Issue 5: Winter 2009 / '10
Experimental Film at Cork Film Festival 2009
There was a great deal on offer for fans of experimental film at the 2009 Corona Cork Film Festival, which proved perhaps the most exciting edition of the last decade for these types of work. Its outstanding feature was the presence of renowned Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky, who delivered a masterclass and presented a retrospective programme of his dazzling found-footage films. The masterclass consisted of a lively and insightful dissection of his latest work to date, Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005). During this memorable session, he went into generous detail in describing the intricate photographic processes used to unleash this blizzard of cinematic intensity.
Eve Heller, subject of another wonderful retrospective programme, also works with found footage. But her best films, such as Last Lost (1996), Her Glacial Speed (2001) and Behind This Soft Eclipse (2004), couldn't be more different from Tscherkassky's fractured, kinetic sensory onslaughts. In fact, they are as mysterious and subtle as their titles, weaving ghostly, mainly black and white 16mm visions in which time seems suspended. At once aethereal and almost cloyingly vivid, these oneiric works linger in the mind long after viewing.
Brighton-based filmmaker and musician Ian Helliwell was Artist in Residence at the Cork Artists' Collective Guesthouse for the duration of the Festival. He presented two programmes under the title ‘Sound-Image-Sound', both of which explored the relationship between the film strip and its soundtrack. The first of these compiled a series of works from throughout film history, whilst the second focused on Helliwell's own films. Dirk de Bruyn's stunning 2nd Hand Cinema (2005) proved the revelation of the exhilarating first programme, with other films by Norman McClaren, Mary Ellen Bute and Guy Sherwin proving predictably delightful. This is not the first time Cork has featured Helliwell's own distinctive work which is characterised by a bargain-basement technophilic DIY vibe. A cinema of research into the creative possibilities of lo-tech gadgetry, his colourful results are always engaging and sometimes truly hypnotic.
Unfortunately I was unable to attend Vancouver-based filmmaker and media-artist Alex MacKenzie's expanded cinema performance The Wooden Lightbox. But reports I heard from those who did go along were generally ecstatic. The Festival coincided with the final days of the Crawford Gallery's major retrospective of Vivienne Dick's work, extensively covered elsewhere in this issue. This exhibition culminated in a live event, 'New York. No Wave. Super 8.', which took place during the Festival. Part of this celebration of the ‘No Wave' movement, which also included live music by Pat Place and Cynthia Sley, featured projections of two classic No Wave films, selected by Dick: Beth and Scott B.'s Letters to Dad (1979) and James Nares' marvellous Waiting for The Wind (1982).
The annual ‘Free Radicals' experimental film programme boasted two of the brilliant Spanish filmmaker Oriol Sánchez's best films: Profanaciones (2008) and Moza de animas (Lady of Souls, 2009). Sánchez's work was discussed at length in a previous issue of Experimental Conversations. But the only other film in the screening that was playing at his level was Thorsten Fleisch's raw, gleefully materialist Wound Footage (2009). Qasim Riza Shaheen had an intriguing six-monitor video installation, Stains & Stencils, at the Triskel. Each screen featured a one-take portrait of Shaheen playing a true-life transgendered Indian sex worker. For a fine discussion of Stains & Stencils, see this essay by regular Experimental Conversations contributor Donal Foreman.
- Maximilian Le Cain