SUBCINEMA
Steven Ball


Steven Ball has been working in audio-visual media since the early 1980s. In the late 1980s he accidentally migrated to Melbourne, Australia, where he continued his practice making a number of film, video and sound and installation works, as well as engaging in various curatorial, administrative, teaching and writing activities, the most significant of which was several year’s deep involvement with the Melbourne Super 8 Film Group. He returned to the UK in 2000, and since 2003 has been Research Fellow in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, where he has been instrumental in establishing the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection.

Since returning to the UK his projects have included Deep Water Web, an audio-visual installation and online collaborative work with John Conomos at Furtherfield Gallery, London (2016); Film of the Same Name (video, 2015) with Philip Sanderson; Concrete Heart Land (video, 2014) with Rastko Novakovic; the screening exhibition Figuring Landscapes, which toured the UK and Australia (artist and co-curator 2008-2010). His publications include ‘Expanded Cinema: Art Performance Film’, Tate Publishing, (co-editor and author, 2011) and writing for journals such as Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ) and Senses of Cinema.

Most recently he has concentrated on music projects, as a member of Storm Bugs (post-punk DIY outfit since 1978) with Philip Sanderson recently releasing ‘Certified Original and Vintage Fakes’ (CD and download, Snatch Tapes, 2017), and his new solo album 'subsongs.' (CD and download, Linear Obsessional Recordings, 2017), which has been described by Radio Free Midwich as “The missing link between reductionist improv and the intimate breathy song cycles of a Robert Wyatt.”

This screening brings together a selection of film and video works made over a span of some twenty years. The work covers a range of territory and approaches, in particular concerning spatiality and landscape in Australia, the UK, and elsewhere, often through the filter of his relationship to what might be thought of as a post-colonial position. The works integrate structural and materialist techniques, they are variously essayistic, experimental, rhythmically abstracted, and occasionally immersive.


Programme

Periscope 180° (super 8, 17 min, Australia, 1992)

The title indicates the scopic and conceptual topography of the film. The film starts in Fremantle, West Australia, with nautical references (seascapes, masts, lighthouses). The second part moves in East Gippsland, Victoria, alternating indistinct images of beach, sea and sky with black and white footage of fishermen on a beach. Taking up notions from Deleuze and Guattarian deterritorialisation, and including lines taken from Stanley Kramer's 1959 film On the Beach, the voice over narration resounds with ironical autobiographical suggestiveness, “...he’s English and he’s here on some scientific job, or was it geographic? What does he do exactly?”, becoming a poetic speculation on the uncertainty of migration towards a nomadic condition of continual departure and the paradox of return: the refrain. The third and final part in aerial transit, an arrival denied by the films ending.

The Ground, the Sky, and the Island (digital video, 8 min, UK, 2008)

This video reworks photographs, super 8 film, sound and anecdotal text from a series of bush and outback locations across Australia during the 1990s. It takes the form of extracts from an imagined first-person journal, layered over extruded experiments with composition and movement constructing a synthetic shifting landscape. Moving through discrete but related sections, the abstracted view shifts vertically through 90°, between the closeness of the local, the ground, and the claustrophobia of the distant colonizing horizon. As it travels east from the South Australian desert, through bush, tablelands and rocky range, the video becomes a subjective essayistic meditation, in absentia, on being in the landscape, the problem of attempting to reproduce these landscapes and the uncertainty of their representation. At its inconclusion we arrive on K'gari (Fraser Island off the coast of Queensland) where we reach the edge of the known world, a space being made in an open future.

However, the Autodidact (super 8, 17 min, Australia, 1994)

From my small back room in Elwood in 1994, with super 8 camera taking revenge on the helicopters which I was convinced might have been spying on me; not paranoid, just healthy suspiciousness. The film was then reshot through several generations of just out-of-date super 8 film given to me by Marie Craven. The variations of grain and colour determined by the stock, which included Kodachrome, Agfa Moviechrome, and Ektachome. I devised an editing structure determined by the ideas that perception of the 'present moment' lasts for around three seconds as theorised in The Dimension of the Present Moment by Miroslav Holub. The soundtrack is constructed using a similar schema, made entirely of extracts from quarter-inch tapes found in a second-hand shop, which included a teach-yourself-French tape, which inspired the title.  

The Defenestrascope (digital video, 6 min, UK, 2003)

Throwing the view through windows from monumental towers in contemporary medieval European city and town. This eccentric exploration of urbanised space revolves around a setting of the traditional 16th century Norfolk song Go from the Window. The melody reconstructed from an ensemble of samples from a variety of sources, determined the choice of a series of views from 'the window' and elsewhere. Framed by a fragmented clapping rhyme it echoes Music Hall and anthropological folk recordings in a neo-rococo vaudevillian romp for the surveillance age.

Aboriginal Myths of South London (digital video, 10 min, UK, 2010)

Aboriginal Myths of South London adapts world views associated with indigenous people of Oceania to an interpretation of the space and social history of places in South London. As the first manifestation of the project, this video is presented as its prelude and explores New Kent Road, a major road close to the artist’s home. This application of attitudes to the status of the dead and human relationship to the ground, becomes a materialist alternative to the concept of the genius loci and the familiar. The approach is measured and austere, employing an arrangement of animated photographs and voice texts that becomes a poetic essay.

Harmonic Three Three (super 8, 23 min, Australia, 1991)

The originating super 8 film was shot on Fraser Island off the coast of Queensland. The relatively firm sand of the beach provides one of the main roads on the island as the interior tracks become unpassable due to the loose sand. As we drove north up the eastern side of the Island we came across the rusting hulk of a ship wreck; one of the more accessible of many such wrecks dotted around the Australian coastline. The former luxury New Zealand trans-Tasman liner Maheno was sold to Japan for scrap metal. On July 9th, 1935, while being towed north by the Oonah, it hit unseasonal cyclonic conditions off Fraser Island. The tow rope snapped and it was driven ashore on the 19th July. It remains there to this day, slowly disintegrating in the salty tropical sea water. I reshot subsequent generations of the film on super 8, off the screen, concentrating on the abstraction afforded by the increasing graininess and contrast of each generation, concerned with the grain, the light, or lack of it, and the degradation of visual information. Much of the film is dark, unreadable, ghostly, shadowy. Occasionally orange light bursts through the silhouetted contrasty skeletal image of the wreck. I used all of the film shot in the re-re-re-reshooting in the final version, which results in long dark sections throughout the film. The experience of watching the film is dense, intense, quite dramatic. This is in part due to the dark ambience of the soundtrack, which was composed entirely from a recording of waves on a beach, slowed to a fraction of its original speed, employing varispeed manipulation, delay and phase effects, which were all improvised ‘live' to tape while watching the film.

