21 February 2007

HEY! Work It Out For Yourself

HEY! WORK IT OUT FOR YOURSELF
London LUX Salon
Wednesday 21 February 2007, at 7pm for 7:30pm start

The LUX Salon returns with a new monthly series of guest curated screenings delving into the vaults of the LUX collection to show the classics; known, lost and forgotten ...

Two rarely seen films exploring the authenticity of production and interpretation, selected by Jackie Holt. Margaret Raspé’s Oh Death How Nourishing You Are explores issues of personal responsibility and death, through the lens of Raspé’s purpose-built ‘camera helmet’. Stephanie Beroes’ Debt Begins at 20, a semi-fictionalised record of the early years of the Pittsburgh punk scene. Oh Death How Nourishing You Are will be accompanied with a live musical performance from LORD JOHN.

Debt Begins at 20 (Stephanie Beroes, 1980)

OH DEATH HOW NOURISHING YOU ARE
Margaret Raspé, Germany, 1972-73, colour, silent, 15 mins (Super-8)
'I was interested in what death is. To know the moment where life breaks into it. I have never killed an animal before consciously. I wanted to feel the moment where the flowing change of life is interrupted by something I do, in order to eat. To realise the death, which is carefully hidden in our technical society. To confront this moment, with the total ignoring of the situation you are in, when you cook something, killed in an unknown sphere. The clash between these realities was a big shock.' (Margaret Raspé)

DEBT BEGINS AT 20
Stephanie Beroes, USA, 1980, b/w, sound, 40 mins (16mm)
With music by The Cardboards, The Snakes, Hans Brinker and The Dykes. "By combining semi-fictionalized and documentary material, this film is as definitive a record of the Pittsburgh punk scene during its nascent underground as anyone could hope for. Beroes' band footage is radical departure from the gimmickry of stereotyped rock band documentary in its use of pans and slow dollys, capturing small glimpses of the musicians at work that a PR film would have avoided at all costs. The cinematography demands a reconsideration of the rock band documentary's hoary technical vocabulary. From the time this film was made changes have already taken place in Pittsburgh punk-dom as the bands have moved from an insular salon society to more 'legitimate' venues. Some say things are better than ever, others mourn the passing of Pittsburgh punk's innocence. Beroes in Debt Begins at 20 has produced not only entertainment, but also a small and very precious time capsule." (W.T. Koltek, WYEP Pittsburgh.)

at

LUX Salon
3rd Floor, Shacklewell Studios, 18 Shacklewell Lane, London, E8 2EZ
Nearest Train: Dalston Kingsland
MAP OF AREA

ADMISSION FREE
Places are extremely limited so booking is essential
To book a place send your name to salon@lux.org.uk
Please be on time - no late entry
Telephone: 020 7503 3980

www.lux.org.uk

09 February 2007

Obcy Aktorzy / Foreign Actors

OBCY AKTORZY / FOREIGN ACTORS
London Whitechapel Project Space
9-11 February 2007

Obcy Aktorzy / Foreign Actors, a film by Matthew Noel-Tod, reworks classic works of Polish cinema, from directors such as Wajda and Kieslowski. The film is a new work, collaging remade elements from the original films, with a cast of Polish actors, including famous Polish actress Ewa Kasprzyk.

Obcy Aktorzy / Foreign Actors (Matthew Noel-Tod, 2006)

Obcy Aktorzy / Foreign Actors
Matthew Noel-Tod, UK/Poland, 2006, Beta SP, colour, sound, 46 minutes

Obcy Aktorzy / Foreign Actors takes as its starting point Polish cinema. Polish actors were invited to audition in Warsaw with dialogue from a favourite Polish film. The actors in Obcy Aktorzy / Foreign Actors perform a series of moments from the films Ashes and Diamonds (1958), Man of Iron (1981) Dekalog 4 (1988) and Sequence of Feelings (1993). Famous Polish actress Ewa Kasprzyk was invited to join the cast and re-perform her dialogue from Sequence of Feelings. During a process of revision and rehearsals, the words and characters from the original films became recontextualised into a new narrative, including actors and characters inhabiting multiple fictions and dramatic spaces. Aesthetic, sexual, historical and dramatic senses are manipulated to create a video that is a dialogue between artist and actors, between language and image, between past and present.

Featuring Ewa Kasprzyk, Sandra Samos, Juliusz Dzienkiewicz, Robert Mazurkiewicz, Katarzyna Maternowska, Malgorzata Kasprzycka.

