Film Talks: A Touring Program of Experimental Cinema

Program 1 of Film Talks will be hosted by the Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago on May 9.

Program 2 will be hosted by Block Cinema at Northwestern University on May 10. 

Film Talks: 15 Conversations on Experimental Cinema, edited by Andrew Vallance and Simon Payne, is a collection of unique conversations on experimental cinema, involving a range of international film and video makers from the United Kingdom, Europe and North America. The book represents a snapshot of diverse ways that several practitioners have come to think about the field of experimental cinema, in relation to other art forms, moving image culture at large, and wider social issues. This touring film program features over twenty 16mm films and video works by several of the artists who feature in Film Talks, drawing out new ideas and connections that span different visions of cinema.

Andrew Vallance and Simon Payne will be present to introduce the screenings. Copies of Film Talks will be available for purchase. For details of the book please see here. 

Film Talks is supported by the Arts University Bournemouth and Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK.

Program 1

Candle, Neil Henderson (UK, 2018, 16mm, colour, silent, 3 mins)

Arm, Flexion, Extension, Bea Haut (UK, 2011, 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 mins) 

Inflated (Double) Struggle, Jenny Baines (UK, 2018, 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 mins)

Babbler, Fairy and Thrush, Karel Doing (UK, 2022, 16mm, colour, sound, 4 mins)

It Matters What, Francisca Duran (Canada, 2019, 16mm digital transfer, colour, sound, 9 mins)

Four Diamonds, Ute Aurand (Germany, 2016, 16mm, colour, sound, 5 mins)

Dark Garden, Nick Collins (UK, 2011, 16mm, b/w, silent, 9 mins)

Five films by Helga Fanderl: Yali; Evening Twinkling; Afternoon Light; Persimmon Tree III; Big Waters 

(Germany, 2011–2012, 16mm blow-ups from Super8, 18fps, colour, silent, 10 mins)

Gasometers 3, Nicky Hamlyn (UK, 2015, 16mm, b/w and colour, silent, 13 mins) 

Night-line, Andrew Vallance (UK, 2023, digital, colour, sound, 10 mins)

Total duration: 70 mins.

Candle, Neil Henderson (UK, 2018, 16mm, colour, silent, 3 mins)

A polaroid of a candle is observed developing from the moment of capture to its final state. The film presents this event in reverse. As the image ‘un-develops’ it dissolves/fades into a frame of white light, illuminating the space and audience in the process. The photographic process takes exactly as long as one 100ft roll of 16mm, creating an equivalence between a still and a moving medium.

Neil Henderson originally made spectacular expanded cinema pieces for up to one hundred Super8 projectors. More recently his 16mm films have involved durational strategies to reveal hidden natural phenomena and structures concerning the landscape, natural light and a range of photographic processes.

Arm, Flexion, Extension, Bea Haut (UK, 2011, 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 mins) 

Arm, Flexion, Extension is a study of domestic time and space. Haphazardly hand-processed 16mm film blurs the distinction between the darkroom and the kitchen sink. Task as performance: a mundane action turned into an imperative gesture. The filmmaker struggles to control her environment. Base material pulses between the abstract and the everyday.

Bea Haut’s films relate ‘everyday’ moments, spaces, and actions, often in absurd and unexpected ways. She positions analogue film as a material with distinct agency. The trace and form of its processes defines her practice. Haut co-founded Loophole Cinema (1989-1998), with Greg Pope, and since 2012 has been programming the film event Analogue Recurring, with David Leister. She also initiated Film in Process (2015-9), with Karel Doing.

Inflated (Double) Struggle, Jenny Baines (UK, 2018, 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 mins)

The performance for camera depicts the artist and another person of equal strength wrestling an oversized balloon. This absurd act seems at times tender and at other times violent. The performance is determined by the camera’s mechanism in correlation to the physical endurance of the performers.

Jenny Baines’s practice finds its form though the relationship between her body and particular mechanisms associated with film. Using a wind-up 16mm Bolex camera to capture her images, and as a timer, she performs actions for the device, exploring the parameters of the apparatus and her own physical endurance. All of her films are edited in-camera. Sometimes they are looped or made for double-screen projection and have been exhibited as gallery installations.

Babbler, Fairy and Thrush, Karel Doing (UK, 2022, 16mm, colour, sound, 4 mins)

An unfiltered stream of perception: small objects and grand panoramas appear simultaneously. The certainties of near and far, detail and overview, inside and outside are deliberately thrown into confusion. Aided by ‘in camera’ superimposition and traveling mattes, a near abstract experience is created. The work was conceived and shot within a few hundred yards from my house, focusing on the plants, flowers, trees and ferns that grow around me.

Karel Doing is an independent artist, filmmaker and researcher whose practice is framed as a search for new meanings that can be attributed to the material of film. His experimental films and expanded cinema works explore different systems of knowledge that relate to phytochemical processes (the development of films using chemicals found in plants) as well as oral histories and historical film footage. Many of his films, from the early 1990s onwards, foreground the rhythmic, textural and performative qualities of the analogue film medium are foregrounded. Since 2014, he has run numerous workshops in phytography.  

It Matters What, Francisca Duran (Canada, 2019, 16mm digital transfer, colour, sound, 9 mins)

Absences and translations motivate this experimental animation in an exploration of the methods and materials of reproduction and inscription. A fragment from Donna Haraway’s essay ‘Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene’ is reworked here as a poetic manifesto. Enigmatic found-footage calls into question human violence over animal species. Plant life is both the subject matter of the images and assists the means of photographic reproduction.