81 mins total

Artist Film Workshop // Image Inverts

Home Movies - Istituto Parri, via Sant’Isaia 20, Bologna, IT

Dall’Australia, un programma di lavori in 16mm dell’Artist Film Workshop, centro di cinematografia sperimentale. Alla luce della crescente precarietà e disprezzo per le pratiche artistiche non funzionali, AFW ha creato uno spazio collettivo per la sperimentazione e la produzione di immagini - e per proiettare lavori poco conosciuti dalla vastità di storie non risolte del cinema. Più recentemente, l’enfasi su un medium spesso caratterizzato come fuori moda come il cinema è diventata la cifra per operare fuori dalle convenzioni prestabilite dell’arte contemporanea - che ha invece più o meno conservato il modello della produzione in studio di singole soggettività artistiche e dei loro lavori. Contro questo modello, AFW ha sviluppato un approccio collaborativo e laboratoriale per investigare e rappresentare il lavoro sul film, e il film in sé. Un programma con film di: Matthew Berka, Hanna Chetwin, Giles Fielke, Zi-Yun Lam, Madeleine Martiniello, Sabina Maselli, Lorant Smee, Richard Tuohy e Dianna Barrie. Introducono Giles Fielke e Madeleine Martiniello.

A program of 16mm and digital video works from the centre of experimental filmmaking in Australia today. In the light of increasing precarity and growing disdain for non-functional artist practices becoming the norm both in Australia and globally, AFW has established a collective space for the experimentation in and production of images, and for screening rarely shown works from the vast and unresolved histories of work on film. More recently, the emphasis upon a medium often characterised as outmoded has become a way of operating outside of established conventions for contemporary art, which has more or less maintained the model of studio-based production of individual artist subjectivities and their works. Against this model, AFW has developed a collaborative and lab-oriented workshop approach for investigating and representing work on film, and film as such.

Program Notes:

Hanna Chetwin – Soda (2017)
Soda explores the forms and rhythms of bubbles. the film uses camera-less techniques (including scratching and rayogramming) intercut with footage of water in progressive stages of boiling. accompanied by a soundtrack by Rohan Drape.

Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie – Pancoran (2017)
Jakarta traffic moves with the harmonious chaos of complex self organising entities everywhere. through contact printer matteing techniques this mass transport becomes denser and denser until only the fluid futility of motion/motionlessness remains. Jakarta traffic stands as proof of the paradox of motion.

Giles Fielke – Internal and External Objects (2017)
Leo’s hand rayogrammed on my laptop, perusing Kracauer. Maddy reads Transparencies on Film and listens to Michael Jackson while I hovered threateningly somewhere in the background.

Madeleine Martiniello – Tomato Day (2017)
a short study of the tension between nostalgia and the filmic image, using the home movie as a means of exploring family, history and cultural knowledge. the images of many hands at work are accompanied by a soundtrack assembled from the hand-developing process of the film, and a instructional conversation between granddaughter and grandmother. Tomato Day is a translation from one generation to the next, in an attempt to learn, to record and to remember.

Lorant Smee – (a)Bridge(d) (2016)
a homage to Shirley Clarke's 'Bridges Go Round' (1958) this is a 16mm colour film of New York's Williamsburg Bridge shot originally on high contrast black and white film. It was printed, and reprinted using a colour additive contact printer, and it includes double exposures (during the printing process) and various other techniques to achieve the 'multiple colour' effect in a single image, as well as incorporation of solarisation during development to some sections.

Zi-Yun Lam – Travel Film (2017)
an excerpt from a work in progress. in a quiet corner on a busier street, conversation and postage stamps take us to other times and other places.

Matthew Berka – Hume’s Disappointment (2017)
based on a story of disappearance which occurred at Mount Disappointment, this film presents a fictional reimagining of explorers Hume and Hovell’s expedition from Sydney to Melbourne in 1824. the phantasms of a Gothic Australian mythos are smeared together from past and future worlds.

Sabina Maselli – Focal Constriction (2017)
moving from the exterior to the interior...a 16mm exploration of the film still as a specimen of time...and time itself as a spiral.

inland concert series, artist film workshop, and incinerator gallery present:

inland 17.C

- the two are sometimes given separately -

with:

dianna barrie
hanna chetwin
rohan drape
giles fielke
aditya martodiharjo
sabina maselli
callum ross-thomson
james rushford
richard tuohy
erkki veltheim

--

Over three nights in 2017, the INLAND Concert Series and Incinerator gallery present the work of Australian sound artists whose work maps a confluence of exploratory streams, tracing a detailed image of contemporary sound practice in Australia today. The concerts take place in the Burley Griffin designed Essendon Incinerator, an icon of early modernism in Australia.

In this concert INLAND teams with Artist Film Workshop - a Melbourne-based laboratory and collective of artists whose work, individually and together, investigates numerous contemporary and experimental approaches to film and film-based image. Together they present a program of works concerned with the intersection of sound and vision, about and accompanied by the work of exploratory musicians including James Rushford, Erkki Veltheim, and Rohan Drape.

- !! All tickets $15 via Eventbrite only !! -

--

performance:

Doors 6:30pm, Friday 22nd September, Incinerator Gallery, Moonee Ponds
tix: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/inland-concert-series-september-tickets-32009510307
fb: https://www.facebook.com/events/310612276078185/
web: http://www.inlandconcertseries.net

EXHIBITION
ARTIST FILM WORKSHOP
SPECIMEN

CCP GALLERY 4
404 George St, Fitzroy
Gallery Hours
Wednesday—Friday 11am—5pm
Saturday—Sunday 12—5pm

Experimental film is best understood as the search for a model of the cinema. But what is cinema a model for, and what is it modelled on? Cinema is both a specific thing and also a generalised description of the world. It is a scientific instrument, an atlas indistinguishable from the globe, a monument to vision, an eye, the industrial conventions of the movie-world. In the camera, the model is the ether. Lucretius spoke of film before the common era. Film cannot be dead, it never lived. It is populated by zombies and docile bodies. Technology is the afterlife.

Specimen is an exhibition by the Artist Film Workshop. Participating artists include: Hanna Chetwin, Tim Coster, Samaan Fieck, John Flaus, Nina Gilbert, Aurelia Guo, Lucas Haynes, Olivia Koh, Lucy Kostos, Zi-Yun Lam, Travis MacDonald, Madeleine Martiniello, Sabina Maselli, Emma Phillips, Callum Ross-Thomson, Richard Tuohy.
Curated by Giles Fielke.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

Program 1:
10 films from the Artist Film Workshop
Sunday 6 August, 6pm
Centre for Contemporary Photography
Gold-coin donation, no bookings required.

Hanna Chetwin, Soda, 2017, 16mm, 6mins - digital sound
Richard Tuohy, Pancoran, 2017, 16mm, 9mins - digital sound
Giles Fielke, Internal and External Objects, 2017, 16mm, 7min - digital sound
Zi-Yun Lam, Travel Film, 16mm, 3mins - digital sound
Madeleine Martiniello, Tomato Day, 2016, 16mm, 6mins - digital sound
Callum Ross-Thomson, Fire Mountain, 16mm, 10mins - digital sound
Lucas Haynes, Shoplifting, 16mm, 2mins - digital sound
Sabina Maselli, untitled, 16mm, 5mins - digital sound
Olivia Koh, frozen spit, digital video, 10mins - digital sound
Nina Gilbert, The Image Possibility, digital video, 8mins 5secs - digital sound

Program 2:
I Walked With A Zombie
Sunday 20 August, 6pm
Centre for Contemporary Photography
Gold-coin donation, no bookings required.

