Saturday 6th at 2pm

XXX: Projector Performance by Bruce McClure.

Bruce McClure doesn’t make films, he performs them. Most movies are frozen on celluloid but McClure’s don’t exist until he creates them in the theater. The New York based artist uses modified 16mm projectors and guitar effects pedals to create dazzling, intense, often starkly simple arrangements of light and sound through a controlled manipulation of rhythm, luminance, focus and form. His projector performances have been included in many international events including the Whitney Biennial, Rotterdam Film Festival, Image Forum (Japan) and the Media City Film Festival, Windsor, Ontario. XXX is a new performance created specially for Colour Out of Space 3.
A mechanical beauty, the movie projector can satisfy by the simultaneous graces of both eye and ear. Between these organs lies the brain in its watery recess shaping the presentation. Analogous to our senses the projector is disjointed and for technical reasons the optical axis and the sound lens are separated by 26 film frames. Conventionally the optical sound line and the discreet film frame are shifted according to the projector's anatomy to bring the eye and ear in sync. 'XXX' triple projection performances use the boundary between film emulsion and the supportive base as a threshold to a scotopic stage show accompanied by psychotropic soundings. Between the swing of the shutter and the other leap of light onto a cathode, a space emerges trod by slow oxen turning the furrowed plain.

Sunday at 12 Midday: Epic Soundtracks: Little Gems of Underground Film

Joy Through Film
Instant Cinema/Flik Flak
Jeff Keen UK 1962 /2008 5 mins DV
‘Jeff Keen has been collecting props from dumpsters and toy shops, spray painting them, setting fire to them and animating the results for forty years. His underground films pre-date Warhol, his fans include some of the most notorious and legendary figures in the world of cinema. Forget the so called greats of the silver screen, the true cinematic visionaries are elsewhere, hidden away, woefully neglected by the bulk of historians, working like alchemists with their old super 8 cameras, chocking refrigerators full of nearly out of date stock and bizarre props made from scrap or purchased in bulk from the pound shop. Jeff keen is one such figure, a true great of the avant-garde, experimental and underground film...’ J.Sargeant. In a programme change Keen reworks two early animations and adds a recently improvised wasp synth/short-wave score that culminates in some boogie woogie swing. We hope Jeff will join us for the screening.
Dove Coup
Ben Rivers UK 2007 4 mins 16mm
Beautifully hand processed and printed using a torch, River’s imprisoned birds take flight disrupting the film frame itself and soaring onto its soundtrack.
Pêche de Nuit
Henri Chopin Luc Peire France Belgium 1963
The late, great Chopin awed everyone at last years festival. Peche de Nuit is a collaboration with the artist Luc Peire - one of two of avant-garde films Chopin created in the 60s. Water, mirrors and abstractions are set to dynamic orchestrations of his voice and body.
Baume im Herbst
Kurt Kren Austria 1960 3 mins 16mm
Deep in the woods, shot in precise patterns, edited in camera, Kren’s trees and branches form abstract shapes and rhythms, flooding the
cinema with calm grey autumnal light. Kren drew on the film’s optical track with ink creating the sound of synthetic storms and wind.
Valentin de las Sierras
Bruce Baille USA 1967 10 mins 16mm
Filmed in a lush spectrum of sunset colours, Baillie’s hand-held camera (initially on horseback) journeys into rural Mexico. The soundtrack is the song of folk hero Valentin, sung by blind Jose Santollo Nadiso.
Place on the Hill
Rob Gawthrop UK, 1979, 6 mins, 16mm
A hipster, a cigarette, a mysterious hill, a quasi-mystical one syllable statement repeated, recut and mined for its phonetic possibilities.
Axiomatic Granularity
Paul Sharits USA 1973 20 mins 16mm
Sharits is best known for a series of flicker films that aimed to alter the brain chemistry though stroboscopic bursts of pure colour and
repitition of sound and image. In ‘Axiomatic’ he takes cinema to its barest essentials - the film grain itself. The process is subtler, the void just as enveloping, reflexive and alluring.
Sync Sound
Taka Iimura Japan 1978 12 mins 16mm
Iimura’s early structural films were part of an attempt to strip theatricality from cinema and re-activate the passive viewer. Sync Sound consists of black leader and white frames anchored around a sound. A game of memory, rhythm and perception.