Produced at a-i-r laboratory CCA Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw through an Arts Council England International Fellowship, 2005.

An accompanying 128pp publication, with Polish and English texts, is available priced £10 from Whitechapel Project Space, and from LUX.

Whitechapel Project Space screening supported by the Polish Cultural Institute, London.

at

Whitechapel Project Space
20 Fordham Street London E1 1HS
Nearest Tube: Aldgate East / Whitechapel
MAP OF AREA

Admission Free
Telephone: 077 4823 5428
www.whitechapelprojectspace.org.uk

Screenings begin on the hour
Friday 9 February 2007, from 7-9pm (free Polish vodka)
Saturday 10 February 2007, from 1-6pm
Sunday 11 February 2007, from 1-6pm

www.matthewnoel-tod.com

04 February 2007

John Porter & One Take Super 8

JOHN PORTER & ONE TAKE SUPER 8 EVENT
London Candid Arts Trust
Sunday 4 February 2007, at 4pm

Canada's foremost super 8 filmmaker John Porter will present a selection of his films and a selection of films from the annual One Take Super 8 Event.

JOHN PORTER & ONE TAKE SUPER 8 is presented by COGCOLLECTIVE.

Scanning 5 (John Porter, 1983)

JOHN PORTER & ONE TAKE SUPER 8

John Porter has been a filmmaker, performer, photographer and writer since 1968. Known in his native Toronto as the king of Super 8, he has made more than 300 short films, mostly Super 8, and has performed more than 70 solo shows internationally. Many of his films are silent, made in series (Camera Dances, crowd portraits, local histories, rituals, toy stories), and he shows his camera originals (no copies). Often while projecting he performs live in the audience, in front of the screen, or while hand-holding the small projector for 'surround Super 8' in galleries and for projecting onto passing people and vehicles while 'film-busking' on the street at night. His films are dynamic, humorous and revealing, enjoyed by people of all ages. John will be showing a selection of films from his Europe 2007 Tour Programme.

The One Take Super 8 Event began in 2000 and has been showcased across Canada, the United States and in a number of international festivals. In 2006 it was held in Regina, Saskatchewan. The event invites filmmakers to shoot a single reel of Super 8 film which are then collectively screened at a public venue. All films are shown as shot, no cuts, no splices, and without the filmmakers having seen their work beforehand. To date more than 200 films have been created for the event.

at

Candid Arts Trust
3 Torrens Street, London, EC1V 1NQ
Nearest Tube: Angel
MAP OF AREA

Tickets: £5 / £3 concessions
Email: info@cogcollective.co.uk

www.cogcollective.co.uk

02 February 2007

To The Winged Distance: Films by Robert Beavers

TO THE WINGED DISTANCE: FILMS BY ROBERT BEAVERS
London Tate Modern
2-25 February 2007

Robert Beavers has laboured in relative isolation on works whose goal “is for the projected film image to have the same force of awakening sight as any other great image.” His meticulously crafted films are at once lyrical and rigorous, sensuous and complex. Whilst communicating his response to the landscapes, architecture and traditions of the Mediterranean and Alpine countries in which they were filmed, they also incorporate deeply personal and aesthetic themes. Rarely seen in public, Robert Beavers’ remarkable body of work is a celebration of light, life and colour.

AMOR (Robert Beavers, 1980)

The retrospective is structured in two parts: Six programmes of selected titles will be followed on the last weekend by “My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure”, Beavers’ complete cycle of eighteen films.

Curated by Mark Webber.
With thanks to Temenos Verein, Cineric Inc. and The Guild of St George.

at

Starr Auditorium
Tate Modern, Bankside, London, SE1 9TG
Nearest Tube: Southwark / London Bridge / Blackfriars
MAP OF AREA

Tickets: £5, booking recommended
Season Ticket: £25
Box Office: 020 7887 8888

www.tate.org.uk

Work done (Robert Beavers, 1972/1999)

TO THE WINGED DISTANCE: FILMS BY ROBERT BEAVERS

Friday 2 February 2007, at 7pm

TO THE WINGED DISTANCE: Programme 1
Introduction by Robert Beavers
AMOR, 1980, 15 min.
Work done, 1972/1999, 22 min.
The Hedge Theater, 1986-90/2002, 19 min.

Sunday 4 February 2007, at 3pm
TO THE WINGED DISTANCE: Programme 2
Introduction by Robert Beavers
From the Notebook of …, 1971/1998, 48 min.

