Film
Light / Sound (7 mins, 2010), the first video I made with Max Le Cain, acclaimed by critic Fergus Daly as one of the top ten films of 2010 in the Senses of Cinema magazine end of year poll, was chosen for distribution by Paris-based experimental film cooperative Collectif Jeune Cinéma.
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Myself, the cub and Ronan Leonard at Triskel Arts Centre, Cork. Photo: Jed Niezgoda
Just about recovered after this year's Corona Cork Film Festival and enjoying some time off before getting ready for next year's festival! Met some lovely people and worked alongside an amazing team of volunteers and annual staff. I didn't get to see as much stuff as I'd like to have seen but it was a real joy to be caught up in the whirlwind of it.
One thing that really caught me by surprise was Paul Duane's excellent documentary Very Extremely Dangerous. Recommended!
Very Extremely Dangerous - Promo from screenworksfilmandtv on Vimeo.
Photo: Marcin Lewandowski
Pictured at our recent programme of experimental Lithuanian cinema at Triskel Arts Centre, 20th October:
(L-R) Alan Lambert, Vicky Langan, Ambassador of Lithuania Vidmantas Purlys, Max Le Cain, Julius Ziz.
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
Dirt (2012) from Vicky Langan on Vimeo.
Since 2010, sound/performance artist Vicky Langan (Wölflinge) and experimental filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain have been working together in a unique creative audio-visual partnership. This is built on the strikingly fitting match between Langan’s magnetic, often troublingly intense presence as a performer and Le Cain’s distinctively jarring, disruptive visual rhythms.
Dirt (2012) is a phantasmagoric mélange of live performances and elements of gothic horror, resulting in a haunting, intense and sometimes humorous portrait of Wölflinge.
Next screening at Hunters Moon Festival, alongside a programme of film from Vivienne Dick, Ludo Mich, Rouzbeh Rashidi and Michael Higgins.
Dirt is dedicated to Lina Romay.
Here are the full programme notes by curator Florian Wüst for last Saturday's Black Sun Cinema screening:
Read MoreBlack Sun Cinema from Black Sun Cinema on Vimeo.
Black Sun Cinema is Cork's platform for experimental, underground and far-out cinema.
For details of past and upcoming events: blacksuncork.tumblr.com/
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.
As part of Judas Steer -Vicky Langan (Wölflinge) at the Galway Arts Centre, on Saturday May 19th, myself and Max Le Cain will be screening our newly finished film DIRT for the first time.
Below are some stills...
Photo by softblackstar
Judas Steer
Vicky Langan (Wölflinge) at the Galway Arts Centre, May 19th.
€5 / BYOB / 8PM
http://www.galwayartscentre.ie/events/view-event/192.html
Vicky Langan is a Galway-born, Cork-based performer and curator whose “vulnerable, emotionally charged performances” (The Wire) have marked her out as one of the most challenging and unsettling presences on the Irish scene today. Her work is multifaceted, embracing not only various types of performance but also filmmaking and organising experimental music events. In this event, she will be bringing these three strands of her practice back home, giving Galway audiences a rare, concentrated one-night blast of the intensity that has made her a force to be reckoned with in Cork.
Judas Steer will feature Langan as performer, filmmaker and curator. Her solo performance project, Wölflinge, uses flesh, fluid and self-built instruments to envelop audiences in an aura of dark intimacy. In opening herself emotionally, she creates warm yet discomforting rituals that at once embrace the viewers and remain resolutely private. Not only will Langan be performing, but she will also present an exhibition of recreations, relics and leavings of past performances. In partnership with experimental filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain, Langan has created a series of films that expand the scope of her performance activities. Le Cain’s distinctively jarring, disruptive visual rhythms have proved a strikingly fitting match to her troubling sensibility. Four Langan/Le Cain films will be screened, including the premiere of a brand new work.
No account of Langan’s accomplishments is complete without mention of Black Sun, Cork’s legendary weirdo/outer limits music event which she founded in 2009 and has curated ever since. Her DJ set, which closes the evening, will give a powerful taste of the sort of strange sounds that have earned Black Sun its international reputation.
Black Sun returns to the Triskel on Saturday 31st March for a night of powerful intensity. We welcome artist and composer John Wiese (USA), Wölfbait, the Irish premiere of 80’s Serbian underground film 'Personal Discipline' and a performance from First Blood Part II & Wölflinge. Doors 8pm.
John Wiese (www.john-wiese.com) is an artist and composer from Los Angeles, California. He works primarily in recorded and performed sound with a focus on installation and multi-channel diffusions, as well as scoring for large ensembles. His ongoing projects include LHD and Sissy Spacek, but is known for his collaborations with many artists as diverse as Sunn O))), Wolf Eyes, Merzbow, Thurston Moore, Bastard Noise, No Age, Smegma, Kevin Drumm, Cattle Decapitation, and C. Spencer Yeh as well as his work as a solo artist. He has toured extensively throughout the world, covering Europe, Scandinavia and Australia as a member of Sunn O))), the UK as part of the Free Noise tour (a tentet including Evan Parker, C. Spencer Yeh, Yellow Swans, etc.), the United States alongside Wolf Eyes, and recently performed in the 52nd Venice Biennale with artist Nico Vascellari. While releasing albums on a variety of international labels, Wiese often releases work on his own label, Helicopter.
You've no doubt heard the rave reports regarding John's recent album for the great PAN label, Seven Of Wands and know his astounding back catalogue that finds itself filed under noise but isn't done justice by that narrow pigeonhole, with a technique more akin to the scientific precision of the late and legendary Maryanne Amacher, combined with tape collage, bloodyminded humour and a raft of sublime collaborations. Live, there's a deft artistry to John's work that sets him ahead of most others working in his area, his live shows as searing and explosive as they are intricately constructed.
This upcoming Black Sun will be shaken by a piercing cry of defiance swelling up from an astonishing and all-but-unknown zone of film history. Miroslav-Bata Petrović and Julijana Terek’s Personal Discipline (1983), without doubt the rarest film Black Sun has yet presented, is a product of the early ‘80s Serbian underground. Throbbing with punk attitude, it details a private ritual enacted by writer/performer Terek spilling onto the street in an irresistible upsurge of self-assertion in the face of repressive societal indifference. The pounding rhythms of Petrović’s aggressive editing combine with Terek’s beguiling concentration to create an experience liable to leave the viewer gasping for breath... We are delighted to be giving Personal Discipline its Irish premiere!
Also lined up is the debut Cork appearance from Wölfbait. I saw these guys in Dublin back in January and my eyes were rolling in their sockets it was so good. Delivering total UNGH! with perfect vocals.
First Blood Part II & Wölflinge return again for bewildering and raw, intimate action.
