LUX Weekly News 11 - 17 June 2007 EVENTS AND OPENINGS IN LONDON THIS WEEK

[luxweekly at lux.org.uk]

LUX Weekly News 11- 17 June 2007
EVENTS AND OPENINGS IN LONDON THIS WEEK

1. no.w.here presents Light Reading Series 7, Matthew Noel-Tod and  
William Fowler, Wednesday 13 June, 7pm

2. LUX salon: MIACA presents a special lecture and screening of  
contemporary Japanese artists' video, LUX offices, Wednesday 13 June  
7pm for 7.30pm start

3. Invisible Mend Salon: VALIE EXPORT: Invisible Adversaries  
(Unsichtbare Gegner), LUX offices, Friday 15 June, 9pm starting at  
dusk, £3

4. Learning behaviour, learnt action, unlearning knowledge: A weekend  
of work from the Cinenova collection, Whitechapel Gallery (Angel  
Alley), Sat 16 - Sun 17 June, screenings daily at 3 pm, 5 pm, 7 pm

5. New Lands, BFI Southbank, Saturday 16 – Sunday 17 June


LUX LONDON EVENTS CALENDAR the most comprehensive daily listing of  
artists' moving image events, screenings and exhibitions in London  
www.lux.org.uk/resources/calendar.htm

1.

Wednesday 13 June doors open at 7pm
no.w.here presents Light Reading Series 7
Matthew Noel-Tod and William Fowler
316 – 318 Bethnal Green Road
London E2
www.nowhere-lab.org
Please RSVP to James at courses at nowhere-lab.org or call 0207 372 3925
Tickets are £4 if pre-booked or £5 on the door.

Light Reading’s 2007 series continues with a conversation between  
filmmaker and artist Matthew Noel-Tod and writer and curator William  
Fowler.

Work by Matthew Noel-Tod will be screened alongside a rare viewing of  
Lindsay Anderson’s Raz Dwa Trzy (The Singing Lesson) (1967).
46min + introduction

2.

Wednesday 13 June 7pm for 7.30pm start
LUX SALON: MIACA at LUX
LUX, 18, Shacklewell Lane, London, E8 2EZ
ADMISSION FREE, places are extremely limited so booking is essential.
To book a place email salon at lux.org.uk

As part of an exchange project between LUX, UK and the Moving Image  
Archive of Contemporary Art (MIACA), Japan, MIACA presents a special  
lecture and screening of contemporary Japanese artists' video at LUX  
on Wednesday 13 June. Includes a lecture by Hitomi Hasegawa and  
Mayumi Hirano of MIACA about its work and the arts scene in Yokohama  
and a screening of work by Tetsushi Higashino, Takehiro Iikawa,  
Tetsuya Karatsu, Takuro Kotaka, Chikara Matsumoto, Kaeko Mizukoshi,  
Daisuke Nagaoka,Masanobu Nishino, Mai Yamashita + Naoto Kobayashi.  
This event is generously supported by The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese  
Foundation, The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and The Japan  
Foundation.

3.

Friday 15 June, 9pm starting at dusk, £3
VALIE EXPORT: Invisible Adversaries (Unsichtbare Gegner)
LUX, 3rd Floor, 18 Shacklewell Lane, London, E8 2EZ (outdoor rooftop  
screening)
EXPORT’s seminal first feature is a tour-de-force of radical paranoia  
presented in a special rooftop screening overlooking the city. Anna  
wakes to a radio signal that she interprets as an alien invasion. Her  
investigations are an exegesis on the self, mental instability, the  
media and sexual politics. 'The film feels a little as if Godard were  
reincarnated as a woman and decided to make a feminist version of The  
Invasion of the Body Snatchers' Amy Taubin. Presented in  
collaboration with Cinenova www.cinenova.org.uk and with thanks to  
Faction Films. NOW FULLY BOOKED

4.

Sat 16 - Sun 17 June
Learning behaviour, learnt action, unlearning knowledge: A weekend of  
work from the Cinenova collection
Whitechapel Gallery
80 - 82 Whitechapel High Street (Angel Alley entrance)
London, E1 7QX
www.whitechapel.org

Screenings each day at 3pm, 5pm, 7pm
£5 screening, £15/12* day / £25/16* weekend
* concessions and Whitechapel Members

To book for screenings, please call the information desk 020 7522  
7888 or email Tickets at whitechapel.org

The Whitechapel Film Programme is presented in collaboration with LUX.

