No.7  AFW + NFSA – Guy Sherwin, Arthur Lipsett, James Broughton, Stephen Dwoskin, Peter Tcherkassky

Tuesday 24 February 2015, 7.30pm for an 8pm start

Cost is $15 for three consecutive NFSA screenings
 

Program
 

Railings Guy Sherwin – 7 mins. An experimental film wholly consisting of a series of shots through some metal railings. The edge of the film frame also appears in some shots as a form of punctuation like the railings. As in other Sherwin films, the soundtrack is derived from sampling the sound that the image makes on the optical track, making use of the unique properties of sound reproduction on film.

At the Academy Guy Sherwin – 4 mins. An experimental film wholly consisting of academy leaders. Printed in such a way that the image of the leaders gradually builds up in layers superimposed, slightly out of phase, moving from one up to twelve layers. A fusing of adjacent frames results. 

Musical Stairs Guy Sherwin – 10 mins. An experimental film consisting of a series of progressions involving a set of metal steps. The soundtrack is the result of Sherwin’s experiments with optical sound developed from pictorial rendering (sampling the sound that an image makes on the optical track).

Sound Track Guy Sherwin – 8 mins. Consisting of a series of shots of parallel railroad tracks taken from the window of a moving train. The soundtrack is a rendering on the optical track of the visual image.

21-87 Arthur Lipsett – 9 mins. This impressionistic montage of images and everyday sounds shows the individual reduced to the anonymity of a number – his/her humanity reduced by contemporary technology. 

This Is It James Broughton – 9 mins. Broughton described this film as “a little Zen poem – a kind of homemade fable about the eternal now and the eternal child”. Another film-maker commented “One of the major mindless delights of the decade”. 

Chinese Checkers Stephen Dwoskin – 14 mins. One of Stephen Dwoskin’s obsessive, erotic films. Two women play a game of Chinese Checkers, with each move expressing an increasingly intense emotional and physical relationship between them. 

Outer Space Peter Tcherkassky – 10 mins. In this film, prolific Austrian avant-garde filmmaker and theorist, Peter Tscherkassky reinvents a 1981 Barbara Hershey horror vehicle, leaving the original’s crystalline surface intact only to violently shatter its narrative illusion. Sounds of crickets, static and distorted music give way to explosions, screams, and garbled voices. The actress’s face multiplies across the screen as the frame is invaded by sprocket holes, an optical soundtrack, and flashes of solarized imagery. 

Parallel Space: Inter-View Peter Tcherkassky – 18 mins. “PARALLEL SPACE: INTER-VIEW was made using a still camera. The photograph produced by a 35mm camera corresponds exactly to the size of two film frames. If the negative of a photograph is projected sideways, two film frames are seen: first the upper and then the lower half of the original photographic image is projected. Its temporal and spatial unity disintegrates into pieces which then start corresponding with each other.” – Source: Canyon Cinema website.

“Photographic processes – the material transformations involved in recording, developing, printing, and in the case of film, projecting function as metaphors for psychological processes. What Tscherkassky does is to take various tropes of ’60s structural filmmaking (derived from Landow, Kubelka, Frampton, Gehr and Sharits) and run them through a Lacanian psychoanalytic sieve. In both form and psychological content, PARALLEL SPACE is deeply reflexive.” – Amy Taubin