Jacques Tourneur, I Walked With A Zombie, 1943, 16mm, 69mins (print courtesy NFSA)
Introduced by John Flaus and with a reading from Ralph de Boissière's Calypso Isle + guests

Program:
1. YFDC - 'Introducing Young Film Makers' nos. 15, 43, 46, 40, 38 (NYC: 1969, 16mm)
Faces (group, 1 minute, Film Unit at Studio Museum in Harlem)
The Thief - Raymond Esquilin, 7 mins, (Film Club)
Thought in Five - Marizol Rios, 8 mins (Film Club)
The Other Brother - Steve Brown 5 mins (Film Unit at Studio Museum Harlem)

2. YFDC - 'Young Film Makers Look At Their World' nos. 10, 36, 31, 52 (NYC: 1969, 16mm)
The Museum Hero - Alfonso Sanchez, 7 mins (YMHA)
Chump Change - Elliot Rodriguez, 8 mins (Film Club)
The End - Alfonso Sanchez, 9 mins (Film Club)
The Rotten Tea Bag - Andy Gurien, 4 mins (Mosholu Montefiore Community Centre)
White Ideals Torture the Ghetto (group, 5 mins, Buffalo Channel of Soul)

3. Peter Drummond - 'The Young Directors' (Melb)
1970, 27 mins, colour, sound, 16mm

Nine short films from the Youth Film Distribution Centre + ‘The Young Directors’

A program of films by and about youth filmmaking from the end of the 1960s, including two compilation reels of short films made by teenagers that were promoted through the Youth Film Distribution Centre in New York, and a experimental documentary capturing filmmaking practices by high school students in Australia from 1970. This collection of short films connects with a longer history of alternative education practices that stretches back to the late 19th century which promoted art and free expression for youth, uncompromised by adult standards of taste. These films are also documents of the community-oriented media movement which was only just emerging in the 1970s (eg. community television and open-access video collectives), and which understood these earlier ideas of self-expression as directly related to the political dimensions of media production and distribution.

‘Introducing Young Filmmakers’ (B&W and Color; Sound; 27 minutes. 1969.)

The Youth Film Distribution Centre was a non-profit initiative begun by Rodger Larson as a means to screen, promote and provide access to the large body of films being produced by teenagers who were involved in the numerous youth film clubs, community centers, and independent art organisations that operated across New York in the 1960s. These groups provided access to film equipment and space for inner-city teenagers to film and edit work that expressed their own ideas and experiences. This collection of experimental films, produced through Film Club, the Film Unit at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the YMHA, include: Faces (group work, 1 min), The Thief (dir. Raymond Esquilin, 7 mins), Thought in Five (dir. Marizol Rios, 8 mins), The Other Brother (dir. Steve Brown, 5 mins), and The Museum Hero (dir. Alfonso Sanchez, 7 mins).

‘Youth Look At Their World’ (Black and White/Monochrome; Sound; 23 minutes. 1969.)

A collection of short films “illustrating attitudes to American social conditions and problems.” These works, produced through the Film Club, the Mosholu-Montefiore Community Centre, and the Buffalo Channel of Soul, include: Chump Change (dir. Elliot Rodriguez, 8 mins), The End (dir. Alfonso Sanchez, 9 mins), The Rotten Tea Bag (dir. Andy Gurien, 4 mins), and White Ideals Torture the Ghetto (group effort, 5 mins).

‘The Young Directors’ (Color; Sound; 27 minutes. 1970.)

Peter Drummond was an Australian director who primarily made educational films across the 1970s and 1980s, ‘The Young Directors’ is an early example of his work and is informed by his experiences as a high school teacher in Melbourne. Drummond was involved in promoting film as an educational tool in Melbourne, and conducted workshops and initiated film projects with students throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. The film documents various examples and efforts of filmmaking practice by students in high schools and TAFEs across Australia, it is a “film about films, it mirrors the distinctive style of student films, cutting quickly, moving rapidly over a wide range of activities and places, contrasting different approaches to film study.”

Guest programmed by Jarrod Zlatic from the archives of the NFSA

Montevideo Cine Experimental: An approach to today's Uruguayan experimental cinema
Thursday 13th of July, 7.30pm

A program of 16mm short films made by filmmakers working out of the Laboratorio de Cine in Montevideo, Uruguay. A small film lab similar to AFW, LiC runs workshops and aims to teach members how to shoot and process 16mm film. In March AFW member Hanna spent a week hanging out at the lab, meeting the LiC lab members, helping with a workshop and processing film. Later this year AFW will be sending over a program of our films for them to see what we've been up to!

All money raised at the screening will go towards sending a care package of spools, cores, filmstock and splicing tape to help out our experimental film buddies in Uruguay!

This program presents an overview of the different approaches of Uruguayan experimental cinema realized in the Laboratorio de Cine FAC (Fundación de Arte Contemporáneo) during its ten years of existence. This selection of films spans the far corners of filmmaking practice: from the pause generated by the sequence shot, to the speed of intellectual montage; from the use of the streets of our country as a matter for artistic practice, to the distancing of these spaces through the invention of dream-like or surreal worlds; from the influence of the African religions in our land, to the critical vision of the times of Uruguayan dictatorship; navigating the intersection between digital technologies and celluloid film materiality; and from directors whose trajectory inclines more to visual art, to new filmmakers with a vision closer to the cinematographic. Some of these films have been part of the first festival of Experimental Film held in Montevideo in 2016, while others have traveled the world as examples of work in the field of Latin American experimental cinema.
--
La presente muestra busca dejar en el espectador una idea fugaz de los distintos abordajes del cine experimental uruguayo realizados en el Laboratorio de cine FAC durante sus diez años de existencia. Desde la pausa generada por el plano secuencia, hasta la rapidez del montaje intelectual. La utilización de las calles de nuestro país como materia para la práctica artística, y la distancia con estos espacios a través de la invención de mundos oníricos o surreales. La influencia de las religiones africanas en nuestra tierra, y la visión crítica hacia los tiempos de Dictadura. El cruce entre las tecnologías digitales y el trabajo con la materialidad fílmica. Realizadores con trayectoria relacionados con el campo del arte, y nuevos realizadores con una visión mas próxima a lo cinematográfico. Las obras que forman parte de este compilado, presentan un acercamiento a los trabajos realizados en el Laboratorio de Cine FAC desde el año de creación (2007) hasta la fecha de hoy. Algunos de estos films han sido parte de las primeras jornadas de Cine Experimental llevadas a cabo en Montevideo el ano 2016, y otros han recorrido el mundo como ejemplos de trabajos en el campo del cine experimental Latinoamericano.

