Cherry Kino: Wondermental Cinema!

Filmmaking Pictures and Vimeo Channel!

2012-02-11T09:55:00.000-08:00

Hey!

Here are some pictures from the first session of the Super 8 filmmaking course, plus some pictures of equipment in the lab.

Also, CK now has a Vimeo channel with a few short extracts from Super 8 and 16mm films made on different workshops! It's early days so keep an eye on it as it'll definitely grow over the next few months. The telecine quality of the last two clips is very basic and they aren't de-interlaced properly yet, but you get the idea! The first is the handmade film emulsion workshop that Robert Schaller and Alex MacKenzie ran (hosted by Esther Urlus) at WORM filmwerkplaats during the Rotterdam Film Festival this January, the second is the workshop film run by Nanolab at CK/LIFF last November, and the third is a tiny clip from a Super 8 project shot by young people in August last year. Take a look at a few below:

Handmade Film Emulsion on 16mm! no.1 from Cherry Kino on Vimeo.

Nanolab Workshop Film @ Cherry Kino, November 2011 from Cherry Kino on Vimeo.

Town Hall Project from Cherry Kino on Vimeo.

x CK

Cherry Kino Super8 Courses Announced!

2012-01-20T02:45:00.000-08:00

Cherry Kino is delighted to be running an 8-week film course working exclusively with Super8 film!

TO BOOK, EMAIL: CHERRYKINOCINEMA@YAHOO.COM

The aim of doing a longer course is so that people can work intensively with this gorgeous format, to actually create finished film-works by the end of the course which will be shown in venues across the UK and submitted to International Film Festivals. Whilst weekend courses are great for learning the basics, a longer course run on a once-per-week basis over 8 weeks will enable a much deeper connection to the creative processes involved in working with Super8.

The courses will run from week beginning Thursday 9th February or Friday 10th February (depending on which day you choose) at East Street Arts (Patrick Studios, LS9 7EH), and each 8-week course will be limited to 4 participants so that each person gets individual resources and personal attention. The cost per person is £300, which includes all equipment, film stock, chemicals, and resources. Participants will shoot, hand-process, hand-edit and project two colour films each, and one black and white film collaboratively (we will also transfer these to a digital format at the end of the course). The course structure is outlined below - as you can see, it's totally packed! It's designed as a dream Super8 course - the course that will give you a truly solid creative and enjoyable experience of Super8, with finished works at the end. By the end of the course, participants will be fully equipped with the knowledge and experience necessary to continue a Super8 filmmaking practice. TO BOOK, EMAIL: CHERRYKINOCINEMA@YAHOO.COM stating which day and time you prefer:

Thursdays 10am-1pm
Thursdays 2pm-5pm
Fridays 10am-1pm
Fridays 2pm-5pm

There are only 16 places in total (4 courses, with 4 participants each), so if you're keen you're advised to book promptly to avoid disappointment.

Analog Film Course Feb – April 2012

Week 1:
We will begin the session by collectively applying direct film animation to Super8, painting, scratching and drawing on film, as a strong physical introduction to the Super8 format as an artistic medium. We will then cover the history of the format, its contemporary use (both commercially and artistically), and a discussion of available film stocks and how film actually works, including ASA ratings, emulsion types, colour and black and white film. Various types of analog film will be passed around and discussed, and we will cover contemporary web-based Super8 resources. Each student will be provided with a link to the Cherry Kino DIY filmmaking hand-booklet full of valuable information. A screening of experimental films made on Super8 will help the students start thinking creatively about what is possible, including a screening of the direct animation film we worked on at the beginning of the session.

Week 2:

The first hour of this session will be spent unearthing a pre-buried film to see the effects the micro-organisms in the soil on the film emulsion, and learning how to partially bleach the image off film with household bleach, offering the students the chance to experiment physically with some found footage and look at the results. Students will then proceed to learn how to operate high-end Super8 cameras, covering every aspect of the camera’s functions. By the end of this session, students will be able to use the camera in multiple ways, and will have learnt tricks and tips on better focusing, setting the camera to each individual eye, depth of field, film speeds, exposure, and how to obtain special effects. Optional lenses and filters will also be covered, with effects demonstrated through a demonstration of films made in this way. Each student will be encouraged to explain their thinking and what they might like to create, and will receive guided support and ideas about how to achieve this.

Week 3:

This will be the primary filming session out and about in Leeds. Students have one top-end Braun Nizo Super8 camera each and one colour Super8 film each, using the filming techniques learnt in Week 2. They will have access to all the camera accessories, such as cable releases and trick and coloured lenses, in order to make the most of the experimental possibilities. They will be encouraged to move away from linear narrative tendencies to explore new ways of recording images, with an emphasis on being present whilst filming (moving towards the ‘in camera edit’ approach), rather than the ‘capture everything now’ mentality that often accompanies digital filming methods. Students will be encouraged to make good use of the camera’s many functions, to really explore the potential of their first Super8 cartridge.

Week 4:

Hand processing the films in the dark room. Students will learn how to process their films professionally using the famed Russian ‘Lomo Tank’ method, as well as how to process in a more DIY fashion using more easily accessible equipment. They will learn about how film processing actually works, where to obtain the chemistry, and how to process economically. The session will function as a masterclass on alternative processes too, including cross-processing the films to obtain different colour palettes, solarisation methods, as well as replacing one chemical step with another using a technique I personally developed to achieve strong colour saturation (similar effects to the now discontinued Kodachrome 40 stock, a long-time favourite of Super8 filmmakers). By the end of the session, students will have hands-on experience of processing their own film, and full information on how to apply new and exciting processes. The session will end with a screening of the processed films. Students will be encouraged to take their films home to work directly on them in the various hands-on ways they have learned, in preparation for Week 5.

Week 5:

This session will begin with an introduction to analog projection. We will cover how to use Super8 projectors, loading the film, adding leader, trouble-shooting and experimental projection (using prisms and mirrors, for example). Students will be shown an extract from a live expanded cinema performance to give them an idea of what is possible with projection alone. Students will also experiment with the varying speeds and functions of the projectors, to actively perform their own film, and will be shown how loops can be created. We will then move on to hand-editing the Super8 films with splicers, using the projectors as our editing tools, and introducing other methods such as using a light box and a Super8 viewer.

