Art Cinema OFFoff: To Be Alive!

Art Cinema OFFoff: To Be Alive!

An evening full of expanded cinema performances. ‘To Be Alive!’ at Vooruit not only looks back at the history of expanded film, it also shows how this medium is still very much alive today.

 

PROGRAM

Take Measure (William Raban,1973) [live performance]

Angles of Incidence (William Raban,1973) - 8’ [16mm]

Surface Tension (William Raban,1976) - 15’ [16mm]

Diagonal (William Raban,1973) - 5’ [16mm]

Solo (Christophe Auger [Metamkine], 2017) - 30’ [live performance - 16mm film, projectors, objects, lenses, lights]

Highview (Simon Liu, 2017) - 20’ [4 x 16mm]

Cluster Click City Sunday (Simon Liu, 2017) - 20’ [16mm]

Even Silence is Cause of Storm (Adriana Vila Guevara & Luis Macias, 2016) - 40’ [16mm]

 

On William Raban:

“Reflecting on both his early experiences studying painting at St. Martins and his formative approach to filmmaking, William Raban has written ‘It was a time for experimentation where ideas were the driving force rather than preoccupations with style or the desire to simply put dazzling images onto the movie screen’ (William Raban in ‘Lifting Traces’, Filmwaves, Spring 1998).”
[...]
“Raban started making films (around 1970), having studied painting. His concerns with the relationships between nature and the filmic process, that would become inscribed into some of his early film work, could be found in his earlier approach to painting.”
[...]
“In the early 1970s, as a member of the London Filmmakers’ Co-Operative, Raban would combine the co-op ethos of hard line politics, rigorous intellectualism and formal experimentation to produce some of the most enduring work of the period. As part of the ‘Filmaktion’ group he would experiment in the realm of ‘expanded cinema’, a film form that would later become aligned with ‘installation’ art. In these pieces, the relationship between audience, theatre, projector and light beam were all engaged in deconstructing the conventional apparatus of cinema - a project that was in keeping with the radical politics of the time. In Take Measure (1973) he physically unwound the film through the audience from projector to screen; Diagonal(1973) used three projector beams extending beyond the screen into the theatre space and centred on the workings of the projector gate. [...] These pieces are some of the most resonant (and characteristically witty) of the period whilst also providing clues for themes that he would continue to develop.”

Darren Green1

 

On Chistrophe Auger and Metamkine:

Christophe Auger is a member of Metamkine. “Based in Grenoble, Metamkine is a trio founded in 1987, compromised of two cineastes and one musician. Christophe Auger and Xavier Quérel wield super8 and 16mm projectors pointed in the direction of the audience where the image bounce off of two or more large mirrors to arrive on the screen at the back of the stage. The sound comes from Jérôme Noetinger’s analog synthesizers, tape loops and amplified objects.”2

 

”When talking about their work, a key idea that the trio often brings up is the Situationist ideal of détournement. Coined by Guy Debord, détournement roughly translates into the idea of collage, putting two different things together to create something new and unintended. As Noetinger states, part of their art is ‘to show that the projector not only plays back the film, but it can be an instrument to act on directly. The image becomes just one part of it. It is like how I work with tape recorders. A tape recorder is meant to record music and play back in a certain way, but you can act on it in different ways. You can change its function to create something new. So, you can take something that is meant for a certain thing and play with it’.”

Chris Kennery3  

Film, Performance
13 Oct 2017 - 13 Oct 2017
Vooruit, Ghent