The exhibition that MuMa dedicates to Nicolas de Staël gives us the opportunity to question the materiality of the image. Light as a raw material. It passes through the eye of a painter who restores it in his landscapes: glowing in the South, changing in the North. In the films of Nathaniel Dorsky and Paul Clipson, it flows into the camera lens and fixes into film, writing that subtle partition of clear and dark, revealing the optical magic of the recording device.

Device set aside by practitioners of direct cinema, cameraless film, who paint directly on the film as Stan Brakhage and Emmanuel Lefrant. The film strip is no longer simply the space where the image is formed, it increases in thickness and becomes the concrete support of the pictorial material. A different material for the image, the pixel has only temporal reality, but may be subject to speculation. In the work of Jacques Perconte, compressions and decompressions allow passages from the figurative to the abstract, without opposing them, as in the painting of Staël.

Wry and formally ingenious, John Smith’s films are playful explorations of the language of cinema and thought-provoking reflections on the image’s role in politics, war, and the global economy. The 2013 Jarman Award winner will screen and discuss a selection of films from throughout his career including Slow Glass (1988-91), an exploration of memory, perception and change through the stories of a nostalgic glazier; Blight (1994-96) a stunning montage depicting the destruction of a London street to make way for new roads; and Pyramids / Skunk (Hotel Diaries #5) (2006-07), in which a chocolate bar in a Rotterdam hotel room eventually reminds the filmmaker that there are important things going on in the world outside. (76 minutes)

Brakhage and Solomon are two American giants in the so-called poetic, lyrical and personal film. Stan Brakhage is one of the most influential filmmakers in American avant-garde cinema, noted for his unflinching social commentaries and technical innovations. Over his nearly 40-year career, he has made over 200 films of varying length. He made his first film, Interim (1952) at age 18 after dropping out of college. Brakhage films seek to change the way we see. They encourage viewers to eschew traditional narrative structure in favor of pure visual perception that is not reliant on naming what is seen; rather his goal is to create a more visceral visual experience, for he believes that a "stream-of visual-consciousness could be nothing less than the pathway of the soul." To this end, his films are shot in highly sensual colors and utilize minimal soundtracks. Phil Solomon is an internationally recognized filmmaker and has been teaching both film history/aesthetics and film production at CU since 1991. Professor Solomon's work has been screened in every major venue for experimental film throughout the U.S. and Europe, including 3 Cineprobes (one-man shows) at the Museum of Modern Art and two Whitney Biennials. 

Laida Lertxundi (b. 1981, Spain) makes films with non-actors – often friends – in and around Los Angeles, the city where she studied under James Benning and Thom Andersen, and where she has been living for a number of years. Shot under the blue Californian sky, her films feature the same topography as Hollywood cinema. Lertxundi questions cinematic conventions of representation and storytelling in her work at the same time that she proposes new associations between sound and image. In London, Beatrice Gibson (b. 1978, UK) addresses similar formal and conceptual concerns in her work, which is also shaped by the material constraints and aesthetic properties of 16mm film. Beyond the differences in the specific subjects of their films, the underlying themes in their work – speculative narrative, film as landscape, sound as material, the production process, collaborative practice – resonate in an uncanny way. The screening will be followed by a conversation between the two filmmakers and curator Maria Palacios Cruz, who has written an essay on the films of Gibson and Lertxundi for the forthcoming issue of Sequence.