Dates:
18 Nov 2009 - 19 Nov 2009
People:
Christian Bertin, Sonia Boyce, Mike Dibb, Omer Fast, Anthony Gross, Gil Leung, Eleanor Nairne, Holly Parotti, Judy Price, Sheena Rose, John Sealey, Gary Stewart, Campbell X.
Location:
Arnolfini, Bristol
Running alongside the Encounters Film Festival, ICF produced a two-day intervention (18 & 19 November 2011) at the Arnolfini in Bristol, threading together responses to the multiplicity of issues that impact on the production, distribution and critical reflection of the moving image in an era of mass and intimate media.
Inspirational, internationally acclaimed artists, curators and agencies were brought together to discuss and reflect on the historical and contemporary impact of cinema as both an industry and scene of cultural production. For the first time the focus was on discussing how artists have engaged with the mainstream processes of production in cinema whilst retaining their aesthetic and political edge. The discussions also explored how this dialogue between cinema, gallery and digital platforms can challenge the artist and curator to find new ways to make the staging of vision memorable.
Masterclass: David A Bailey in conversation with Mike Dibb
18 November
16:30 – 19:00
This session was an opportunity to gain an intimate yet detailed experience of Dibb’s work. Mike Dibb has been making films for television and mainstream cinema for nearly 50 years. During that time he has defined and re-defined not only the televisual art documentary genre but has been able to make moving image pieces as a form of self portraiture. The masterclass was followed by a premier screening of Mike Dibb’s 75min film Playing Against Time.
Playing Against Time by Mike Dibb (2011)
A powerful and moving ‘medical/musical’ exploration of Parkinson’s Disease, featuring the virtuoso UK jazz saxophonist/composer Barbara Thompson and her husband, the jazz-rock drummer Jon Hiseman. For over forty years the saxophonist/composer Barbara Thompson has been Britain’s most brilliant and best-known woman jazz musician. Her original compositions and soaring improvisations have attracted large and enthusiastic audiences beyond the confines of contemporary jazz. She’s released many albums and toured regularly throughout Europe, mainly with her own band Paraphernalia. Then, tragically, in 1997 Barbara was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and by 2001 had to stop playing in public. Since 2003 various new drugs have restored intermittent mobility in her fingers, miraculously allowing her to play again – but for how long? Playing against Time is a 75 minute documentary about Barbara’s inspiring struggle with this degenerative disease of the central nervous system that has increasingly affected her life and work. Written and directed by the award-winning arts documentary film maker Mike Dibb, it has been made across a period of five years with the support of The Wellcome Trust and now been acquired by the BBC for UK TV transmission on dates to be confirmed. Interweaving musical and medical sequences, Playing against Time follows Barbara and Jon as they try to pursue their lives as musicians while struggling with uncertain- ties over Barbara’s worsening condition and the side-effects of her medication.The film features a remarkably intimate look at their daily life as well as following the couple through their consultations at London’s King’s College Hospital with Professor Ray Chaudhuri and with Oxford Professor Tipu Aziz, the UK’s leading authority on deep brain stimulation by implanted electrodes.
Panel discussion: The spectacle of the performer
19 November
10:30 – 12:30
This session provided a unique insight into the imaginations of the performer/artists – what she/he feels, sees, imagines and re-imagines rather than a dialectic relationship between spectator/voyeur and audience. This idea of performance, the art object, the artists and the subject has been an important theme in contemporary art for a number of artists.
The panellist are: Mike Dibb, Gary Stewart, Judy Price and Sonia Boyce.
Crop Over by Sonia Boyce (2007)
“Sonia Boyce’s two-screen video Crop Over (2007) visually samples the many traditions, histories and cultural practices that inform this Barbadian festival, culminating with the carnivalesque parade known as Kadooment. Presenting a wide range of related performances, some real and some staged by the artist, Boyce constructs a pseudo-documentary, pseudo-pantomime collage of events that subtly reveals the multiple dimensions of this creolized spectacle, deliberately building up layers of interpretation and presentation that seek to identify, historicize and problematize these cultural icons. Unlike many of the pre-lenten carnivals in the region, Crop Over celebrates the end of the sugar cane season, and directly ties the subversive elements and inversions of traditional carnival to the sugar economy of the Caribbean, with its relationship to families like the Lascelles of Harewood House in the UK, and their historical dependence on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. While traditional representations of Carnival by artists such as Belisario are marked, according to Stuart Hall, by what is not said, Boyce’s Crop Over is motivated by what remains unexplained.” (Allison Thompson, Small Axe (Vol 13, No 2) June 2009.)