Friday 9 February 2007, at 7pm
TO THE WINGED DISTANCE: Programme 3
Early Monthly Segments, 1968-70/2002, 33 min.
Sotiros, 1976-78/1996, 25 min.
The Ground, 1993-2001, 20 min.

Sunday 11 February 2007, at 3pm
TO THE WINGED DISTANCE: Programme 4
Palinode, 1970/2001, 21 min.
Diminished Frame, 1970/2001, 24 min.
The Painting, 1972/1999, 13 min.

Friday 16 February 2007, at 7pm
TO THE WINGED DISTANCE: Programme 5
Winged Dialogue, 1967/2000, and Plan of Brussels, 1968/2000, 21 min.
Still Light, 1970/2001, 25 min.
Wingseed, 1985, 15 min.

Sunday 18 February 2007, at 3pm
TO THE WINGED DISTANCE: Programme 6
Ruskin, 1975/1997, 45 min.
The Stoas, 1991-97, 22 min.

Early Monthly Segments (Robert Beavers, 1968-70/2002)

Friday 23 February 2007, at 7pm
MY HAND OUTSTRETCHED: Programme 1
Early Monthly Segments, 1968-70/2002, 33 min.
Winged Dialogue, 1967/2000, and Plan of Brussels, 1968/2000, 21 min.

Friday 23 February 2007, at 9pm
MY HAND OUTSTRETCHED: Programme 2
The Count of Days, 1969/2001, 21 min.
Palinode, 1970/2001, 21 min.

Saturday 24 February 2007, at 12pm
MY HAND OUTSTRETCHED: Programme 3
Diminished Frame, 1970/2001, 24 min.
Still Light, 1970/2001, 25 min.

Saturday 24 February 2007, at 2pm
MY HAND OUTSTRETCHED: Programme 4
From the Notebook of …, 1971/1998, 48 min.
The Painting, 1972/1999, 13 min.

Saturday 24 February 2007, at 5pm
MY HAND OUTSTRETCHED: Programme 5
Work done, 1972/1999, 22 min.
Ruskin, 1975/1997, 45 min.

Sunday 25 February 2007, at 12pm
MY HAND OUTSTRETCHED: Programme 6
Sotiros, 1976-78/1996, 25 min.
AMOR, 1980, 15 min.

Sunday 25 February 2007, at 2pm
MY HAND OUTSTRETCHED: Programme 7
Efpsychi, 1983/1996, 20 min.
Wingseed, 1985, 15 min.
The Hedge Theater, 1986-90/2002, 19 min.

Sunday 25 February 2007, at 5pm
MY HAND OUTSTRETCHED: Programme 8
The Stoas, 1991-97, 22 min.
The Ground, 1993-2001, 20 min.

www.tate.org.uk

FOLLOW THIS LINK FOR DETAILS OF THE FILMS

Robert Beavers: Complete Programme

TO THE WINGED DISTANCE: FILMS BY ROBERT BEAVERS
London Tate Modern
2-25 February 2007

The retrospective is structured in two parts: “To the Winged Distance”, six programmes of selected titles, will be followed on the last weekend by “My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure”, Robert Beavers’ complete cycle of eighteen films.

FOLLOW THIS LINK FOR THE INTRODUCTION

The Hedge Theatre (Robert Beavers, 1986-90/2002)

Friday 2 February 2007, at 7pm
TO THE WINGED DISTANCE: Programme 1

Introduction by Robert Beavers


AMOR
1980, 35mm film, colour, sound, 15 min.
AMOR is an exquisite lyric, shot in Rome and at the natural theatre of Salzburg. The recurring sounds of cutting cloth, hands clapping, hammering, and tapping underline the associations of the montage of short camera movements, which bring together the making of a suit, the restoration of a building, and details of a figure, presumably Beavers himself, standing in the natural theatre in a new suit, making a series of hand movements and gestures. A handsomely designed Italian banknote suggests the aesthetic economy of the film: the tailoring, trimming, and chiselling point to the editing of the film itself. (P. Adams Sitney, Film Comment)

WORK DONE
1972/1999, 35mm film, colour, sound, 22 min.
Bracing in its simplicity, Work done was shot in Florence and the Alps, and celebrates an archaic Europe. Contemplating a stone vault cooled by blocks of ice or the hand stitching of a massive tome or the frying of a local delicacy, Beavers considers human activities without dwelling on human protagonists. Like many of Beavers’ films, Work done is based on a series of textural or transformative equivalences: the workshop and the field, the book and the forest, the mound of cobblestones and a distant mountain. (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice)