Diago Amir, member of the Laboratorio de Cine FAC.

Montevideo, Uruguay.
Julio de 2017.


List of films:

-Angela Lopez: Plegarias, 1:29 min
-Felipe Bellocq: Talk to the hands, 2016, 1:37 min
-Guillermo Zabaleta: Elegible, 2008, 3:04 min
-Ina Lopez: Alusión, 5:20 min
-Luciana Damiani: Velo, 2011, 2:59 min
-Martin Klein: Halo, 2009, 3:46 min
-Silvana Camors: Where to go, 2016, 4:20 min
-Sofía Martinez: H, 2010, 1:43 min
-Teresa Puppo: Viaje de ida, 2010, 7:06 min
-Uzi Sabah: Mirando desde lejos, como desde una colina, 2012, 3:41 min

Analogica Film Festival - Touring Program 2017

AFW is please to be a host venue of the 2017 Analogica touring program. Analogica is an annual festival of analogue media art in Bolzano, Italy.

Date: Friday 23rd of June
Time: 7.30 for 8pm start.
Tickets at the door. $5
(all works screened digitally)

ANALOGICA SELECTION was created to show selected film works collected by an international open call that attracts dozens of productions every year. After the festival, the Selection Program travels on an international screening tour until the following edition of the festival.

ANALOGICA SELECTION 6

program / 58'
Melbourne // 23 June

The end. A mexican movie / Annalisa D. Quagliata / 2' 33'' / 16mm / 2016 / Mexico
“THE END A MEXICAN MOVIE” is a short film that reappropriates and subverts the romantic story of "Two monks" (1934) focusing on the female protagonist that is murdered. The constant masculine aggression and her bold defense resonate with the issues of violence and femicide still corroding Mexico and Latinamerica. Two stories in one: Men putting an end to thousands of women's lives and women fighting to put an end to that terrible history. Annalisa D. Quagliata (b. Veracruz, Mexico 1990) is an artist and filmmaker whose films and installations focus on the human body and portraiture. In her work the body is explored as a mirror that reflects different states of being; spanning from the intimate and psychic to the social and political. She is a graduate from Massachusetts College of Art and Design where she majored in Film/Video and Studio for Interrelated Media. Annalisa currently resides and works in Mexico City.

Y api / Aaron Khandros, Nathaniel Draper / 09:08 / 2015 / 16mm / Greece
Greece is covered in concrete tumors — yapi, half-finished buildings left in permanent limbo, skeletal structures like temples to some obscure future gods. People don’t explicitly speak of them or really even seem to see them. They’ve just grown from the landscape, a symptom of European change. Emerging from their obscurity, the yapia grow to take on a life of their own. The future of their meaning, and their moment, are up for grabs.

Deux Champs (Two Fields) / Kevin Obsatz / 07:51 / 2015 / 16mm / USA
In 1953, a young photographer in Greenwich Village took a photo of Marcel Duchamp that was double-exposed by mistake. Over 50 years later, he saw his own photo in Smithsonian Magazine, and learned that it would be featured at the Smithsonian Museum in a Duchamp retrospective. Deux Champs (Two Fields) is a short, black and white documentary shot on 16mm film which gives Victor Obsatz, now in his 90s, an opportunity to reflect upon that day, and everything that has happened since. Kevin Obsatz is the son of the cousin of Victor Obsatz, but the two had never met until one day in the spring of 2015, when Kevin arrived in New Jersey to capture this story with a 16mm Bolex camera. Since the crux of the story is a double-exposed black and white negative, it seemed important to shoot this project on film and create double-exposures in-camera, trusting in fate that the footage would turn out okay.

Notes from the Interior / Ben Balcom / 11' / 16mm / 2015 / USA
Wandering through the body puzzling out a system of symbols. The trouble is, affect resists signification outright. The inside and outside become muddled when you start to feel your body in relation to an image. Ben Balcom was born in Massachusetts and raised in Illinois. He received his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and his bachelor's degree in Film-Video Production from Hampshire College. Ben currently teaches film production at UWM and is the technical director for the Milwaukee Film Festival. He is also a co-founder and programmer of Microlights Cinema. Since 2013, Microlights has hosted nearly 30 film and video artists from around the world.

S an Guerrero / Jeff Zorrilla / 3' / Super8 / 2015 / Argentina
A short Documentary about an American ex-pat who lives in Buenos Aires and works as a city tour guide during the day and a sexual tour guide during the night. The film was first short on vision 3 negative super 8 and then refilmed we color reversal super 8 from my computer screen so that I can project it live. It is a first glimpse of my full-length feature called Monger. Jeff Zorrilla was born in 1984 in the United States. He studied film at the University of Santa Cruz (California, USA), and the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). He currently lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He’s directed numerous short films in Super 8 which have gone on to play in festivals in Cannes, La Paz, Montevideo, Taipei, and New York.

Ora d'aria / Francesco Fei / 6' 53'' / 16mm / 2015 / Italy
(Yard time) Ex Prison of Sant'Agata in Bergamo. Francesco Fei was born in Florence and lives in Milan. In 2004 he shoot and produce his first feature film, “Onde”. The movie has been selected for many festivals worldwide and has been recognized by critics as one of the most interesting Italian first movies of the last few years. With the documentary in 16mm "Armenia!" he participated at the Trieste Film Festival, 2016 and the Bellaria Film Festival, Red House Art Doc 2014. He is teaching at the Academy of Fine Art in Bergamo and at IED in Milan.

T erre di Peccioli / Arepo / 2' / 16mm / 2016 / UK
A short documentary showing the daily life of a small Tuscan village, where people seem to magically merge with the rural surrounding and where time appears to have stopped. Arepo is a filmmaker based in London, where he founded his own production company Arepo Films, specialising in the use of 16mm and 35mm film media. Credits include Contemplazione, Eso and Music Sound Machine.

H arbour City / Simon Liu / 14' / 2015 / 16mm / Hong Kong – UK
A view through cracks between fish markets and high-rise buildings; urban imagery of Hong Kong and the indulgence of domestic life. Massage parlors, dim sum parlors, nail parlors —its Parlor City, baby! Views thicken; detail lost to generations. A dream of turning two images into one, a density of information reserved for the modern cloud. Simon Liu lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He is a member of the artist-run Negativland Motion Pictute Lab, where he prints, processes and completes his films on 16mm.

OTARIE // Sophie B. /2' 45'' / super8 / 2016 / France
Fusion between man and animal, on an air of death metal. Sophie BOULOUX alias Sophie.B experimental filmmaker since 1999. Her work reveals a rich variety of creative concrete poetry, photographs and artwork. Many mediums which depict a real dialectic of strange worlds describing this strong probity to design some créations representing the foundations of her personality.

Analogica.org

OUR POWER - OFFICIAL TRAILER 2016 from Peter Yacono on Vimeo.

