria does in the film but what she is. There is no inhale for her exhale, in no image does she drag on a cigarette. Smoke simply, magically, emanates from incarnadine lips. Across a series of close-ups that unfurl, pause and fade, that double and blur, Maria confronts camera, Katerina, and spectator across wafts of smoke, and also withdraws into those veils, eyes closed in bliss. Adrift from the dualism that underlies Double Labyrinthe, Maria is able to draw the diaphanous into her realm, and free to deliver a stare that is describable as ‘fuck-off’ and ‘come-hither’ all at once.

In the DVD booklet, Thomadaki collates fragments of writing on the films into a ‘mosaic essay’. Taken from texts by Klonaris and Thomadaki, as well as by theorists such as Laura Mulvey and Nicole Brenez, these fragments are published in French and English – most appearing in English for the first time. At the centre of the booklet lies an abbreviated version of the artists’ incantatory manifesto for un cinéma corporel, a cinema of the body, written in 1978. Set off by a ‘because’, each line reads as an instinctual, passionate response to the insistent voice of reason, its invisible but ubiquitous why.

Two earlier manifestos, from 1975, agitated for different, feminine forms of filmmaking and writing to break from capitalist, patriarchal forms of production and concomitant phallocentric imaginaries: one was, of course, Mulvey’s essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema; the second was Hélène Cixous’ The Laugh of the Medusa. When Rachel Blau DuPlessis said of manifestos that ‘the new time … is already here’, she spoke about the ways in which an ardent, breathless urgency typical of manifestos often results in the text itself touching or tracing utopia. [2] To whatever extent the new time of the feminine is tangible in Cixous’ and Mulvey’s manifestos, Double Labyrinthe and Smoking fulfil both Mulvey’s hopes for an alternative, artisanal cinema that ‘could conceive of a new language of desire’ and Cixous’ calls for writing ‘as women, towards women’. [3] Between these two films made in 1975, the new time being envisioned by Cixous and Mulvey is already here – realised to a dazzling degree.

That Klonaris and Thomadaki continued to make art with a double signature in the feminine for forty years is extraordinary. As much as authorship is a contested desire for feminists, life-long collaboration that bears the names of two women artists is so rare that I am awestruck at the very fact. And beyond that improbable reality, there are numerous other treasures to be found too.

[1] Marina Gržinić, ‘Conversation with Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki – Dissident Subjectivities: The Filmmakers as Double Subject’ in Subjectivity, ed. Dominique Chateau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 191.

[2] Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘f-words: An Essay on the Essay’, American Literature 68/1 (March 1996): 35.

[3] Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16 / 3 (Autumn 1975): 8; Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ [1975], trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1 / 4 (Summer 1976): 875.

Double Labyrinthe is available to buy on DVD from RE:VOIR.

Laura Staab is a writer based in London, with specialisms in art cinema, experimental film, and women’s filmmaking. See linktr.ee/laurastaab for links to other recent writing.

Originally published on ALT/KINO on 20 March, 2023.

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When Daniel Kasman covered the Locarno Festival on Notebook in 2017 he hit upon a great way of engaging with standout work. In his introduction, he explained that he would be “looking for specific images, moments, techniques, qualities or scenes…that grabbed me and have lingered past and beyond the next movie seen, whose characters, story and images have already begun to overwrite those that came just before.” This seemed like a great way to engage with the creative work in a milieu like a festival - to concentrate on that which lingers rather than attempting to highlight everything. As such, we’ve shamelessly pilfered this very technique for the ALT/KINO festival reports.

On this occasion, Patrick Gamble went in search of memorable ideas and aesthetics from the ever-fascinating selection of experimental work included in the various sections of this year’s Berlinale programme.

The poetry of Lucille Clifton in James Benning’s Allensworth

Watching James Benning’s landscape films, you’re often made aware of the off-screen space. It might be the sound of a passing train, the bark of a dog, or the ring of a church bell. However in Allensworth, a film about the California municipality where Col. Allen Allensworth - a former slave and retired Army chaplain - built a utopian town for black Americans, it’s what’s missing from these scenes that’s most notable. Structured as 12 five-minute static shots, one for each month of the year, it isn’t until August that we see a human being. A young black girl, dressed in period clothing, stands in a dilapidated school building and reads a poem by Lucille Clifton. Much like Benning, Clifton’s work is also notable for what’s missing, with her politically charged poems about race in America often lacking capitalisation and punctuation; her prose so pared down that its spaces take on substance. The same could be said of Benning’s work; his fixed-frame shots, with their scant margins of movement, convey the strangeness of this deserted landscape, and force the audience to consider why this utopian vision of Black liberation failed.

“I’m not a woman. I’m a doorknob.” The refusal of subjecthood in Mary Helena Clark’s Exhibition

Why do museums and galleries collect artefacts and what is it about these objects that triggers our desire to gather, sort, and display them? That’s one of the questions at the heart of Mary Helena Clark’s Exhibition, an enigmatic montage film about objects and how they assert their presence on us. Organised as a series of vignettes coupled with narration – Clark described the film as her first “talky” – the film weaves together multiple biographies and texts. From Eija-Riitta Eklöf-Berliner-Mauer, the Swedish woman who married the Berlin Wall, to Mary Richardson, the Canadian suffragette who attacked Velásquez’s The Toilet of Venus with a meat cleaver, Clark has created a cinematic museum of unreliable objects. By compiling all these artefacts into one ‘exhibition’, alongside quotations from Sigmund Freud and abstract painter Agnes Martin, whose aforementioned quote spoke to her desire for anonymity regarding how her work was perceived, Clark has curated a strangely haunting film about the uneasy relationship between meaning and perception.

A memetic study of American politics in Soda Jerk’s Hello Dankness

It’s hard to imagine anyone better than Soda Jerk to depict an era of political discourse dominated by conspiracy theories and deep fakes. Opening with an unedited version of Kendall Jenner’s controversial Pepsi commercial, which demonstrates the extent to which reality has become stranger than fiction, the film reassembles hundreds of pirated audiovisual samples from popular American films and television series in an attempt to make sense of the surreal spectacle of American politics from 2016 to 2021. From a Bernie Sanders supporting Tom Hanks (The ’Burbs) living opposite a Hilary Clinton loving Annette Benning (American Beauty), to The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles explaining Pizza-gate, the film beautifully mirrors this strange political epoch, in which simulations of reality often seem more authentic than reality itself.