Panel discussion: Narrative
13:30 – 15:00
How moving image works deploy elements of storytelling, myths and legends has been closely linked with the notion of how artists have dealt with this theme through their exploration of how these so called narrative tales are re- worked within the machinery of popular culture.
The panellist are John Sealey, Anthony Gross and Campbell X.
Presentations: Moving image commissions & collections.
15:30 – 17:00.
At the beginning of the 21st century there has been a massive shift in relation to moving image art commissions. Established visual art organisations have now developed moving image projects as a major element in their organisation mission to the point where over the last 20 years significant art organisations and moving image agencies have dramatically change the parameters in relation to moving image commissions and how that work is archive and collected. This session focused on 2 moving image art institutions and collections – Lux presented by Gil Leung and Artangel presented by Eleanor Nairne.
Following on from this presentation there was special screening of Omer Fast’s Venice 2011 project and the launch of his book In Memory.
Five Thousand Feet Is Best by Omer Fast (2011)
Omer Fast’s film Five Thousand Feet Is Best takes its name from an excerpt of an interview between Fast and a Predator Drone aerial vehicle operator now based in Las Vegas and working as a casino security guard. The operator recalls his jobs in Afghanistan and Pakistan, activating the unmanned plane to fire at civilians and militia from the optimum height of five thousand feet. For the large part Fast shows us reconstructions of the interview and memories, using actors and a more cinematic aesthetic. The re-enacted interview takes place inside a Las Vegas hotel room, the operator awkwardly propped-up on the bed, as if ambushed there by Diane Arbus for his portrait. The actor operator is defensive, while the genuine one is more confessional: ‘there was such a loss of life as a direct result of me’, he says. Despite his frankness, we know that the operator broke off the interview with Fast, and often diverted the discussion to anecdotes from his current life policing the casino. His excuse was that ‘we tell these stories to make life a little less boring’, but it is clear that the stories offer an escape from memories and guilt rooted far from Las Vegas. This evasion technique becomes integral to Fast’s reconstructed footage, the interview constantly digressing into vignettes of casino fraud and robbery. Fast is constantly provoking the audience’s certainty and empathy.
In addition to a constant undermining of what has been said, the film contains much ambiguity. As the operator describes a roadside bombing mission, we see an American family pack into a car and embark on a road trip. Leaving suburbia, they soon drive through terrain that might, it suddenly seems, be Middle Eastern. The voiceover offers no clarification; ‘In these parts of the country, it’s hard to get lost …’ Likewise, Fast interweaves aerial views from Las Vegas (including its version of Venice’s St Mark’s and Rialto, a disorientating experience in itself for those watching the film at the Biennale in Venice, Italy) with military aerial surveillance footage from the Middle East. This juxtaposition of pleasure and military flights only becomes more uncomfortable as we realise the American car trip narrative is about to collide with the Drone operation one. Thus the family’s car is caught in the fire from five thousand feet, and as the smoke clears, we see that its occupants are motionless and bloody. Then, in a characteristic twist, Fast has the family get up from their slumped positions, clamber out of the wrecked car, and walk off set, exposing themselves as actors in the story. We watch, feeling duped and insecure – by now completely unable to trust what is shown us, and yet equally unable to feel nothing.
Caribbean cinema club screenings.
17:30 – 18:30
Working in Trinidad with Chris Ofili and several local artists, Peter Doig established the StudioFilmClub at CCA, the Centre For Contemporary Arts, which became a way to show to a mass audience classic films by Caribbean artists such as Horace Ove, as well as work by up and coming emerging artists. It is our intention as a homage to present: The Cinema Club, a screening of rarely seen but influential films that reflect the Caribbean and might define the genealogy of the moving image as an art form.
