The second weekend of Exploratory Visions animation + experimental + avant garde film program focuses on the avant garde, or films with some kind of narrative even if barely recognisable as such.
The individual films are mostly longer than last weekend but there are fewer of them.
The multi-award-winning collage animation Once I Passed, a collaboration between Germany’s Martin Gerigk and Serbia’s Nikola Gocic opens a stylish window to the past and a poem by Walt Whitman, followed by Debjit Bagchi’s fascinating Memoir from India which explores the fragmented memories of a man we never see.
Once I passed
Memoir
Spain’s Luis Carlos Rodriguez gives us a new take on a classic Hollywood narrative with a brand new version of his award-winning Collage 37, while Italy’s Emanuele Dainotti allows us an almost Godardian glimpse into the mind of a filmmaker in Hedgehog’s Dilemma.
Collage #37
Hedgehog's Dilemma
Blast from the Past takes us back to 1995 Australia and Margaret Haselgrove’s black-and-white experimental narrative Replay, described as a cinematic etude informed by questions of sexual identity.
Replay
For a complete change of pace, we plunge into the mesmerising Almost Forgotten by Canada’s Charles Tashiro. And for the grand finale, we have brain-stomping sci-fi fashion show LED3Times from Italy’s Alessandro Amaducci.
Almost Forgotten
LED3Times
So put aside an hour over 03 – 04 December and get blown away by some of the world’s finest risk-taking filmmakers, streaming internationally from The Screening Room –
Here are some notes, reactions to my experimental moving image work being exhibited in a group show at Brighton Gallery, in Brighton until 18 December this year, highlighting its photographic materialist experimentation.
https://www.bayside.vic.gov.au/threshold
It’s been a while since my obsessions have gone public, especially in Melbourne. I have come to terms with why I gravitated to such a discounted local practice in the 70s when the co-op movement reared its ugly head. In a lot of ways this experimental thread even became incidental to that movement, and how that history has been remembered. it was certainly there at the start through artists like James Clayden, Michael Lee and Albie Thoms, for example, but drifted to its margins and outside its focus as documentarist and feminist waves took hold, with a last unfortunate gasp for experimentation at MIMA in 1992. And there was Cantrills Filmnotes. I was attracted to these margins, re-enacting the dislocation of my migrant background. Underneath lay a survival impulse to understand my parent’s experience of migration from the old world to the new.
They were not Australians but were cloaked in the erased migrant identity of the “New Australian.” The chameleon-like Dutch were good at that, that’s how they survived European nationalist tugs-of- war for centuries. It all left an ambiguous gap in my identity that I filled with moments of erasure and denial, a dissociative outside the outside mentality that stumbled through my abstractions. 223 (1985, 5 minutes) is the short film in the exhibition that most clearly plays with this tension. In the exhibition interview with Paul Carter I note the impact of my mother’s dressmaking on my arts and crafts approach to assemblage, but after the interview my bricklaying father’s impact also came back to me. Behind the film’s childhood photographs of me playing with forms are images of the houses Piet built before he left Dordrecht to take his family to Australia. 223’s instability, flicker and its ensuing hypervigilance relate back to his psychotic episodes. One where he came at my mother and me with a knife, the other an episode of moaning where he turned the lights on and off at breakneck speed.
https://vimeo.com/139100396
The other film I want to mention is the continually growing Covid-initiated Looking For Birrarung (2020-2022 60 minutes) which records the changes of light on Port Phillip Bay near where I live, a sea-shore I was able to access during lockdown. This is the slither of native park Sanctuary encasing Melbourne suburbia in the arc between Brighton and Beaumaris, that includes Ricketts Point Marine Park, Clarice Beckett’s old stomping ground, 100 years on. That fact that Melbourne has four seasons in one day is a real asset in filming the bay in time-lapse a couple of days a week for one to two hours each time. A relentless record of tonal change and fog gathers the momentum of a trance-like state. This is projected in the Gallery on a large screen and benefits from the dwarfing of the human body. Looking at the horizon line, I have been told is a resting place for the eyes. This provided a therapy for my screen obsessions and helped me stay balanced during those lock-downs.
The covid crisis atrophied any travel for us all. It brought me back to the local. I had to make creative use of my immobility and this project inserted a productive contemplative Everyday into my straight-jacketed daily grind. Because of its length, in the gallery there is a QR code that accesses Looking For Birrarung online while in Brighton Gallery or when you leave the Gallery. The link below does the same. Every week I add what I have shot the week before onto this compendium. Vimeo is very handy for that.
(Well, there's one thing you can't lose... It's that feel...)
