Solus/EFS Screening at Filmbase, Dublin

An Evening of Experimental Film With

Solus Film Collective & Experimental Film Society

Tuesday September 9th, 6.30 pm, €7,
Filmbase, Curved St., Temple Bar, Dublin 

Solus presents Masha Godovannaya's
'Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear' 

Experimental Film Society presents
‘Forbidden Symmetries’ & ‘Tangled And Far’ 

Solus is an independent film collective. It has the dual aim of showing Irish short and avant-garde films abroad and international short and avant-garde films in Ireland. Experimental Film Society is a not-for-profit entity that promotes, archives and produces work by a dozen experimental filmmakers operating in several different countries. 

The screening of Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear is the third installment of the Solus 2014 tour, covering USA, Russia and Ireland. It is curated and presented by Alan Lambert. For information on the film, please visit:http://www.soluscollective.com/ 

The Experimental Film Society section of the programme consists of: 

Tangled And Far (Vicky Langan/Maximilian Le Cain, 2013, 12 mins) 
This video is the most recent in the ongoing collaboration between Vicky Langan and Maximilian Le Cain. Drawing on footage of Langan’s performances over the past two years, as well as scenes specifically shot for this video, it foregrounds the overlap between intimate domestic detail and its reflection in Langan’s performance work. The private and public projections of her presence and actions collapse into each other in this phantasmagoric continuum of alternate selves and self-images to form a fractured dream portrait. 

Forbidden Symmetries (Dean Kavanagh/Maximilian Le Cain/Rouzbeh Rashidi, 2014, 97 mins) 
This collaborative feature is an ostensibly science fictional trip, arranged in three half-hour ‘phases’, one by each director. They are three witnesses to the invasion giving three accounts. Are they observing the same thing? Were there any warning signs? And, after all they’ve seen and heard, are they even competent to offer a reliable report? The purpose of this film is to demonstrate that an effort to construct functions known not to exist may on occasion produce interesting frauds. (Please note: this film contains intense strobing effects.)

Rouzbeh Rashdi, Dean Kavanagh, Vicky Langan and Maximilian Le Cain will be present to introduce their films. 

Please support Maximilian Le Cain's Cloud Of Skin

My collaborator Maximilian Le Cain is embarking on his debut feature film and needs your support. 

“Ghost love in a haunted landscape: a challenging and darkly poetic experimental feature film.”

— https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cloud-of-skin

Max Le Cain has made more than eighty short, medium and feature length experimental films and videos over the past decade. He is also a film critic and editor of Cork Film Centre’s online experimental film magazine Experimental Conversations. He regularly programmed experimental film for the Cork-based experimental music/film event Black Sun and has presented avant-garde film events in collaboration with, amongst others, Cork Film Centre and Cork Film Festival, involving filmmakers such as Peter Tscherkassky, Pip Chodorov, James Fotopoulos, Abigail Child and Vivienne Dick.

He is currently working in creative partnership with sound/performance artist Vicky Langan. He collaborates with artist Esperanza Collado as ‘The Consecutive Impostors’ in the multi-disciplinary art project Operation Rewrite and with composer Karen Power on the sound / film / performance project Gorging Limpet. He is a member, with Rouzbeh Rashidi and Dean Kavanagh, of the Cinema Cyanide noise project, and of the Experimental Film Societycollective. In 2011, he received an Irish Arts Council bursary award to develop his practice from video to film-on-film work.

For an in-depth account of his work in the context of contemporary Irish experimental film, see New Voices in Irish Experimental Cinema, an article by Donal Foreman.

As a film critic, his writings have appeared in a broad range of international film journals, most notably Senses of Cinema, and in several books, including The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World (Wallflower Press, 2006).

He is based in Cork City, Ireland.

Official website

EFS @ The Guesthouse Double Bill -The Avant Festival

July 17th, The Guesthouse. 7.30pm. Free

The Cork premiere of two films shot last year involving members of Experimental Film Society in which The Guesthouse is one of the main locations.

Tangled And Far (Vicky Langan/Maximilian Le Cain, 2013, 12 mins)

TANGLED AND FAR

This video is the most recent in the ongoing collaboration between Vicky Langan and Maximilian Le Cain. Drawing on footage of Langan’s performances over the past two years, as well as scenes specifically shot for this video, it foregrounds the overlap between intimate domestic detail and its reflection in Langan’s performance work. The private and public projections of her presence and actions collapse into each other in this phantasmagoric continuum of alternate selves and self-images to form a fractured dream portrait.