THE HEDGE THEATRE
1986-90/2002, 35mm film, colour, sound, 19 min.
Beavers shot The Hedge Theatre in Rome in the 1980s. It is an intimate film inspired by the Baroque architecture and stone carvings of Francesco Borromini and “St. Martin and the Beggar,” a painting by the Sienese painter Il Sassetta. Beavers’ montage contrasts the sensuous softness of winter light with the lush green growth brought by spring rains. Each shot and each source of sound is steeped in meaning and placed within the film’s structure with exacting skill to build a poetic relationship between image and sound. (Susan Oxtoby, Toronto International Film Festival)

Total running time c.80 min.


From the Notebook of … (Robert Beavers, 1971/1998)

Sunday 4 February 2007, at 3pm
TO THE WINGED DISTANCE: Programme 2

Introduction by Robert Beavers

FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF …
1971/1998, 35mm film, colour, sound, 48 min.
From the Notebook of … was shot in Florence and takes as its point of departure Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and Paul Valéry’s essay on da Vinci’s process. These two elements suggest an implicit comparison between the treatment of space in Renaissance art and the moving image. The film marks a critical development in the artist’s work in that he repeatedly employs a series of rapid pans and upward tilts along the city’s buildings or facades, often integrating glimpses of his own face. As Beavers notes in his writing on the film, the camera movements are tied to the filmmakers’ presence and suggest his investigating gaze. (Henriette Huldisch, Whitney Museum of American Art)

Total running time c.70 min.


Sotiros (Robert Beavers, 1976-78/1996)

Friday 9 February 2007, at 7pm
TO THE WINGED DISTANCE: Programme 3

EARLY MONTHLY SEGMENTS

1968-70/2002, 35mm film, colour, silent, 33 min.
Early Monthly Segments, filmed when Beavers was 18 and 19 years old, now forms the opening to his film cycle, “My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure.” It is a highly stylized work of self-portraiture, depicting filmmaker and companion Gregory J. Markopoulos in their Swiss apartment. The film functions as a diary, capturing aspects of home life with precise attention to detail, documenting the familiar with great love and transforming objects and ordinary personal effects into a highly-charged work of homoeroticism. (Susan Oxtoby, Toronto International Film Festival)

SOTIROS
1976-78/1996, 35mm film, colour, sound, 25 min.
In Sotiros, there is an unspoken dialogue and a seen dialogue. The first is held between the intertitles and the images; the second is moved by the tripod and by the emotions of the filmmaker. Both dialogues are interwoven with the sunlight’s movement as it circles the room, touching each wall and corner, detached and intimate. (Robert Beavers)

THE GROUND
1993-2001, 35mm film, colour, sound, 20 min.
What lives in the space between the stones, in the space cupped between my hand and my chest? Filmmaker/stonemason. A tower or ruin of remembrance. With each swing of the hammer I cut into the image and the sound rises from the chisel. A rhythm, marked by repetition, and animated by variation; strokes of hammer and fist, resounding in dialogue. In this space which the film creates, emptiness gains a contour strong enough for the spectator to see more than the image – a space permitting vision in addition to sight. (Robert Beavers)

Total running time 78 min.


The Painting (Robert Beavers, 1972/1999)

Sunday 11 February 2007, at 3pm
TO THE WINGED DISTANCE: Programme 4

PALINODE

1970/2001, 16mm film, colour, sound, 21 min.
In Palinode, a disk-shaped matte continually shifting in and out of focus alternately blocks part of the image or contains it. Its respiratory rhythm matches operatic fragments of Wladimir Vogel’s ‘Wagadu’, as the camera studies a middle-aged male singer in Zurich, singing, eating, window shopping, meeting a young girl. The filmmaker told himself, “Don’t let yourself know what that film is about while you are making it.” (P. Adams Sitney, Film Comment)

DIMINISHED FRAME
1970/2001, 16mm film, black-and-white and colour, sound, 24 min.
There is in Diminished Frame a balance between a sense of the past seen in the views of West Berlin, filmed in black & white and a sense of the present in which I film myself showing how the colour is being created by placing filters in the camera’s aperture. It is the space of the city and of the filmmaker. I searched for signs of war’s aftermath and a few moments of ordinary existence. (Robert Beavers)

THE PAINTING
1972/1999, 16mm film, colour, sound, 13 min.
The Painting intercuts shots of traffic navigating the old-world remnants of downtown Bern, Switzerland, with details from a 15th-century altarpiece, "The Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus". The painting shows the calm, near-naked saint in a peaceful landscape, a frozen moment before four horses tear his body to pieces while an audience of soigné nobles looks on; in the movie’s revised version, Beavers gives it a comparably rarefied psychodramatic jolt, juxtaposing shots of Gregory Markopoulos, bisected by shafts of light, with a torn photo of himself and the recurring image of a shattered windowpane. (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice)

Total running time 58 min.