Francisca Duran is an experimental media artist who creates films, installations and mixed media works about history, memory and violence. She moved to Canada following the military coup in Chile in 1973. Her experience of exile is integral to her artistic practice which centres on traces and lost, irretrievable things. Working with photography, film, digital video and other media, she takes images and sounds apart and reassembles them to reveal the tactile qualities of media that are often thought of as ephemeral. 

Four Diamonds, Ute Aurand (Germany, 2016, 16mm, colour, sound, 5 mins)

Two memories from a longer visit to New England in Autumn 2012: a group of elderly ladies playing bridge followed by the stormy ocean at Cape Cod in Winter while listening to Etienne Grenier's music practice.

Ute Aurand is a 16mm filmmaker. She has produced a distinctive body of work and has actively promoted other female filmmakers through influential curatorial initiatives, such as Filmarbeiterinnen-Abend (1990-95), and the publication Frauen machen Geschichte – 25 Jahre Studentinnen an der DFFB (Women Make History – 25 Years of Women Students at the DFFB) with Maria Lang.

Dark Garden, Nick Collins (UK, 2011, 16mm, b/w, silent, 9 mins)

16mm's black can be as dark as a winter's night. Dark Garden is akin to a black-and-white herbarium shot in the filmmaker's garden on one such cold night. Frozen plant skeletons appear on the dark emulsion and reveal their delicacy in a silver glow.

Nick Collins predominately works with 16mm film, exploring landscapes and the mark of time. He studied History at Cambridge, in the mid-1970s, before enrolling at the Slade School of Art. Around this time, he also discovered the London Filmmakers Co-operative, and its experimental culture, and this is where his filmmaking really started to flourish.

Five films by Helga Fanderl: Yali; Evening Twinkling; Afternoon Light; Persimmon Tree III; Big Waters (Germany, 2011–2012, 16mm blow-ups from Super8, 18fps, colour, silent, 10 mins)

My films record encounters with events and images in the real world that attract me. There is no post-production in my work. Every single film preserves and reflects the traces of its creation, the sensations and emotions I felt in the moment of filming.

Helga Fanderl initially studied German, Romance Languages and Literature. After working as a professor of literature for many years, she decided to study and make art. Since then, she has developed a unique 8mm film practice. Fanderl’s films are partially systematic, but through editing in-camera she has developed a form of shooting that is responsive and lyrical. Fanderl’s work has won many awards including the Coutts Contemporary Art Award and the German Film Critics Association Prize for Experimental Film.

Gasometers 3, Nicky Hamlyn (UK, 2015, 16mm, b/w and colour, silent, 13 mins) 

One of a series of films focusing on redundant gas holders (known as gasometers in the UK) most of which were constructed between 1860 and 1890. My primary interest with the film is the way they filter, reflect, refract and break up the light that falls on them. The latticework columns and circular girders generate complex patterns of overlapping shadow movements and shifts of light. Gasometers often come in pairs, so that there is additional interplay of cast shadows over the course of a day. 

Nicky Hamlyn studied Fine Art at Reading University where he became interested in film. Later, he joined the London Filmmakers’ Co-op and was co-founder of the journal Undercut. His work includes 16mm films, expanded works and video. He often uses the camera as means to explore his immediate environment, testing the productive relationship between the lens, the frame and the form of his subject matter. Hamlyn has written widely on artists’ film and video. His book Film Art Phenomena was published in 2003. He has also recently co-edited books on Kurt Kren and experimental animation.

Night-line, Andrew Vallance (UK, 2023, digital, colour, sound, 10 mins)

After dark London takes on a different form, when work, leisure and other activities diverge from daylight expectations. New sensibilities emerge and time and space are recalibrated. At night, sound bends towards the earth, flattening sonic perspective. Night-line pursues the nocturnal city from dusk to early morning, a place that gets in your head. Sometimes it is liberating, at other times a refuge. It is forever relentless and enveloping.

Andrew Vallance’s video works concern his sense of the urban environment, its sedimented histories and relational narratives. Vallance has also developed numerous curatorial projects, working with Simon Payne, initially on Assembly: A Survey of Recent British Artists’ Film and Video, 2008-13 (Tate Britain) and various events under the banner of Contact. He has championed experimental filmmaking of all descriptions and explored discursive forms of programming that brings artists together in conversation. 

About the Editors:

Andrew Vallance is a video artist whose works concern his sense of the urban environment, its sedimented histories and relational narratives. Vallance has also developed numerous curatorial projects, working with Simon Payne, initially on Assembly: A Survey of Recent British Artists’ Film and Video, 2008-13 (Tate Britain) and various events under the banner of Contact. He has championed experimental filmmaking of all descriptions and explored discursive forms of programming that brings artists together in conversation.

Simon Payne is a video maker whose works involve systematic graphic sequences, abstract color fields, and an exploration of digital video aesthetics. His work has been shown in festivals and screenings worldwide. He has also written widely on experimental cinema. He edited the no.w.here journal Sequence: New Artists’ Film & Video (2011–6), co-edited the book Kurt Kren: Structural Films, with Nicky Hamlyn and A.L. Rees, whose posthumous book, Fields of View: Film, Art and Spectatorship, he also edited. Since 2013, he has been co-curating Contact with Andrew Vallance.

Film Talks is supported by the Arts University Bournemouth and Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK.