NEW NIPPON: CONTEMPORARY FILM & VIDEO FROM JAPAN
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | December 1, 2009
Thursday, December 3, 6pm
- Akino Kondoh, “Ladybirds’ Requiem,” 2005-6. Courtesy the Artist and Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo.
In a nation that is geographically isolated yet always looking outward, rooted in ancient tradition while existing at the forefront of technological innovation, the complexion of contemporary Japanese moving image is like no other. This evening’s program brings together work by some of Japan’s brightest emerging film and video artists. From digital filmmaking and award-winning shorts to works that draw from the country’s rich experimental film and hand-drawn animation traditions—“flip book” paintings, diary films, and time-based collaborations between avant-garde artists and musicians—”New Nippon” explores the inventive and otherworldly work of Tomonari Nishikawa, Wada Atsushi, Maya Yonesho, Hiroshi Kondo, Stom Sogo, and many others. Curated by SAIC graduate student Kelly Shindler. 2002–09, various artists, Japan, multiple formats, ca. 80 min.
Program
Maya YONESHO, Daumenreise 6: Kyoto Mix (2008, Beta SP, 5 mins)
With Ken Shinno, Maya Tsujimura, Keiji Aiuchi, Jerome Boulbes. Music: Akira Morita
A collaboration between the artist and four of her students, this snapshot of the famous city of Kyoto was first composed as hundreds of still images and then transformed into an animated flip book. “Daumenreise is an animation workshop project with the same method of “Wiener Wuast”—shooting small drawings in our hands in the real view, over the world with students, children and friends. Films have been made in Taiwan, Norway, Croatia, Israel, Kyoto, and Poland since 2007.” (MY)
Tomonari NISHIKAWA, Sketch Films #3-5 (2006-7, Super-8 shown on mini-DV, silent, 3 mins each)
#3: “It starts with series of a pair of frames, a blurred image by camera movement followed by its steady image. Later, it shows my challenge on creating apparent depth on the screen.”
#4: “My first Sketch Film in color, trying to see the mingle of colors through projector. I used Kodachrome, and sent it to Dwayne Photo to process.”
#5: Nominated for a Tiger Award at the 2008 International Film Festival Rotterdam. “All images had been shot in Marin, California, when I had a studio space at the Headlands Center for the Arts for a year. The footage shows the nature in the area, as well as historic buildings, including batteries and the Nike Missile Site.” (TN)
Naoyuki TSUJI, Zephyr (2009, 16mm on DVD, 6 mins)
This newest work by Tsuji, who was featured in CATE’s Spring 2009 season, continues the artist’s fascination with the wind and family. “Zephyr refers to the Greek god of the west wind. Zephyr in Tsuji’s work comes to a baby and takes the baby into inside of the sun. What kind of experience is waiting for the baby?” (Tomio Koyama Gallery, Kyoto)
Atsushi WADA, Well That’s Glasses (2007, DVCam, 5:40 mins)
Hand-drawn cell animation about the veracity of vision, illustrating what happens when work, sleep, chemistry, and the human, animal, and dream worlds collide. Wada’s magic realist approach deftly incorporates repetition and a sparse color palette to illustrate the most curious of stories. (KS)
Joji KOYAMA, From Nose to Mouth (2006, 16mm and video on Beta SP, 18.5 mins)
Commissioned by Animate Projects, UK. “A solitary figure emerges out of seclusion to learn an ice-skating dance sequence. Set in a disorientating arena of shifting boundaries, structures and languages, the lessons are not going well… From Nose to Mouth portrays the unsuccessful efforts of a character trying to make sense of the demands and tasks of a strangely disjointed and fragmented world. Lost in the gaps and ‘in-betweens,’ the film is a kind of homage to awkwardness and inexactitude.” (JK)
Hiroshi KONDO, Live Material 001 and Live Material 002 (2008, DVCam, 1 min each)
Short “documentations” of live VJ performances by this Sapporo-born video artist. Composed with contemporary technologies (AfterEffects and Inferno), both shorts simulate the dated technicolor palate and tone of 90s rave culture. (KS)
Akino KONDOH, Ladybirds’ Requiem (2006, DVD, 6 mins)
Henry Darger meets ladies’ manga in this innovative video by young multimedia artist Kondoh. “Recently, [Kondoh] has been drawing on a special surface treated with gesso so that the pencil lines appear indented from pressure, like soft embroidery. In [Ladybirds’ Requiem], it is as if the world of her drawings is sewn piece by piece into the sequence of images on screen. The drawings of little girls will continue hatching without end, and the pursuit of images will result in a proliferation of variety, until these memories leave the imprint of their stitches throughout the world.” (Sayaka Nishiki)