Timothy Hillier Guest Screening 8pm Thursday, February 9 2017

Program:
Layhapuy Homelands Tour Doco - 2014 10.39 minutes
Blek Bala MJ (Still in Production) 2017 6 minutes approx.
Collection of IHHP Video clips (Gunbalanya - Wet Season 2016 5.46 minutes, Dhalinbuy - This is our Country 2015 4.27 minutes, Danzel Baker - Cloud 9 2017, Milingimbi and Elcho Island Dance 2017, Logan - Logan City 2016 4.43 minutes)
A short selection of out takes.


These films where made over the last 4 years with the Indigenous Hip Hop Projects (IHHP) organisation. They were made in collaboration with community members around the idea of youth strength and eliminating shame. Young people from the communities are engaged with every element of the program, from song writing, recording, filming and dancing in all of the projects. The films are most often shared over Youtube and remote communities from all over the country watch and rewatch theirs and others video clips. This is a selection of some of my favourite works, and previews of future works.

Friday 23rd September, 8pm
Entry $6
2 Kerr St, Fitzroy

AFW is very pleased to present a long awaited screening of films by Melbourne experimental film icon Michael Lee. Lee came to Melbourne in 1968 to attend the only film school in Australia at the time – Swinburne. He was a founding board member of the Melbourne Film-makers Co-op.

His films consist frequently of animations and flickerings made from simple and direct materials, often with a motif of the cross and other religious iconography (Lee is a re-lapsed Catholic). There is a directness in his work which can be both kitsch and transcendent. A rare opportunity not to be missed!

All works screening on 16mm with the filmmaker present.

Program:
Black Fungus 15mins, 1971

Extract from "Mystical Rose" 5 mins, 1976

Rock Heart Fire 21mins, 1985

A Contemplation of the Cross 27mins, 1989

Razzle Dazzle Rhapsody 15 mins, 1992

Screen 5 mins, 1994

16mm Program (played twice over the night):

Hanna Chetwin – Intimacy is hair in the drain (2015), 8 mins, sound

Carl Looper – Split (2015), 8 mins, sync sound

Giles Fielke – Apartment (2015), 8 mins, silent

Sabina Maselli – Equations for a falling body (2016), 5 minutes, sound

Hollis Frampton – Critical Mass (1971), 27 minutes, sound

16mm Films by Richard Tuohy & Dianna Barrie
Ironwood (2009), 7 mins, sound
Tree lines (2009), 9 mins, sound
Ginza Strip (2014), 9 mins, sound
Seoul Electric (2012), 7 mins, silent
Etienne's Hand, (2011), 13 mins, silent
Blue line Chicago (2014), 10 mins, silent

Shireen Seno and Artist Film Workshop present:

The Kalampag Tracking Agency

Neon Parlour, Thornbury
Thursday 17th March, 7pm

Shireen Seno & Merv Espina

Overcoming institutional and personal lapses to give attention to little-seen works—some quite recent, some surviving loss and decomposition—this programme collects loose parts in motion, a series of bangs, or kalampag in Tagalog, assembled by individual strengths and how they might resonate off each other and a contemporary audience. Featuring some of the most striking films and videos from the Philippines and its diaspora, this is an initiative that continues to navigate the uncharted topographies of Filipino alternative and experimental moving image practice.

In our notes for the program regarding how the name came about, we likened the Tagalog word “kalampag" to a rattling sound or a bang, usually used in reference to machines and other mechanical devices such as a car or other moving vehicle. A kalampag implies that the machinery is somehow damaged. Or perhaps it never really ran smoothly. But what is this machinery we speak of?

In 1975, only three years after the declaration of Martial Law in the Philippines, the Marcos regime orchestrated Thrilla in Manila, the legendary boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Ferdinand Marcos wanted the glory that would come from presiding over the bout and saw to it that the necessary funds were made available. Not everything went smoothly. Security was tight because of insurgent political activity and early-morning roadwork conflicted with an overnight military curfew.

But Marcos’s move was brilliant. People all over the world were glued to their seats watching live televised coverage of the fight, made possible by satellite broadcasting.

Ali won, and in his honor, the Philippines built the first multi-level commercial shopping mall, Ali Mall, as a tribute to his victory.

Soon after, another grand illusion in the country was under way: Francis Ford Coppola’s Sisyphian film project, Apocalypse Now. From 1975 to 1977, the film was shot entirely in the Philippines, with its cheap labor and ready access to American military equipment, as an easy stand-in for Vietnam. There were times when shoots would be delayed or cancelled because crew, helicopters, and equipment were sent off to shoot and quell actual rebel insurgents in the south. A war was still being waged in our archipelago after all. The film premiered two years later in Cannes as a “work in progress” and won the Palme D’Or.

Arguably the greatest illusion of the time came in the form of the Manila Film Center, which opened, to much controversy, to serve as main venue of the inaugural Manila International Film Festival on January 18–29, 1982. It was originally designed to be a one-stop shop for anything film-related, including a film archiving facility, with UNESCO as consultant in its design. But because of the controversies surrounding it, the Manila Film Center was never fully utilized. The Philippines only had a National Film Archive, effectively, by October 2011.

To certain generations of Filipinos, the Manila Film Center, widely claimed to be haunted, is the stuff of legend. And as legend has it, construction of the building started in early 1981 and had just a year to be finished to meet the deadline: the January 1982 opening of the Manila International Film Festival. This required around 4000 laborers to work three shifts across 24 hours. In November 1981, heavy rains caused the scaffolding to collapse, killing 169 workers, who, in Imelda Marcos’ hurried attempt to finish the construction of the building, were instantly buried under quick-drying wet cement.

These grand gestures were sleight of hand tactics, an attempt to show the world that the banana republic of the Philippines was a cultural mecca. As all this was happening, atrocities were happening left and right: an all-out war on Muslim and communist insurgencies, and some of the brightest and most critical artists, students and activists disappeared without a trace.

For this program, we wanted a body of works that rattled the system at least for a brief moment in time. Many screening programs and curatorial projects are based on themes. The Kalampag Tracking Agency aims to be functional as well; it treats the screening program as a method, an ongoing process of investigation and a means to not just promote these works, but more importantly, to preserve them as well.

We use the opportunities provided by festivals, archives, museums, art spaces and other platforms that have invited the screening program to access equipment that we don’t have in the Philippines. In this way, we have been able to make newer and better transfers of several works. Each screening is slightly different, as there are always slight improvements here and there.

The first times we screened the program, at the University of the Philippines Film Institute and Green Papaya Art Projects, were important discursive platforms. Several generations of artists and filmmakers attended and exchanged ideas, talking history, aesthetics and process. For the older works especially, these were rare opportunities to illuminate actual histories. Simple things people take for granted, such as date or medium and other such clerical errors, were pointed out. These details are important and would have otherwise gone unnoticed for such errors have been published and republished in what little actual documentation they were mentioned in.