The all-seeing eye of domestic surveillance in Graeme Arnfield’s Home Invasion

Look on YouTube or any community WhatsApp group and you can find hours of footage captured by video doorbell cameras: attempted burglaries, disgruntled delivery drivers, or the nocturnal activities of animals. This footage has even been used by law enforcement to help solve crimes, leading to a culture that is completely obsessed with the self-policing of neighbourhoods. But is it worth the erosion of our privacy? Jumping off from the prevalence of doorbell cameras and their role in making surveillance technology ubiquitous, Arnfield’s film charts the entwined history of technology and the curtailing of our civil liberties. From the story of Marie van Britten Brown who invented the first doorbell camera in 1966 to keep herself safe, only to become obsessed with the images she observed, to the role the telephone played in D.W. Griffith’s use of parallel edits to build dramatic tension, the film explores the various ways that these technologies have invaded our homes. Choosing to shoot his essay film through the voyeuristic frame of a peephole, Arnfield embraces the paranoia of our times, and uses it to explore how home and neighbourhood surveillance technologies have been normalised in the name of safety and security.

The four and a half minutes of quiet deliberation in Kevin Jerome Everson’s If You Don’t Watch the Way You Move

Everson’s latest film begins with trap group BmE laying down their latest track in a Columbus Recording studio. As the men leave the booth to listen to the playback the sound suddenly drops out and their session is interrupted by an impromptu performance of John Cage’s 4’33”. Blending fiction and documentary, Everson’s cinematic portraits of African American lives often explore aspects of black identity by focusing on everyday acts of labour and leisure. Here, he not only celebrates Black excellence, but gives space for us to contemplate stereotypical depictions of Black male rap artists in popular culture. Cage’s 4’33” is often referred to as the composer’s silent opus, but in reality it is a performance piece; one in which the audience is forced to consider the environment around them. Here Everson uses silence in much the same way; prompting questions about representations of black masculinity and the role music has played in amplifying the voices that society seeks to silence.

The beauty of Soy Sauce Crystals in Deborah Stratman’s Last Things

Combining passages from J.-H. Rosny’s 1910 novella The Death of the Earth, with microscopic imagery of Mitochondria and the rock formations of Chondrites, Deborah Stratman’s enigmatic essay film blends science fact with science fiction to depict the end of the world through a non-anthropological lens. Footage of natural phenomena like the crystallisation of salt in soy sauce, are accompanied by geophone recordings of the low vibrations made by minerals, creating a landscape that looks alien, yet feels familial on a cellular level. By tracing various evolutionary paths, Stratman expands our understanding of the world and in the process has created a film that tempers our collective anxieties about climate change with the reassuring knowledge that long after humans have ceased to roam the planet, life will find a way to endure.

The six lights of the Bardo Thödol in Lois Patiño’s Samsara

There’s a moment in the middle of Patiño’s latest, a film that explores the cycle of birth, death and reincarnation, in which the Spanish director asks the audience to trust him. Positioned between the tale of a young Laotian man who crosses the river every day to read the Bardo Thödol to an elderly woman and the story of a young girl in Tanzania and her pet goat, the 15 minute sequence sees Patiño transfer the film from the screen onto an entirely different canvas, one alive with our own projections. A moment of pure cinematic immersion, Patiño leads us through a sensory pathway, of pulsating lights and disorientating sounds as we cross a series of physical and spiritual borders. It’s a hypnotic, transformative, and genuinely life affirming moment of cinema that will live on for generations.

The 2023 edition of the Berlinale ran from 16-26 February 2023

Patrick Gamble is a writer on film and culture, whose work has featured on Hyperallergic, BFI, Calvert Journal and Kinoscope. Further links to his writing can be found at patrickgamble.contently.com.

Originally published on ALT/KINO on 13 March, 2023.

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There is a sentiment, apocryphally attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, that art is never finished, merely abandoned. This may be why many artists revisit subjects, reinvent previous pieces, or work iteratively. In the cinematic mode, there are tinkerers like George Lucas, who was still updating Star Wars (1977) decades after its release. The advent of DVD gave the opportunity to revisit in new ways, like the option to watch Christopher Nolan’s non-linear thriller Memento (2000) in chronological order, or the wealth of directors’ cuts that claim to be an original vision that was lost to commerce or compromise. Some directors make belated sequels, while others even remake their own work – a tradition that stretches from Cecil B. DeMille via Ozu and Hitchcock to Michael Haneke and Sebastián Lelio, whose latest film Gloria Bell (2019) is a US-set remake of his Gloria (2013).

Sometimes filmmakers and artists reconstitute and remould their own work into new forms to engage with their past practice – something that has been done most famously, perhaps, by Godard or Straub-Huillet. Elsewhere, the revisiting of prior work is a reckoning with the project’s history. Last year Sandi Tan’s Shirkers used footage from a lost film shot 25 years ago to tell the story of its mysterious fate. At last month’s Sheffield Doc/Fest American filmmaker Zia Anger used her unreleased debut feature as the basis for a live performance-cum-desktop documentary reflecting on her experiences of the film’s creation and its subsequent limbo status as a work that had never actually received a premiere.

The Canadian artist Michael Snow has returned on no less than three occasions to his avant-garde landmark from 1967, Wavelength. Wavelength is possibly the most analysed experimental film ever made; in her book-length study of 2009, Elizabeth Legge referred to it as “a blue screen in front of which a range of ideological and intellectual dramas have been played out.” The basic premise is simple: a camera progressively zooms in across an 80-foot New York loft for 45 minutes while on the audio track a sine wave shortens, becoming increasingly high pitched. However, the film is open to myriad readings; it might be about any number of things, from the representation of filmic space and time to the nature of human perception. In returning to the work, with Slidelength (1969-71), WVLNT (Wavelength for Those Who Don’t Have Time) (2003) and now Waivelength (2019), Snow has sought to complement, emphasize and expand upon the multivalent ideas in play. Given the importance of space in the original film, it is interesting that each of the three subsequent works has a spatial relationship to their progenitor.