Ryusuke ITO, Plate #43-44 (The Forked Tongues) (2008, 16mm, 4 mins) 2008
“I make “plates” consisting of film strips cut; it is a kind of transparent collage on a small plastic board. I put this on raw stock and contact print several times (usually 20 times). Most sounds come from the results of the optical-sound-head of a projector reading the images on the film. When the soundtrack of the original stock occasionally gets in a “right” place, we hear segments of some music or human voice. My source material is [found] footage gathered [from my] travels. For this film, I use some images of Czech film, which I got there. I bought tons of abandoned films at a small camera store in Prague.” (RI) Ito, who teaches at the Hokkaido University of Education in Sapporo, holds an MFA in Filmmaking (1992) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Stom SOGO, Try (2002, mini-DV, 9 mins)
A loop of two lovers is slowed to quasi-stillness as the dub soundtrack crackles with static and noise, which is central to much of the artist’s work. “Try was originally shot on Super-8mm film and then re-shot on video. The idea was to have the image of young kids kissing forever. Ecstasy here is so wasted.” (SS) “The films of Stom Sogo are incantatory and self-combustible. An erratic master of low tech do-it-yourself sortilege, he puts his works through seemingly perpetual remakes.” (Mark McElhatten)
Takashi MAKINO, Still in Cosmos (2009, 35mm on HDCam, 19 mins). Music: Jim O’Rourke
“A product purposed of an installation project held at Tokyo’s Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Recomposed as completed film work in 2009. This film visually demonstrates the fact that human has ability to change Chaos [into] Cosmos. A transcendent Free Jazz soundtrack is presented by band Osorezan, commanded by Jim O’Rourke. Now images and sound break the wall of the universe and plunge in the new world.” (TM)
TRT: 80 mins.
Intelligent Wounds: An Interview with Mike Hoolboom by Abina Manning
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | December 1, 2009
- Mike Hoolboom at work. Courtesy the artist.
Abina Manning: In October, 2009, you were in Chicago for Conversations at the Edge and showed your latest feature, Mark (2009, 70 minutes). Can you tell us a little about it and your process of making it?
Mike Hoolboom: Mark is a portrait of my friend and former editor Mark Karbusicky. Political vegan, caretaker of feral cats (and his own brood of more than a dozen felines), still punk after all these years. He was a large man who had the presence of someone half his size, able to melt into the smallest shadow of his former self, his smile stretched across everything he couldn’t find words to say. His voice was pitched just above his voice box, a nearly French sounding sing-song, which he must have picked up from his partner of ten years, the Quebecois MTF Mirha-Soleil Ross. He was a master of those skills usually not considered skills at all. Listening, waiting, understanding, being present. Everything he ate was politics, and while this occasionally showed itself in demos and office break-ins, it was more often carried in his day to day. His employment, for instance, was housing advocacy for ex-psychiatric patients, and before that caretaking physically disadvantaged folks. He might have unlearned the art of complaining at the punk collective, Who’s Emma. Along with the word ‘no’ which he was reluctant to pronounce, no matter how often we sat facing computer silence at the video co-op. He navigated our treacherous communal shareware in between his real jobs, which usually meant not sleeping. If you put a needle into his finger he would have bled coffee.
On the last day I saw him alive, he came to my apartment with a shining new edit program, and installed it on my computer, and booted it up not once but twice, and even guided me to digitize clips and lay them on a timeline. It was a typical Mark performance: thorough, meticulous, and free from any worried fussiness. He had been urging me for years to work at home, even though that would probably mean leaving Mark as an editor. I didn’t realize then that this was his way of saying good-bye. He was dead less than two months later. His feet hovering an inch or so off the steps that separated upstairs from down. There was no room for error in his death, and it was no cry for help. Like everything else in his life, it had been researched, deliberated, executed. He didn’t leave a note.