Through such publications as the seminal magazine Screen in the 1970s  
and Laura Mulvey's essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'  
psychoanalytic theory was introduced into the study and practice of  
both film and art. At the same time the consciousness-raising  
activity of the Women's Movement engaged in workshop-based film  
production and screenings as a means to activate discussions about  
women's lives, document their stories and allow women to experience  
their subjectivity. This weekend of screenings explores both these  
developments through special presentations and film and video drawn  
from the collection of the women-only distributor Cinenova and unique  
special projects by Laura Mulvey herself and American artist Sharon  
Hayes.

'[Cinenova is] Not so much separatist as structurally integral to the  
distribution of women-made motion pictures in educational, cultural,  
institutional and community instances, a visibility and a discourse  
are being generated every time this work is seen, rooted in a history  
still adept at snatching possibility out of the jaws of the present.'  
Marina Vishmidt

Cinenova was founded in 1991 by the merger of two equally  
unprecedented feminist film distributors, Circles and Cinema of Women.

PROGRAMME NOTES:

Saturday 16th June
3pm

An Epic Poem, Lezli Ann Barret, UK 1982 30mins
Home and Dry, Leeds Animation Workshop, UK 1987, 8mins
Living the Sacrifice, Emily Roysdon, 8mins, USA, 2006

Introduced by a conversation between Emma Hedditch and Ian White

An Epic Poem is a psychologically dynamic, baroque combination of  
archival footage, dramatic neo-classical architecture, romantic  
landscape, theatrical tableaux and Velzquez’s Venus made into a  
perversely everyday scene with references to Mary Richardson’s  
infamous Suffragette-supporting attack on the painting. Historical  
and mythological figures continually position and reposition  
themselves addressing the representation of women as an act of  
viewing. 'The film looks back, not in order to find a lost women's  
history truer than the prevailing male versions, but to provoke  
contradictions which allow us to question the past and it's  
inevitability. It finds the past again in a new set of problems and  
contradictions' Pam Cook

Leeds Animation Workshop is a not-for-profit, cooperative company,  
which produces and distributes animated films and videos on social  
and educational issues, begun in 1976 by a group of women friends who  
came together to make a film about the need for pre-school childcare.  
Since the mid-1980s the Workshop has been run by five women, who  
carry out all stages of the production process, from initial research  
to final distribution. In Home and Dry four women discuss their  
housing situations, the inadequacies of council policy and the  
political thinking that lies behind them.

Living the Sacrifice is a contemporary video by New York-based artist  
Emily Roysdon. It combines performance and philosophy into an  
elliptical non-event of historical and linguistic inquiry. Through  
speech shared experience becomes meaning that nevertheless always  
feels just beyond reach. Something is happening, but what escapes  
articulation? Do we need the validation of memory and documentation?  
Is this woman emerging into a documentary tradition or returning to  
an oral one? This film presents a queer relationship to memory,  
history, and community and a tribute to the many voices that emerge  
from one historical body.

-----

5pm
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey with Emma Hedditch

"It is said that analysing pleasure or beauty annihilates it. That is  
the intention of this article" Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and  
Narrative Cinema, 1975.

For the first time Laura Mulvey translates into video her seminal  
1975 essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' in a special  
project conceived by Laura Mulvey with the artist Emma Hedditch. As  
Mulvey is recorded reading her manifesto out loud – a work that was  
in itself the starting point for this weekend of screenings - we see  
a series of film clips of the sequences she was thinking about while  
writing, some of which are named in the text itself some of which  
have remained unnamed. This video, made for the event, is a unique  
and historically important document.

-----

7pm
Daughter Rite, Michelle Citron, USA, 1978, 53mins
Women of the Rhondda, Esther Ronay, Mary Capps, Brigid Seagrave, Mary  
Kelly, Humphrey Trevelyan, UK, 1972, 20mins

The deconstruction of documentary certainty has been critical to  
Feminist film making, as a way to foreground the subjectivity of the  
maker and present questions about the construction of an ideological  
image. Shot as a documentary Daughter Rite actually shows two  
actresses convincingly portraying sisters coming to terms with their  
mother’s death and improvising around the discovery of family secrets  
that concern finance and sexual abuse. An accompanying voice-over and  
super8 home movies which seem to tell about other mother daughter  
relations, variously reinforce or contradict each other

Women of the Rhondda looks at the role played by women in the Welsh  
Miners' Strikes of the ‘20s and ‘30s. Interviews with four women are  
interspersed with shots from local streets and coalmines. After  
recording their stories, the women reflect on their representation at  
the film’s exhibition in the Rhondda valley. They come to represent  
the importance of women’s contributions to the strike, through their  
descriptions of everyday domestic tasks and understanding of their  
potential political power.