Still Light (Robert Beavers, 1979/2001)

Friday 16 February 2007, at 7pm
TO THE WINGED DISTANCE: Programme 5

WINGED DIALOGUE and PLAN OF BRUSSELS

1967/1968/2000, 16mm film, colour, sound, 21 min.
Winged Dialogue details with growing clarity the desperate beauty and sexuality of the body animated by its soul, essence blindly reaching out, touching, in brilliant patterns through and beyond those of the vanishing images, expressed vividly in the after-image on the mind, on the soul’s eye. (Tom Chomont, a note on Winged Dialogue)
Shedding all traces of narrative in Plan of Brussels, Beavers filmed himself in a hotel room, both at his work desk and lying naked on the bed, while in rapid rhythmic cutting, and sometimes in superimposition, the phantasmagoria of people he met in Brussels and images from the streets flood his mind. (P. Adams Sitney, Film Comment)

STILL LIGHT
1970/2001, 16mm film, colour, sound, 25 min.
The first half of the film explores delicate nuances of lighting, colour and depth as Beavers shoots the face of a young man in various locales on the Greek island of Hydra, using a variety of customized masks and filters. The man’s face remains constant throughout, surrounded by iconic elements in the landscape, like a pulsating Renaissance portrait. Still Light’s second half was shot in the London flat of art critic Nigel Gosling. The two halves of Still Light bring to mind any number of structuralist binarisms: youth and age, creation and criticism, action and reflection, living landscape and mummified text. (Ed Halter, New York Press)

WINGSEED
1985, 16mm film, colour, sound, 15 min.
A seed which floats in the air, a whirligig, a love charm. This magnificent landscape, both hot and dry, is far from sterile; rather, the heat and dryness produce a distinct type of life, seen in the perfect forms of the wild grass and seed pods, the herds of goats as well as in the naked figure. The torso, in itself, and more, the image which it creates in this light. The sounds of the shepherd’s signals and the flute’s phrase are heard. And the goats’ bells. Imagine the bell’s clapper moving from side to side with the goat’s movements like the quick side-to-side camera movements, which increase in pace and reach a vibrant ostinato. (Robert Beavers)

Total running time 61 min.


Ruskin (Robert Beavers, 1975/1997)

Sunday 18 February 2007, at 3pm
TO THE WINGED DISTANCE: Programme 6

RUSKIN

1975/1997, 35mm film, black-and-white and colour, sound, 45 min.
Ruskin visits the sites of John Ruskin’s work: London, the Alps and, above all, Venice, where the camera’s attention to masonry and the interaction of architecture and water mimics the author’s descriptive analysis of the “stones” of the city. The sound of pages turning and the image of a book, Ruskin’s ‘Unto This Last’, forcibly remind us that a poet’s perceptions, and in this case his political economy, are preserved and reawakened through acts of reading and writing. (P. Adams Sitney, Film Comment)

THE STOAS
1991-97, 35mm film, colour, sound, 22 min.
The title refers to the colonnades that led to the shady groves of the ancient Lyceum, here remembered in shots of industrial arcades, bathed in golden morning light, as quietly empty of human figures as Atget’s survey photos. The rest of the film presents luscious shots of a wooded stream and hazy glen, portrayed with the careful composition of 19th century landscape painting. An ineffable, unnameable immanence flows through the images of The Stoas, a kind of presence of the human soul expressed through the sympathetic absence of the human figure. (Ed Halter, New York Press)

Total running time 67 min.

Ruskin will be shown in a brand new print. The preservation of this film has been made possible by the generosity of Cineric Inc. and The Guild of St. George.