For me, for many of his friends and family, his death came as a sudden and terrifying shock. He was just thirty-five years old, healthy and beautiful and filled with a geek know-how that faced down every new glitch with a fascinated and easygoing determination. Perhaps not so easygoing in the end. The movie is a way to say hello and good-bye, to introduce him to strangers, to run my fingers over his pictures. Along the way, I visited with his old childhood friend Andrew Vollmar who lived, up until last year, in the very same apartment they both grew up in. And Lauren Corman, who has just become Canada’s first animal studies prof. Kristyn Dunnion aka Miss Kitty Galore is a queercore punk novelist and member of all-girl metal band Heavy Filth. Lorena Elke is a political vegan, trained in the Celtic Faery Tradition of witchcraft and an animal rights activist. Mark’s life partner, Mirha-Soleil Ross, is a media/performance artist and activist, a slightly larger-than-life speed talker and working class mega donna. Each makes their own approach to Mark, and they are knit together to create a mosaic of intimate distances.
AM: I hear that you will be making a new edit of the film. Did you take anything from the Chicago screening that you will utilize in the editing process?
MH: Digital media resists traditional closure, which might mean: no more monuments or heroes. Though I have to admit a weakness for recutting. Behind the impulse to make every movie, there is some infantile wish to go back and fix the past. Sharpen conversations, fine-tune punch lines and interludes. Next week, for instance, I will begin recutting Tom (2002, 75 minutes), which will likely shrink by fifteen or twenty minutes. There are no plans to air out this new version; it will simply make me sleep better.
What my work presents is a temporarily optimal arrangement. Much of it is available as free online downloads, and in place of a copyright warning, there is a note urging viewers to steal as much of the movie as they please, and revise according to their own necessities. Insofar as the Chicago screening went, the fact that Mark worked as my editor was unclear until the very end of the movie, an ambiguity that was quickly corrected by changing a single line. Further sound level and color adjustments have occurred, and additional picture layerings in soft areas. The work continues.
Tags: Canada > Monographic Shows > Non-Fiction > Political > Video Data Bank
LOOK FOR ME: ANIMATED FILMS BY LAURA HEIT
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | November 17, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 6pm | Laura Heit in person!
- Image: Laura Heit, The Matchbox Shows (1999-current). Image courtesy of the artist.
Poignant and smart, the animated films of puppet artist and SAIC alumnus Laura Heit employ stop-motion, live action puppetry, hand-drawing, and computer animation. Heit is the co-director of the Experimental Animation department at CalArts and her award-winning work has screened extensively at museums and film festivals around the world. This program showcases her films from the last twelve years and features a special live performance of her acclaimed puppet-show-in miniature, The Matchbox Shows. Films include: Parachute (1997), an allegory following a young woman as she leaves home; (2002), Collapse a 2D computer animation tracing a single tragic moment; The Amazing, Mysterious and True Story of Mary Anning and Her Monsters (2003), about the little-known paleontologist Mary Anning; and Look For Me (2005), a Channel 4 UK television commission imagining one’s own invisibility. 1997-2005, USA, multiple formats, ca. 65 min.
LAURA HEIT has a MA in animation from the Royal College of Art in London and a BFA in film from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her award-winning experimental animation and puppet films have been screened extensively in the US and abroad (including Rotterdam, Annecy, Hong Kong International Film Festival, London International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Walker Art Center, Guggenheim). Her most recent film, Look for Me, was commissioned by Channel 4 Television and the British Council. She is an animation director at Slinky Pictures (UK) and Duck Studios (LA). Besides her work in animation, Heit also works in puppet theater-she has been a member of Redmoon Theater (Master builder/designer/artistic associate 1996-2001), Theater Dank, and En Fuego. The Matchbox Shows, her solo cabaret in which tiny stories unfold within matchboxes, has toured all over the world. She is currently co-director of Experimental Animation at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).
Parachute (1997, 16mm, multi-plane cut-out animation, 17:00)
Parachute follows a young woman as she leaves home. Both frenetic and lyrical, this allegorical film is a combination of animation, puppetry and theater design.
Collapse (2002, Beta SP, 2D computer animation, 4:08)
A meditation on a single tragic moment.
The Amazing, Mysterious and True Story of Mary Anning and Her Monsters (2003, live action puppetry and 2D animation, Beta SP, 7:45)
A toy theater show based on the life of amateur paleontologist Mary Anning (1799-1847) from Lyme Regis, England. At a time when most children were afraid of monsters, Mary sought them out. She had a passion for the inexplicable and in the end her discoveries would change more than she bargained for.
Look For Me (2005, Beta SP, 2D computer animation, 3:35)
What would you do if you woke up one day and were invisible? Commissioned by Channel 4 London.