The founding of Mowelfund (short for Movie Workers Welfare Foundation) in 1974 and the University of the Philippines Film Center in 1976 did help sustain and distance independent cinema from the mainstream film industry, but there has been a continued lack of a decent archive. The National Film Archive was only established in 2011, several decades too late. Groundbreaking works have literally turned into vinegar and dust. Only a small fraction remains and is barely accessible.

Mowelfund, Philippine Information Agency, and Goethe Institut Manila’s highly influential jointly-organized film workshops in the 1980s helped incubate the likes of Lav Diaz, Raymond Red, Roxlee, and many others. We have several works from this period, particularly from German filmmaker Christoph Janetzko’s optical printing workshops conducted between 1989 and 1990: Kalawang (Rust), Bugtong: Ang Sigaw Ng Lalake (Riddle: The Shout of Man), and Minsan Isang Panahon (Once Upon a Time). Some of the material used for these works were reportedly sourced from a trash dump half submerged in a creek outside one of the major film studios.

Using the debris of the commercial industry and turning it into art is a recurring process in the program. Tito & Tita’s Class Picture was shot on expired rolls and short ends that would have been otherwise been destined for the trash bin. In Chop-chopped First Lady + Chop-Chopped First Daughter, Yason Banal melds Youtube and crass cinema through split screen, combining newsreel film footage of the failed assassination attempt on the life of then First Lady Imelda Marcos as captured and broadcast live on television in 1972 and juxtaposing it with footage from a gory 1974 popular film top-billed by Kris Aquino, the First Daughter to Marcos’ successor, Cory Aquino.

Roxlee’s crude yet compelling techniques—hand-drawn animation, painting on film, found footage, and collage, make for a witty, powerful new take on the alphabet in ABCD. Raya Martin’s minute-long Ars Colonia, shot on Hi8, blown up to 35mm and hand-colored, then with screening copies in both 35mm and HD video, utilizes generation loss and data migration, adding new layers of texture and meaning from each conversion, a subtle parody on the unrelenting beauty of the colonial master and his image.

The program also showcases documentary as essay, parody, diary, experiment and critique. A ghostly absurd white figure crawls across the city/screen in Roxlee’s Juan Gapang, a performative document of Manila, culminating at the Manila Film Center itself and the famed Manila Bay sunset. Martha Atienza’s Anito is a highly stylized document of the already quite exotic folk festival in the artists hometown in Bantayan Island, Cebu, indulging yet at the same time questioning viewer’s expectations. Miko Revereza’s DROGA! takes the other end of the exotic, documenting the Los Angeles cityscape and the lives of the artists’ family and other Filipino immigrants, and creating new intersections of American pop culture and Filipino traditions. Tad Ermitaño’s The Retrochronological Transfer of Information was simultaneously a conceptual experiment and an elaborate joke whose process and output questioned causality, fact, and objectivity in the traditional notions of science and history. Then there’s the crude and yet deceptively simple documentation in John Torres’ Very Specific Things at Night and Jon Lazam’s hindi sa atin nag buwan (the moon is not ours), where humor, emotion and a sense of wonder is exercised in form and editing, yet also strongly suggesting the power of the title as essential text and map to chart the cartographies of these abstract and poetic works.

It’s important to note that the works of Tito & Tita, Yason Banal, and Martha Atienza have also appeared as installations in commercial art galleries and related spaces, perhaps indicating a fluidity of form and exhibition in current practice, as opposed to the older works in the program that were intentionally designed solely for the cinema.

Unfortunately, there is still a preferred bias for length, for bigger bangs and grander statements, and more attention for the film as akin to the novel or epic over the film as short story or poem. This is why no one knows where films showcased in Manila’s first National Festival of Short Films in 1964 can be found, yet we still have feature films from this period. But before asking how these small, eccentric bangs of moving image practice can challenge the dominance of popular cinema and the national narrative, we have to investigate, preserve and circulate them first. Only then can we re-draw the map and see how these works contribute to a larger critical discourse.

The Kalampag Tracking Agency is an ongoing initiative and screening program exploring alternative notions/visions in moving image practice from the Philippines. Many of the works only exist as memories, rumors, and text on forgotten catalogs and manuscripts, even those as recent as five years ago. Perhaps the moving image can in fact bear witness to the instability/precarity of our times, challenging the very structures and dynamics that constitute these works with its audience, whose various acts of witnessing, participation and remembrance is key—and for some works, could now only be its only form of existence.

Published in Arkipel: Grand Illusion festival catalog, 2015

Programme notes: Precarious Landscapes by Sami van Ingen
Works depicting terrains where battles of thought, memories and actions take place.

THE BLOW (20 mins)
The near un-focused camera makes the viewer to find focus in the space. One´s gaze can only wander along the patina of the wood and the rusty metal, and give one´s self to the inhale or rhythm of the Blow. The film was conceived after the grandfather died, when the house reviled itself as just a building, still full of memories.

STAGE COACH (7 min)
Wheels where paramount in the conquering of the west, they made possible the transporting of building materials to build towns and cities. Wheels – now in the form of the private automobile – have become a symbol of freedom and the last way to conquer “the big outdoors”. However getting out of ones the car has got more difficult and much scarier.

PERAMBULATIONS (10 min, silent)
In 1995 I made a trip with my grandmother to of her childhood island of Inis Mor in Ireland. To her it becomes a nostalgic pilgrimage to memories and to me a challenge of understanding and of documentation.

DEEP SIX (6 min)
Deep Six has three starting points: a little narrative re-edited from a Hollywood B-film (The Rage, 1998), an attempt to use the color photocopy as a cinematic aesthetic and to explore the frame line as a dynamic visual element.

HATE (12 min, silent)
In 1959, Soviet film director Aleksandr Ptushko (1900 – 1973) directed a feature film titled Sampo, which was loosely based on the Finnish national epic Kalevala and which was partly filmed with two cameras simultaneously. The implications of portraying the repressed “Other” in Ptushko´s depiction of Kalevala are exposed. The stroboscopic effect of the film contrasts with the pictorial content that follows traditional narrative lines: the abduction of the fair maiden, the events lead to a disgraced and defensive suitor, who, once defeated, exits the set sulking.

NAVIGATOR03 (3 min)
Navigator03 is the third version of this work which combines Petri Kuljuntausta´s sound collage based on beluga whale sounds and some sequences of weightless figures I found from an old VHS-cassette.

Programme notes: Super 8 Dreams by Bill Mousoulis
Super 8 films from Australia in the 1980s

Acclaimed Greek-Australian filmmaker Bill Mousoulis (9 features to his name) started making films in 1982, by utilising the Super 8 medium. By the end of the '80s, he had made over 40 short Super 8 films, and we present 8 of the best ones in this special programme.

From narrative works showing Mousoulis' development from Spielbergian sentimentalism to Bressonian formalism, to non-narrative works showing Mousoulis' growing interest in the auto-portrait and essay modes, this is a rare glimpse into a particular time and artistic space.

The original Super 8 films themselves will be projected, on loan from the National Film and Sound Archive.