Week 6:
Each student will shoot and process a second Super8 colour film using the skills they have learnt, and will individually hand process their film (with the option of using any of the experimental methods taught to them). They will then project their second film in an informal screening at the end of the session. In this way they will selectively apply the knowledge they have learnt, and whereas the first film will have been their first experience of Super8, the second film will enable students to be more disciplined and directed in their approach. One of the great myths to be exploded on this course is that ‘experimental’ film is indeed simply an experiment – whilst it certainly embraces the experiment, it is in fact a highly refined and diverse movement in art, and this will be stressed.

Week 7:

This will be the primary editing session of the course where students will draw together their footage from their two Super8 films into (at least) one completed film, editing by hand with splicers. Students will then share one Super8 film to create the credits for their films using experimental techniques, and hand-process the film. At the end of the session, we will learn how to telecine all the films (with credits added), transferring them to a digital format. Students will then have the option to continue the editing process using a digital editing programme between Week 7 and Week 8, in their own time.

Week 8:

As a group, we will shoot one black and white Super8 film together, and hand-process the film to negative using ‘Caffenol’ – a processing solution made with coffee! Students will learn how black and white film works, how it differs from colour film, and the way that regular household products can be used in an environmentally sound way to process film. This is a fun introduction to collaborative work and the world of innovative ‘underground’ film processes. While the film is drying, we will discuss the history of film as an artistic medium, and the role of DIY film labs in the modern era of analog filmmaking. Whilst many consider analog film to be an almost obsolete medium, this session will invigorate the students by opening their eyes to the vibrant culture that continues to grow around analog artist film, and inspire them to continue to explore it in their own practices. We will conclude the session with a tutorial on getting your work shown internationally. We will look at how best to submit a film to a festival, from writing a succinct synopsis, presentation, and the best film festivals to submit experimental work to. In addition, we will consider the increasingly important role of art galleries, independent cinemas (such as the Cube in Bristol and the Star and Shadow in Newcastle), and distribution. We will conclude the session with a screening of the black and white collaborative film, improvising its performance as a group and filming the results digitally.

Public Screening
The films from the course will be screened at East Street Arts in April from a digital format, since this is most realistic in terms of how analog films are currently being distributed, especially Super8. This screening will be free and open to the public, publicised in the East Street Arts programme, offering students the chance to introduce their films personally in front of a public audience. External examiners and members of staff are very welcome to attend this event if any participants want their work to be considered as part of studies they might already be undertaking, and the programme of films will also be offered as a free programme to cinemas in Newcastle and Bristol.

Extra Event
The lovely and knowledgable Toni Booth who works at the research centre of the National Media Museum will hold a guided tour for all the course participants of the archives of the Museum, focusing specifically on the history of analogue cine film! Considering the regular suspects such as 35mm, 16mm and 8mm film, but also looking at the renegade and obsolete formats such as Pathe's 9.5mm and 17.5mm and even 60mm and 65mm film, the tour is a great chance to see some really beautiful and rare specimens of cameras and projectors, and get a feel for where Super8 sits in the grand scheme of things. The collection is really impressive, and it's also a great chance to make some interesting connections between what we learn on the course and the history of analogue cine film and explore how artisan use of film has its roots in the early days of cinema. A perfect complement to the course!

TO BOOK, EMAIL: CHERRYKINOCINEMA@YAHOO.COM

Photos of the Cherry Kino Microcinema!

2011-11-19T16:18:00.000-08:00

Free Cherry Kino Microcinema from today until Sunday!

2011-11-17T06:00:00.001-08:00

Hello!

Free Screenings this Thursday 17th, Friday 18th, Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th!

From this Thursday, Cherry Kino is delighted to present a whole host of screenings of wondermental cinema, totally free, down at the Granary Wharf Unit 7, an empty shop unit offered by Granary Wharf, as part of the Leeds International Film Festival! The Microcinema is two doors down from local cafe 'Out of the Woods' who are remaining open while the events are on, offering some cinema specials like popcorn, hotdogs and hot drinks specially for the events - perfect for cold dark northern weather!

It will be great if you can come, and if you miss the start time you're still very welcome to drop in at any point during the evening!

Directions:
Walk away from the train station through the tunnel with the light and sound installation in it, and turn right into the dark arches (lots of parked cars in the units along your way) which lead to Granary Wharf. If you come out onto the concourse you will see The Hop to your right, and Mint Hotel even further right. You want to head over to the river/lock, and it is there that you will find the special pop-up Microcinema. Call 07935916560 if you have trouble finding it.

The screenings will be as follows:

Thursday:

(7pm) Galaxy - A surreal masterpiece from 1967, and Japan's first feature-length underground film!

(8.30pm) Destructural Video - A programme of extraordinary video work showcasing contemporary artists who exploit and explore the imperfections hidden in the signal/data structures of moving image technology.

Friday:

(7pm) Free Radicals - A History of Experimental Cinema' - Awesome documentary about the artists and poets of cinema, crazy about filmmaking, who push the artform in radical new directions. With loads of extracts of the films themselves, and narrated in a lovely personal manner by Pip Chodorov.

(9pm) Lab Love! - A gloriously free-wheeling selection of films on Super8 and 16mm, made by artists at DIY film labs and chosen for their sense of fun, freedom, and their uncompromising attitude!

Saturday:

(7pm) Obscura - A dazzling selection of recent artist cinema from some of the most interesting and engaging contemporary artist filmmakers, celebrating the richness of 'obscure' cinema.

(9pm) Galaxy - A surreal masterpiece from 1967, and Japan's first feature-length underground film!

Sunday:

(2pm) Lucida - A joyfully diverse selection of new works, blending kitsch Egyptology mash-ups, colourful video collage and plenty more, all films which consider life through the cinematic magic of the prism.

(4pm) Language and Possession - Two very special medium length films dealing with the fascinating topic of language and possession in politically resonant ways. The daring 'Out' by Roee Rosen has won numerous awards, and 'The Folds of the King' takes a fascinating look at simultaneous translation.

Be great to see you!

X CK

Microcinema set up photos!

2011-11-16T16:37:00.000-08:00

Ok, so here are a few photos of the Microcinema set-up today! Cheers to Lester, Jess, Rachel, Vicky, Niamh and James who all helped brilliantly. It looks amazing! Screenings start on Thursday (7pm and 8.30pm) and continue until Sunday evening! All screenings are free, thanks to generous support from ISIS, Granary Wharf and East Street Arts, and Out of the Woods cafe (virtually next door to the Microcinema) are offering popcorn, hotdogs and coffee. The transformation from empty shop unit into Microcinema is great to see, showing that any empty space can become what you want it to be - in this case, a Microcinema showing wondermental cinema. See you Thursday!

