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PROGRAMME & SCHEDULE

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Please click here to view the full festival schedule.

Day 1 / Day 2

This year’s festival comprises a constellation of screenings, readings and workshops extending from an invitation made by writer and researcher Laura Guy and artist Cara Tolmie to artists Mia Edelgart, Deirdre J. Humphrys and Alberta Whittle. It features contributions from Fiona Jardine and Mira Mattar, and films by Sonia Boyce and Ain Bailey, Christian Noelle Charles, Harry Dodge, Jacqui Duckworth, Catherine Gund and Julie Tolentino, Henriette Heise, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki, Jaguar Mary (formerly Jocelyn Taylor), Trinh T. Minh-ha and Jean-Paul Bourdier, Jayne Parker, Pia Rönicke, S. Pearl Sharp (formerly Saundra Sharp), and Ramses Underhill-Smith.

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RUSHES

Cherry Smyth

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1

That you could handle film was like touching God. That you could lift a spool in your white cotton fingers from its can, from the tower of cans, and thread it onto the Steenbeck was like showing how God moves. I watched you in the dark make thousands of tiny decisions of light.

2

3

You’d sit at the edge of your seat. You couldn’t hear anything else when you were editing. The images were sound that needed an exact rhythm, a melody only you could detect. You knew to cut just before it seemed to need it, your attention fastidious. Thelma Schoonmaker sat at your right shoulder. When we watched La Regle du Jeu I didn’t flinch as the dozen rabbits and birds were shot. You’d taught me to go inside the cuts – 102 in 4 minutes – counting Renoir’s rhythm, defined by Marguerite Houlet, his editor and lover at the time.

4

We’d flirted at a feminist film group. I’d noticed your walk – a loping swagger on long legs in tight jeans. The static between us made me giggle so much I had to leave the room. You didn’t want a relationship. I made you have one. We met in unadorned rooms in Soho, in basements, or at the end of a grey corridor where daylight never arrived. The sun burnt a bar of gold on the ceiling or the wall where the blackout curtain didn’t quite close. In these dark and smoky places, you showed me what made you, making sense of every film I’d ever liked, teaching me why, giving my passion a possible world. We never once had sex there. You were paying by the hour.

5

Film buffs were men. With beards and BO. We were cinema fiends. There were no videos or DVDs. There was the ceremony of cinema. A von Trotta Double Bill at the Academy; a Bergman Triple at the Electric; midnight cults at the Scala; Monday nights at the Everyman. We travelled, stayed awake, skived off work because there were films to be seen. I’d smuggle in a bowl of finely chopped, dressed salad, fresh bagels and two forks, and we’d sit in silence nourishing ourselves for hours. You never stood up until the last credit, as if by reading each name, honouring each member of the crew, you could absorb their skill, their magic.

6

You were in love with many women, always. You appreciated them like a connoisseur of fine liquers with a longing roll of the eyes and a small gasp: Gena Rowlands in Woman Under the Influence, Bernadette Lafont in La Fiancé du Pirate, Giulietta Masina in Nights of Cabiria, Sophia Loren and Catherine Deneuve in anything. You were a big flirt and a big fan and I didn’t realise then how much humility and forgiveness that required.

  You forgave Deneuve her bad plots and her love affairs with ugly, much older men; you forgave me my younger women. You were capable of devotion. You knew the difference a 25th of a second could make to a glance across a crowded bar.

7

You were a celluloid master. I bowed at your feet. Once you rescued a bored porn star from another bad movie, devising a way she could cut herself free from the film strip and escape on the back of your motorbike. No one believed it would work. Or the 16mm feature you made of the threesome you were living in, in a flat in Warren Street in the early 80s. You ate only toast and tepid tea. But women always fed you more.