Breathe by Holly Parotti (2011)
“Take a deep breath, you’ll feel better” is often advised when someone is under emotional duress. Breathing exercises are recommended to manage anxiety and bring relaxation. Drawing oxygen into the body followed by expelling carbon dioxide can be almost involuntary although it is inherent. Breathe looks at the physical mechanics of the body while in the process of trying to calm a body during hyperventilation. The use of x-ray imagery and the awkward movement of a starkly contrasted body under stress attempts to illustrate the fragility of the human body performing such a basic yet vital routine.
Ragga Gyal D’Bout! by Campbell X (1993)
Dancehall music is often portrayed as sexist and homophobic, yet many Black women are ardent fans. Ragga Gyal D’Bout! explores the complexity and layering of music, identity, desire culture and politics. The women in this short film surprise us with their responses as they show there are no easy answers or solutions to loving a music genre vilified by LGBT activists and feminists.
Town and Cape Town by Sheena Rose (2009)
The primary focus of my animation is something that I can arguably say everyone struggles with, and that is constantly thinking about our daily problems. There are not very many times during the day when our minds are at rest. We are always dwelling on something that we need to do; a broken relationship, how we are going to manage paying the electricity bill.I am interested in the daily lives of Barbadian people, especially with what is going on in their minds. Cape Town is an animation that is about the busy urban life style and experience of Cape Town. The animation is not a narrative, it is more abstracted. It is focusing on the shopping stores, signs and shopping windows. It would let the viewers realise that our mind collects information subconsciously and it creates a very abstract story.
Diable Rouge by Christian Bertin (2010)
A documented live performance in Paris by the Martinique artist Christian Bertin.
The work of Christian Bertin revolves around the ideas of Aimé Césaire. It was Aimé Césaire who not only inspired Bertin but also supported his sponsorship to art school. In Bertin performance the artist carried a large red drum container (which he calls the devil) which has in its container small quotes from Aimé Césaire writings which is printed on small sheets of paper. Bertin then hands out the Césaire quotes to the audience. In this interactive performance Bertin takes on the form/persona of a carnival performer using the red container as a mask and the Aimé Césaire quotes as the vocal performative discourse.
Moving image and sound performance.
19:00 – 20:00
Gary Stewart presents a moving image and sound based new work.
Running alongside the Encounters Film Festival, ICF produced a two-day intervention (18 & 19 November 2011) at the Arnolfini in Bristol, threading together responses to the multiplicity of issues that impact on the production, distribution and critical reflection of the moving image in an era of mass and intimate media.
Inspirational, internationally acclaimed artists, curators and agencies were brought together to discuss and reflect on the historical and contemporary impact of cinema as both an industry and scene of cultural production. For the first time the focus was on discussing how artists have engaged with the mainstream processes of production in cinema whilst retaining their aesthetic and political edge. The discussions also explored how this dialogue between cinema, gallery and digital platforms can challenge the artist and curator to find new ways to make the staging of vision memorable.
Masterclass: David A Bailey in conversation with Mike Dibb
18 November
16:30 – 19:00
This session was an opportunity to gain an intimate yet detailed experience of Dibb’s work. Mike Dibb has been making films for television and mainstream cinema for nearly 50 years. During that time he has defined and re-defined not only the televisual art documentary genre but has been able to make moving image pieces as a form of self portraiture. The masterclass was followed by a premier screening of Mike Dibb’s 75min film Playing Against Time.
Playing Against Time by Mike Dibb (2011)
A powerful and moving ‘medical/musical’ exploration of Parkinson’s Disease, featuring the virtuoso UK jazz saxophonist/composer Barbara Thompson and her husband, the jazz-rock drummer Jon Hiseman. For over forty years the saxophonist/composer Barbara Thompson has been Britain’s most brilliant and best-known woman jazz musician. Her original compositions and soaring improvisations have attracted large and enthusiastic audiences beyond the confines of contemporary jazz. She’s released many albums and toured regularly throughout Europe, mainly with her own band Paraphernalia. Then, tragically, in 1997 Barbara was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and by 2001 had to stop playing in public. Since 2003 various new drugs have restored intermittent mobility in her fingers, miraculously allowing her to play again – but for how long? Playing against Time is a 75 minute documentary about Barbara’s inspiring struggle with this degenerative disease of the central nervous system that has increasingly affected her life and work. Written and directed by the award-winning arts documentary film maker Mike Dibb, it has been made across a period of five years with the support of The Wellcome Trust and now been acquired by the BBC for UK TV transmission on dates to be confirmed. Interweaving musical and medical sequences, Playing against Time follows Barbara and Jon as they try to pursue their lives as musicians while struggling with uncertain- ties over Barbara’s worsening condition and the side-effects of her medication.The film features a remarkably intimate look at their daily life as well as following the couple through their consultations at London’s King’s College Hospital with Professor Ray Chaudhuri and with Oxford Professor Tipu Aziz, the UK’s leading authority on deep brain stimulation by implanted electrodes.