The Matchbox Shows (2000, Performance, 20:00)
“With childlike simplicity and arresting nonchalance, Heit offers 30-second vignettes that make Mr. Bill seem positively Rocco.” (Justin Hayford, Chicago Reader)
VARIABLE AREA: HEARING AND SEEING SOUND, 1966–78
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | November 10, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 6pm | Art Lange, Guillermo Gregorio and Brian Labycz in person!
- Still from The Gypsy Cried (Chris Langdon, 1972). Courtesy the artist.
Experimental Sound Studio’s Outer Ear Festival of Sound and CATE team up once again to present a program of films that investigate the visual and aural possibilities of 16mm optical audio, as sounds perform images and images become sonic scores. Sound functions both as a sonic and visual element in these 6 films. Collectively they propose a new model for listening and seeing – a listening that happens with the eyes, and a seeing that happens with the ears. Curated by SAIC faculty member Michelle Puetz. Co-presented by Experimental Sound Studio. 1966–78, various artists, USA, multiple formats, ca. 65 min.
The OUTER EAR FESTIVAL OF SOUND (November 3–22, 2009) is the only comprehensive interdisciplinary sonic arts festival in the Midwest. Visit www.exsost.org.
Program details
Chris Langdon, The Gypsy Cried (1972, 16mm, 3 minutes, b/w, sound)
“When one likes something very much, or someone, it is hard to do anything but like it. I didn’t want to take anything away or add anything to this song because I like it a lot.” (Chris Langdon)
Paul Sharits, Ray Gun Virus (1966, 14 minutes, 16mm, color, synchronous sprocket hole sound)
Ray Gun Virus consists of a series of rapidly and intermittently flickering fields of color that are accompanied by an “open system” soundtrack made possible by double perf 16mm film. Sharits wrote that Ray Gun Virus was an attempt to “allow vision to function in ways usually particular to hearing . . . rapidly alternating color frames can generate, in vision, horizontal-temporal chords . . . Just as the film’s consciousness becomes infected, so does the viewer’s consciousness: the projector is an audio-visual pistol; the screen looks at the audience; and the viewer’s normative consciousness. The film’s final ‘image’ is a faint blue; the viewer is left to his own reconstruction of self, left with a screen upon which his retina can project its own patterns.”
Robert Russett, Primary Stimulus (1977, 13 minutes, 16mm, b/w, sound)
In Primary Stimulus, the soundtrack printing process was kept completely photographic so that “the sound emitted is the sound the projector interprets from the lines which are the film’s image. What comprises the film are sixteen different ‘grates’ of varying amplitudes (sixteen compositions of black and white horizontal lines): onto each frame of film one of these patterns is printed. The sequence varies. The compositions are similar enough to one another so that the afterimage of one relates compositionally to the next.” (Laurence Kardish)
Peter Kubelka, Pausa! (1977, 12 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
Peter Kubelka’s first and only sync-sound film, Pausa! captures a rare glimpse of the Austrian artist (and namesake of Kubelka’s famous 1960 film) Arnulf Rainer engaged in a full-body performance with a microphone. The vibrations of Rainer’s breath and highly gestural movements form a visceral sonic and visual portrait of his body.
Barry Spinello, Soundtrack (1969, 10 minutes, 16mm, color, sound)
“During the first half of Soundtrack, the “sound painting” – drawn on the soundtrack – is magnified and redrawn, frame by frame, on the image track so that the viewer literally sees what he hears . . . The closing section of Soundtrack makes use of acetate self-adhesive screens and tapes. These screens and tapes, cut to fit the soundtrack, yield controlled pitch for any duration in as many different timbres as there are patterns.” (Barry Spinello)
Richard Lerman, Sections for Screen, Performers and Audience (1974, 6minutes, 16mm, color, live accompaniment by Art Lange, Guillermo Gregorio, and Brian Labycz)
“I was always fascinated by music scores and often imagined how concerts might be changed if performers were not hidden behind music on stands. In the 1960’s, I made several films that used oscilloscope imagery and, in doing so, learned to ‘play’ various synthesizers to generate images. For this film, I used colored gels while filming and chose to optically print a few visual phrases, allowing for repeated sections. I also super-imposed hi-contrast notation over the film. So, Sections became a kind of feedback piece: sound generated the images for the score and performers created new sounds and a new piece from these images.” (Richard Lerman)
About the artists
Guillermo Gregorio is a composer, improviser, and visual artist in Chicago. Trained in architecture and music, he was associated with the Madi movement in Argentina in the 1960’s, and the spirit of experimentation across forms continues. He is especially noted for his compositions that combine improvisation and composed elements through graphic notation.