Dreams Never End (1983, 9 mins)

Delirious narrative film, a look at the life of a 16-year-old girl, played by Mousoulis’ sister Mary.

"The Bresson of Super-8, Bill Mousoulis, makes films which are a sublime and quizzical mix of down-home observational physicality and transcendental spirituality, luminous with both the sadness and potentiality of individual dreaming. You won't believe it until you see it. Dreams Never End is a classic." - Adrian Martin, film critic, 1986.

No.16 in "28 All-Time Greats of Super-8" by Mark Titmarsh, Limit of Maps, Spring 1985.


In a Lonely Place (1982, 4 mins)

The first of Mousoulis' films to consciously attempt an impressionistic, experimental style.

It is also the first time Mousoulis started playing with the idea of the "subversive music clip", taking a known song and putting his own images to it.


J.C.: The Jewellery-Case (1984, 10 mins)

Another delirious “home movie” type narrative film, again featuring family and friends of Mousoulis. A tribute/parody of Spielberg and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.

"Dreams Never End and J.C.: The Jewellery-Case are both extremely personal, and, to borrow a term from Paul Schrader, exhibit what might be called a "transcendental film style". These films' undeniable honesty renders all cynicism impotent." - Andrew Preston, Filmnews, 1985.


The Green Door (1986, 5 mins)

Mousoulis films moments in his home in an eclectic, strange way, creating both an ordinary and extraordinary representation of reality.

"A quite personal film, which bears some resemblance to Gillian Leahy's My Life Without Steve. The Green Door, however, has a simple eloquence and an authenticity the bigger film lacks." - Anne-Marie Crawford, Super Eight magazine, Dec 1986.


Physical World (1986, 10 mins)

A man and a woman prepare to go to work in the morning. A rigorous, formal narrative work, Mousoulis at his most “Bressonian”. "Physical World is dry, austere, methodical. However, it is a film which draws the viewer's attention away from the surface towards a deeper meaning. We cannot accept that Life, as represented in the first three quarters of the film, is solely composed of the dull, everyday physical activities that we are watching - there must be something more. Through implication the answer is conveyed - yes there is more. There is love. Love alone is the fuel that drives our tired bodies on." - Mark La Rosa, Super-8 Yearbook, Feb 1987.


Knowing Me, Knowing You (1988, 6 mins)

An essay film about the failure of post-modernism. Mousoulis’ first attempt at an “essay” film, in the mode of Marker and Godard.

"I admire Mousoulis' narrative fiction but it is his essay films which are the most interesting for me. Knowing Me, Knowing You is so contained within its rhetoric, those of us in the audience can only wonder what he's getting at ... I hope Mousoulis continues with this series of films, possibly the most philosophically contained and interesting of its kind in Super-8." - Andrew Frost, Filmnews, Feb 1989.


Melbourne '89 (1989, 13 mins)

Various tableaux of Melbourne in 1989, as experienced by the filmmaker. An eclectic film, impossible to predict as you are watching it.

"It is a film of shots/views. Views of Melbourne and portraits of friends. There is also a section of Bill and his band. The ten second portraits of Mark Freeman, Sarah Johnson, Chris Windmill, Heinz Boeck and others looked good. The last shot of George (Renaissance Man) Random in drizzly Punt Road was SENSATIONAL!!!" - Nick Ostrovskis, Super Eight magazine, Oct 1989.


Faith (1987, 27 mins)

A period in the life of a young Australian couple. Mousoulis’ most ambitious narrative short film on Super 8, close to half an hour long.

"With gentle direction, Bill does not impose a story upon the viewer. Faith lets its story grow from its spaces, revealing how the cinema and its meanings can be very hard to pinpoint. Bill lets meaning grow out of silence; significance grow out of the fact that he has faith, as much as the viewer slowly begins to realise, that the characters do not have to be spoken for. Their richness slowly rises to the surface." - Darron Davies, Filmviews, Sep 1987.

- Voted Best Super 8 Film of 1987 in Super-8 Yearbook 1988 (making 12 Top Ten lists)

6.30pm @ Goodtime Studios, followed by Q & A with Paul Clipson – Cost is $7

Artist Film Workshop has great pleasure in presenting San Francisco based experimental film legend Paul Clipson in town for one night only! Paul is an undisputed master of in-camera constructed mind scapes. A program not to be missed!


Program:

SPHINX ON THE SEINE (2008) Super 8mm/16mm, 9 mins, color/B&W Music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma;

A program of 8 hand made machine infused 16mm film works by AFW's Richard Tuohy

Friday 6 March 2015 from 8–10pm, $8

Artist Film Workshop in association with Otherfilm is pleased to present American artist Roger Beebe. Beebe will give a show with 10 single projector and expanded cine masterpieces.

These films attempt to marry experimental forms with a documentary interest in a cinema as a means of engaging with the world around us. The works are diverse in subject matter—covering such disparate topics as women in the air force in World War II, companies that changed their names for positioning in the phone book, and the horrors (and beauties) of suburban sprawl—and are equally diverse in the strategies and formats–with work in 16mm and super 8mm; works of found footage along side photographic images; single-channel films alongside multi-projector performances–they are united by their use of an ironizing poetics to cast a sidelong glance on some often overlooked realities of 20th and 21st Century Americana.


Program


TB TX DANCE (2006, 2:30, 2 x 16mm)

The Strip Mall Trilogy (2001, 9:00, 2x super 8mm on video)

A Woman, A Mirror (2001, 15:00, 16mm)

(rock/hard place) (2005, 5:15, 16mm and unslit regular 8mm)

Composition in Red & Yellow (2002, 2:30, super 8mm)

Money Changes Everything (2009/rev. 2011, 5:00, 3 x 16mm)

Beginnings (2010, 5:00, digital audio)

[sic] series (2014, 5:00, 16mm)

S A V E (2006, 5:15, 16mm)

AAAAA Motion Picture (2010, 11:00, 2 x 16mm)



Who is Beebe?

Roger Beebe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the Ohio State University. He has screened his films around the globe at such unlikely venues as the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square and McMurdo Station in Antarctica as well as more likely ones including Sundance and the Museum of Modern Art. Recent solo shows of his work include the Laboratorio Arte Alameda (Mexico City), the Wexner Center for the Arts, and Anthology Film Archives. He has won numerous honors and awards including a 2013 MacDowell Colony residency, a 2009 Visiting Foreign Artists Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, and a 2006 Individual Artist Grant from the State of Florida. Beebe is also a film programmer: he ran Flicker, a festival of small-gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000 and was the founder and Artistic Director of FLEX, Florida Experimental Film Festival from 2004-2014.

[Beebe’s films] implicitly & explicitly evoke the work of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand & Lee Friedlander, all photographers of the atomic age whose Western photographs captured the banalities, cruelties and beauties of imperial America –David Fellerath

Beebe’s films are both erudite and punk, lo-fi yet high-brow shorts that wrestle with a disfigured, contemporary American landscape –Wyatt Williams, Creative Loafing (Atlanta)

Join us between 6.00 & 9.00pm, with film screenings at 7.00 & 8.00pm

Student Conservators for Timor-Leste invite you to join us on November 5th for a film screening and exhibition celebrating the Tais. SCTL will present a screening of ‘Heru Ini Lafu: Weaving Life’, with accompanying photos by Sally Gray and traditional Tais from Iliomar.

