THE BRIGHTON FILM FESTIVAL
17 NOVEMBER - 4 DECEMBER 2005
THE BASEMENT SCREENINGS
BRIGHTON FRINGE BASEMENT
sat 26 nov - sat 3 dec
FREE ENTRY
A week of free screenings presenting a diverse range of artists’ film and video in association with Brighton Fringe Basement, Duke of York’s Picturehouse and Cinematheque
artists’ moving image symposium
Sat 26 Nov 10.30am – 5.30pm
SALLIS BENNEY THEATRE,
UNIVERSITY OF BRIGHTON
£ 20 / £5 concessions and students (includes lunch and refreshments)
It is supported by
Arts Council England and the University of Brighton.
Please register before 24 November. Email sefva@brighton.ac.uk or send a cheque
(payable to the “University of Brighton”) with your contact details to TIMEWORK,
South East Film & Video Archive, University of Brighton, Grand Parade, Brighton,
BN2 0JY.
These two PURE PRODUCTS film programmes offer work by a range of artists
and filmmakers which not only meditate on the dominance of American culture – its
effect on modern western culture, on modern western private experience – but
also find new ways to express its complexity. Loosely themed around ideas of
family and culture, the two programmes offer innovative ripostes to the bizarre
kitsch world constructed from daytime TV, the fading glitz of Hollywood and
the freaky shine of materialism. The artists search for the authentic, the
human,
the lost landscape of the real, buried deep in the craziness of modern culture.
6pm
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME?
Directors: Matthias Muller/Christophe Girardet. Germany 1999. 5 mins
The definitive study of Hitchcock’s distinctive portrayal of mothers.
MIGRATION OF THE BLUBBEROIDS
Director: George Kuchar. USA 1989. 12 mins
It is the first white turkey day for fifty years: snow abounds yet life goes
on.
THE PHARAOH’S BELT
Director: Lewis Klahr. USA 1993. 9 mins
“Klahr’s characters negotiate a labor of extrication from the morass
of Betty Crocker chocolate icing, formica kitchens and parental phantoms toward
a mastery of the imagination and the attaining of true love.” Tom Gunning
THE WALTONS
Director: Anne McGuire. USA 1996. 7 mins
A homespun deconstruction of an entire era of TV mannerisms, this re-examination
of John-boy’s near death experience at the sawmill is deft and cunning.
BACK EAST
Director: Cordelia Swann. UK 2000. 14 mins
A chronicle of a progressively darkened New York childhood.
ALPSEE
Director: Matthias Muller. Germany 1995. 15 mins
Muller’s unforgettable moving portrait of growing up in the 1960s.
8pm
KARAOKE KULTURE
EXCHANGE POLICY
Directors: Gordon Winiemko and Julie Wyman.
USA 2001. 14 mins
A wild-eyed spending spree or a study of modern shopping?
WE THE NORMAL
Director: George Kuchar. USA 1987. 11 mins
If only life was like in the movies.
WE EDIT LIFE
Director: Vicki Bennett (aka People Like Us).
UK 2002. 11 mins
A journey through the layers of perception to the very centre of your imagination.
PONY GLASS
Director: Lewis Klahr. USA 1997. 15 mins
The story of comic book character Jimmy Olsen’s secret life.
I AM CRAZY AND YOU’RE NOT WRONG
Director: Anne McGuire. USA 1997. 11 mins
McGuire portrays a Kennedy-era singer performing in a space where theatre meets
TV.
More than 260,000 metres of nitrate film footage from the Dutch film archives served as the source material for this documentary. In a span of ninety minutes the film aims to show how the Netherlands administered its colony as a colonial enterprise and what the relations were like at the time. The original commentary has been omitted and in its place poems and songs in the Indonesian language have been included in a new sound composition.
The programme takes us through THE RESIDENTS’ audio-visual weirdness from VILENESS FATS (pioneering the use of early video in the 70s) through to warped classics THIRD REICH ‘N’ROLL and HELLO SKINNY. In 1980 they started to produce a one-minute movie for every track on their Commercial Album LP. The ones that got made were soon incorporated into the Museum of Modern Art permanent collection in New York. Now they’ve finished what they started 25 years ago and produced a 60-second film for all 40 tracks on the album.
RE-MAKE RE-MODEL Mon 28 NOV 8pm
8pm
ALONE. LIFE WASTES ANDY HARDY
DIRECTOR: Martin Arnold
Austria 1998. 15mins
“ The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider.”