Slidelength, which came soon after Wavelength, takes the form of a slide-projector installation that includes stills from the original film and numerous photographs of the process of making it. These include images of gels that were utilised during filming; Snow’s hands regularly appear in the frame. He wanted to emphasise the physicality of his practice, in much the same way that the visible brushstrokes on a canvas connect the viewer to the physical practice of painting. Slidelength is a zoom out from Wavelength. Effectively a highbrow ‘making-of’ document, it allows the viewer to see not just through the camera’s lens, but outside the frame. The piece also adopts a sculptural quality, in that the projector stands proudly on a plinth which viewers can move around and walk behind; this further complicates the notions of projected space with which Wavelength is fascinated.

WVLNT (Wavelength for Those That Don’t Have Time) is a very different animal. Snow has cut the original film into three equal segments, then overlaid them. The result is a 15-minute version of the film that folds Wavelength on top of itself, creating a dense and entrancing palimpsest. The durational element of the zoom or the sine wave is eliminated, the spatial progression disrupted. While all three images concurrently tighten, the camera seems impossibly immobile. The film also further warps any vague sense of narrative, as events that happen sequentially in the original film – and which might point to an oblique murder mystery – are reordered.

If Slidelength steps back from the camera, and WVLNT folds events across one another, then Waivelength is like stepping through the looking glass. A live audio performance by Snow and the Toronto-based multimedia artist Mani Mazinani, it reinvents Wavelength’s sinewave, creating a binaural soundscape that utilises the pliability of a Dolby 7.1 sound system to broadcast different notes from different speakers. Accompanying the audio is a single shot of the ocean, a close-up of the waves as the sun goes down, in which the image gradually slows to a halt. The visuals seem to correlate directly to the photograph on the wall that Wavelength ultimately zooms in to: it is as if the audience has continued the zoom and passed through the photo to see the actual ocean. Waivelength juxtaposes the flatness of the cinema screen with the dimensionality of the auditorium: watching it, the viewer feels consumed by the building torrent of aural (sine) waves.

Ben Nicholson is a writer and curator specialising in non-fiction, experimental film, and artists’ moving image. He is the founder and editor/curator of ALT/KINO.

This piece is reproduced with the permission of Sight and Sound on the occasion Michael Snow’s passing.

Originally published on ALT/KINO on 16 January, 2023.

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Rather than producing just another indistinguishable ranked list of the “best” films of the year, we decided instead to ask a handful of our contributors to select their own handful of favourites of 2022 for the below display.

In the spirit of pushing boundaries and resisting categorisation, our 2022 review doesn’t restrict recommendations to experimental/avant garde/artist’s moving image films but could include any other - even tangentially related - product or production. They could select books, records, performances, DVD or Blu-ray releases, articles, interviews, film screenings, podcast episodes.

Blight soundtrack by purge.xxx

There are few film soundtracks quite so memorable as Jocelyn Pook’s inventive, melodic, and mournful audio assemblage for John Smith’s Blight (1994-96). This fantastic vinyl release of the soundtrack also includes a more overtly musical variation using the same elements, Tango with Corrugated Iron. BN

Dry Ground Burning (Joana Pimenta & Adirley Queirós)

A brilliant synthesis of two forms that rarely cross-streams fruitfully: full-throated genre cinema and close-up, ethnographic filmmaking. However, this binary doesn’t say it all. Since it’s a film that constantly revises itself, seeking new ways to express the direct experiences, wounds, aspirations and rage of the disenfranchised. RM

Penny Slinger’s artist’s book 50% The Visible Woman (1971)

Long out of print, the publication of Penny Slinger’s future-looking artist’s book 50% The Visible Woman was a major cause for celebration. Influenced by Max Ernst’s collage books, but also drawing on Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), it’s a messy, ritualistic, blood-and-guts descent into female consciousness. I reviewed it here. SSB

Les Mains négatives + Simone Barbès ou la vertu: The Machine That Kills Bad People at the ICA, London

Parisian streets collapse inward, seediness spills out like a broken sewage pipe, but it is deeply, profoundly human: love reigns, even when you don’t touch. SP

MISS-COMMUNICATION by Joanna Walsh.

Combining an AI generated text with a choose-your-own-critical-theory adventure, Walsh’s book sits alongside Jeppe Lange’s Abyss and the 25,000 films created by Eye Filmmuseum’s Jan Bot as a fascinating - if somewhat bewildering - work that asks interesting questions about authorship in art created by AI. PG

Derek Jarman’s Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping

Derek Jarman’s only piece of narrative fiction, written in 1971, was published just a few weeks ago by Prototype. A fabulous, surreal road trip through a fairytale America, it’s veering narrative makes the experience of reading it like being relayed someone’s dream. At the same time, the accompanying texts in the book place it brilliantly amongst Jarman’s other work. BN

Instant Life (OJOBOCA)

I first saw Ojoboca’s Instant Life at the Berlinale Forum in February, and since then there’s barely been a day when I haven’t thought about it. A mischievous celebration of the creative and destructive power of reproduction, Instant Life is a riddle that refuses to come to rest. PG

Daniel & Clara’s Red Letters

A year-long project that’s about to end, Red Letters, by M.I.A. founders Daniel & Clara, has been a 2022 delight. A monthly missive, on vivid cardinal paper, delivered by snail mail, depicting an encounter with place – often conjuring a similar sense of the uncanny as do the duo’s moving images. BN

Heron 1954-2002 (Alex McCrimmon)

Can you piece a human being back together from the objects and memories they leave behind? How do you memorialise? An evocation of a cruelly, one-sided aspect of loss; the plummeting feeling that living have been left with the dead, in shards but never the whole, while the dead forget the living very quickly. RM

Garrett Bradley’s Safe (2022) at Lisson Gallery

Exhibited on three channels across all of Lisson Street’s gallery spaces, artist Garrett Bradley’s Safe (2022) explores interior emotions through abstraction, working with light, repetitive bodily movements, and the reflections and ripples on Mylar to create an enfolding psychic space. But it was all about the score for me: an enveloping, sometimes deafening cacophony of sirens, speech, and street sounds that felt like entering the belly of the underground. SSB

Wiliam Basinski performing the Disintegration Loops live at the Barbican, London

This one, I shared with Patrick, unknowingly. SP

Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol, Pavilion of Chile, Venice

From essential oils and an evocative soundtrack of Selk’nam voices, to video work by director Dominga Sotomayor Castillo, this Ecofeminist installation by a team of Chilean artists combines various techniques to submerges you into a Patagonia bog to highlight the ecological potential of peat lands. PG