Panel discussion: The spectacle of the performer
19 November
10:30 – 12:30
This session provided a unique insight into the imaginations of the performer/artists – what she/he feels, sees, imagines and re-imagines rather than a dialectic relationship between spectator/voyeur and audience. This idea of performance, the art object, the artists and the subject has been an important theme in contemporary art for a number of artists.
The panellist are: Mike Dibb, Gary Stewart, Judy Price and Sonia Boyce.
Crop Over by Sonia Boyce (2007)
“Sonia Boyce’s two-screen video Crop Over (2007) visually samples the many traditions, histories and cultural practices that inform this Barbadian festival, culminating with the carnivalesque parade known as Kadooment. Presenting a wide range of related performances, some real and some staged by the artist, Boyce constructs a pseudo-documentary, pseudo-pantomime collage of events that subtly reveals the multiple dimensions of this creolized spectacle, deliberately building up layers of interpretation and presentation that seek to identify, historicize and problematize these cultural icons. Unlike many of the pre-lenten carnivals in the region, Crop Over celebrates the end of the sugar cane season, and directly ties the subversive elements and inversions of traditional carnival to the sugar economy of the Caribbean, with its relationship to families like the Lascelles of Harewood House in the UK, and their historical dependence on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. While traditional representations of Carnival by artists such as Belisario are marked, according to Stuart Hall, by what is not said, Boyce’s Crop Over is motivated by what remains unexplained.” (Allison Thompson, Small Axe (Vol 13, No 2) June 2009.)
Panel discussion: Narrative
13:30 – 15:00
How moving image works deploy elements of storytelling, myths and legends has been closely linked with the notion of how artists have dealt with this theme through their exploration of how these so called narrative tales are re- worked within the machinery of popular culture.
The panellist are John Sealey, Anthony Gross and Campbell X.
Presentations: Moving image commissions & collections.
15:30 – 17:00.
At the beginning of the 21st century there has been a massive shift in relation to moving image art commissions. Established visual art organisations have now developed moving image projects as a major element in their organisation mission to the point where over the last 20 years significant art organisations and moving image agencies have dramatically change the parameters in relation to moving image commissions and how that work is archive and collected. This session focused on 2 moving image art institutions and collections – Lux presented by Gil Leung and Artangel presented by Eleanor Nairne.
Following on from this presentation there was special screening of Omer Fast’s Venice 2011 project and the launch of his book In Memory.
Five Thousand Feet Is Best by Omer Fast (2011)
Omer Fast’s film Five Thousand Feet Is Best takes its name from an excerpt of an interview between Fast and a Predator Drone aerial vehicle operator now based in Las Vegas and working as a casino security guard. The operator recalls his jobs in Afghanistan and Pakistan, activating the unmanned plane to fire at civilians and militia from the optimum height of five thousand feet. For the large part Fast shows us reconstructions of the interview and memories, using actors and a more cinematic aesthetic. The re-enacted interview takes place inside a Las Vegas hotel room, the operator awkwardly propped-up on the bed, as if ambushed there by Diane Arbus for his portrait. The actor operator is defensive, while the genuine one is more confessional: ‘there was such a loss of life as a direct result of me’, he says. Despite his frankness, we know that the operator broke off the interview with Fast, and often diverted the discussion to anecdotes from his current life policing the casino. His excuse was that ‘we tell these stories to make life a little less boring’, but it is clear that the stories offer an escape from memories and guilt rooted far from Las Vegas. This evasion technique becomes integral to Fast’s reconstructed footage, the interview constantly digressing into vignettes of casino fraud and robbery. Fast is constantly provoking the audience’s certainty and empathy.