Directions:
Walk away from the train station through the tunnel with the light and sound installation in it, and turn right into the dark arches (lots of parked cars in the units along your way) which lead to Granary Wharf. If you come out onto the concourse you will see The Hop to your right, and Mint Hotel even further right. You want to head over to the river/lock, and it is there that you will find the special pop-up Microcinema. Call 07935916560 if you have trouble finding it.

Processing Tri-X b/w Super8 in COFFEE!!!

2011-11-13T12:47:00.000-08:00

Here's what we did for the 'Coffee, Anyone?' Super8 workshop where we used Caffenol - developer made using coffee!

We shot on Tri-X Super8 reversal, but processed the film to negative by using the following mixture:

40g instant coffee (Co-op own brand)
54g washing soda crystals (bought off ebay)
16g pure vitamin C powder (from Holland and Barrett)

Procedure:

Put 800 ml water in a bucket. Then put 40g coffee in a container and add 200ml boiling water. Add this mixture to the water. Then add the 54g washing soda crystals and stir (or swish bucket) until dissolved. Next, add the vitamin C powder. Your developer is ready!

We used this developer for 22 mins at about 27 degrees Celsius (but it cooled down over the processing time). Then pour the coffee out of the tank, rinse well, and fix (with any fixer) according to instructions. We fixed for 5 mins. Then rinse. Then dry. Then project your negative film! Some beautiful results! The developer doesn't keep well, so we used fresh for each batch of 2 films.

Finito!

Cheers to everyone who came, it was loads of fun!

xx CK

Chemical Colours Super8 Workshop - instructions!

2011-11-13T12:41:00.001-08:00

Here's what we did on the 'Chemical Colours' Super8 workshop on Saturday 12th November!

We used Ektachrome 100D (Kodak) Super8.

We cut each film in half, and processed half in E6 chemistry as reversal (positive) with the chemistry at 40 degrees Celsius, using the following timings (with fresh E6 chemistry):

1st developer = 6 mins 15 secs
Colour developer = 6 mins
Bleach Fix = 6 mins
Stabiliser = 1 min

Then we processed the other half in C-41 chemistry as negative (funky negative!), using the following timings (with fresh C-41 chemistry, also at 40 degrees Celsius):

1st developer = 3 mins 15 secs
Bleach Fix = 4 mins
Stabiliser = 1 min

It came out ace!!

Thanks to everyone who attended, had a great time!

xx CK

Photos and Films from the Aussie Weekend!

2011-11-10T03:53:00.000-08:00

Here are some pics from the weekend just gone plus the films made on the workshops - a massive thanks to Richard, Dianna and Sally who made it a fantastic experience and shared their skills, and thanks to Elsy for the photos!

x ck

Untitled from Cherry Kino on Vimeo.

This Weekend: Cabinet of Aussie Cine Film Curiosities - FREE Expanded Cinema and Magical 16mm Creations, THIS SAT & SUN!

2011-11-02T22:34:00.000-07:00

Richard and Dianna from Nanolab and Sally Golding are here this weekend!
They're the guests of East Street Arts and Cherry Kino, who have teamed up to put on this weekend of Australian wondermental film. Sally is performing on Saturday night, and Richard and Dianna on Sunday night, both shows are at 7pm. Here's more info:
The events are Free No ticket needed, just show up!

Sally Golding (Saturday 5th November, 7pm, Patrick Studios, ESA)

Face of An Other
Obsessions with horror manifest as phantasmagoric projections onto the filmmakers own body in a bizarre accumulation of unreality. Notions of ‘projected’ identity, grotesquerie, and the uncanny are interrogated in this shifting projector alignment for face(s). Golding’s key expanded cinema work, as noted in the recent symposium on Expanded Cinema at the Tate Modern. (16mm film reel & film loop, vintage sound effects, unhinged Foley, stroboscopic lightning.)

Super Grotesquerie
A form of disjunctive archiving, images and sounds were contact printed from 16mm science educational films Voice of the Insect and Photons, and Golding’s home archive of classic Super8 horror and sci-fi films. Projected images are further manipulated with refracting lenses during the performance, shifting the locked rectangle of the screen. The soundtrack was made by manually sampling contacted printed waveforms and made sound graphics - a darkroom composition. (Double screen film performance. 16mm film reel and film loops, original 16mm & Super8 images, made & found waveforms, refracting lenses & filters.)

Psycho Sub Tropo
An audience of seated children react in horror and delight as a finger wags across the screen and the performers own body moves across the projectors obscuring and blending the images. A laboratory strobe light cuts a rhythmic beat over the gurgling optical printed soundtracks. A rotating colour wheel turns the vision on screen into a brain melting vortex of abstracted shape. Duration shifting piece for blurred/sharp flickering vision. (3 x 16mm projectors, contact printed optical sound film loops, rotating colour wheel, laboratory strobe, oscillator synth, prismatic interference, bodily obstruction.)

The Films of Richard Tuohy, with a Film by Diana Barrie
(Sunday 6th November, 7pm, Patrick Studios, ESA)

Richard Tuohy – Recent Works

Multitude Studies
4 x 16mm loops, 15 minutes, 2009
A 4 projector loop work experimenting with apparent movement generated out of temporal relationships, rhythms, image collisions and acoustic emphases. Featuring my friend Toby, who like to say he ‘contains multitudes’. Made in response to the expanded cinema works of Bruce McClure.

Iron-wood
16mm, 7 minuetes, 2009
Iron-wood is an abstract visual exploration of the deeply fissured 'cog-like' bark of the Australian tree Eucalyptus Sideroxylon - Red Ironbark.

Flyscreen.
16mm, 8 minutes, 2010
Flyscreen is a camera-less ‘rayogram’ (photogram) film, made by layering fly-screen material onto raw 16mm film stock and then exposing to light. The sound heard is the optical sound of the images passing the 16mm optical sound head. It is very Australian.

Tasmanian Splintering
16mm, 15 minutes, 2010
Bones of a dead Tasmanian forest colourfully ‘ re-animated’ in a film printer.

Horizontals
3 x 16mm projectors, 11 minutes, 2010
Filmed on the broad, tree-less expanse of the Hay Plain, Horizontals makes a game of the endless horizon.

Etienne’s Hand 16mm, 13 minutes, 2011
A movement study of a restless hand. Made from one five second shot. Sound constructed from an old French folk tune played on a hand cranked music box.