Striking Land (Raul Domingues)

A relationship to the land captured in deromanticised, intimate detail. The MiniDV format has a remarkable heightening effect, for its textures made me feel like I was burrowing into the earth. RM

Archangel Michael, Stone Nest, London

Redcar (Christine and the Queens) welcomed me in a holy space: a church and a confessional, a rusty old metal letterbox, red pencils, red ribbon to tie your paper slip. “It’s all yours in love and respect, [...] fill the box with deep secrets and feverish prayers.” SP

Jason Sharp at Cafe Oto

I discovered experimental saxophonist Jason Sharp last year when I saw Daïchi Saïto’s earthearthearth. For this unforgettable performance Sharp used a heart monitor to fuse his auscultated heartbeat with the corporeal sound of his sax; creating a haunting and at times deeply unsettling score to accompany Guillaume Vallée’s psychedelic visuals. PG

Luke Fowler and Ernst Karel on the Lucid Dreaming podcast (Anthology #5, Conversation #2)

The Lucid Dreaming podcast is a consistent source of inspiring conversations, but I had to pick out this particular episode from February this year which brought together two absolute favourites in filmmaker Luke Fowler and sound artist Ernst Karel. BN

Flora (Nicolás Pereda)

The violence that underpins a society, its fascination with that violence and its masquerade, played out as a comedy of manners, flipped onto its back to reveal a tightening thriller. RM

Betzy Bromberg retrospective at Open City Documentary Festival

A retrospective of the American avant-garde filmmaker Betzy Bromberg has been a long time coming and this did not disappoint. I particularly enjoyed the rare opportunity to slip into her long-form, later abstract work like A Darkness Swallowed (2005) and Voluptuous Sleep (2011) and having the darkened space of the cinema to contemplate the strange sounds and forms before me. SSB

A Woman Escapes (Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, Blake Williams)

I dreamt about this film before even seeing it. In my tiny room at a Norwegian fjord, my mind

made up its own 3D sequences and I woke up crying (captured this in an essay for Square Eyes). SP

Ungentle (Hew Lemmey & Onyeka Igwe)

So entranced was I by Huw Lemmey and Onyeka Igwe’s installation at Studio Voltaire, Ungentle, that I sat and watched it twice. An exploration of the intersections between espionage and male homosexuality, it’s wonderfully narrated by Ben Whishaw and the clear influences of the likes of Kieller, Jarman and Alan Clarke only cemented its position as one of my favourite works of the year. BN

Stilled Shadows: A Magic Lantern Show with Chloe Ardijis at Swedenborg House

I was completely knocked out by a spectral magic lantern presentation from novelist Chloe Ardijis and lanternists Jeremy and Carolyn Brooker. Amid the dark atmospherics of Swedenborg House, we watched, enchanted, as enigmatic strands of stories were woven together before us: lost lovers, haunted furniture, escapades to outer space: all brought to life with modern and archival slides on a mammoth, three-tiered Victorian lantern. SSB

Defiant Muses.Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives of 1970s and 1980s France at Kunsthalle Vienna

Portrait of Seyrig by Varda, Carole Roussopoulos’s conviction that “video allows them [the people she’s filming] control over their image and statement”, the patriarchy telling you to give birth laying down. SP

Lacerate (Janis Rafa)

Although it premiered at FIDMarseille in 2020, Janis Rafa’s film was the standout video work at this year’s Biennale. A 16 minute canine chiaroscuro about domestic abuse, influenced by baroque art and biblical iconography, the film got under my skin and unsettled me more than any horror this year. PG

Jonas Mekas: Diaries, Notes & Sketches Vol. 1-8 Blu-Ray Boxset

Despite a preponderance for physical media, there is not a purchase in 2022 I snapped up more quickly than this wonderful boxset of Jonas Mekas films on Blu-ray from Re:Voir. As if 27 of his films across 8 discs and an accompanying booklet weren’t enough, a clipping of 16mm filmstrip sealed the deal. BN

Hole in the Head (Dean Kavanagh)

It brilliantly expresses the lusty, tactile appeal of film while also the tendency to distance the half-willing supplicant from the very world to which it’s supposedly tethered. Cinema is an indexical record but a cracked one, and horror and confusion can pour from its fissure. RM

Sonic Cinema’s Austrian Synaesthetic Cinema at Cafe Oto

Sonic Cinema’s Oliver Dickens curated an exciting ride through contemporary Austrian synaesthetic cinema at Cafe Oto. Strobes, flickers, and glitches played at the limits of perception as we cycled through digital projections by Tina Frank, Siegfried A. Fruhauf, Rainer Kohlberger, NO1, Peter Kutin & Florian Kindlinger, as well as a live A/V performance by Billy Roisz and Dieb13 titled TWIXT.

It was also a sheer delight to celebrate and return to the work of John Smith across several extensive retrospectives; discover Derek Jarman’s only novella, published by Protype; enjoy the programmes of Another Gaze’s Another Screen and explore the Experimenta strand at London Film Festival in letters with Patrick Gamble. And ALT/KINO’s Ojoboca screening at the ICA was also fab: Instant Life (2022) is living rent-free in my head. It’s been a good year. SSB

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In February 1970 in Rome, Miklos Janscó, Glauber Rocha, Jean-Marie Straub and Pierre Clémenti sat down for a group discussion. [1] The heady theme was the possibility of freeing cinema from its status as a chief idealogue of global, industrialised capitalism. At first, the conversation is driven by the reliably voluble Rocha and Straub, though later in the piece Clémenti begins to chime in.

By this point, Clémenti’s reputation as an actor was already well established, and quite unique. Since appearing in Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963) he had achieved an underground superstardom. His Mephistophelian and wounded presence, exuding an allure of sexual danger and vulnerability, and open alignment with the far left in the run-up to, and following, that explosive year, 1968, made him a muse for a subversive strain of modernist cinema. Appearing in films by Luis Buñuel, Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Philippe Garrel and, in 1970, Rocha himself.