Peter Kubelka was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1934 and is an “artist and theoretician who has worked in the art forms of film, cuisine, music, architecture, speaking and writing. In 1964, Kubelka co-founded the Austrian Film Museum and has been its curator ever since. In 1978, he became professor in film at the Art Academy in Frankfurt, where he also served as Rector in the period of 1985-88. Kubelka’s theoretical work in cooking began in 1967, and in 1980 his teaching position was expanded to include ‘Film and Cooking as Art.’ He is a co-founder of the Anthology Film Archives in New York.” (Hong Kong International Film Festival)
Brian Labycz is a Chicago improviser primarily performing with electronics. He draws from a variety of sources including analog systhesizers, acoustic instruments, digital manipulations, field recordings, and self-made devices to produce and explore various expressive forms.
Chris Langdon is from the middle of the country somewhere. He studied art (and a little film) at the California Institute of the Arts roughly between 1972 and 1976, during which time he made somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 films. He collaborated with Fred Worden and worked with Jack Goldstein and John Baldessari on several of their early films.
Art Lange has produced more than two dozen recordings for artists like Matthew Shipp, Ellery Eskelin, Ran Blake, and Guillermo Gregorio, and he has directed ensembles in the music of Cornelius Cardew and Anthony Braxton. His writings on music have been published across the U.S., England, and Europe. He teaches at Columbia College, Chicago.
Richard Lerman has been creating electronic music and interdisciplinary art since the 1960’s and has performed and exhibited his artwork and film in North and South America, Asia, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. For the last 30 years, he has been designing and building microphones using piezo disks. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the NEA, the Asian Cultural Council, among many others. A 2-CD set of his early audio work, including “Travelon Gamelon” and a performance of “Sections for Screen, Performers and Audience,” is available on EM Records. For more information please visit http://www.sonicjourneys.com
Robert Russett holds degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design and Cranbrook Academy of Art. Following his graduate work at Cranbrook, Russett continued his studies in Paris at Atelier17. His films have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Whitney Museum (NYC), the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, as well as on PBS, The Learning Channel, and Spanish National Television. His tapes and video installations have been shown at SIGGRAPH, the American Museum of the Moving Image (NYC) and the International Symposium on Electronic Art in the Netherlands. Awards include 3 MacDowell Colony fellowships, a Media Fellowship from the Louisiana Division of the Arts and a production grant from the American Film Institute. John Libbey and Co. has published his new book, HYPERANIMATION: Digital Images and Virtual Worlds (2009), in association with the University of Indiana Press. Formally an Honors Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Russett is now Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts and a full-time artist and writer.
Paul Sharits is widely considered to be the first American filmmaker to make “pure-color” flicker films. He was involved with Fluxus in the 1960’s and worked in a variety of different mediums including film, sound, sculpture, drawing, performance art, typography, and printmaking. His film work investigated visual and aural modes of perception by examining the intersections between shifting fields of color and sound, the mechanics of film projection and optical sound reproduction, and what he referred to as “the operational analogues constructed between ways of seeing and ways of hearing.”
Barry Spinello came to animation from painting, and completed a number of films in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s (Soundtrack, Sonata for Pen, Brush and Ruler, and Six Loop-Paintings) that explored various techniques of painting and drawing images and soundtracks directly onto 16mm film. His films have been shown at the Whitney Museum and at various international film festivals, and he taught animation at the University of California at Berkeley.
ALL TOGETHER NOW: VIDEOS BY HARRY DODGE & STANYA KAHN
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 30, 2009
Thursday, November 5, 6pm | Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn in person!
- Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, “Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit it Out” (2006). Image courtesy of Elizabeth Dee Gallery.