I would like to start this post with the repeated information about David King's Web TV sequenced program "Exploratory Visions", previously announced via the "Friends of the Armchair Traveler" blog. Impressive 60 minutes of recent experimental film and video production (a part of which I would not dare to include in my presentation programs) yet you can follow the two more days at the address:
I am looking forward to watch the second part of this little avant-garde net show, about which you will be informed in due course and based on a number of relevant sources such as this www point. I owe a lot to David and our friendship, just to mention. BTW, during our exchange of emails and hopefully valuable life experiences I reflected on the enormous losses for the avant-garde art scene during the past year. So, before the coming holidays, we should remember, among others, Nick Zedd (1958-2022), Paolo Gioli (1942-2022) and Toshi Ichiyanagi (1933-2022).
Nick Zedd (1958-2022)
Since I previously elaborated on my personal chatting experience with him and paid tribute in relation to the opus and hard-to-digest Nick Zedd attitudes (you read about it in my earlier posts), this time, as a kind of homage contribution, I would like to place a few of my humble works along with basic remarks about forever lost masters Gioli and Ichiyanagi.
As Wikipedia states: “Paolo Gioli (12 October 1942 – 28 January 2022) was an Italian painter, photographer, and experimental film director. Gioli was born in the northeastern Kingdom of Italy and attended the "Academy of Fine Arts in Venice". Early influences include Hans Richter and Walter Ruttman. He did not take an interest in film until he lived in New York in 1967, where he discovered the "New American Cinema school of filmmaking”.
Paolo Gioli (1942-2022)
I have presented Paolo Gioli's films at Cine Club Split in the fall of 2019, and in the announcement of the program I included an excerpt from an interview conducted with Paolo Gioli by the Italian journalist and writer Caludia D`Alonzo for the needs of the digital online publication "Digimag Journal":
“Claudia D’Alonzo: When did you begin to understand that the modalities of production and perception of cinema imposed by standardized production were too strict for you?
Claudia D’Alonzo: So what interested you was controlling the development phase and print phase?
All of Paolo Gioli's Cinema ("RARO VIDEO") - https://www.rarovideo.com/
Paolo Gioli: Development is one thing. In development you see what you have done. When you have a negative you’re alright, you edit the negative and as you go you accumulate 6 or 7 meters, you realize that everything changes. Everyone said to me: but cinema film is different, it’s not like photographic film, it’s different. I didn’t believe them, so I bought some film, and I developed it as if it were any old photo film and I saw it was the same thing. Everyone was so obsessed with technicality… they all felt these technical barriers, complicated stuff full of secrets: it’s so stupid. Film is film. In other words I had to do it myself and not listen to what other people said. Then I realized that I could make a film from morning to evening! I would shoot a piece, if I liked it I would edit it, piece by piece, and so forth. Once I had finished I would print everything in a laboratory. I printed some pieces myself, I would make the positive with an old camera, I used it like Lumière did, he used the camera to shoot and print: you put the new film in contact with the developed negative, you shoot a white light, for example from a wall, and you impress the positive film. Which is what happens in the laboratory, the printer does exactly that. From then on I began working autonomously, even on duration. This notion that a film must last an hour and a half, derives from focus group tests on audiences, they noticed that spectators have had enough after two hours. This notion of an hour and a half created itself, it’s an old story. But this is true for commercials too: if they are bad those two minutes are unbearable, if they’re good you never want them to end.
Paolo Gioli`s CCS presentation A4 paper announcement (scan) found on the official Ian Gibbins web page (thanks for keeping this dear friend...)
Claudia D’Alonzo: You lived in two important contexts for the whole experimental cinema scene, New York at the end of the Sixties and Rome during the second have of the following decade…
Paolo Gioli: I wasn’t making movies when I was in New York . At that time I was mostly drawing. I followed the circuit of little cinemas that showed these “forbidden” films, underground films. But from there I understood a lot of things. For example, wandering around the bay of New York at night, in quite dangerous places, by chance I saw a little cinema with a line of people outside. A lot of the people waiting in line were holding these little boxes in their hands, I just thought they were strange spectators. I sneaked inside too. I found out that those spectators were really auteurs and that the boxes were boxes of Super8 film. You didn’t know what was going to come out of it, the people in line gave their films to the projectionist. At a certain point the police ruptured into the cinema, everyone out, turned everything off, and identified everyone present. I had a tourist visa and was terrified.
Paolo Gioli - Quando l'occhio trema (1989)
Claudia D’Alonzo: So even in America there was not all this freedom that people imagine. When you read about that era it seems as though things were so simple, very free and shared, even in the management of spaces created in the most unthinkable places…
Paolo Gioli: No, all of Mekas’s exhibitions were very organized. Here is my little video collage link , official. But then there were as many autonomous places, pontoons and barges where you could sleep too. There were film slide projections, mostly in Super8. Most of these were psychedelic films that implied the use of various substances during the course of the evening. I never used anything like that but all the possible substances available at the time were shared right in front of me."
