LUX UPCOMING EVENTS AND OPENINGS THIS WEEK Thursday 24 - Wednesday 30 July 2008

[luxweekly at lux.org.uk]

UPCOMING EVENTS AND OPENINGS THIS WEEK

1. Thursday 24 July. LUX presents  - HACKNEY PREMIERE of Anja  
Kirschner and David Panos', 'TRAIL OF THE SPIDER'. Chats Palace, London

2. Saturday 26 July. Mary Ellen Bute. Sketch, London

3. Wednesday 30 July. Light Reading Series 8: Neil Henderson and Evan  
Parker. Light Reading, London



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1.
Thursday 24 July.  7.30pm 'til late
LUX presents  - HACKNEY PREMIERE of Anja Kirschner and David Panos',  
'TRAIL OF THE SPIDER'
Chats Palace Arts Centre, 42-44 Brooksby’s Walk, Homerton, Hackney,  
London E9 6DF
Entrance FREE

LUX presents  - HACKNEY PREMIERE of Anja Kirschner and David Panos',  
'TRAIL OF THE SPIDER'
...filmed on location in Hackney Marshes & Essex.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the makers of the film +  
bar and DJs MIZ CB2000 & guests.

Trail of the Spider is a Western shot in Hackney and Essex, with a  
cast of actors and non-actors including many residents of East London.
The film recreates the epic panoramas of the Wild West using landfill  
sites in the Thames Gateway, gravel pits serving the Olympic Park,  
and Hackney Marshes - an area affected by the land grab accompanying  
the 2012 Olympics.
Trail of the Spider takes elements from the history of the Western  
(the stylized violence of Spaghetti Westerns and the melodrama of  
golden era 'Horse Operas') and combines them with the suppressed  
history of the multi-racial American West, where many cowboys were  
black, and alliances that crossed racial boundaries were common.
The film also addresses class conflict and displacement in East  
London today. By using standard Western plot devices of the 'arrival  
of the railroad' and the 'end of an era', Trail of the Spider  
explores the compromises and struggles of a population facing a new  
order of property speculation and gentrification.

www.anjakirschner.com/trailofthespider




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2.
Saturday 26 July.
Mary Ellen Bute.
Sketch, 9 Conduit St, W1S 2XG
Opening Reception: Sat 26 July, 2-4pm Exhibition Jul 26 - Sep 13.  
Open Tue-Sat 10-5pm

Gallery survey exhibition of the abstract filmmaker Mary Ellen Bute.

 From 1934 - 1957 Mary Ellen Bute made fourteen short films  
pioneering techniques with  light, sound and the moving image. Her  
work involved collaborating with artists, musicians, inventors and  
others who adopted a scientific, experimental approach to creating  
sound and optical effects. In addition to sampling hand processes  
such as drawing and painting directly on film the work features  
imagery created automatically by a custom-built, cathode-ray  
oscilloscope. She was one of the first women artists to experiment  
with the medium but unlike contemporaries Hans Richter (b. 1888), Len  
Lye (b. 1901) and Oskar Fischinger (b. 1900), her work remains  
largely unknown. This exhibition brings together a complete  
chronology of her abstract films, most of which have never been shown  
in Britain and for the first time will present her work as a multi- 
screen installation using Sketch’s twelve projectors.

Born in Houston in 1906, Bute studied painting in Texas and  
Philadelphia before working with stage lighting at the Yale School of  
Drama. During the 1930s she collaborated with the colour organist  
Thomas Wilfred (b. 1889), the composer Joseph Schillinger (b. 1895)  
and electronic musical instrument inventor Léon Theremin (b. 1896).  
With Theremin, Bute began to use prisms, oscillators and mirrors to  
project coloured light with the intention of synchronizing these  
effects with sound in a new device that would translate the sonic  
output of Theremin’s electrophones.

In 1934 Bute began to formalise her experiments with light and sound  
in film, enlisting the help of cinematographer Ted Nemeth. Her early  
black and white films manipulate light with prisms, cellophane and  
ice cubes and use domestic objects such as kitchen utensils, ping  
pong balls, and bracelets to create graphic characters. Each work is  
structured as an interpretation of a musical score. By 1937 she was  
using colour stock, devising numerical arrangements and Newtonian  
formulas to map colour over sound. In the 1950s Bute commissioned a  
technician from Bell Telephone Laboratories to design an oscilloscope  
that enabled her to work electronically, drawing on screen with a  
beam of light and generating patterns automatically.