Sunday 17th June
-----
3pm
The Impossible Decade, Juliet Miller, UK 1985, 50mins
Light Reading, Lis Rhodes, UK 1978, 20mins

One of many films commissioned by the United Nations to commemorate  
the Decade For Women, which began in 1976, The Impossible Decade  
assesses what has actually happened to women in those ten years. The  
film’s global survey ranges from Mexico to Bolivia and Gambia,  
recording women’s lives far beyond the reach of the UN’s optimism,  
presenting challenging, alternative statistics and opinions and  
throwing the difference between political rhetoric and political  
action into stark relief.
Light Reading, by contrast, is a beautiful, aesthetically structured  
essay of fragments and repetitions on what we see and how we see it,  
how we ‘read’ images and how these are framed by representation. “She  
watched herself being looked at She looked at herself being watched  
but she could not perceive herself as the subject of the  
sentence...” (Lis Rhodes).

-----

5pm
Phrenological Self Portrait, Marianne Heske, 1976, 8mins
Sharon Hayes ‘reads’ Sadie Benning

Are there eternal truths and values in science (and art)? And the  
things we believe in and practise today, what will history's verdict  
be about them? In Phrenological Self Portrait Marianne Heske is shown  
drawing a map of her own brain onto her image on a television screen.

In a special project that derives from the collapse of time and space  
peculiar to video art that Rosalind Krauss describes in her essay  
‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, artist Sharon Hayes presents a  
‘reading’ of an early video by another artist, Sadie Benning.  
Benning’s video will be shown twice. Speaking live from Documenta in  
Kassel, Germany, Hayes will speak over the second screening to  
introduce analysis into the context of the auditorium as a unique  
kind of direct intervention, a participatory act of reading.

-----

7pm
Veronica 4 Rose, Melanie Chait, UK 1983, 48mins
Model of the Figure, Karolin Meunier, Germany 2005, 7mins

Made for audiences of schools and the general public, Veronica 4 Rose  
is a tender portrait of different groups of young lesbians aged  
between 16 and 23 from Newcastle, Liverpool and London. Made by and  
with these young women, they speak about their experiences and  
theories of the heterosexist society in which they live, alternating  
between personal history and political organization. Interviews  
recorded over a two-year period are combined with scenes scripted and  
performed by the women themselves.

Resonating with Marianne Heske’s Phrenological Self Portrait, Model  
of the Figure shows the artist constructing a complex, interconnected  
linguistic diagram of the self on a white board as a television  
monitor - placed in front of the screen - shows a series of women’s  
heads all taken from feature films, slowly turning.

5.
Saturday 16 – Sunday 17 June 2007
NEW LANDS
BFI Southbank
Belvedere Road, South Bank
Waterloo, London SE1 8XT
Booking information:
Individual screening programmes: £5, concs £4
Performance: £5, concs £4
Installations: Free
Weekend ticket available for all paid screenings:
£19, concs £14
BFI members pay £1 less on each ticket
Box Office: 020 7928 3232
https://tickets.bfi.org.uk/welcome.asp

STEVEN BALL, STEPHEN CONNOLLY, GRAHAM GUSSIN, ANJA KIRSCHNER, HILARY  
KOOB-SASSEN, RICHARD LINKLATER, URIEL ORLOW, MATTHEW NOEL-TOD

A weekend programme of new and recent features, shorts, installations  
and performance inspired by Charles Fort’s visionary text, New Lands.

It is the "aftermath of war, as in the year 1492 [, there are]  
readjustments; crowded and restless populations, revolts against  
limitations, intolerable restrictions against emigrations' but 'I  
have data upon data upon data of new lands that are not far away. I  
hold out expectations and the materials of new hopes and new despairs  
and new triumphs and new tragedies. . . . Sounds have been heard in  
the sky. They have been heard, and it is not possible to destroy the  
records of them. In their repetitions and regularities of series and  
intervals, we shall recognize perhaps interpretable language."
New Lands, Charles Fort, 1923

Fort takes a long term view of history and draws comparisons between  
different moments spread over hundreds of years and locates his hopes  
for escaping the problems of his time, and by inference, moments  
doomed to repeat themselves, in strange landscapes in the sky. In his  
broken language, he paradoxically suggests that these landscapes are  
at once tangible and real but also mystical and identifiable only  
through faith.