Screen Tone
1 or 3 x 16mm projectors, 18 minutes, 2011
Half-tone dot ‘screens’ intended for use as shadings and tones in Manga comic illustrations have here been ‘photogrammed’ directly onto raw 16mm film stock. A flicker collage of these dots has then been created using a16mm film printer. The sounds heard are those that the dots themselves produce as they pass the optical sound head of the 16mm projector. This is a camera-less and sound-recorder-less film!

Cherry Kino at Leeds IFF - Free Screenings of Wondermental Film!

2011-10-20T14:17:00.000-07:00

Hello!

CK news!

The CK programme at Leeds International Film Festival is launched!: http://www.leedsfilm.com

Every single CK screening will be FREE this year! Making it free is a bit of an experiment, so come and support it! No booking necessary, just turn up for the event!

The first two weekends will take place at Patrick Studios, East Street Arts, and the final long weekend (starting on Thursday 17th!) will be down at Unit 7 in Granary Wharf, it's an ace space, really excited, it's right by the lock! The Cherry Kino programme, celebrating the special occasion of the 25th Leeds IFF, is being given kind support from Granary Wharf, ISIS, East Street Arts and Anita Morris Associates.

Attended the International Film Labs meeting in Zagreb, Croatia in September, and the ‘Kinetica’ book launch festival at Gran Lux cinema space in St. Etienne, France. Both were amazing experiences, and great chances to see new work and meet brilliant people! There are blog posts about both events.

Have just now collected some more 16mm projectors (thank you Owen!) which will be used by Sally Golding for her live expanded cinema performances on 5th November, and also for Richard from Nanolab's screening on 6th November. A veritable Australian weekend kicks of the CK programme - bonzer mate! (sorry...) It's wicked to have such experienced and daring experimenters coming to Leeds to share their work and skills, very grateful they can come.

CINE FILM WORKSHOPS!
Both Sally and Richard will be holding a workshop each, highly recommended. There are 4 film workshops this year, so take your pick/s:

Richard's workshop involves hand-painting film chemistry onto the black and white film to develop it in experimental and partial ways, I for one am totally excited about it because it opens up a whole new way of working with cine film processing that I've never tried. He is a maestro! And a brilliant character to spend the day with!

Sally's workshop involves creating a photo-sonic film, utilizing the photogram method to create images but also sound, since these photograms can be made over the area of the film read by the projector as sound! Ace stuff.

There will also be 2 Super8 workshops, each focusing on different processing techniques - 1 with experimental colour processing, and 1 with processing black and white film to negative in coffee!

Full info is at http://www.leedsfilm.com
To book on any of these workshops, send an email to: cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com

There are only about 4 places left on each workshop (lots of bookings already), so get in touch soon if you want to book!

FREE CK SCREENING THIS FRIDAY NIGHT AT SOUTH SQUARE! (Friday 21st October!)
Come along to the beautiful South Square Gallery (I really love that place!) for a screening that starts tomorrow (Friday) evening at 7pm. The screening will be of films made at the 2 Super8 workshops CK ran there in July and August, and a large portion of the films will be shown on their original Super8 format, which is gonna be great! It's totally free, and there will be complimentary drinks too, and many of the filmmakers will also be in attendance. You'll get the chance to also watch Esther Johnson's film 'Analogue Kingdom' too, which is screening in another room in the gallery - an analogue evening out, then! Well, semi analogue semi digital...!

You can get the bus from Bradford Interchange, the 696 and 697, roughly every 30 mins. Get fuller directions here: http://www.southsquarecentre.co.uk/index.php?/find-us/

Bye!

x CK

Gran Lux & Kinetica Book!

2011-10-13T05:58:00.000-07:00

I just got back from St. Etienne in France!! It's a place I've dreamed of going to since I was about 15, because of a terrible film I saw and there was something that massively spoke to me about the shots of the streets there. I can't explain it! But now I've finally lived my dream and been to St. Etienne! The event was the launch of a book called 'Kinetica' compiled by the great people of Gran Lux, which is an AMAZING cinema space with bar and huge rooms for massive film experiments, plus a film lab. It is incredible, really amazing what they've made in an old (and huge!) factory! I was massively inspired by it. Anyway, the book is about alternative spaces for cinematographic experiments, i.e. spaces used for cinema activity that weren't originally cinema spaces. They visited loads of these places around Europe (Cherry Kino included!) and compiled their information and photos into a gorgeous book. The launch event had loads of projections, live film performances, and installations, including a sound performance too. There was food too, and we all met lots of different people engaged in similar cinematic activity, with similar aims and desires, it felt like it had a really big impact on everyone there, and it was really enjoyable. I feel wiped out with tiredness (and partying) but absolutely invigorated at the same time, passion rising for cinema cinema cinema!

There is one place that particularly took my imagination - Bioskop in St. Sever le Moustier in France, a few hours from Montpellier and towards Toulouse, where a lovely guy called Florent Ruch bought at auction (really cheaply) loads of huge 16mm and 35mm processing and printing and sound machines from the French military, and set about putting them back together and finding spare parts etc, and now he has a fully operational 16mm and 35mm film lab! In the middle of the French countryside too! It's bloody amazing. A real inspiration. And something that perhaps we should all be trying to do, since labs are closing down left, right and centre. If we want to keep working with film, labs are the life blood. The CK lab is such a tiny space, and really hands-on, but I'm going to start looking for some small machines for Super8 and 16mm film processing and printing, to try to expand it, and I will look for a bigger premises too. This all takes a lot of time, but I've always loved the idea of making a lab, since 2008, and slowly slowly I'm getting there!

Honestly? Sometimes I feel that the UK is a sinking ship. I long to be somewhere with sunshine and a deeper sense of community, somewhere without millions of surveillance cameras, rules, scare-mongering, aggression, social division, class system, and so on. But rather than feeling down about the things I don't like about where I live (and there are plenty of things I love about it too) it's better to try to make things happen. I don't want to complain, I want to positively act. I know what CK does isn't a big deal at all, it's just a small and personal contribution, but I just hope it gives people some pleasure and access to art they might never see otherwise. It comes from a deep love for cine film, and the joy that working with it can bring, the art it can create, the way you can discover true beauty in the world through it. And it's a beauty that is yours, that is discovered and made without the restrictions of industrial ideology. Did you know that in America quite a few labs are owned and run by extreme Christian groups, who can refuse to send you your processed film back if they object to what it contains? That is absolute madness. Put film in your hands!