Working as her own distributor, Bute had her 35mm films screened with  
Hollywood features at the Radio City Music Hall in New York before  
showing them in cinemas across the United States. In the late 1950s  
she stopped making ‘absolute’ film to work with actors on narrative  
dramas, using techniques developed early in her career to create  
surreal effects. In The Boy Who Saw Through (1956) Bute cast a  
fourteen-year old Christopher Walken as the lead character of Ernest,  
a boy who possesses the paranormal ability to see through walls. Her  
last complete film, Passages from Finnegans Wake (1965), includes  
reverse footage, rapid motion, stop action, negative images,  
documentary material and subtitles in a cinematic version of Mary  
Manning’s dramatization of the James Joyce novel. Her extraordinary  
montage flashback sequences juxtaposing imagery of atomic weaponry  
and 1950’s dance steps led to the film winning an award at the 1966  
Cannes International Film Festival.

Shortly before her death in 1983, the Museum of Modern Art New York  
hosted a retrospective screening programme of the artist’s work.

This exhibition has been curated by Michelle Cotton who has included  
Bute’s work in a survey of artist film distributed by the Independent  
Cinema Office. Essentials: Modernity will be released nationwide  
later this year.

www.sketch.uk.com




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3.
Wednesday 30 July. 7pm
Light Reading Series 8: Neil Henderson and Evan Parker.
Light Reading, 3rd Floor, 316–318 Bethnal Green Road, London, E2 0AG
Tickets: £5 door / £4 advance. Places are limited so booking is  
essential. Tel 020 7729 4494 email james.holcombe at now-w-here.org.uk

Light Reading’s 2008 series continues with a conversation between  
artist Neil Henderson and musician Evan Parker. A selection of  
Henderson’s films will be screened during the event, including  
Landscape Film (2002), Tidal (2005), The Street (2008) and the  
documentary Evan Parker (2008). In addition, Evan Parker will perform  
a short piece on soprano saxophone.

Neil Henderson’s practice is one that engages with the technical  
specificities and processes of making images that provoke highly  
particular and interrogative experiences. Much of his earlier work,  
simple in its construction, is concerned with testing out fundamental  
questions and assumptions about the medium of film. What constitutes  
a film? How can it be defined? In such works, where Henderson uses  
multiple projectors, the function of the projector is also  
transformed; from necessary support to an engagement with its  
performative characteristics and impact on the space and the  
audience. Henderson’s recent work demonstrates a more visible  
synthesis between film and photography. Using an arrestingly subtle  
approach, Henderson explores ideas of gradual development and  
process, exposed and scrutinized through a parallel focus on regular  
occurrences and changes in nature and the landscape and its effect on  
human interaction with it.

Neil Henderson studied at the Kent Institute of Art and Design and  
the Slade School of Art. He is currently a lecturer in Film Studies  
at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. His work has been shown  
nationally and internationally, with recent screenings at the  
Animator Festival, Poznan, Poland, 2008, Phoenix Arts, Leicester,  
2008, Diversions Film Festival, Edinburgh, 2008, Film Festival  
Centre, Rodina Cinema, St Petersburg, 2008 and the 19th Onion City  
Film Festival, Chicago, 2007. His work is discussed in Nicky Hamlyn’s  
Film Art Phenomena (London: BFI, 2003).

Evan Parker is one of Britain’s most prolific free improvisation jazz  
players on tenor and soprano saxophone. His international music  
career has spanned over four decades during which time he has  
recorded countless solo and group albums, although unaccompanied solo  
performance still forms a major part of his work. Parker’s early  
recordings of the 1960s and 1970s are known for their experimental  
and unusual recording methods with among others, plastic reeds,  
circular breathing and rapid tonguing. Unlike his influences from the  
American rhythmic jazz scene of the 1950s, Parker creates abstract  
soundscapes with a focus on shape rather than melodic content. His  
recent work has demonstrated more of an interest in electronics,  
working with other musicians to process his music in real time,  
creating feedback loops and playing with the shifting and innovative  
forms of his pieces.

Light Reading is an ongoing series of critical dialogues that engage  
artists, writers and curators in conversation around a selected  
artist’s body of work. To be included on the mailing list for future  
events, please contact: james.holcombe at no-w-here.org.uk

www.nowhere-lab.org






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