In addition to a constant undermining of what has been said, the film contains much ambiguity. As the operator describes a roadside bombing mission, we see an American family pack into a car and embark on a road trip. Leaving suburbia, they soon drive through terrain that might, it suddenly seems, be Middle Eastern. The voiceover offers no clarification; ‘In these parts of the country, it’s hard to get lost …’ Likewise, Fast interweaves aerial views from Las Vegas (including its version of Venice’s St Mark’s and Rialto, a disorientating experience in itself for those watching the film at the Biennale in Venice, Italy) with military aerial surveillance footage from the Middle East. This juxtaposition of pleasure and military flights only becomes more uncomfortable as we realise the American car trip narrative is about to collide with the Drone operation one. Thus the family’s car is caught in the fire from five thousand feet, and as the smoke clears, we see that its occupants are motionless and bloody. Then, in a characteristic twist, Fast has the family get up from their slumped positions, clamber out of the wrecked car, and walk off set, exposing themselves as actors in the story. We watch, feeling duped and insecure – by now completely unable to trust what is shown us, and yet equally unable to feel nothing.
Caribbean cinema club screenings.
17:30 – 18:30
Working in Trinidad with Chris Ofili and several local artists, Peter Doig established the StudioFilmClub at CCA, the Centre For Contemporary Arts, which became a way to show to a mass audience classic films by Caribbean artists such as Horace Ove, as well as work by up and coming emerging artists. It is our intention as a homage to present: The Cinema Club, a screening of rarely seen but influential films that reflect the Caribbean and might define the genealogy of the moving image as an art form.
Breathe by Holly Parotti (2011)
“Take a deep breath, you’ll feel better” is often advised when someone is under emotional duress. Breathing exercises are recommended to manage anxiety and bring relaxation. Drawing oxygen into the body followed by expelling carbon dioxide can be almost involuntary although it is inherent. Breathe looks at the physical mechanics of the body while in the process of trying to calm a body during hyperventilation. The use of x-ray imagery and the awkward movement of a starkly contrasted body under stress attempts to illustrate the fragility of the human body performing such a basic yet vital routine.
Ragga Gyal D’Bout! by Campbell X (1993)
Dancehall music is often portrayed as sexist and homophobic, yet many Black women are ardent fans. Ragga Gyal D’Bout! explores the complexity and layering of music, identity, desire culture and politics. The women in this short film surprise us with their responses as they show there are no easy answers or solutions to loving a music genre vilified by LGBT activists and feminists.
Town and Cape Town by Sheena Rose (2009)
The primary focus of my animation is something that I can arguably say everyone struggles with, and that is constantly thinking about our daily problems. There are not very many times during the day when our minds are at rest. We are always dwelling on something that we need to do; a broken relationship, how we are going to manage paying the electricity bill.I am interested in the daily lives of Barbadian people, especially with what is going on in their minds. Cape Town is an animation that is about the busy urban life style and experience of Cape Town. The animation is not a narrative, it is more abstracted. It is focusing on the shopping stores, signs and shopping windows. It would let the viewers realise that our mind collects information subconsciously and it creates a very abstract story.
Diable Rouge by Christian Bertin (2010)
A documented live performance in Paris by the Martinique artist Christian Bertin.
The work of Christian Bertin revolves around the ideas of Aimé Césaire. It was Aimé Césaire who not only inspired Bertin but also supported his sponsorship to art school. In Bertin performance the artist carried a large red drum container (which he calls the devil) which has in its container small quotes from Aimé Césaire writings which is printed on small sheets of paper. Bertin then hands out the Césaire quotes to the audience. In this interactive performance Bertin takes on the form/persona of a carnival performer using the red container as a mask and the Aimé Césaire quotes as the vocal performative discourse.
Moving image and sound performance.
19:00 – 20:00
Gary Stewart presents a moving image and sound based new work.
Dates:
18 Nov 2009 - 19 Nov 2009
Location:
Arnolfini, Bristol