8

You gave me a Super 8 to take to Russia, showed me how to use it. I carried it like a baby. I shot blossoms falling in a Moscow park, a gigantic mural on the dull outskirts, a sudden heap of tomatoes for sale on the roadside. I couldn’t film people. The camera was a gun I couldn’t point. I couldn’t see a whole from parts, came home with short unfinished poems. I don’t know where that footage is. In a grey can somewhere, held closed with white tape with my name on it, on a shelf in some dusty cutting room.

For Jacqui Duckworth, director of An Invitation to Marilyn C, Home-Made Melodrama, A Prayer Before Birth, and A Short Film About Melons. Published in Chroma: A Queer Literary Journal, No. 4, Spring 2006.

via poetrymagazines.org.uk

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Alberta Whittle, I is for the Illusion of Inclusion, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

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JAKOB JAKOBSEN & HENRIETTE HEISE

Lars Bang Larsen

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Extract from Lars Bang Larsen ‘Jakob Jakobsen and Henriette Heise’ Artforum, September 2003.

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Ramses Underhill-Smith, A Short Film About Us, 1996. Courtesy of the artist.

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Jayne Parker, RX Recipe, 1980. Courtesy of the artist and LUX.

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ACT UP ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Catherine Gund & Sarah Schulman

SS: Okay, so we’re talking about the one-stop shopping aspect of ACT UP; that you’re making art with people, you’re having sex with people, you’re socializing with them, you’re living with them in your loft.

CG: A lot of them.

SS: Yeah.

CG: All at once.

SS: it was a total lifestyle immersion, wouldn’t you say?

SS: So were you in Ray’s care group? Did people say, this is Ray’s care group, or did it just evolve as he got sicker?

CG: Oh, it just evolved. It was already, I mean it, it did, at some point, it kind of brings back, actually, it’s funny, back to your real question at this stage, which was about the women. But there was one woman who, I was with a woman; she — whatever. As soon as we were over, she was with someone else. And that woman and I — who are dear friends to this day — became friends taking care of Ray. And it was because Ray and I, and they had introduced me to Lola. And he was, you have to, got to meet this woman. Which I loved. I loved.

SS: Lola Flash.

CG: Lola Flash.

SS: Right.

CG: Who is also a dear friend to this day, and has a Mohawk like one of my kids. And they have like a little Mohawk bond for that. She substitute teaches at their school, which I love, too. I don’t realize how many people, Donna Binder’s kid also goes to my kid’s school. And that morning, and John Wright. And John Wright and Tracy Gardner?

SS: No.

CG: They were part of Black Action Mobilization more, but John considers himself, he was part of ACT UP. And their kids go to our school, too. And I was trying to get John and Donna to go with me to the thing. And Gerry.

SS: Wells.

CG: Gerry Wells’s daughter graduated last year. So there’s a lot. And Sandra Elgear. So it’s pretty amazing that there are so many of us in that situation. Anyway, so Ray introduced me, were you off? Or you were – you were fine.

SS: We’re fine. We’re fine.

CG: Anyway. Ray introduced me to Lola. And I was so excited that it was, it was a match. Because Ray was so excited. And if it hadn’t been right, that would have been a bummer. Because he was like, you got to check this out. So Lola and I had a blast. When that was over, she started dating Julie Tolentino, and I was not having it. Not because I was necessarily jealous; I just didn’t know her, and I was totally intimidated by her. And –

SS: She was the Steve Rubell of the lesbian world. She was the nightclub entrepreneur –

CG: Right. This is before that.

SS: Oh, okay, okay.