Produced by the East Timor Women’s Association (ETWA), the film documents the history of Timor­-Leste and the beauty of its culture. It explores how women are reclaiming their culture and reducing poverty through the manufacture of Tais. Sally Gray’s photographs capture the many stages of Tais production, from spinning of the cotton, to manufacture of natural dyes and weaving of the textile on the back-strap loom. We hope to see you there!

(flyer here)

(facebook here)

Thursday 22 May, 6pm at Gertrude Contemporary - 200 Gertrude St. Fitzroy

Under Mack’s direction stoner shop tie-dyes and dollar-store trinkets collude to create pulsing, ebullient spectacles. Colour-in-motion is the Trojan horse by which Mack smuggles in a series of questions about regimes of looking and the stability of human perception in a post-psychedelic world.

Mack animates single-frame photography of domestic and recycled materials into complex patterns of movement she calls ‘anti-sequences’. Her works illuminate the shared territory between abstraction and the domesticity of mass-produced goods.

This program features a selection of Mack’s recent work, which unleashes the kinetic energy residing in wasted and overlooked consumer objects, including her song-and-dance documentary tribute to her mother’s screenprinting business, Dusty Stacks of Mom. The program concludes with the experimental 3D performance extravaganza, Let Your Light Shine. described by Fandor Film Blog as ‘a wholly immersive and near-weightless experience, the piece exists outside most conventions of even non-narrative visual art, simultaneously collapsing and expanding perception to encompass the full spectrum of sensory existence’.

In conjunction with:

Friday May 23rd 5.30 pm @ Melbourne University, John Medly Building G23.
Lecture: Visiting artist Jodie Mack will give an artist talk placing her work as an artist/performer within the vibrant world of abstract animation.

Saturday May 24th 11 am until 5pm @ Goodtime Studios, basement 746 Swanston St.
Workshop with Jodie Mack. Please see upcoming workshops


This is event is curated by OtherFilm, Institute of Modern Art, Gertrude Contemporary and co-presented by Artist Film Workshop. Jodie Mack’s visit to Australia is supported by Screen Queensland.

7 – 9pm Sunday 4th May @ Shebeen – 36 Manchester Lane, Melbourne

Fear of the Future trespasses forgotten lands where celluloid spills into dark spaces, dark spaces become spoken words, and the chatter of ghosts waltzes with amplified machines. Join Sabina Maselli, the Artist Film Workshop (AFW) and a surprise guest for a night of expanded cinema and performance for all of us suffering from futurephobia. AFW will be presenting a live painting performance with loops of 16mm film. Including films by Richard Tuohy, Nina Gilbert, Sabina Maselli and more.

Friday 25 April 2014 – 7.30pm $5

Between 2004 and 2008, Richard Tuohy made around 30 short films on Super 8. This was a prolific (and unexpected) return to the small gauge after a protracted hiatus from film-making. ‘Landscape Dances’ (a term coined by friend, painter and Melbourne Super 8 Group figure Maeve Woods to describe some of Tuohy’s films from this period) is a representative selection of 9 short and rarely seen ‘camera original’ Super 8 works on Kodachrome, Ektachrome and Tri-X. These films portray a deep, if somewhat troubled, appreciation of the Australian nature-scape and a abiding fascination with the possibilities of the super 8 camera.

A day long survey of current underground arts practices in Melbourne, featuring an artist market, experimental cinema, and performance evening

Alberts Basement, Crazy in Love, Smalltime Books, Sunshine & Grease, Artist Film Workshop, Danni Zuvela (OtherFilm), Abstract Mutation, Fingers Pty Ltd, Bearded Iris, Christopher LG Hill and more.

Minor Developments is a three-part survey of current underground arts practices across Melbourne that is both celebratory as well as a slight lamentation on the changing landscape of affordable art spaces in the inner city. The title is a play on the site of Slopes being currently designated for major development.

The project will take place over one day and night on Saturday 29 March 2014 and will be divided into the following three events:

Artist market (12pm – 2pm) In the morning to mid-afternoon Slopes will be occupied by market stalls presented by a cross- section of Melbourne artists and collectives. Stalls will be held by Alberts Basement, Crazy in Love, Smalltime Books, Sunshine & Grease and more.

Experimental cinema (3pm – 5pm) Entry by donation Following the artist market an experimental cinema event will host a presentation by Artist Film Workshop, as well as a screening of a selection of 16mm films made by members of the Ubu Films collective in Sydney between 1966 and 1971, the heyday of ‘underground’ film, presented by Danni Zuvela, for OtherFilm.

Variety Night (6pm – 9pm) Entry by donation Minor Developments will continue into the evening with a variety night in which the gallery space will host performance and bands. Including sets from Abstract Mutation, Fingers Pty Ltd and Bearded Iris, as well as a poetry reading by Christopher LG Hill.

For more information please contact: Brooke Babington – brooke@slopesprojects.org, or Jared Davis – jaredvdavis@gmail.com

AFW is pleased to present a program of works by master Australian flmmaker Paul Winkler. Perhaps one of Australia’s most prolific film artists (Winkler has been regularly producing new work every year since the early 1960′s), Winkler’s film illustrate a visual intensity and technical sophistication that is virtually unique in world cinema. Paul will be present at the screening. “Filmmaking has always been a journey into the unknown for me. Each new film demands its own trajectory. I might start with a particuliar idea and than after the first 100 feet of exposed film comes back, the imagines tell me which way to go or not to go. There is always a kind of pull between me and the material photographed, something opens up. If everything works out fine and the imagines connect to me and i can almost hear the sound they want, it is one hell of elation running through your body and mind, unbelievable. To sum up, my approach to filmmaking is primarily an organic one. The films are a synthesis of the intellect and emotion all filtered through the plastic material of film. I try to let imagines flow freely to the surface.” – Paul Winkler (taken from the DVD box set ‘Paul Winkler Experimental Film Collection 1964-2011′ from artfilms.com.au) THURSDAY 13th March, 7.30. AFW (Good Time Studios, Basement 746 Swanston St Melbourne) Neourosis 9 min Capilliary Action 16 min Time Out For Sport 19 min Long Shadows 17 min Cars 15 min Bondi 15 min

As a part of the NGV’s Melbourne Now exhibition, Artist Film Workshop will be hosting a Community Hall event in conjunction with the gallery’s DIY Series. Drop into the NGV International this Friday the 10th January—between 11am-4pm—to participate in the free workshop and experiment directly with film stock.

Visitors will get the chance to manipulate the surface of film by hand, and play with the possibilities of positive and negative images in a black & white reversal taping workshop.

AFW’s Loop Library will also be on display in space.