TIE, THE INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA EXPOSITION
TIE Retrospective
Emerson College
October 16, 2008, 7:00PM
*TIE Curator, Christopher May, in-person

Program 1 Films:
The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose. [. . .] what is really at stake is much larger. Silent and silenced voices speak through the works in this program, without which any society would remain stagnantly monotone. This rare program of contemporary Super-8 work, consists of highly significant films from TIE exhibitions. Work from Jesse Kennedy, Gustav Aschenbach and Cine Parkour is included in this program.

Q&A

Prelude to Program 2:

The Influence of Ocular Light Perception on Metabolism in Man and in Animal, Thomas Draschan and Stella Friedrichs (2005,16mm, sound, 6min, 24fps, Austria/Germany)
A found footage piece that uses film from the 1960's and 70's to create an active visual test directed at the audience. Some of the most interesting moments of the film are from the short clips of two or more men, which when taken out of context create a sense of homoeroticism which was obviously not the original purpose of the original footage.  The film is synchronized to an Italian sort porn soundtrack from the sixties, which only adds to the eroticizing of the "squeaky clean" imagery. Draschan's film is reminiscent of the Russian montage film, combining unlike images to create a new meaning from them. 

Program 2
The following 16mm program, like all TIE film exhibitions, remains dedicated to screening films in their true format, from some of the world's most significant contemporary makers of experimental cinema. The program features an eclectic range of previously exhibited TIE selections that illuminate the continuing vitality and beauty of celluloid. The show explores the ways in which these particular artists exploit the materiality of film to reveal secrets (that only cinema can reveal) while exploing such topics as physical coordination, transcendence, and psycho-sexual meta-physics.

Program 2 Films:

The Crossing, Timoleon Wilkins (2007, 16mm, silent, 6min, 20fps, USA)
The film begins with a brief flash of molten-red grain followed by a long scene of darkest night-blue sea ripples. Hexagonal refractions and spectral rays puncture alluded-to landscapes—rivers, skies, prairies, trees, mountains. Graphic (yet spatially free-floating) imagery slices intently wrought rhythms of light and dark color fields, producing afterimages. The uncertain sense of scale that permeates life-changing geographic and spiritual crossings. The title is derived from Cormac McCarthy's novel The Crossing, the second installment in his Border Trilogy (1992-98). The film was created while under the joyful influence of these sensuous nature/ cowboy/ youth/ coming-of-age adventures, and is a filmmaker’s cinematic analogue to McCarthy's major area of exploration: the uncertain sense of scale that permeates life-changing geographic and spiritual crossings.

And We All Shine On, Michael Robinson (2006, 16mm, sound 7min, 24fps, USA)
This film is a machine-eyed vision of a post-apocalyptic paradise. Frequently working with abjected imagery—forgotten television, mid-century magazines—and overly familiar pop songs, Robinson's work flirts with a resigned pessimism, yet dares to find hope in the very heart of despair.

Transaension, Dan Baker (2006, 16mm, sound, 6.5min, 24fps, USA)
Heartbeat. Out of a sick morass of reds and yellows, blacks, burns, and direct-to-film scratches, arises the (post) post-industrial terror of our collective oil-stained subconscious. Only three color tones are necessary to conjure up a veritable prehistoric nightmare or The Element of Crime. The primordial fire gives way directly to digital-age carnage and reinforced titanium imperialist ambition…Image would be clearer without the toxic pyro-fog. But instead, it's heat without season, drought without cycle; this moment is the unforeseen arrival, the final annihilation. Chirp your last, all precious consumer-constituent. Representation becomes survival, as the farce of authority crumbles along with every other vestige of a frantic, deluded civilization... We are the Hindenburg, the Titanic, the World Trade Center. A figure appears in the lower right corner, arms outstretched, a stand-in for humanity: Welcoming?... Challenging?

Steifheit 1 & 2, Albert Sackl (1997-2007, 16mm, silent, 6min, 24fps, Austria)
The man in this film beats off, in private, while at the same time pointing the camera at himself and addressing an off-screen outsider. The environment: a non-environment, a black room which isolates his body from its natural environment. This artificial non-space creates distance, both for and from the viewer, and for him, from his mise-en-scene, his presentation of himself. The two unedited scenes, made ten years apart, were shot in single frames. Time lapse condenses the four hours of footage into three minutes of projection time. Steifheit 1. Cut. Ten years later. Steifheit 2. The same setup, postures, movements. Sackl repeats his actions, though at the same time he seems to be someone else. Steifheit 1 shows Sackl as he presents himself and intends to present himself. Steifheit 2 shows us Sackl demonstrating the act of self-presentation to himself. 

Metaphysical Education, Thad Povey (2003, 16mm, sound, 4min, 24fps, USA)
Instead of using tape splices 16mm wide, this film was edited by turning the splicer sideways to reveal the sprockets and the soundtrack. The long cuts run diagonally across the screen and, as the filmstrip slides by, the highest jumper shows the way to the herd. Gravity and the desire to fly battle for a boy's soul.

Shudder (top and bottom) (2001, 16mm, sound, 3min, 24fps, USA)
The source for this work is a found piece of 35mm film which was cut down and re-perfed for 16mm projection. Each frame of the original 35mm image covers two 16mm frames, with the top half of the original image on one frame and the bottom half on the next frame. The film is a kind of shuddering optical toy, with a dense, collagist soundtrack that rubs against the complicated visual weave of the images. It scratches at the fiction of the original footage, leaving behind, in its phosphene-laden after-image, a throbbing world of lonely danger.

Vom Innen; von Aussen, Albert Sackl (2006, 16mm, silent, 20min, 24fps, Austria)
This film is a wonderfully unnerving, scrutinized, study of the human body within the context of its environment. The film opens with an empty apartment set in motion, revolving around a fixed point. This introduces the kinetic fixation that Sackl explores thoroughly within the film, the revolution. Implications of the revolution within man's own self image and man's historic worldview seem to be the larger conceptual concerns of the work. Ultimately, the film has a truly meditative quality, a meditation that encompasses our notions about our bodies and the rules that govern it, both environmental and self-imposed.

Q&A

TIE
Phone: 303-408-4623
Web: experimentalcinema.org