CK has a copy of the book at the lab, so if you come by you can check it out! It's written in French, but there are short English summaries too, and lots of pictures. Really big thank you to Gran Lux for paying for my flight, and to East Street Arts for paying for my train fares!

x CK

Cherry Kino at Leeds International Film Festival!

2011-10-04T03:34:00.000-07:00

It's nearly that time of year again! It comes around so fast. Cherry Kino organises the wondermental film strand of the Leeds International Film Festival and this year's programme has gone to the printers and will be available for all to read in the brochure, which will be launched this Friday on Light Night!

I don't want to spoil the surprise so I won't say too much about it now, but there is a focus on film workshops this year, with loads of brilliant and fun film techniques to be learnt, to encourage people to work hands-on with film. There will also be a special venue for the final weekend of the festival by a body of water... and some exciting programmes of short films and features too! Whether you're new to wondermental cinema or an old hand, these screenings and events are open and accessible to all, to make the art of film as welcoming as possible.

THE BIGGEST BIT OF NEWS IS THAT EVERY SINGLE CHERRY KINO SCREENING THIS YEAR WILL BE FREE!

There's also some more exciting news but I'm not allowed to reveal it until 12th October, so will keep you posted!!!

x CK

International Film Labs Meeting in Zagreb!

2011-09-28T03:29:00.000-07:00

Just got back from Zagreb, where 'Film Anarchy' was held - this year's International Film Labs Meeting, hosted at the brilliant 25fps festival. It was a great chance to meet lots of new people, and to participate in daily discussions about pressing issues concerning DIY film labs, strategies for survival, how to share cheap film stock, issues of availability of chemistry, and new technique sharing and tips.

So... above are some pictures from the trip, including stills of live cinema performances, and photos of the cafe bar where we hung out, and some photos of the meetings and presentations. The event took place in a big cultural complex in Zagreb which has a very long and impressive history of being a hub for radical Croatian art, including film. x CK

Cherry Kino at Leeds IFF - Submissions now open!

2011-09-12T01:57:00.000-07:00

Submission to Cherry Kino at the Leeds International Film Festival is free, and now open!

Cherry Kino is an independent wondermental film organisation (films that fill you with, and make you, wonder - an alternative term for 'experimental' or 'avant-garde') in Leeds, UK. In 2008, Cherry Kino founded the wondermental film strand of the Leeds International Film Festival, and we are delighted to announce that submissions are now open.

Celebrating its 25th edition this November, Leeds IFF is the biggest regional festival of its kind in the UK, and welcomes in excess of 30,000 visitors. The popular 'festival pass' initiative means that as well as regular attendees of Cherry Kino events, the wondermental programmes attract a diverse range of audiences who are open to trying different things, leading to a vibrant, eclectic, and appreciative audience. Highly respected internationally, Leeds IFF is a public festival rather than an industry one, and we pride ourselves on the adventurous nature of our audiences which enables the Programming Team to continue to present a diverse and original programme.

Submission to Cherry Kino is FREE. Submitted works must have a completion date after January 2010. UK Premiere status is not an issue, and neither is film length. The deadline for submission is 30th September, and all applicants will be informed by 15th October. We are able to screen the following formats: Super8, 16mm, MiniDV, Digi-Beta, Beta SP, and HDCam.

Please include with your submission: a short synopsis, running time, filmmaker, country, screening format.

We look forward to the creative endeavour of experiencing your work and the structures that will emerge from it!

Please send all entries, to arrive no later than 30th September, to:

Cherry Kino c/o ESA
Patrick Studios
St Mary's Lane
Leeds LS9 7EH
West Yorkshire
UK

Warm regards,

Cherry Kino
http://www.leedsfilm.com
http://www.cherrykino.blogspot.com

Krzysztof Kieslowski's 'Dekalog' at Close-Up in London

2011-09-07T07:15:00.000-07:00

Hello!

Just received Close-Up's newsletter with dates for screenings of legendary (for good reason) Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski's 'Dekalog', in September-October, and thought you might be interested.

I'm personally a massive fan of 'Dekalog'. Episodic in nature, it was originally made for television, and was broadcast in Poland in 1988-89, before being shown on international networks. It is an enduring artwork, and exemplifies a deep love and compassion for humanity amidst its complex navigations of life, a warm yet unflinching presentation of human experience in the context of a Warsaw housing estate, showing human lives at a juncture between disillusionment with Marxist ideology and its equally problematic political successor, provoking questions about meaningful personal and social existence. As Kieslowski once remarked in this regard,

"What is the true meaning of life? Why get up in the morning? Politics doesn't answer that."

Kieslowski was himself an agnostic, and 'Dekalog' is remarkable in its exploration of how the 'Ten Commandments' can transcend their religiosity and gain a potent secular meaning for humanity.

It's extremely moving, human, intellectual, real, and down to earth. It has something that feels so familiar, even though I never experienced Poland in the 1980s! There is a universality to the films (10 hours in total) that has a deep integrity, and doesn't confuse beauty with naive resolutions. Highly recommended. Brilliant that Close-Up is offering the chance to see them on a big screen. I remember how incredible I found the expressiveness of the actors - best appreciated large.

x CK

Screening info below:

20 September – 18 October 2011: DEKALOG - THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

Tuesday 20 September – 8pm: DEKALOG I – II
Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski
1988 | Poland | 53 & 57 mins | Colour
Ticket: £5/FREE to Close-Up members

Tuesday 27 September – 8pm: DEKALOG III – IV
Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski
1988 | Poland | 56 & 55 mins | Colour
Ticket: £5/FREE to Close-Up members

Tuesday 4 October – 8pm: DEKALOG V – VI
Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski
1988 | Poland | 57 & 58 mins | Colour
Ticket: £5/FREE to Close-Up members

Tuesday 11 October – 8pm: DEKALOG VII – VIII
Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski
1988 | Poland | 55 & 55 mins | Colour
Ticket: £5/FREE to Close-Up members

Tuesday 18 October– 8pm: DEKALOG IX – X
Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski
1988 | Poland | 58 & 57 mins | Colour
Ticket: £5/FREE to Close-Up members

programme details: http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=57e249d09500d0a296cbd7103&id=dab80fd810&e=856806c95e

CLOSE-UP
97-99 Sclater Street
London E1 6HR
United Kingdom
www.closeupfilmcentre.com
www.vertigomagazine.co.uk

Lab Work!