Winged Dialogue (Robert Beavers, 1967/2000)

Friday 23 February 2007, at 7pm
My Hand Outstretched: Programme 1

EARLY MONTHLY SEGMENTS

1968-70/2002, 16mm film, colour, silent, 33 min.
Early Monthly Segments, filmed when Beavers was 18 and 19 years old, now forms the opening to his film cycle, “My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure.” It is a highly stylized work of self-portraiture, depicting filmmaker and companion Gregory J. Markopoulos in their Swiss apartment. The film functions as a diary, capturing aspects of home life with precise attention to detail, documenting the familiar with great love and transforming objects and ordinary personal effects into a highly-charged work of homoeroticism. (Susan Oxtoby, Toronto International Film Festival)

WINGED DIALOGUE and PLAN OF BRUSSELS
1967/1968/2000, 16mm film, colour, sound, 21 min.
Winged Dialogue details with growing clarity the desperate beauty and sexuality of the body animated by its soul, essence blindly reaching out, touching, in brilliant patterns through and beyond those of the vanishing images, expressed vividly in the after-image on the mind, on the soul’s eye. (Tom Chomont, a note on Winged Dialogue)
Shedding all traces of narrative in Plan of Brussels, Beavers filmed himself in a hotel room, both at his work desk and lying naked on the bed, while in rapid rhythmic cutting, and sometimes in superimposition, the phantasmagoria of people he met in Brussels and images from the streets flood his mind. (P. Adams Sitney, Film Comment)

Total running time 54 min.


The Count of Days (Robert Beavers, 1969/2001)

Friday 23 February 2007, at 9pm
My Hand Outstretched: Programme 2

THE COUNT OF DAYS

1969/2001, 16mm film, colour, sound, 21 min.
The film is seen as though upon and through the structure of its spiritual partitions. One might say that there are three elements or levels to the images: narrative, descriptive or analytic, and abstract. The Count of Days is not an account so much as an accounting of the essence of the days in which three separate persons are related at points … a penetration through the masks and habits of these days to reveal the nature of the charade and the arena in which it is enacted. (Tom Chomont, Film Culture)

PALINODE
1970/2001, 16mm film, colour, sound, 21 min.
In Palinode a disk-shaped matte continually shifting in and out of focus alternately blocks part of the image or contains it. Its respiratory rhythm matches operatic fragments of Wladimir Vogel’s ‘Wagadu’, as the camera studies a middle-aged male singer in Zurich, singing, eating, window shopping, meeting a young girl. The filmmaker told himself, “Don’t let yourself know what that film is about while you are making it.” (P. Adams Sitney, Film Comment)

Total running time 42 min.


Diminished Frame (Robert Beavers, 1979/2001)

Saturday 24 February 2007, at 12pm
My Hand Outstretched: Programme 3

DIMINISHED FRAME

1970/2001, 16mm film, black-and-white and colour, sound, 24 min.
There is in Diminished Frame a balance between a sense of the past seen in the views of West Berlin, filmed in black & white and a sense of the present in which I film myself showing how the colour is being created by placing filters in the camera’s aperture. It is the space of the city and of the filmmaker. I searched for signs of war’s aftermath and a few moments of ordinary existence. (Robert Beavers)

STILL LIGHT
1970/2001, 16mm film, colour, sound, 25 min.
The first half of the film explores delicate nuances of lighting, colour and depth as Beavers shoots the face of a young man in various locales on the Greek island of Hydra, using a variety of customized masks and filters. The man’s face remains constant throughout, surrounded by iconic elements in the landscape, like a pulsating Renaissance portrait. Still Light’s second half was shot in the London flat of art critic Nigel Gosling. The two halves of Still Light bring to mind any number of structuralist binarisms: youth and age, creation and criticism, action and reflection, living landscape and mummified text. (Ed Halter, New York Press)

Total running time 49 min.


From the Notebook of … (Robert Beavers, 1980)

Saturday 24 February 2007, at 2pm
My Hand Outstretched: Programme 4

FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF …

1971/1998, 35mm film, colour, sound, 48 min.
From the Notebook of … was shot in Florence and takes as its point of departure Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and Paul Valéry’s essay on da Vinci’s process. These two elements suggest an implicit comparison between the treatment of space in Renaissance art and the moving image. The film marks a critical development in the artist’s work in that he repeatedly employs a series of rapid pans and upward tilts along the city’s buildings or facades, often integrating glimpses of his own face. As Beavers notes in his writing on the film, the camera movements are tied to the filmmakers’ presence and suggest his investigating gaze. (Henriette Huldisch, Whitney Museum of American Art)

THE PAINTING
1972/1999, 16mm film, colour, sound, 13 min.
The Painting intercuts shots of traffic navigating the old-world remnants of downtown Bern, Switzerland, with details from a 15th-century altarpiece, "The Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus". The painting shows the calm, near-naked saint in a peaceful landscape, a frozen moment before four horses tear his body to pieces while an audience of soigné nobles looks on; in the movie’s revised version, Beavers gives it a comparably rarefied psychodramatic jolt, juxtaposing shots of Gregory Markopoulos, bisected by shafts of light, with a torn photo of himself and the recurring image of a shattered windowpane. (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice)

Total running time 61 min.