However, in this discussion, Clémenti is not speaking just as an actor but as a filmmaker. His speculations on how the medium’s miniaturisation could be a potential path for turning a bourgeois commodity into a people’s art and his admiration for the American underground film -were not just percolating in his mind and performances, but being worked out from behind the camera. From 1967, he took up a Bolex and began making short films that were in equal parts diaristic and psychotropic. Blazing overlaid and lapping entities of light & music, of family, friends, and himself in psychedelic exultations of a fiercely committed bohemian existence. This small but rich body of work, along with a few choice examples of his acting, are currently undergoing a retrospective at MOMA in New York. It’s a showcase of an artist who took seriously the radical potential of a new ‘caméra-stylo’—to re-appropriate Alexandre Astruc’s proto-auteurist notion—that the camera could become as swift and ubiquitous as the pen and write a burning, revolutionary script.

Though not the first film he shot, The Revolution Is Only a Beginning: Let’s Continue the Fight (1968) is a major early example of his vivid, bricolage style, and one where the radical political purpose is explicit. The film is a pint-sized but spirited record of the legendary students riots of May 1968, captured in the spur of the moment. This is not just reportage, but an ambitious plait of cinema as a militant weapon, a pathway into the interior and a kaleidoscopic heightener of reality. We see feet on the ground and cobblestones in the air, with first hand footage of clashes between students, workers and the police - but Clémenti also feeds in scenes of his family life, friends, his wife, the actor Margareth and their son Balthazar in Paris and Rome, in their playful day to day. Neither kind of footage is presented as is, but instead heightened. The images come nestled in an irised frame, distorted with multiple exposures and wild psychedelic tinting. Clémenti eschews any explanatory voiceover, opting for scrolling intertitles that shout such statements as “Art is shit. This movie is shit. The one who made it is an asshole. The ones who discuss it are assholes.”

As an experimentally non-dictatorial piece of newsreel, it’s as potent a transmission of May ’68, the revolutionary moment and the power of its image, as its kindred spirit, Actua 1 (1968), directed by Philippe Garrel. The kinetic colour palette and the juxtaposition between its bucolic Italian scenes with the direct action reportage renders the act of revolution as a joyous and creative force, without short-circuiting its rage and strong political will.

The filmmaker Jackie Raynal, Clémenti’s contemporary and a member of the Zanzibar Group, a collective of dissident filmmakers, including Garrel, to whom Clémenti was associated, once stated about her compatriots; “We were influenced by Andy Warhol, and we were closer in spirit to the Factory than to the French New Wave.” [2] The influence materialises in Clémenti’s first feature-length work New Old (1979). A trilogy of films, Visa De Censure No.X, Livre De Famille, and Anima Mundi, filmed in fits and starts across the late 60s and 70s.

This anthological approach and the protracted period of filming reveal key aspects of Clémenti’s practice. The latter is partly a necessity, since eschewing ‘traditional’ modes of financing left him with little money to work with, largely his own. It’s also an intentional avoidance of bestowing any single film a monolithic status. He did not make holy objects, for his films don’t occupy a heterogenous space. Instead, they intermingle, sharing footage, and Clementi’s love of multiple exposures and rhyming, paroxysmal editing creates an aura of perpetual redressal, rather than of sanctified ossification.

New Old is not only three films but a cornucopia of approaches and style. Visa De Censure No.X is perhaps the most varied. A melange of casual autoportraiture, such as behind the scenes on Garrel’s The Inner Scar (1972) and the Clémentis on holiday, with moments of hyperactive hippie play. Such as a prog jam session perched on the coast, where images pile on each other like the crashing waves, or a hallucinatory hang out-cum-cabaret, not unlike Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954). The manic accumulation of wilful abandon climaxes with the cortex branding sight of Clémenti vomiting live crabs. As the title suggests, Livre De Famille consists mainly of diary-like material, including a visit to New York where Clémenti connects with those aforementioned American underground influences, bumping into Warhol, the superstar Viva and the genius minimalist composer Moondog. Anima Mundi veers into very different territory, one of unabashed performativity and fiction, which places Clémenti as a performer front and centre. It’s a Commedia dell’arte piece and a brilliant outlet for Clémenti the actor, including reviving the rarefied pre-Risorgimento setting of The Leopard to play the dual role of a pederastic nobleman and a prancing, syringe-wielding devil.

This phantasmagorical side of Clémenti’s filmmaking got its fullest outing with In the Shadow of the Blue Rascal (filmed between 1979-85, released in 1986). A crime epic set in the dystopian Necrocity, tyrannised by the twin terrors of dictator General Nutsbody (Pierre Clémenti) and drug lord Captain Speed (Jean-Pierre Kalfon). The artful dodger, working around and against both sides, is the consummate thief and killer Hassan (Achmi Gachem). His Querelle-esque voiceover, along with Clémenti’s blown-out lighting and elliptical editing, and Gilbert Artman and Ricky Darling’s pulsing rhythm section, sets the film a tone of constant potential violence, drugged-out hypnosis, and an everlasting witching hour. The film came out in a period of French cinema where there were several, inventive instances of the ‘policier’ genre, such as the 80s directorial work of another child of the revolution, Juliet Berto, Maurice Pialat’s Police (1985) and Catherine Breillat’s Dirty Like An Angel (1991). Clémenti’s film occupies its own strange zone. An inspired amalgam of the genre with the French mavens of ecstatic literary dissidence, Arthur Rimbaud and Jean Genet, and the contemporary current of cyberpunk.

Clémenti’s unabashed bohemianism and leftism made him many enemies who threw spanners in the works. The most catastrophic of which was his arrest in Rome in 1971 on shaky drug-peddling charges. Though the accusations were eventually dismissed, it was not before he had served nearly two years in prison. It was an experience that was both traumatic and galvanising, and which he recorded and contemplated in his memoir A Few Personal Messages (Quelques Messages Personal, 1973), whose first-time translation and publication in English coincides with this retrospective. He also poured his imprisonment into his final film, and reportedly his own personal favourite, Soleil (1988). A perfect synthesis of the punk policier style of Blue Rascal with a more introspective lens, it’s a fleeting, moving exegesis on the ability to film, to write, to paint, to act, and it transfigures oppression and pain into hope and into one’s relationship with the world. A man-made spell to wrest and ward off the darkness.

[1] ‘There’s Nothing More International Than a Pack of Pimps’ Discussion was transcribed by Patrick Letessier, translated by John Mathews and published originally in Cinematics no. 4. Republished online by Lola in 2004.