With a biting yet surprisingly tender wit, Los Angeles performance and video artists Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn couch social critique in bizarre, hilarious, and seemingly impromptu scenarios. Collaborating since 2001, their work has been featured in exhibitions and film festivals the world over. “At first glance,” writes critic Jeffrey Kastner, “[their videos] seem like lo-fi screwball sketches, thanks to their improvisational skills, Kahn’s magnetic performances, and Dodge’s keen directorial hand.” Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit it Out (2006), featured in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, trails a bloody-nosed modern-day Valkyrie-cum-raconteur as she wanders the streets of L.A. Their 2008 tour de force, All Together Now, imagines a post-apocalyptic scenario where different clans forge their way in an anarchic world. Also featured: Whacker (2005); Let the Good Times Roll (2004); and Winner (2002). 2002–08, USA, multiple formats, ca. 90 min.
HARRIET “HARRY” DODGE was born in San Francisco in 1966. STANYA KAHN was born in San Francisco in 1968. They first met in 1993 in San Francisco, and began collaborating in 2001, when they moved to Los Angeles. In 2003 Dodge and Kahn each received an MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, NY. Both have extensive solo careers in performance: Kahn is the creator of the critically-acclaimed performance The Ballad of Crappy and Seapole (According Shempco) (2001); Dodge has appeared in numerous indie films and videos, including John Waters’ Cecil B. Demented; and both artists are featured in Dodge’s 2001 feature By Hook or By Crook, which she wrote and directed with Silas Flipper. Dodge and Kahn’s collaborative work has been exhibited in solo shows at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, and in numerous group exhibitions, including the Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Germany; Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania; the 2008 Whitney Biennial; The Getty Center, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens, NY; and Art in General, NY; among many others. Their video works have been widely shown in film festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival; NY Underground Film Festival; Mix Festival, NY; London Lesbian/Gay International Film Festival; Los Angeles Film Festival; New Festival, NY; San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival; and the Paris International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.
Interview with Daniel Eisenberg on Johan van der Keuken’s THE WAY SOUTH (1981)
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 29, 2009
On the occasion of this Thursday’s forthcoming screening of Johan van der Keuken’s The Way South, CATE interviewed SAIC Film, Video, and New Media Professor Daniel Eisenberg, who will be introducing the film, and who himself is deeply influenced by van der Keuken’s work.
- Still from Johan van der Keuken’s “The Way South” courtesy of Ideale Audience Internationale.
CATE: Can you tell us a little about The Way South?
Daniel Eisenberg: The Way South is a film that was made in 1980-81, and originally broadcast on Dutch television as three separate pieces which JVDK then reedited into one long film. It’s a remarkable film that speaks to us about contemporary post-modern, post-colonial conditions and political and economic networks long before the term “globalism” ever appeared in critical discourse. Its most important themes, that of exile, dislocation, and displacement, our economic interconnections to communities both near and far, disparities of power and wealth, are all so large and immense that they can only be embraced in the personal essayistic style that JVDK so brilliantly employs.
CATE: The film is part of a series of political works, including van der Keuken’s “North-South Triptych.” How does it relate to the other films in this series, and why is this relationship important?
DE: The point you raise about connecting this work to his others is important. JVDK was a prolific and yet self-critical filmmaker. He was able to engage large themes and at the same time be aware that his work was more about the subjective relation he and his images have to the world. So his oeuvre is marked by continuity as well as discontinuity. Those continuous and discontinuous threads occur both within and between works. Themes are rethought and reconsidered over decades, and traces the progress of his own thinking as well as producing a picture of the world.
CATE: What is your relationship to van der Keuken and his work? How has it inspired you?
DE: I met JVDK in 1988 at a film festival in Mannheim, Germany. It was my first international film festival, and he showed his remarkable film, The Eye Above the Well, about his travels in Kerala, India, which was a new and powerful experience for me.
The film embodied so many of the desires that I had as a filmmaker: to be able to use the camera to “see” critically. To use the camera as a way to open things up, rather than to close things down, as it so often does. To register the self as well as the subject and at the same time to invoke the third body in the equation, the viewer. To invoke deep political and human relations, visually.
I also was gratified that some of the ways Johan used his camera in The Eye Above the Well were echoed in the work I presented at the festival as well, Cooperation of Parts. He felt to me like a kindred spirit. After the screening I wanted to let him know how powerful my experience of the film had been, and mentioned my own work to him. He said he would very much like to see it, and took my contact information. I received a phone call about a year later from Johan letting me know that he had seen a notice for a screening of Cooperation of Parts in NYC while there, and that he would come to the screening, and hopefully we would be able to talk about the work afterwards. Johan was that kind of person…authentic, generous, aware of himself and of others.