More about Paolo Gioli you can find on this web addresses:
Here is the link for my little video homage to the work of Paolo Gioli:
Darko Duilo - Pale After Rain (2022)
Toshi Ichiyanagi, “avant alerter”, was a Japanese avant-garde composer and pianist. He provided film scores for some of the crucial works of Toshio Matsumoto (1932-2017) whose short works little retrospective i have curated at the Cine Club Split during the spring of 2011. and the cycle composed of some of his features was presented several years later,
Toshi Ichiyanagi (1933-2022)
Besides, Toshi Ichiyanagi composed some of the main works of Yoshishige Yoshida (presented at the CCS too). For better understanding of a function of “avant-garde alerting” I am adding one more of my recent works (dedicated to Toshi Ichiyanagi and "soundscape filled" with one of his composition) to this post:
Darko Duilo - Living Space (2022)
Some of the works by Yoshida and Matsumoto with Ichiyanagi soundtracks you can find free to watch (stream) on the "Internet Archive" web:
https://archive.org/
Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
And for the end of this session of the experimental cinema encyclopedic entries I was planning to use the opportunity to present you some underrated works form “alerting video producers” teams, but my contacts with those YouTube channels are lost. Instead, here is one more You Tube clip with Toshi Ichiyanagi`s composition:
Ichiyanagi Toshi - Duet for Piano and String Instrument (1961)
And, what happened to my love life? Well, for the end of this post let me get you a little bit depressed with this one (premiered exclusively for the "Friends of the Armchair Traveller”):
Darko Duilo - Royal Cut Sutro (2022)
Well, at least there's one thing you can't lose...
Echoes of war reverberate through the first weekend’s Exploratory Visions animation + experimental + avant garde film program this year.
From Finland, Eija Temiseva’s abstract but powerful Feelings of War is followed by Indian director Debraj Naiya’s Seedlings which looks at the trauma suffered by children in an unnamed theatre of war, followed by Janja Rakus’s Song For Haron (Slovenia) which evokes a ferry taking the dead across the River Styx.
'Feelings of War' - Eija Temiseva
'Seedlings' - Debraj Maiya
'Song or Haron' - Janja Rakus
But it’s not all doom and gloom. This is the first time the program will open with a student film – Yuzuki Tachibana’s Deduce from Genjipai is a delightful and intriguing experimental animation from Japan which evokes the spirit of Rene Magritte.
'Deduce from Gejapai' -Yuzuki Tachibana
Australia’s Ian Gibbins gives us a haunting and visually seductive video poem in After Image while the USA’s Dee Hood explodes our minds with Fragments of Knowable Truth, and Canada’s Deb Ethier - Best Film award winner at the 2021 Hell Chess Film Festival – brings us her award-winning animation Once There was a Girl.
'After Image' - Ian Gibbins
'Fragments of Knowable Truth' - Dee Hood
'Once There was a Girl' - Deborah Ethier
There’s also a special presentation of ABODE – a series of films made by an international collective of filmmakers who took Ito Takashi’s 1985 experimental horror film GRIM as a source of inspiration for their own films about a place of residence, work or refuge. The filmmakers are Kunal Biwas (India), Camelia Mirescu (Italy), Rrose Present (Spain), Hiroshi Atobe (Japan), Anna Grigorian (Armenia-Canada), Debjit Bagchi (India), David King (Australia – also curator) and Serge Maslov-Szymarski (Stateless).
And for the trance-pumping grand finale we welcome the return of Dean Winkler and Don Butler (USA) with their eye-popping and mind-bending blend of live action, 2D, 3D and CGI animation in Our America.
'Our America' - Dean Winkler & Don Butler
And all this in just one hour. So put aside an hour over 26 – 27 November and tune in to The Screening Room at www.salto.nl/programma/the-screening-room/for the first weekend’s edition of Exploratory Visions animation + experimental + avant garde film program for 2022.
In his previous post Darko mentioned some of Piero's films, as well as posting some lovely images from those films.
Here are the films which Darko referred to:
Piero Bargellini - Nelda (1969)
Piero Bargellini - Morte all'orecchio di Van Gogh (1968)
I CAN'T FIND THIS NEXT TITLE
Piero Bargellini - Trasferimento di modulazione (1969)
YOUTUBE SAYS "INAPROPRIATE CONTENT" !!!!!!!!!!!!!
Perhaps someone shot a lot of people in a public place, or sent a number of rockets loaded with explosives into a neighbouring country for no particular reason...which might have qualified as perfectly appropriate content.
ANYHOW, HERE IS A COMPENDIUM PIECE OF SOME OF PIERO'S WORK:
FEEL FREE TO ADD TO THIS POST.
pt
Hi Peter Tammer,
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