The Horse Hospital - Kerry Laitala: Mercurial Cinema
Friday September 24, doors 19:30h, £5
The Horse Hospital
Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD, UK

San Francisco filmmaker Kerry Laitala is a gem of the cinematic underworld. Her long engagement with the avant garde processes of cinema position her as one of the most informed process-based artists workingwithin the medium. Harnessing glimmering, fluorescing light, macabre artefacts and an array of abandoned filmic devices and conventions, her films are a deep transgression into the al/chemical side of cinema. The films of Kerry Laitala evoke a glowing world in which spirits, memories and mouldering and artefacts swirl into feverish dreams recalling gothic conditions of poetry and decay. Seeming to hover on the borders of life and death, madness and sanity, these haunting alchemical films raise the dead from long slumbers to become luminous phantoms of flickering cinema.– Steve Polta, SF Cinematheque “Kerry Laitala takes eye-popping visual phenomena and turns it into refined artistry, in a body of work that is playful, visually articulate and a loving homage to the fundamental magic of cinema.”

Pleasure Dome: The Broken Shape
Jennet Thomas in Person
Saturday, September 18, 20h pm, $8/5 members + students
CineCycle, 129 Spadina Ave. down the lane, Toronto

Jennet Thomas’s work emerged from the anarchistic, experimental culture of London’s underground film and live art club scene in the 1990’s, where she was a co-founder of the Exploding Cinema Collective. It now screens extensively in international film festivals and galleries. Her work began as hybrid spoken word performance and projections for a live audience, it now combines a variety of filmic languages, ranging from soap opera to experimental and underground filmmaking, from sci-fi to musicals. “I like to explore unexpected processes of sense-making. My narratives are often fractured, absurdist–generated via dream-logic and increasingly experimental methodologies, inspired by odd corners of British culture, driven by the urge to tell.”

“Jennet Thomas is a zealous god-devil, who constructs bizarre narrative worlds in which we can recognize the pull of gravity, the attraction of belief or the logic of causality, but these forces are somehow reconfigured to describe a place that is way off the map of normality, perhaps with one foot in the realm of the paranormal. And yet Thomas suggests the near-feasibility of the absurd by expressing messages from alternative dimensions, bizarre social codes and accounts of recent cultural history through everyday means. Sausages, sporting trophies, lengths of string and packages sent through the post are the tools with which normal looking people conduct their peculiar activities in community halls, supermarket car parks, back gardens and nicely kept living rooms. The bizarre, Thomas seems to suggest, is a close relative of the ordinary.”

CJC: Preview 2010
Thursday September 9th 2010, 21h
La Clef, 21 rue de la Clef, 75005 Paris

For this re-entry session, we wanted to present a selection of films that have recently joined the Collectif Jeune Cinema Catalogue. Proposed by Laurence Rebouillon, this programme opens a season on "Perspectives", where we seek to increase contact between young creations and historical films. Note: The regular meetings of the CJC change day from Fridays to Thursdays! We hope to meet you there many times throughout the year.

Programme:
- There is no G.O.D. without R.G.B. (Clint Enns, 2008)
A homage to Brakhage using techniques inspired by PaperRad. Digitized film leader painted frame by frame in MS paint.
- La Perle (Marguerite Lantz, 2007)
A woman is transforming herself into a picture.
- Magia (Gérard Cairaschi, 2010)
A young boy molds objects with clay that he then manipulates, combines and associates, in an obscure ritual. As the objects/representations he creates combine and develop a narrative, the fast alternation of images on the screen imbricate and shape images/apparitions that only the “lanterna magica” of cinema and the magic of editing allow. Magica means enchantment.
- Mur Blanc Eau Noire (Daphné Le Sergent, 2009)
The video shows a series of pictures of Belfast's peacelines (walls between catholic and protestant districts). A wall slowly appears under which water is flowing (the wall, which crosses a stream, was built in Alexandra Park to prevent conflicts between teenagers in the beginning of the 90s). This water spouts out, coming first as the contrast of a moving image against still images; then it dissolves the peaceline pictures, giving birth to a rhythm of alternating black walls and white scum, eventually leading to a flicker (a syncopated alternation of black and white). This break through the walls, through this border, thus echoes the current screening room and the real wall as well as any constraints to the self.
- D’Ici (Eric Bouttier, 2007)
Kerhouarn, Meriadec: a small place in Brittany, territory of origin and place of childhood. Each new voyage causes the same rediscoveries, each return to these sources sees re-appearing the same rituals, the same small ceremonies, and reactivates the same images, starts the same reminiscences, recurrences of scenes which however never resemble each other completely.
- Portrait of an Imagined Woman with Totems & Domestic Detail (Caitlin Horsmon, 2004)
A meditation on expanded portraiture, “Portrait of an Imagined Woman with Totems and Domestic Detail” coobles a feminine figure through glimpses of the animal and the lived - predator, prey and extreme close-ups of domestic epiphanies.
- Série BB n°2 : Blanblan/noir ou ‘le savon noir’ (Carole Contant, 2006)
Portrait of Blandine Beauvy (BB) reading black soap, a Francis Ponge book, and a Chomsky book.
- Prepare to Qualify (Clint Enns, 2008)
A circuit bent Atari filled with self doubt struggles to qulify as ‘good’ or ‘valid’ art.
- Broken Windows (Richard O’Sullivan, 2009)
Broken Windows consists of the last footage shot with a digital camcorder - these are the dying gasps of the camera. On one level, the piece might serve as a de-mystification of the digital image itself; the degradation of the image broadly implies the processes by which the real world is interpreted as video. Video’s constitution of the world as image is laid bare, and it is disconcerting to see the torturous decay of the image as the camera fights to maintain its simulation of the world.
- Back + Forth (Clint Enns, 2009)
Shot entirely in one take. This film documents the happenings on one of the strangest streets in Winnipeg.
- Tree Stain Man (homage to Stan) (Peter Snowdon, 2007)
An experimental round dance in three movements, composed using footage of trees taken in Oxford in spring 2001. My first ever roll of Kodachrome 40. A homage to the life-in-work of Stan Brakhage.
- Winnipeg stories: sacrificial memories (Clint Enns, 2008)
An experimental film made from discarded film footage found in thrift shops and flea markets in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Music is eu un miroir, obscurment by natural snow buildings.
- Themes and variations for the naked eye (Caitlin Horsmon, 2007)
Themes and Variations for the Naked Eye borrows objects from the still life and transforms them through the use of the extreme close-up. A curious character evokes sensuality through touch, taking the audience through excavations of a series of bodies and creating a reflection on synchresis, objecthood and interiority.