[2] ‘Jackie Raynal’ Artforum, Interviews. Published online Feb. 2021.

MoMA’s Pierre Clémenti season runs both physically and online from 14-31 October 2022.

Ruairí McCann is an Irish writer, curator and musician, Belfast born and based but raised in Sligo. He’s a co-editor of the film site Ultra Dogme, and has contributed to various publications, such as photogénie, Electric Ghost, aemi online, Screen Slate, MUBI Notebook and Sight & Sound.

Originally published on ALT/KINO on 26 October, 2022.

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Dear Patrick,

You’ll be pleased to know I lasted the distance with De Humani Corporis Fabrica. To be honest, I wasn’t particularly disgusted by the ‘depictions of human physiology’ you mention in your letter, that graphic footage of intestines and orifices, breasts and bladders. In a media landscape where you can pretty much access anything online, I’m not convinced the human body is the ‘ultimate frontier,’ as Leonardo Goi says in Reverse Shot. Medical imaging is such a standard procedure in hospitals now, that if you’ve gone through any major surgery you’ve likely already travelled through the canals and waterways of your own body. I’ve watched Caesareans on Tiktok, and vaginal births on Instagram. By the time I gave birth to my daughter, I was completely nonplussed about peering at my watery insides through multiple screens. There are cinematic precedents for the internal study of the human body, although none match this film for its visceral, glistening, in-your-face quality. There’s a curious little science documentary-cum-sex film called The Body (1971) by British director Roy Battersby, best known for his work on Inspector Morse, A Touch of Frost and his Play for Today films. The Body uses endoscopic photography, to the music of Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, to plunge us into the deepest crevasses of the human body. I recommend it as a ‘70s psychedelic curio: just for heads.

What did shock me about De Humani Corporis Fabrica were the scenes in the psych ward, where patients, imprisoned by their condition and trapped within the walls of the institution, pace the corridors like caged animals. Critics have already compared the film to Stan Brakhage’s documentary of autopsies, The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), down to the carving into a human skull, but the psych-ward scenes brought me back to Frederick Wiseman’s still controversial Direct Cinema documentary, Titticut Follies (1967). It felt exploitative and unnecessary, there merely to reinforce the idea of the hospital as a Dantean hellscape from which one might never escape. Shot across several French hospitals over a period of five years, De Humani Corporis Fabrica is above all a study of labour conditions, an expose of the effects that chronic understaffing and underfunding have wreaked on institutions over time. (I did enjoy the gallows humour of the medical professionals, obviously disassociating from the work of chopping up bodies to chat about their holidays!)

As I segue out of organs and into the natural world, I notice that several films in the Experimenta strand also highlight the labours of care and extraction. Both Lisandro Listorti’s feature-length film Herbaria (2022), about the mutual preservation of analogue film and botanical specimens, and Julia Parks’ short Seaweed (2022) explore, through the medium of 16mm film, our implicated relationship to the natural world and its rapidly dwindling resources.

Imbued with the elegiac spirit of Margaret Tait, Seaweed is an exquisite 16mm film exploring the folklore and working practices of those who harvest marine algae on the Hebridean shoreline. Threaded through the film are the voices of modern-day seaweed harvesters, alginate factory works and environmental activists alongside Gallic folk songs and archival soundbites, offering a rich aural and visual tapestry of ideas about algae and what might be lost if we zealously overfarm.

Argentine filmmaker and archivist Lisandro Listorti’s Herbaria examines the intricate and time-consuming conservation of celluloid film and botanical specimens, making links between these two fragile and finite spheres as they hover on the brink of disappearance. As with De Humani Corporis Fabrica and Seaweed, we watch hands hard at work, caring, cataloguing, and protecting from loss; these are hands that preserve but that also wrench, pulling up from the body, from the earth, and the sea in ways that are not always questioned. Like Seaweed, Herbaria merges archival footage with new material shot on 16mm (and here also 35mm). The film is a collage, tactile and teasing, which merges its materials into a unifying whole, obscuring at times our ability to identify the old from the new. (Listorti is working with the same sound designer as his first feature-length work, The Endless Film (2018), to imperceptibly stitch together and hide the seams between time frames.) As well as connecting practices across time, Herbaria unites people across space: film preservationists in Berlin and botanists in Argentina share similar goals and analogous processes, each little changed over the years.

Herbaria and Seaweed brought to mind another film at the festival, Jacquelyn Mills’ Geographies of Solitude (2022), which was lurking with intent in the ‘Create’ strand. (I’m sorry, I’ll never not prickle at the naming of these sections, and quite purposefully included films not in Experimenta in my correspondence!) Both elegant and somehow messy, Geographies of Solitude also tackles nature conservation through the medium of 16mm film, but does so to curious, un-worked out ends. There are other links too: sections of the film are developed in seaweed, and the sound of insects, processed with sensors, feature on the score (Listorti’s film uses plant sounds in a similar way). Geographies of Solitude is a beautiful portrait of a place—the remote island of Sable in the Atlantic Ocean—and an unspoken homage to a dedicated individual, the environmentalist Zoe Lucas. Here’s where the film is rendered fascinatingly strange. Unlike Herbaria and Seaweed, the filmmaker seems infatuated with the person behind the preservation, her admiration for Lucas seemingly stopping her from asking further questions. Who is this person really? Why have they lived on this island, alone, for 40 years? What’s behind their subsuming drive to kill, skin, pin, dissect, bottle, preserve, and catalogue? The film’s title and snippets of speech, begin to tease this out, but don’t quite arrive at that point. Geographies of Solitude is nature conservation as psychodrama. I wanted the real story, the love affair behind the camera.

Thanks Patrick for sharing your observations and recommendations with me. I’ve enjoyed all of them, Jill, Uncredited and Lewis Klahr’s film in particular. I’ve relished the space to swap notes and traverse the seemingly random through the left-field byways of film: from highways and entrails to seaweed fronds. I think some of those trails tie up nicely.

All the best,

Sophia

You can read the other parts of the Experimenta correspondence here: #1, #2 and #3.

The 2022 edition of London Film Festival runs from 5 - 16 October.

Sophia Satchell-Baeza is a writer and editor, focusing on artists’ film, psychedelic art, and the 1960s counterculture.

Originally published on ALT/KINO on 19 October, 2022.