Work done (Robert Beavers, 1972/1999)

Saturday 24 February 2007, at 5pm
My Hand Outstretched: Programme 5

WORK DONE

1972/1999, 35mm film, colour, sound, 22 min.
Bracing in its simplicity, Work done was shot in Florence and the Alps, and celebrates an archaic Europe. Contemplating a stone vault cooled by blocks of ice or the hand stitching of a massive tome or the frying of a local delicacy, Beavers considers human activities without dwelling on human protagonists. Like many of Beavers’ films, Work done is based on a series of textural or transformative equivalences: the workshop and the field, the book and the forest, the mound of cobblestones and a distant mountain. (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice)

RUSKIN
1975/1997, 35mm film, black-and-white and colour, sound, 45 min.
Ruskin visits the sites of John Ruskin’s work: London, the Alps and, above all, Venice, where the camera’s attention to masonry and the interaction of architecture and water mimics the author’s descriptive analysis of the “stones” of the city. The sound of pages turning and the image of a book, Ruskin’s ‘Unto This Last’, forcibly remind us that a poet’s perceptions, and in this case his political economy, are preserved and reawakened through acts of reading and writing. (P. Adams Sitney, Film Comment)

Total running time 67 min.

Ruskin will be shown in a brand new print. The preservation of this film has been made possible by the generosity of Cineric Inc. and The Guild of St. George.


AMOR (Robert Beavers, 1980)

Sunday 25 February 2007, at 12pm
My Hand Outstretched: Programme 6

SOTIROS

1976-78/1996, 35mm film, colour, sound, 25 min.
In Sotiros, there is an unspoken dialogue and a seen dialogue. The first is held between the intertitles and the images; the second is moved by the tripod and by the emotions of the filmmaker. Both dialogues are interwoven with the sunlight’s movement as it circles the room, touching each wall and corner, detached and intimate. (Robert Beavers)

AMOR
1980, 35mm film, colour, sound, 15 min.
AMOR is an exquisite lyric, shot in Rome and at the natural theatre of Salzburg. The recurring sounds of cutting cloth, hands clapping, hammering, and tapping underline the associations of the montage of short camera movements, which bring together the making of a suit, the restoration of a building, and details of a figure, presumably Beavers himself, standing in the natural theatre in a new suit, making a series of hand movements and gestures. A handsomely designed Italian banknote suggests the aesthetic economy of the film: the tailoring, trimming, and chiselling point to the editing of the film itself. (P. Adams Sitney, Film Comment)

Total running time 40 min.


Efpsychi (Robert Beavers, 1983/1996)

Sunday 25 February 2007, at 2pm
My Hand Outstretched: Programme 7

Ευψυχι (Efpsychi)

1983/1996, 35mm film, colour, sound, 20 min.
The details of the young actor’s face – his eyes, eyebrows, earlobe, chin, etc. – are set opposite the old buildings in the market quarter of Athens, where every street is named after a classic ancient Greek playwright. In this setting of intense stillness, sometimes interrupted by sudden sounds and movements in the streets, he speaks a single word, “teleftea”, meaning the last (one), and as he repeats this word, it moves differently each time across his face and gains another sense from one scene to the next, suggesting the uncanny proximity of eroticism, the sacred and chance. (Robert Beavers)

WINGSEED
1985, 35mm film, colour, sound, 15 min.
A seed which floats in the air, a whirligig, a love charm. This magnificent landscape, both hot and dry, is far from sterile; rather, the heat and dryness produce a distinct type of life, seen in the perfect forms of the wild grass and seed pods, the herds of goats as well as in the naked figure. The torso, in itself, and more, the image which it creates in this light. The sounds of the shepherd’s signals and the flute’s phrase are heard. And the goats’ bells. Imagine the bell’s clapper moving from side to side with the goat’s movements like the quick side-to-side camera movements, which increase in pace and reach a vibrant ostinato. (Robert Beavers)

THE HEDGE THEATRE
1986-90/2002, 35mm film, colour, sound, 19 min.
Beavers shot The Hedge Theatre in Rome in the 1980s. It is an intimate film inspired by the Baroque architecture and stone carvings of Francesco Borromini and “St. Martin and the Beggar,” a painting by the Sienese painter Il Sassetta. Beavers’ montage contrasts the sensuous softness of winter light with the lush green growth brought by spring rains. Each shot and each source of sound is steeped in meaning and placed within the film’s structure with exacting skill to build a poetic relationship between image and sound. (Susan Oxtoby, Toronto International Film Festival)

Total running time 54 min.