He remained generous to me in so many ways over the next decade, as we would often meet at film festivals in France and Germany. I can’t say we were close, but every time we got together it was like being with an old friend, sharing stories and experiences. That he saw himself as a quiet mentor to so many young filmmakers such as myself was simply the way he was, and that humility and generosity fueled an entire generation. You knew that you were in part, making work for Johan, an experienced and demanding filmmaker himself, and in that way you were never alone with your work. And it goes without saying you always learned from his work…
CATE: Why did you want to bring this film to Conversations at the Edge? What do you hope the audience will get out of this screening?
DE: Although well known in Europe, Johan van der Keuken’s work is virtually unseen in the US. The sense of time that is embedded in his work — both the cinematic time of the films themselves, and the historical time of their production — I think that we have lost something of that in the work that’s being produced today. He was the embodiment of a humanist film practice, deeply respectful of the people he filmed and met. That resonates in his work. I want students to see and feel that it’s important to be present in their work, that cinema as an art form is more than a set of formal and conceptual strategies, and beyond that, more than a set of career choices. For cinema to continue to be relevant we need to re-embrace that sense of connectedness, that desire to reach beyond the image. Johan so deftly showed us that was indeed possible.
THE WAY SOUTH
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 23, 2009
Thursday, October 29, 6pm | SAIC Professor Daniel Eisenberg in person!
- Image: Johan van der Keuken, “The Way South” (1981). Image courtesy of Idéale Audience International.
Prolific Dutch documentarian, author, and photographer Johan van der Keuken produced 55 films and nine books over the course of his career. Influenced by Dutch realist photographers, existential and Eastern philosophies, and abstract painting and jazz, van der Keuken’s memorable style combined political and avant-garde filmmaking traditions with subjective expression and objective explanation. In The Way South (1981), part of a series of political films examining the disparities between the northern and southern hemispheres, van der Keuken’s camera travels from Amsterdam through Paris, the Alps, and Rome to Egypt and documents the plights of immigrant communities—Dutch squatters, Moroccan migrant workers, and generations of African emigrés—along the way. Introduced by SAIC professor Daniel Eisenberg. In Dutch with English subtitles. 1981, Netherlands, 16mm, 143 min.
JOHAN VAN DER KEUKEN (1938-2001, Netherlands) was a documentary filmmaker, author, and photographer. Extraordinarily prolific, he shot 55 documentaries in the span of 42 years, most produced for the Dutch television station VPRO. He also authored nine books on film and photography. “Lucid, complex, and exquisitely framed aural and visual compositions, Johan van der Keuken’s documentaries are based in a persistent curiosity about the ever-changing world and its inhabitants. Throughout his career, he sought forms sufficient to convey his sense of wonder and personal urge to communicate his global yet intimate perspective. JVDK…disregarded preconceptions about barriers between art forms and artificial subdivisions between fiction and documentary filmmaking. His filmmaking practice included “painting with sound,” rehearsing his “characters,” rearranging shots, looking for “the moment where the photographic image moves,” and otherwise structuring his films on techniques adapted from jazz improvisation. Usually a one-man band, he worked the camera, wrote, directed, and edited his own films, often with his wife, Noshka van der Lely, as sound operator. In this way, he controlled a multilayered documentation of the world and the place of the individual within it, creating links and contradictions that encourage the viewer to look beyond the frame.” (MoMA)
Visit MoMA’s interactive website on Johan van der Keuken
Bad at Sports on MARK
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 22, 2009
Read Lauren Vallone’s post on Mike Hoolboom’s film Mark here.
Mike Hoolboom’s MARK
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 18, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 6pm | Mike Hoolboom in person!
- Image: Mike Hoolboom, Mark (2009). Image courtesy of the artist.
“Society is not first of all a milieu for exchange where the essential would be to circulate or to cause to circulate, but rather a socius of inscription where the essential thing is to mark and to be marked.” — Deleuze and Guatarri, Anti-Oedipus
Award-winning Canadian filmmaker and writer Mike Hoolboom makes his Chicago debut appearance with the premiere of Mark (2009), an elegiac portrait of his friend and collaborator, Mark Karbusicky, who committed suicide in 2007. Mark weaves together childhood snapshots, found footage, and interviews with Karbusicky’s friends, family, and longtime partner, transsexual performance artist Mirha-Soleil Ross, to map the contours of a life lived “in the background” and trace the mark he left on the communities around him. Curator Mark Webber notes, “few filmmakers use re-appropriated footage in such an emotive way…Hoolboom’s recent work is in profound sympathy with the human condition that speaks directly to our hearts.” Co-presented by the Video Data Bank. 2009, Canada, video, 70 min.