CG: This is before that. And then, yeah, because then Jocelyn [Taylor], who I was living with and then had an affair with, or a relationship with. She and Julie started the Clit Club and that. But before all that, before that was when Ray got sick, and Julie and I would overlap at Ray’s bedside. And that is a really amazing – I felt like that was one of these weird little things that happened. Everything else to me is more predictable. The care group, we figured out who was going to be there and when. We all had various relationships with his mother, who was incredibly supportive and around him. He was exuding essays and things to the end, and we’d jot for him. There was – and then he ended up in the hospital, and he made his own kinds of peaces with different people, and his lover was in the same hospital on the same floor. And his sister came to town. So in those, those senses, there are details, but I feel like the little things that made it really different are the fact that, in the drawer by his bed — I wrote about this, too — but in the drawer by his bed, like where his socks were, and we kept everything right there, like the rubbing alcohol and stuff; there were all these dildos. And he just refused to take them out. And so his mother, who was among the caregivers, would have to move the dildos aside to get him his medications, or whatever we needed. And he just wanted them there, all the time. He didn’t want anyone to ever forget. He was, so, there, there’s a lot of great specific details about caring for him. As far as the care group itself, I think many of us were already friends. It was all, it was interesting who really stepped up in a way; and that’s probably true for all the different care groups. That –

SS: Who was in his care group?

CG: There’s people who I might have thought were closer to him, in some ways, but for whatever reasons weren’t able to participate. And there’s people who I didn’t realize — like Julie — who were re-, that close to him, who were there for him, really. Aldo Hernandez, Debra Levine, Lola Flash; Anthony Ledesma was his lover, who was sick at the same time, and died soon after him. His mother, Gregg Bordowitz, myself. I’m not sure even who I said, because I thought about a lot of people, but I’m not sure who I said but Julie and Aldo, and Lola; Gregg, me, Deb Levine; his sister Christine, his mom, Patricia. Zoe Leonard did an art project. Oh, I’d love to talk about Keep Your Laws Off My Body, that was really Target City Hall –

SS: Okay.

CG: Not yet.

SS: Okay.

CG: Anyway, and then, I certainly wouldn’t want to take away from anybody who was around that I didn’t mention, because people helped in a lot of different ways.

SS: What was the process of collaborating with him when he was very ill? How did you do it?

CG: It was, maybe, I don’t know. I think – Zoe, you already interviewed, or –

SS: Not yet.

CG: Well, she should talk about her project with him. That was very specific. And they did it together, and it, I thought, was incredible. And she’s written about it, and talked about it. But I wouldn’t say that we did too much collaborating after he was blind. Because at that point, it wasn’t collaborating, really. It was him asking me to write things down for him. We finished one project that we were collaborating on, but then after that, I, and I think that Zoe would certainly say, for her project, that she was doing what he asked her to do.

SS: Okay.

CG: It was hard to collaborate at that stage, I think. He had a few things he wanted to say. And so he said them.

Extract from Catherine Gund & Sarah Schulman, ACT UP Oral History Project, Number 071, 20 April 2007, pp. 48–53.

PDF

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SOFT CLOSE

Mira Mattar

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Our shoes are in an adorable pile by the back door. We run like children outside for fun and just in case. Doing the dishes her mother watches serenely, gladder by the plate they’d come here. Each item happily washed adds value. To us her face is mellow as our TV moms and we as sassy and rich as their daughters. Our hair as sleek and crimpable, raised above this lamentable frizz. Truly though it is relief not serenity that washes across her mother’s features. This home’s cruelty is softer than the last home’s cruelty. (It is the higher distribution of certainty that makes the weather here tolerable.) A slur in the end does not penetrate a body. And it is nice, after all, to be able to plan your own death. Information is a body wrapped in a flag and raised above the heaving crowd. Do our parents weep more regularly than our friends’ parents weep? Or is it always with the same abjection that infants view this? We do not enjoy missing Saturday morning TV only in order to better understand the cadences of their sorrows.

via her-mouth.tumblr.com

PDF: ‘Soft Close’ (2017)

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Mia Edelgart, Hearts in Tiny Chests P.S. Pollination Services, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

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CINEMA OF THE BODY

Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki

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THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Our cinema has often been spoken of as a cinema in rupture. This rupture is situated on several planes, as much on the plane of statement as on that of the creative process. For us, the method of producing images is as significant as the images themselves. Our cinema is marked by our determination to create in independence, far from the constraints and the norms imposed by the industrial cinema. We work together, abolishing specialisations. We appropriate for ourselves all creative functions, at once theoretical, technical and visual. On the level of our personal relationship, it is a political process, being egalitarian, based on dialogue and the autonomy of each, within the framework of a common project.