The Ground (Robert Beavers, 1993-2001)

Sunday 25 February 2007, at 5pm
My Hand Outstretched: Programme 8

THE STOAS

1991-97, 35mm film, colour, sound, 22 min.
The title refers to the colonnades that led to the shady groves of the ancient Lyceum, here remembered in shots of industrial arcades, bathed in golden morning light, as quietly empty of human figures as Atget’s survey photos. The rest of the film presents luscious shots of a wooded stream and hazy glen, portrayed with the careful composition of 19th century landscape painting. An ineffable, unnameable immanence flows through the images of The Stoas, a kind of presence of the human soul expressed through the sympathetic absence of the human figure. (Ed Halter, New York Press)

THE GROUND
1993-2001, 35mm film, colour, sound, 20 min.
What lives in the space between the stones, in the space cupped between my hand and my chest? Filmmaker/stonemason. A tower or ruin of remembrance. With each swing of the hammer I cut into the image and the sound rises from the chisel. A rhythm, marked by repetition, and animated by variation; strokes of hammer and fist, resounding in dialogue. In this space which the film creates, emptiness gains a contour strong enough for the spectator to see more than the image – a space permitting vision in addition to sight. (Robert Beavers)

Total running time 42 min.


AMOR (Robert Beavers, 1980)

All screenings at

Starr Auditorium
Tate Modern, Bankside, London, SE1 9TG
Nearest Tube: Southwark / London Bridge / Blackfriars
MAP OF AREA

Tickets: £5, booking recommended
Season Ticket: £25
Box Office: 020 7887 8888

www.tate.org.uk

Michel/Ackers/Novakovic

ARIANE MICHEL / TOM ACKERS / RASTKO NOVAKOVIC
London Whitechapel Project Space
2-4 February 2007

Tri u dva ne ide (Rastko Novakovic, 2006)
ARIANE MICHEL
Rêve de Cheval (Horse Dream), 2004, 11 minutes

Here they are, sleeping. From one leg onto the other, strong and quiet, hidden in the winter. From far away, a rumour comes up. Ears straighten-up: all of them have heard. In their secret language, they all come to an agreement: they are scared and have to run away. A weird animal will appear in their panic, hybrid, worrisome like an enigma.

TOM ACKERS
Adult Education, 2006, 16 minutes

A series of scenarios present Cognitive Behavioural Therapy as a site for different levels of performing. Actors devise a range of roleplaying characters, and in various presentations of themselves arouse confusions of perception, self-knowledge and self-alteration around their use or avoidance of cliché.

RASTKO NOVAKOVIC
Sundays in Majdanpek: Tri u dva ne ide, 2006
Sundays in Majdanpek: Twice Shy, 2007, 32 minutes in total

Five shots of the town’s disused cinema present a fleeting document of the social space and history of Majdanpek, a devastated mining town in Eastern Serbia. The cyclical gesture of entering the cinema, the expectations in starting afresh, tracing the same route, but each time with different images and sounds, creates an accumulative intermingling of textual and visual historical records. They present simultaneously two contradictory conceptions of history: history as a narrative and history as that which is recorded in a particular medium.
A single uninterrupted shot of Majdanpek’s open mine in 4:3 aspect ratio is tilted so that its diagonal fits the 16:9 format - stretching the tension between home video and cinema, the public and private, the lived and the represented, off-screen space and the proscenium. The contradiction between place and sound, and the structurally warped projection of this industrial landscape, elicits an archaeological texture that shifts between dialectical materialism and spiritual meditation.

at

Whitechapel Project Space
20 Fordham Street London E1 1HS
Nearest Tube: Aldgate East / Whitechapel
MAP OF AREA

Admission Free
Telephone: 077 4823 5428
www.whitechapelprojectspace.org.uk

Screenings begin on the hour
Friday 2 February 2007, from 7-9pm
Saturday 3 February 2007, from 1-6pm
Sunday 4 February 2007, from 1-6pm