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Hey Sophia,

Thank you for your last correspondence. It sounds like you’re having quite an intense festival. I hope Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica hasn’t pushed you over the edge. I certainly wouldn’t judge you if you did walk out. When it comes to depictions of human physiology I find the line between fascination and revulsion can seem very thin. Watching the film made me acutely aware of my own body; like wearing an outfit that didn’t quite fit properly.

I also had a pretty powerful reaction to David Leister’s Roary, which screened before the world premiere of Lewis Klahr’s The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness. A psychedelic ode to one of the most enduring images from the Golden Age of Hollywood, Leister loops three 16mm reels of Leo the Lion, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s famous mascot, until the colours bleed into one another and the sound goes out of sync. I found the film strangely moving, and couldn’t help but draw parallels between the endangered status of lions and the demise of celluloid. On a side note, did you know that the roar we hear during the MGM logo is actually a tiger? It came up during the film’s Q&A. Apparently lions don’t sound very ferocious, so the studio decided to dub him. How embarrassing for poor Leo.

While we’re on the topic of misdirection, I’m glad you managed to catch the end of James Benning’s The United States of America. When I saw the film during the Berlin Film Festival, my initial reaction to its ending was one of anger. I was working to a tight deadline, so had mentally started writing my review during the film, confident that once the credits rolled I could rush back to my hotel and type it up that evening. Benning’s little joke at the end meant I had to start from scratch. I was pissed off at the time, but now I can’t help but admire his striking mix of formal rigour and mischievous invention.

The barren landscapes of The United States of America also reminded me of lockdown, and how empty and eerie the streets of London were during the pandemic. After a week of navigating the busy pavements of Leicester Square and the Southbank, I have to admit, I kind of miss it. The first time I covered a festival using correspondences like this was during the pandemic, when Ben and I covered the 2020 25FPS program remotely. The intention was to use these correspondences as a way to imitate the communal experience of a film festival; creating a space where our thoughts could coalesce into new ideas. Even though we’re ‘back to normal’ I’m glad we’ve continued with this approach. How else would we be able to discuss lip-synching lions and the existential crisis of pandemic-era Pret a Mangers.

Like you, my view of America was also shaped by a “series of fantasies culled from comic books, records, and the movies”, perhaps that’s why I enjoy Lewis Klahr’s collage work so much. After all it’s a very literal deconstruction of this false and superficial image of America. His latest, The Blue Rose of Forgetfulness is a collection of six films unified by their fascination with the opacities of narrative and a sense of romantic longing. I always enjoy the simple pleasure of searching for a narrative thread in Klahr’s work and seeing where it leads you. More often that not, I find myself at a dead end but I was comforted by Klahr’s candid post-screening Q&A in which he told us not to worry about feeling stupid when watching his films. “If you’re struggling to follow a narrative it probably means it isn’t there,” he told us.

The film with the most ‘conventional’ narrative in the program was probably Alcestis, in which a house party full of Greek gods dressed as comic book superheroes unravels into a humorous, yet surprisingly profound, distortion of this eponymous Athenian tragedy. It would be unfair to label Alcestis the stand out of these films, it’s just the only one I can talk to you about without giving a purely subjective reading. But rest assured, what I felt whilst watching Klahr’s elliptical narratives was not confusion, but the coiled charge of possibility contained within each of these meticulously constructed artefacts.

Finally, before I leave I thought I should mention another film in the program that you might find interesting; Anthony Ing’s Jill, Uncredited. A celebration of the unsung heroes of cinema, the film is a compilation of footage featuring prolific extra Jill Goldston, whose extensive array of cameos and walk-ons ranges from movies like The Elephant Man and Flash Gordon, to episodes of The Bill and Doctor Who. Inevitably, combining these clips allows new narratives to emerge, like the moment we spot Jill being removed from a car by paramedics during an episode of Minder, only to reappear moments later as a nurse on an intensive care ward.

The job of an extra is to not stand out, and with almost two thousand uncredited film and TV appearances, Jill has mastered the art of being invisible. That means we have to work extra hard to find her in some of these scenes, with Ing encouraging us to adopt a broader view of cinema, and consider the lives of those characters just outside of the frame. That’s all from me for this year, but before I slip out of focus, I’d like to finish by saying thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences with me. I look forward to hearing how the rest of your festival went.

All the best,

Patrick

You can read the other parts of the Experimenta correspondence here: #1, #2.

The 2022 edition of London Film Festival runs from 5 - 16 October

Patrick Gamble is a writer on film and culture, whose work has featured on Hyperallergic, BFI, Calvert Journal and Kinoscope. Further links to his writing can be found at patrickgamble.contently.com.

Originally published on ALT/KINO on 17 October, 2022.

Dear Patrick,

I just read your first correspondence and will reply properly later. But just to say that I might not be able to write about the new James Benning film after all. The first hour and a bit of The United States of America flew by and I was completely engrossed, alternating between writing furiously in my notebook and getting lost in the eerie, people-less vistas and immersive drones of clanging scaffolding. Then I got a weird dizziness, a kind of centralised headache somewhere between my eyes, mixed with the nausea of not having eaten enough at the festival. I felt completely trapped in the black box. At what point could I flee the cinema: after New Hampshire or North Dakota? Anyway, I left around 20 minutes before the end. All those wide open spaces and there I was, completely claustrophobic!

Dear Sophia,

Oh no! But also...that’s kind of fascinating, especially considering how the film ends. Maybe you should write about it …

Dear Patrick,

So I watched the end of the film. I can’t believe it. Very rarely have I left a screening before it’s over for exactly this reason. What if something happens that completely alters my perspective of what came before it? What if the filmmaker drops a last-minute idea, a new framework, an alternative lens for understanding the material that we’ve just seen? Surely with Benning I was safe!