Martin Arnold
ROSE HOBART
DIRECTOR Joseph Cornell
USA 1936. 17mins
Consists almost entirely of footage taken from EAST OF BORNEO, a 1931 jungle B-film starring the nearly forgotten actress Rose Hobart. Cornell condensed the 77-minute feature into a 20-minute short, removing virtually every shot that didn’t feature Hobart, as well as all of the action sequences. In so doing, he utterly transforms the images, stripping away the awkward construction and stilted drama of the original to reveal the wonderful sense of mystery that saturates the greatest early genre films.
A WINTER’S NIGHT
DIRECTOR: Barbara Meter
NL 2002. 7mins
Love, dread, desire and forboding - the uneasy sensuality of 40’s and
50’s Hollywood icons.
HOME STORIES
DIRECTOR: Matthias Muller
Germany 1990. 6mins
Collecting the most kitschy and colourful images of disturbed housewifes in
evening gowns from 1950s Hollywood melodramas, Müller re-cut them into
a film that both comments on gender entrapment in classic-era Hollywood while
exhibiting the sheer joy of image mutilation.
6pm
AVANTOSCOPE 1
K (Desert)
DIRECTOR: Frederique Devaux
Fr 2004. 5mins
LUUKKAANKANGAS
DIRECTOR: Dariusz Krzeczek
Aus 2004. 7mins.
4X8X3
DIRECTOR: Chris Kennedy
Can 2004. 3mins
REPLAY
DIRECTOR: Matt Hulse
GB 2005. 9mins
GET SET
DIRECTOR: Ian Helliwell
GB 2005. 3.5mins
LE POSTULAT D`EUCLIDE
DIRECTOR: Augustin Gimel
Ger 2004. 10mins
CHRONOMOPS
DIRECTOR: Tina Frank
Aus 2004. 2mins
KULESHOV’S CABINET
DIRECTOR: Witkacy
Can 2005. 5mins
MIRROR MECHANICS
DIRECTOR: Siegfried A Fruhauf
Aus 2005. 7.5mins
SAT 3 DEC 8pm
AVANTOSCOPE 2
ALTITUDE ZERO
DIRECTOR: Lauren Cook
USA 2004. 5mins
DISKO BAY
DIRECTOR: Aurelie Doutre
CH 2004. 11.5mins
RETURNING
DIRECTOR: Nancy Jean Tucker
USA 2005. 3.5mins
YOU BREATHE LIFE
INTO MY BOSOM, OLEANDER
DIRECTOR: Barbara Doser
& Hofstetter Kurt
Aus 2005. 10mins
THE HYRCYNIUM WOOD
DIRECTOR: Ben Rivers
GB 2005. 3mins
MODERN TIMES
DIRECTOR: Chris Coleman
USA 2004. 3mins
L`ECLAT DU MAL
DIRECTOR: Louise Bourque
Can 2005. 6mins
HARROW SUBSTATION
DIRECTOR: James Holcombe
GB 2005. 3.5mins
2ND HAND CINEMA
DIRECTOR: Dirk de Bruyn
Australia 2004. 6mins
POINT BLANC: MATT HULSE AND BEN RIVERS
TUES 29 NOV 8PM
NOW I AM YOURS
S8/DV M.H. 2001. 7mins
Through the act of looking hard and long through a lens I hoped I might be able to reveal to the audience something else beyond the facades of the ruined buildings, something concealed, some ghosts or fleeing souls perhaps.
TAKE ME HOME
16mm M.H. 1997. 7mins
A free-wheeling expression of irrepressible energy in the face of certain death.
REPLAY
S8/DV M.H. 2005. 9mins
Memories can be so fragile, so elusive and so unreliable. Using cameras and other recording devices we try to capture life as it slips by but it’s all in vain.
GOD SAVE THE QUEEN
DV M.H. 2003. 4mins
The Pistol’s irreverent classic reworked for the Golden Jubilee in British Sign Language.
THERE IS ONLY LIGHT
S8/DV M.H. 2004. 4mins
An intense exploration into and abstraction of diverse sources of illumination.
WE THE PEOPLE
16mm B.R. 2004. 1min
A fragment from a small ghost town; justice is played out in an unending nightmare.
THE BOMB WITH A MAN IN HIS SHOE
16mm B.R. 2005. 18mins
A freewheeling day in the life of a shoemaker, and his dogs.
FARM HORROR
16mm B.R. 2005. 3mins
Suspense is everything.
OLD DARK HOUSE
16mm B.R. 2003. 4mins
Rooms in an abandoned house revealed by multiple exposures of torch-light, intrepid filmmaking.