2011-08-28T14:28:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update on what I've been doing in the lab!

I've been down there loads lately, and time disappears, it's amazing, getting so involved in what I'm doing I don't notice until I nearly miss my last train home! I have been known to sleep there, but no mattress etc so it's a case of sleeping on the floor and putting up with the resident ghost. Seriously.

Anyhow! This is what I've been up to:

1. Properly learnt how to do an okay DIY job of telecine of Super8, and to make DVDs from the footage. Good to know. Useful I guess. Would love a professional telecine unit, maybe in the future!

2. Acquired some new kit, including cameras, polaroid film (Impossible Project), polaroid cameras, gossen light probe for the lunasix light meter (for use with JK optical printer). Old film stocks! Filters for the little Nizos.

3. Started a project with a small number of people making films over an intense period of time. It's ace!

4. Got to grips with the optical printer "Pat". Am using colour print film in the bolex, so I was experimenting with long single frame exposures on the bolex, and about 8 seconds with aperture fully open on lens at end of bellows (3.5) plus a strong orange filter (to give a nice peachy hue) is working well! Pretty laborious doing single frame exposures and counting in my head for 8 seconds each time, but mechanically sort of pleasing to do so! Get into a rhythm. Also tried out some plus-x 16mm negative film I have (dated 1989!) and will develop in D-19 when roll is finished.

5. Processed old Video News ektachrome in C-41 chemistry, and was rubbish. I think the stock is really past it big time. I've also processed it in E6, tweaked to be VNF compatible, but was equally crap! So am thinking of getting rid of it. It's a shame, as I have tons of the stuff! It can still be used for its magnetic sound strip though. I am thinking about using it simply as a sound film, to run alongside a pic, in a double 'projection'.

6. Processed colour print film that has been in the optical printer at 8 second exposures per frame. I used the E6 method taught me by Etienne Caire of MTK in Grenoble, it's ace. 1 minute in first dev, 2 minutes in colour dev, 2 minutes in blix, and 1 or 2 minutes in stabiliser. Really beautiful! I love being able to get a positive so bloomin quickly - 7 or 8 mins! Perfect! Nice rough and ready look too, especially when I'm rough with the film and handle it lots before it's dry.

7. Collected together all the empty Super8 cartridges that I've been saving, and am planning to make a big mural out of them! To be added to each time another is processed. I like seeing the old stocks in there too, adds a bit of verve to the otherwise total kodak monopoly!

8. Ordered some 'cinevia' super8 stock from GK film, process paid! I know that's a very un-lab like thing to do, and have only ever had about 2 films processed (right at the beginning, before I knew how to do it myself), and a little bunch of Kodachrome 40 at the end of last year too, but I'm really curious to see if it lives up to the hype, and also want to remind myself of what an industrially processed film looks like, and compare my efforts!

9. Found a 'Ferrania' Super8 splicer and 2 'CIR' Super8 splicers on ebay and got em! Ace.

10. Learnt more about processing cine film in coffee! Enrico from Kino Lab in Colombia posted on his blog about it. Really amazing. I had seen examples of photo negs done in coffee, but never tried it myself, and the cine film he developed looks brill! Another guy blends up onions to make fixer! I tweeted the blog posts - can't remember the blog addresses off hand, but they're on my twitter thingy. Or just search on internet! The pet name for this coffee developer is "Caffenol". Like it! Gonna try it next week I think!

11. Going to Chapeltown Carnival tomorrow to shoot some footage! Amazing colours there, really nice vibe too. Am glad I'm not at Notting Hill Carnival, where it's expected to totally kick off. It's so huge, you can hardly move anywhere. Chapeltown Carnival in Leeds is the original! And the coolest I reckon!

Bye!

x CK

Expired Super8 Film Stock!

2011-08-23T08:42:00.000-07:00

Hello!

Thought I'd do a quick post about the expired Super8 stocks I currently have in my fridge, as have been really relishing the beautiful packaging of some of them - great coloured boxes that have tons of character! Especially the pink one and the orange one, and that crazy harlequin one! Totally ace. Also I found an amazing second hand '70s maxi dress, and am just feeling very very dated at the moment, and lovin the simplicity of it!

So....

clockwise from top left....

1. Kodak Ektachrome Sound film! - colour reversal stock with a sound stripe on it! Wow! Very uncommon these days, since sound film was discontinued a fair while back. Conjuring up a way to use this single cartridge (I only have one!) in an interesting way, for an in camera edit. I feel very strongly that I want to shoot this film in Bradford. Not sure why!

2. Agfachrome - Apparently this stuff might not come out too well, but worth a try at least!

3. Agfa Moviechrome 40 - I've shot two cartridges of this and have one left. Have had some ace results! Beautiful pastel colours, and a very soft effect. I feel like I want to shoot this film at the Chapeltown Carnival this weekend!

4. Ferrania Film - Made in Italy, and the use by date is 1977! Wow. Not holding out too much hope for brilliant results, but you never know! I am in love with this box. Funky aint the word! It's effin magic. It says you can send it to Glasgow with 60p and they'll process it. Ha. Imagining some old guy waiting for the last reels to come in so he can honour the company promise. ha ha.

5. Kodak Ektachrome 160 - I reckon I'll get some good results with this. Can't wait to try it out!

6. Kodak Plus-X (old version) - I have 4 of these to use. Gorgeous stock. Not too old and stored really well.

7. Kodak Plus-X (new version) - Recently discontinued (about a year or so ago). Sob... Though saved about 14 so have enough for a while!

8. Kodak Ektachrome 64T - Discontinued a few years ago. I saved a couple so I can do dark room exposures with a mini maglite (tungsten bulb so truer colours), but apart from that, it's really not much of a loss. The new stock is much nicer!

I'll let you know how I get on with these, as and when! I'll add a bit of writing about each film when I've used them. If anyone has old stock they don't want, send it to me, I'll be really grateful! Address: Cherry Kino, c/o Patrick Studios, ESA, St Mary's Lane, Leeds, LS9 7EH, UK.

Just bought a cool and cheap cupboard unit to store my Super8 cameras in, it's perfect! Lab needs a good clear out! It always does! :)

Adios amigos,

x CK

Pics from workshops at South Square on 6th & 7th August!