Forbidden Symmetries (Dean Kavanagh/Maximilian Le Cain/Rouzbeh Rashidi, 2014, 97 mins)

FORBIDDEN SYMMETRIES

Emerging from a Guesthouse residency, this collaborative feature is an ostensibly science fictional trip, arranged in three half-hour ‘phases’, one by each director. They are three witnesses to the invasion giving three accounts. Are they observing the same thing? Were there any warning signs? And, after all they’ve seen and heard, are they even competent to offer a reliable report? The purpose of this film is to demonstrate that an effort to construct functions known not to exist may on occasion produce interesting frauds.

View trailer here.

Tangled and Far - New Langan/Le Cain film

Tangled And Far is the most recent collaboration between Vicky Langan and Maximilian Le Cain. Drawing on footage of Langan’s performances over the past two years, as well as scenes specifically shot for this video, it foregrounds the overlap between intimate domestic detail and its reflection in Langan’s performance work. The private and public projections of her presence and actions collapse into each other in this phantasmagoric continuum of alternate selves and self-images to form a fractured dream portrait. 

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Hereunder now on Vimeo

Here's something myself and Max made back in April 2011. It was filmed in Galway and in Tuam, my hometown. A good portion of this was shot in the middle of the night in my Grandfather's shed. As an only child living with my grandparents, I spent a huge part of my childhood fooling around in there on my own.

I have a sad memory of spending a whole day trying to catch a Bánóg Bheag. Finally I had one clasped between my hands and it, fluttering wildly. I brought it to the shed to transfer it to a jar I had half-filled with india ink, naïvely hoping to help it get patterns on its wings. I forgot about the butterfly and found it drowned the following day. The shed was where I did my best exploring. Tools, rust, strange cans and tins, making up mixtures, climbing up the mountain of turf and sliding down again, finding dead birds, hammering nails into things. For me, so much of my head is tied up in that place.

So far, Hereunder has been screened at the Just Listen sound art festival in Limerick,
Hilltown New Music Festival, Westmeath, Cinekinosis in Bristol, the CineB Festival in Chile and at the Galway Arts Centre.

Hereunder from Vicky Langan on Vimeo.

Collaboration with Maximilian Le Cain 12 mins, HDV

Black Sun Cinema: A Day of Experimental Film at Triskel Christchurch

Presented in association with Triskel Christchurch, Black Sun, Cork’s weirdo/outer limits music/film event, is presenting a day of unsettling experimental film, a host of rare cinematic shadows flickering mysteriously at the darker fringes of the mind. On a Sunday afternoon this August (date will be confirmed next week), adventurous souls seeking haven from the harsh summer light will find sanctuary in Triskel’s Christchurch Cinema as three programmes of hauntingly dreamlike avant-garde visions fall through the church’s muffled darkness to take possession of all present:

- American underground legend James Fotopoulos’ feature The Nest (2003) “offers up a bleak and cryptically funny assault on suburban anomie… Fotopoulos creeps around the edges of character and drama, conjuring moods of paranoia and dread that suggest the carefully ordered routines of daily life are a kind of opiate administered by sinister forces. Shooting in harsh 16mm color, Fotopoulos renders The Nest in a typically Spartan, forbidding style that makes it seem as though he is some extraterrestrial visitor photographing humans for the first time.” (Scott Foundas, Variety) Ideal mind-warping viewing for admirers of David Lynch who think they’ve seen everything...

- Frans Zwartjes is arguably Holland’s preeminent experimental filmmaker. His highly stylised, poetically claustrophobic films achieve a unique level of sensual intimacy in their renditions of sexual and domestic tension, and voyeurism. These wordless works draw on performance art but are equally distinguished by their oneiric visuals, disconcerting editing rhythms and hypnotically minimal sound design. Once Zwartjes has caressed the surface of your eyeballs, you will never see cinema in the same way again. Black Sun will present a mini-retrospective of five of his most accomplished short films from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

 - And three of Ireland’s most uncompromising contemporary experimental filmmakers, Rouzbeh Rashidi, Dean Kavanagh and Black Sun film programmer Maximilian Le Cain, will be on hand to present a series of their more disturbing short films. Strange atmospheres, tense self-portraits, troubled meditations on the ghostly power of cinema itself… Filmmaking at its most eerie and obliquely personal.

 Although best known as an experimental music event, Black Sun is also Cork’s only year-round platform for screening experimental film. For over two years, Black Sun’s film programmes have given Cork an all-too-rare taste of the more far-out side of cinema. It has established an impressive track record of world-class film programming, introducing Irish audiences to the work of several major underground filmmakers for the first time. This is the first of what will become regular Black Sun events devoted exclusively to film.