THE HYRCYNIUM WOOD
16mm B.R. 2005. 3mins
The title is from an out of date thesaurus and means ‘mystery’ which is exactly what this film remains to me.
DOVE COUP
16mm B.R. 2005. 2mins
Birds in my hotel garden in Rotterdam, a film print made using a torch.
POINT BLANC
S8/DV 2005. 4mins
“ Club lost or deteriorate: 200 francs. Stray bullet: 10 Francs.” A film by Matt Hulse and Ben Rivers shot at Mini Golf ‘Route de la Minoterie’, Uzerche, France.
ALIEN ANOMALIES UNDER AMERICA
DIRECTOR: Craig Baldwin
US 1991. 48mins
Unrelentingly lurid and equally hilarious, this document of underground agitprop is both a skewed history of United States intervention in Latin America and a satire of conspiracy thinking as well as an impressive demonstration of the sort of connect-the-dots logic that makes such political or world views possible.
With a sci-fi plot suggesting that current unrest can be blamed on space aliens who live under U.S. atomic test sites, the film illustrates its lurid comic drama with images culled from everything from newsreels to Mexican horror flicks. This nutty little item suggests that conspiracy thinking is a Frankenstein monster which inevitably destroys its creator: first you have the conspiracy theory, and then the conspiracy theory has you.
8PM
DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y
DIRECTOR: Johan Grimonprez
Belgium 1998. 68mins
Buckle up for DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, the acclaimed hijacking documentary that eerily foreshadowed 9-11. We meet the romantic skyjackers who fought their revolutions and won airtime on the passenger planes of the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1990s, such characters were apparently no more, replaced on our TV screens by stories of anonymous bombs in suitcases.
Johan Grimonprez investigates the politics behind this change, at the same time unwrapping our own complicity in the urge for ultimate disaster. Playing on Don DeLillo’s riff in his novel Mao II: “what terrorists gain, novelists lose” and “home is a failed idea”, he blends archival footage of hijackings with surreal and banal themes, including fast food, pet statistics, disco, and his quirky home movies. David Shea composed the superb soundtrack to this freefall through history, best described in the words of one hijacked Pepsi executive as “running the gamut of many emotions, from surprise to shock to fear, to joy, to laughter, and then again, fear.
IAIN FORSYTH & JANE POLLARD
Artists Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard make remarkable work about popular culture and ordinary life. They’re best known for their pioneering re-enactment projects including ‘A Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide’ (ICA, London) recreating David Bowie’s final performance as Ziggy Stardust in microscopic detail.
Michael Connor, head of exhibitions at BFI SOUTH BANK, will introduce this selection of their recent film-based works. The programme includes ‘Walking After Acconci (Redirected Approaches)’ which references an early video work by Vito Acconci and features Plan B, a remarkable young MC recently signed to 679 Recordings – alongside ‘File under Sacred Music’, Forsyth & Pollard’s controversial remake of an infamous bootleg video documenting The Cramps playing live for the patients at Napa State Mental Institute in 1978.
8PM
GRANT GEE 1998 - 2005
Selected short docs, a pop video and an extract. Brighton-based film-maker Grant Gee combines personal work on experimental documentaries with creative commercial work as a director.MEETING PEOPE IS EASY (extract) 6mins
Shooting a documentary about Radiohead while shooting a pop video for Radiohead. Don’t drown the singer.
CITY SYMPHONY
8mins
Starting a film about Bauhaus architecture in a peaceful Tel Aviv (May 2001). By the time the video’s edited the Intifada’s resumed and there’s blood on the streets again. Either discard the vid. or use it to twist it and at least try and depict the noise. Chose the latter. Not sure if it shouldn’t have been the former.
DISCRETION GROVE
4mins
A pop video. Singer (Steven Malkmus, ex-Pavement) in America, me in London. Not enough budget to get us together so make a video using video conferencing. Fashionable woman gives singer directions with flash-cards composed while very stoned. Funny!
400 ANARCHISTS
20mins
Mugshots of 19th Century French Anarchists do Mogadon-speed Busby Berkeley. BBC voice muses distractedly about photography, forensics, ID cards, love and terrorism.
JC-03
30mins
John Cale at work. In 2003.
(MR.) FRED ZENTNER’S
CINEMA BOOKSHOP WAS HERE
10mins
It was (for 37 years). But now it’s not. Which is sad. And what’s the difference between an old-fangled Bolex and a newfangled Sony HDV.
We are delighted to welcome Ian White, a writer and curator (including previously at Lux Cinema) to introduce the screening.