The works presented over this weekend share a similar relationship to  
landscape, exploring a line between the tangible and the perceptual  
or allegorical. They also attempt to grapple with the repressed  
histories and elusive messages around us today, many of which concern  
the moving image itself.

William Fowler
Curator of Artists’ Moving Image, BFI National Archive

Saturday 16th June

Studio 12:00 – 17:00
New Lands Installation: (Free)
AMBIENT HORROR (DAY OF THE DEAD FIFTEEN LAYERS)
UK 2006 Graham Gussin 100mins looped
Reflecting Gussin’s frequent dialogue between the structural and the  
sublime, this striking aesthetic experience, here premiered, looks  
like a breathing Turin Shroud. The cinema screen acts as a boundary  
onto a world of ghostly lost souls, trapped, trying to penetrate or  
find their way out of the layered images of Day of the Dead in which  
they find themselves caught.

NFT3 15:50
OBCY AKTORZY / FOREIGN ACTORS
UK 2006 Matthew Noel-Tod 46mins
Video, Polish dialogue with English subtitles
Using Polish actors, Noel-Tod re-presents a series of moments from  
the Polish films – Ashes and Diamonds (1958), Man of Iron (1981),  
Dekalog 4 (1988) and Sequence of Feelings (1993) - and through their  
fractured recasting and combination creates a new broken world where  
history and location, both in and outside the cinema, form dialogues  
with politics and perception.
-Introduced by Matthew Noel-Tod


NFT3 18:00
WAKING LIFE
USA 2001 Richard Linklater 99mins
Following the on-going wonderings and wanderings of a young man,  
Waking Life uses both its form (rotoscope animation) and the dialogue  
of its characters to reflect back on itself and consider free will  
and distinctions between appearance and reality. Along the way its  
takes in quotes from the Situationists (amongst others) and a slew of  
eccentric characters last seen in Linklater’s Slacker.


Sunday 17th June

Studio 12:30 – 14:30
New Lands Installation: (Free)
THE VISITOR + THE GUIDE, looped alternately

THE VISITOR
UK 2007 Uriel Orlow 16mins
This photo-essay documents Orlow’s audience with Oba Erediauwa, the  
current king of Benin, and his court. Recounted by a local narrator,  
communication is somewhat obscure, highlighting differences in their  
cultural and historical positions, yet remains centred on the Benin  
Bronzes, collective memory and the demand for restitution.
+
THE GUIDE
UK 2007 Uriel Orlow 16mins
The camera trails said guide on a tour through the labyrinthine  
complex of Ogiamen’s palace in Benin City, presenting ruptured  
dialogues between seeing and understanding, tradition and the  
contemporary. The extraordinary building was constructed in the 12th  
century and is one of only a handful of houses that survived the  
British punitive expedition of 1897, and remains inhabited to this day.


Studio 15:00
New Lands Performance:

NEW VERNACULAR
Hilary Koob-Sassen
In a performance especially put together for New Lands, Hilary Koob- 
Sassen will perform a 3-name phrase: The Venus of Filletville (an  
anatomy of live), Bridge to Trellis Formation (a morphology of  
culture), and Traction on Time (a figure/ground transition), using  
audio-visual technological means and song.


NFT3 16:15
New Lands Short Films:
GREAT AMERICAN DESERT
UK 2006 Stephen Connolly 19mins
In this new film, the camera observes a scrubby Western Arizona  
desert seasonally occupied by itinerant citizens. Other elements  
emerge in juxtaposition, including contemporary recordings of  
military procedures and an account of the men who carried out the  
Hiroshima bombing.

THE WAR ON TELEVISION
UK 2004 Steven Ball 6mins
News images from a distant conflict in Iraq, fractured from their  
source, are further digitally attacked and broken to create some new  
perceptual, almost existential nothingness.

POLLY II – PLAN FOR A REVOLUTION IN DOCKLANDS
UK 2006 Anja Kirschner 25mins
In this sci-fi tale of a contemporary but lawless and flooded East  
End of London, self-elected saviours of the people become seekers of  
self-interest, and pirates, who traverse the flooded waters around  
Canary Wharf, offer chances of liberation.

PARACULTURE/FUTURE GARDEN STRUCTURE
UK 2005 Hilary Koob-Sassen 13mins
Song and images of organic matter mix to tell the story of how we  
make and interpret the world but also to propose a new model for the  
organization of the economy.

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