To draw a parallel with writing, our films and film/events work not so much like novels but more like poems and essays. No fictional alibi masks the mental experience. The process is action, which is to say, decision and the moving toward action of the subjects. Imaginative and conceptual sequence substitutes itself for narrative sequence. The film becomes a continuum of signifying images, structured according to non-narrative conceptual schemas. The progression of sequences is defined not by chronological linearity, but by associative groupings/slips. The fictional persona is abolished, to the profit of the presence of the subjects, moving through the films. Identity is not presented through the mediation of a third person, but enacted by ourselves. We incarnate our mental images, moving toward a validation of signification by the body. Relationship with language is thus inscribed within the field of relationship to the body. 

A CINEMA OF THE BODY, AND ALCHEMY

To transpose to cinema what Artaud has said of theatre: "there is a mysterious identity of essence between the principle of cinema and that of alchemy. Every true alchemist knows that the alchemical symbol is a mirage, just as cinema is a mirage."

In the perpetual spectre which is the projected image, we establish the body, our own bodies, in their materiality. The body is the raw material of our cinema. The body, subject of disguises, transformations and metamorphoses, brings about the transmutation of material into mental, and mental into material. In the space of the body the fusion of abstract and concrete consumes itself, the mental image becomes spatialised thought. It is a "philosophical state of matter", where the unconscious clothes itself in the appearances of the body, the I/within shows itself as I/outside, and the language of the body materialises the language of the unconscious.

The elaboration of gesture and posture leads us, of course, to the imaginary. The body, charged with signs, produces at the same time a manifest meaning, a latent meaning, and a hidden meaning. The features which it seizes upon (objects, make-up, jewellery, costumes, gestures, posture), lift up the mask only imperfectly: they hide in unveiling, and reveal by hiding. Artifice is that through which the body becomes inaccessible, that is to say, through which it accedes to the unconscious.

The unconscious manifests itself in the closed chamber of the mind, the silent matrix of the dream, vessel of the alchemical process. Our films are "chamber films", manifestations of the night: we always shoot in the same room, always at home, and always at night. Our only venture outside: the water of a pond at the beginning of L'Enfant qui a pissé des paillettes. The black background which effaces all environment, and which we use in our performance works, evokes the interior screen: that which is found on the other side of the mirror, inside the mind, behind closed eyelids, and which promotes introspection. The quest of alchemy, after all, is the journey into the depths of things.

ABOUT PROJECTION

The room in which we film is the first place where projection, in the analytical sense of the term, is spatialised. The body is the first material screen, where we project the rituals of our desire. It is in that other camera obscura, the cinema hall, that the screen becomes a precise object, and projection a physical act.

By handling the projectors ourselves, we create a mirror effect between projecting and projected bodies. By our presence in the room, we give a physical quality to the cinematic apparatus, demythifying the technological process which presupposes the absence, the physical effacement ot the film-makers.

In addition, the putting of the film into a box, its reduction to the status of object, following the norms of traditional projection, is radically cancelled by the significant integration of other media: video, slides, live sound through a microphone; above all the slide, the fixed image, which has a very important place in our film/performances: it is the instant, suddenly caught in the trap of duration.

The expanded screen in L'Enfant qui a pissé des paillettes, the exploded screen in Soma, the pultiple screen in Arteria Magna, the white screen, emptied of images, and refilmed, in Unheimlich I: Dialogue secret, the black screen in Astarti, the broken, torn screen in Ouverture are so many devices for the explosion of projection, both mental and cinematic.

Extract from Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki, ‘Cinema of the Body,’ 1979.

First published in Canal, No. 35–36, Paris, January 1980.

Translated by David Templer, published in Undercut: the magazine from the London Filmmakers’ Coop, No. 2, London, August 1981.

Full Essay