2011-08-10T05:27:00.000-07:00

Here are pics sent by Dave Beveridge and Pete Smyth who attended the Cherry Kino Super8 Workshop at South Square Gallery in Thornton last weekend (thanks for sending these!), plus some comments about the South Square workshops - thanks guys!! If you attended and have extra pics, email them over and I'll add them to this blog post. It was an ace time! If you're interested in attending a Super8 workshop, email cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com for more info!

Cherry Kino did 2 workshops at the lovely South Square Gallery over 2 consecutive weekends, so here are a few things people have written about it - thanks guys!

Your knowledge, teaching methods and passion for the subject was all very inspirational and thats what makes attending workshops good value all round.!!! - Carole

I've been meaning to drop you a line to say thank you very much for the workshop. It made a thoroughly enjoyable weekend and it was a real pleasure to meet such a lovely bunch of people. I would definitely recommend the workshop to anyone interested in film generally - In fact I was thinking of mentioning it to my old tutor at Leeds Met because I think the process could be of interest to students working in film and across other media - maybe even painting/drawing students who might benefit from broadening their approach. I totally appreciated your own enthusiasm for your work. It's kind of infectious, which I think made your workshop particularly enjoyable. - Kathryn

I had a brilliant weekend. Despite already being fairly familiar with the Super 8 format I learned loads of new things, both technical and creative skills. I thought Martha was an engaging and totally delightful person, so patient and relaxed. I really appreciated how we were all made to feel equal and capable, Martha was completely un-intimidating and had an obvious desire to share her passion for film.
I came away with a recharged head! A much needed renewal of ideas and energy. All for £80 and a couple of days worth of time...what a bloomin' bargain! - Lucy

Martha, can't thank you enough for putting on such an amazing, informative, fun and creative weekend. Really had a fantastic time. You are a real inspiration to just getting out there and doing it!
Defo let me know about the gallery showing in October, would love to come back and see all the films and everyone again! - Pete

x CK

a tin of cine with a side of mushy peas please - er, and an iphone...

2011-08-01T11:59:00.000-07:00

Photos from the hipstamatic app on iphone

Erm, I got an iphone! totally weird, i've had nothing but fairly trash phones forever, and suddenly the chance came up and... er, i have one. it's pretty ace! it's funny - so intensely analogue with my filmmaking and totally clueless when it comes to digital filmmaking, but i'm so excited about the HD video option on this cool phone, i tried it out, and it's definitely weird to use something not analogue, and the image feels distant to me, but i'm so up for learning to combine it with Super8 and 16mm in some way! really really looking forward to exploring what i can do with it! love children of analogue and digital. like the film me and paul made i guess. speaking of cine film (aren't i always...), i had fish and chips in bradford today, and sat opposite a man in his seventies called eddie, we got chatting and i told him what i do, and it was such serendipity - he has loads of old cine film, standard 8 reels, that he got given as extras at an auction in the 70s, and he says he has never been able to watch them and doesn't want to die and then have them just thrown out by his relatives when they sort out his stuff. it was such a touching thing, hearing him speak so frankly about it, kind of refreshing and lovely. he just wants it to see the light of a projector, and make someone happy. he kept calling me 'kid'. it was really nice. so i've got his address and i'm gonna go pick it up in about a week, and i think i'll take a projector along so that eddie and me can watch some of them together and he will get the chance after hanging onto them since the 70s!

apparently the films are of all kinds of different places, and the guy who originally shot them (around the 50s) seems to have lived in bingley. i was saying the original filmmaker can't have been short of a bob or two coz in those days it was expensive to travel around and also to have cine stuff, not that many people could afford to do that really, and eddie said 'well, he did live in bingley, he can't have been that well off!' it was well funny. maybe you had to be there...! eddie told me a great story about these 35mm slides that he got with the cine stuff. basically, he got totally taken with these images of the dolomites in northern italy, and found that he was totally compelled to go there, and endured a 3 day bus trip, back in the 70s, so he could see them, and stare at them in wonder. i asked him how he felt when he'd arrived, and he said he was pretty 'fed up' coz of the long journey! but i think, from the way he lit up when telling me about it, those dolomite images really spoke to him, and inspired him to visit the real thing, which he said made a huge impression on him, even after the long journey there. he has transferred the images onto his computer now so he can look at them still, and he still does. it's beautiful, isn't it, the way images can really enter a person? this person who made all these images has touched eddie, after his own death and house clearance auction, and another 40 years later, me too, as eddie thinks about his own passing too. i feel honoured that i'm going to be able to watch them. it feels intimate. the fish and chips place we were in seemed to be a favourite spot for elderly folk, overlooking centenary square, called 'a plaice to be' - haw haw. it was fun to treat myself to something like that, it's about the closest thing i can think of that's a typically british example of our fair isle's, ahem, 'cuisine'. mushy peas rule too, of course.

love love love, peace out, (or should that be 'peas' out...groooaan) x CK

Super8 filming in the forest

2011-07-24T09:43:00.001-07:00

Just went out filming on my Super8 in the woods near where I live. Couldn't decide which film stock to use! Opted for Ektachrome 100D, and brought my wide angle lens along with me. It's a beautiful sunny day and the light comes down through the trees like drops of translucent sun batter! The green of the forest is so multiple, and shifting constantly with the sun and shadows, and filming on Auto B and with the shutter open sometimes too is ace. Spinning round with the lens above my upturned eye until I nearly fall over. Ace fun! Getting inside a tree that hides its interior from the light, and letting the camera catch time in the process of moving, and with it, light... I have some 16mm cameras, but I still favour using Super8. It's really nice to feel in touch with a camera, like I know it well and am discovering it as part of my body. Sometimes it feels very intuitive. Sometimes, though, it's as if you're forcing yourself to film when it doesn't feel right, and normally in those situations I end up feeling I've wasted a film, or feel dissatisfied, like I've tried to 'capture' instead of co-exist with what I'm filming. I made a film with my friend Paul about a week ago, and it was completely edited in camera, and fully made in the present, spontaneously, and feels right and somehow complete in itself but still open. It's called "Chrysalis".