MIKE HOOLBOOM (1959, Canada) is a Canadian artist working in film and video. He has made fifteen films and videos, which have appeared in over four hundred festivals, garnering thirty awards. He has been granted two lifetime achievement awards, the first from the city of Toronto, and the second from the Mediawave Festival in Hungary. He is the author of three non-fiction books: Plague Years (1998), Fringe Film in Canada (2000), and Practical Dreamers (2008) and one novel, The Steve Machine (2008). He has co-edited books on media artists Philip Hoffman (2000) and Frank Cole (2009), and co-authored a book on David Rimmer (2009). He is a founding member of the Pleasure Dome screening collective and has worked as the artistic director of the Images Festival and the experimental film coordinator at Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. He is the recipient of twelve international retrospectives of his work, most recently in Poland.
Interview with Golan Levin by jonCates (2003)
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 16, 2009
Following Golan Levin’s September 17 appearance at CATE, we present you with an excerpt of an interview conducted by SAIC Assistant Professor of Film, Video, and New Media, jonCates, in 2003. This interview was done as part of Cates’s Critical Artware project.
Double-Taker (Snout), Interactive Robot from Golan Levin on Vimeo.
jonCates: Have the histories and developments of live experimental video, electronic visualization events and the performance of video image processing also played a role in conceiving of and realizing your own work?
Golan Levin: If you’re referring to what is generally called ‘VJ’ing, I’d have to say that it has not been a particular influence, and in fact, it’s provided me with a wealth of negative examples. It’s never good to generalize, but grossly speaking, I’ve often found the VJ’ing stuff to be aesthetically uncritical, and rather too concerned with the same, tired, ‘psychedelic’ surface manipulations that seem to persist as a trope in the medium. Another aspect of the VJing scene is that everyone uses the same tools — Nato and Jitter — and so it all tends to look alike to me. Finally, I think there’s an inherent conflict between using pre-stored video materials, and creating a ‘live’ performance event, that only a few practitioners seem to have surmounted. And on a personal note, it seems that most VJ’s aren’t performing sound and image simultaneously, but rather conceive of their work as accompaniment for a music DJ; this leads to a lot of rather arbitrary juxtapositions, I feel, which is exactly the opposite of what my work is about.
That said, I think there are a lot of people doing live experimental video that have really done interesting and important work. Kurt Hentschlager from the Austrian group Granular Synthesis would be at the top of my list. Some of the folks using VinylVideo have found a nice way to enhance the manipulability of stored materials. Sue Costabile is doing terrific work in performing live imagery; her stuff is extremely organic, and her use of video processing is powerful but completely transparent. When I want ‘psychedelic’ stuff, though, I return to the masters of 1960’s light shows, like Michael Scroggins.
And of course, there is a huge tradition of live experimental video which has nothing to do with ‘surface’ manipulations at all, but is altogether more closely related to conceptual and performance art; I’m thinking of the E.A.T., Fluxus, Paik, Gary Hill, and Bill Viola video art/performances. Oddly enough, I think certain aspects of my work are now heading in a direction related to this.
jC: This is very interesting and related to what I was asking in terms of recent histories. Whereas some of the influences you list existed as and/or became increasingly sculptural and installation oriented in their stagings other contemporary practitioners such as Ralph Hocking, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Dan Sandin, Phil Morton and others consider or positioned artists’ tool and system design as a major aspect of their work. Could you describe the role that your instrument design plays within your practice? To what extent is the development of the toolset and/or system in and of itself the artwork?
GL: I’ve tried to have my cake and eat it too. On the one hand, I regard my interactive software systems as meta-artworks, completed in collaboration with a user, whose chief subject is the cybernetic feedback loop that they establish. On the other hand, I also enjoy using my systems as instruments towards specific ends, such as a performances. Usually, however, these performances are intended to illustrate, if not outright demonstrate, the interactive qualities of the system in some hopefully poetic way.
To read the full interview, click here.
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Conversations at the Edge is a weekly series of screenings, performances, and talks by groundbreaking media artists.
CATE is organized by SAIC's Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and SAIC's Video Data Bank.
Programs take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State / Chicago, IL / 312.846.2600), unless otherwise noted.