I love it: at 79 years old, the legendary American experimental filmmaker drops the mother of all twists, slap bang at the end of an epic remake of sorts. I’ve been told. In The United States of America (2022), Benning revisits a 1975 short of the same name, which he shot with his then partner Bette Gordon on two road trips through New York and Los Angeles. They mounted a 16mm camera to the back of their car—the avant-garde equivalent of GoPro!—and filmed their journeys as the radio played the greatest hits of the moment. This was to be the last of their collaborations. Although I haven’t seen the short, I read Gordon in an interview with Scott MacDonald saying that it “also had to do with the credit that was going to him and not to me.” What interests me is how, when the collaboration broke up, Benning took one path (the avant-garde structural film route) and Gordon another (that of the independent narrative film). As MacDonald implies, this was already set out in the specifics of the route, which headed straight for Hollywood. Was Gordon having second thoughts about what kind of filmmaking she wanted to go into? Curiously, two of her later films, Empty Suitcases (1980) and Variety (1983), did crop up at the festival this year, in excerpts from Laura Poitras’s supreme portrait of Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022).

Anyway, here we are and Gordon is gone and the premise is different. Benning’s new film is made up of 52 short landscape shots - one of every state in the U.S. (alongside Puerto Rico and Washington, D. C). The compositions are, per Benning, highly formalised: static shots of fields and junctions and bridges (and yes, clouds too). It’s a state-of-the-nation portrait captured through its freeway underpasses and detention centres, its nuclear power stations and its missile sites. It feels like it’s taking place at the end point of the American experiment, when all the people have been wiped off the planet but somebody left the radio on. Like a post-apocalypse film for the avant-garde, but it’s also reminiscent of my experience of walking through the city centre in lockdown. London opened up as a vast canvas of metallic infrastructure and nobody in it. What is the point of the sad Pret a Mangers and high-rise office blocks if there’s no-one going in them? Is a Pret still a Pret if nobody’s buying the baps? A philosophical quandary… In Benning’s film, there might be almost no people, but there are plenty of ghosts. The ghosts of presidents and activists, the spectres of the victims of police violence, the phantoms of Trump and Reagan. I imagine that the experience of watching this film (and its twist) is felt very differently by American audiences who might well recognise the spaces they are seeing and find that they don’t quite match. I’m not attached to these landscapes through nostalgia or recognition, so the twist works well. It reminds me that what I know of America is a projection anyway, a series of fantasies culled from comic books, records, and the movies. “This land was made for you and me.”

Anyway, I’ve walked out of one screening already. Two and it becomes a thing I do! Guess I’ll have to stick through the whole of De Humani Corporis Fabrica…

Looking forward to hearing from you again, and thanks for encouraging me to stick with the Benning film to the end.

Best wishes,

Sophia

You can read the other parts of the Experimenta correspondence here: #1.

The 2022 edition of London Film Festival runs from 5 - 16 October.

Sophia Satchell-Baeza is a writer and editor, focusing on artists’ film, psychedelic art, and the 1960s counterculture.

Originally published on ALT/KINO on 16 October, 2022.

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Dear Sophia,

I’m writing to you from a cafe in central London, surrounded by critics and film industry types discussing the Oscar chances of this morning’s gala screening. I always feel a little like an imposter at big festivals like this, and never really know how to participate in these conversations. Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to Experimenta. I’ve always liked how this sidebar feels like an outlier in the festival program. There’s something endearing about the way these films refuse to be pigeonholed into the loose thematic strands like ‘love,’ ‘journey’ or ‘debate’, instead striving to challenge the arbitrary ways we categorise and define cinema.

This desire to dissolve boundaries was encapsulated by the films in the ‘Some Say the Devil is Dead’ program which features various perspectives on how the violent implementation of borders forces us to think about the world in binary terms. The program is named after an Irish republican song that features prominently in Eoghan Ryan’s A Sod State. A disjointed collage of news footage from Northern Ireland is punctuated by interviews with a confused Irishman and the pig-headed puppet that represents his inner turmoil. Ryan combines a disorientating cavalcade of techniques, be it transforming one of Ian Paisley’s rants about catholicism into a crucifix, or beat-matching the lights of police riot vans to The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil to interrogate the role religion and the state have played in creating the binary contradictions that gnaw at the core of the Troubles. I’ve always been fascinated by how the conflict in Northern Ireland was depicted by the British media, and enjoyed Ryan’s focus on how being exposed to this constant narrative of violence has left a permanent scar across the island of Ireland.

The damage inflicted by British partition is also the subject of Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night. The film is constructed around the performance of an opera that combines the Arabic folk song Al Ouf Mash’al with Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, in which the Czech composer set five poems from Friedrich Rückert’s Songs on the Death of Children to music. Filmed in a derelict chapel, soprano Nour Darwish sings of “a tragedy shared with those unborn” against a backdrop of archival material shot in Palestine during the First World War. Originally created as a three-channel video installation, striking black and white footage of Darwish’s performance is positioned amidst images of the War to recreate the elegiac tone of an altar triptych. The result is a sad, lonely lament for those displaced from their homeland by the British Mandate for Palestine in 1948.

Elsewhere, Beirut-based artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s The 45th Parallel encourages us to consider the absurdity of borders and their role in perpetuating violence. I’ve been following Abu Hamdan’s work ever since I saw his Earwitness Theatre exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, and have been fascinated with his inquiries into the political effects of listening. His new film is shot inside the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, a unique municipal site straddling the Canadian and US border, between Quebec and Vermont. People from both countries can use the library. There are no visa checks at the door and for all intents and purposes the border vanishes once you step inside. The only rule is that you exit into the country you arrived from.

Structured as a series of monologues performed to camera by film director Mahdi FleifelIt, the film’s thesis centres around the Hernández vs Mesa judicial case, in which a US Border Patrol Agent killed an unarmed Mexican boy. Even though the gun was fired on US soil, the agent was eventually acquitted because his bullet crossed the border before killing the boy in Mexico. Judges were concerned that a prosecution could set a legal precedent that would leave the door open for the families of those accidentally killed by US drone strikes abroad to also seek justice through the US court system. By telling this story in the Haskell Free Library, where criminals smuggle handguns in the bathroom and Muslim families impacted by Trump’s travel ban use Canadian visas to meet-up with their loved ones, Abu Hamdan creates a space where we can question the facile dichotomies and ridiculous nature of these borders.

That’s all from me for now. I hope you’re having an enjoyable festival and I look forward to hearing all about your discoveries.

Until next time,

Patrick

The 2022 edition of London Film Festival runs from 5 - 16 October

Patrick Gamble is a writer on film and culture, whose work has featured on Hyperallergic, BFI, Calvert Journal and Kinoscope. Further links to his writing can be found at patrickgamble.contently.com.

Originally published on ALT/KINO on 15 October, 2022.

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