Paul had created an installation of drapes hanging from ceiling to floor, creating a kind of material maze, and he performed video projections live for me as I wandered around it. Then suddenly it felt very strong that I needed to film, so I asked him to perform the piece for me again, while I filmed it using my nizo and lots of its brilliant functions, to abstract it, and so the result is very far from a straightforwardly filmed 'document' of the installation, but feels instead like a completely fresh work we made together, and watching it back, we felt it was like something trying to emerge from a multi-layered shroud of cotton-like material, like being inside some kind of woven web or shedding a skin, and it suddenly became very clear that the film had managed to convey the sense of the installation, even though it was created in a completely different way. I love that. The material, form, and subject all seem to fit together in a true way. The mode of its creation too. And the fact that it was fully in the moment and complete in itself, it won't be edited, and we are making a soundtrack for it, composed of loops of the sounds made by the Super8 camera alone. It's funny - I've been working on a film project for absolutely ages, and was feeling like I had too much footage, from 5 years of filming and was getting lost, not knowing how to start to help the film take its shape. This "Chrysalis" creation happened in 30 minutes, and I processed and watched it back straight away, so it was all done in less than 2 hours. It's amazing how it has actually come to enact the very nature of a chrysalis, in that it has unblocked my being stumped with filmmaking, like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, and it just all feels very right. It's the first time I've really felt this, and it's really wowed me! It also reminds me how brilliant it can be to make something together with somebody else. A lot of my filming and making I do alone, so it was a cool departure from that. So anyway, I'm writing this post because it's personal and what I'm thinking at the moment, and not something about what CK is planning next etc... I realised that the last few posts have been a bit impersonal, and wanted to redress the balance. I'm doing this blog, and all the CK stuff, for personal reasons, and it's through the personal, I believe, that I can reach the social. I'm very into that idea. I think it's good that CK is a personal expression, not an institutional one, and I will keep it that way.

xxx CK

Super8 Workshop at South Square Gallery, in Thornton!

2011-07-13T08:33:00.001-07:00

Wicked!

CK has been kindly invited by the folks at South Square Gallery to put on 2 Super8 workshops - one on 30th/31st July, and one on 6th/7th August! (The July one is full, but there are still 3 spaces on the August one - email cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com to book!).

So, South Square is the total perfect spot to do some Super8 filming. There's so much stunning countryside all around it, and a gorgeous big viaduct too, it's ace. There's also a sculpture garden out the back, and loads of ace little ginnels and snickets to explore, teeming with wildlife (wild life - the only kind to live!). haha. So yeah, it's gonna be really good, and there's this amazing little vegetarian restaurant and they're offering everyone on the workshop a FREE dinner on both days! The food is amazing - I ate there a few months ago, it's proper lovely home-cooked food. Delicious. And of course the Gallery is ace to explore too, lots of exhibits and artist studios too. I'm really chuffed to be doing something there, it has got me feeling very passionate and happy.

Another bit of news is that Richard and Dianna from nanolab in Australia will hopefully be coming to CK during Leeds IFF in November, and presenting their films as well as running a film workshop! Here's a pic of Richard below, and one of him and Dianna below that!

Both of them are massively knowledgable and experienced - I'm well looking forward to it! I'm itching to get in the darkroom today, but I have to study now... keep dreaming of toning b/w film... It's the deepest pleasure, so so good.

Also, Sally Golding is coming to perform at CK! She'll also be running a film workshop! It'll be a veritable Australian weekend at the Leeds IFF on the 5th and
6th November, aint that the truth! Here's a pic of one of her performances below:

Do you know what? I'm really happy today. I got loads of useful things done, it's sunny, I feel very much in love, I'm feeling film a lot and I am gonna go swimming before studying for the night. I might un-cook something delicious tonight too - something raaaawwwwwww vegan!

xx

Workshop Photos!

2011-06-20T09:14:00.000-07:00

I am terrible for never documenting CK events, so a big thanks to Andy who took these on Sunday 22nd June!

x CK

Stuff!

2011-06-20T07:45:00.001-07:00

Thought I'd do a little blog about general CK stuff, what's been going on, what's planned, etc!

First off, the Robert Todd event was magical, I really enjoyed myself, and experiencing his choice of programme with him there to present was a special situation and a rarity, really grateful to Robert for getting in touch and coming, and also to the University of Leeds for helping me to give Robert something for his trouble. Thanks also to Robin, John, Karen and John who helped out so much on the night. I think that will be the last CK screening for quite a few months now, since I need to search for some funding and also complete my Masters, which is nearing its end!

Workshops - these have been amazing fun to do! I really like them, and am constantly interested by how varied people's takes on the visible world are, and the different techniques they use to express themselves. I always learn a lot at these, and feel good!

Edwin - Edwin from the Star and Shadow cinema collective in Newcastle came down to Leeds to use the CK Lab to make a film which is now showing at OnSite Gallery in Newcastle. It was ace to spend time with him, and do lots of processing and have plenty of film discussions. Really good to generally feel that the lab is of use! Very awesome. The Star and Shadow are a brilliant group too, so I'll go up and maybe do something at their lab sometime this year.

Lucy - Lucy has been attending OpenLab regularly (OpenLab is now taking a big break due to other commitments), and borrowed some CK equipment to put on her degree show at the University of Leeds in the Fine Art Department this June. Great show!

South Square Gallery - This place is awesome! It's in Thornton, Bradford. Check it out. It is a gorgeous place to head out to for a day trip. There's a gallery, studios, and a vegetarian/vegan cafe with amazing home cooked food. They've asked me to do 2 workshops here in the summer - 1 in July, 1 in August - teaching Super8, and it has THE BEST surroundings for shooting film!! There will be free lunches in the cafe included in the price of the workshop. It is seriously gorgeous there. If you want to book a place (£80), email cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com The workshops will also be announced very soon by email.

National Media Museum, Bradford - The NMM have invited Cherry Kino to curate a series of wondermental film screenings from October onwards, to show in the Cubby Broccoli cinema every 6 weeks on a Thursday evening! This has got me totally excited, and I'm really happy to have the chance to curate events there - it'll be a great project and I think it could really get some good crowds down there. It's such an ace space, I love going to the cinema there, and I reckon a regular CK event will be just the ticket for establishing more of a 'wondermental' audience in Bradford. Also keep an eye on Impressions Gallery's "Intermission" events, which are very good.

Kinetica - Cherry Kino hosted members of the GranLux DIY lab in St. Etienne, France, who came to visit earlier this year on a research project of european spaces for cinematographic experiments, and they've compiled a whole book about the topic, and included Cherry Kino! They've invited me to visit them in October for the launch party of the book at the lab - can't wait to see it. I love their website and their curation, really impressive, and they are awesome, genuine people who are in love with films. The title of their book is "Kinetica", which is, funnily enough, the first ever name of what is now known as "Cherry Kino"!

Malakta - Cherry Kino also hosted Britt and Jukka who are friends working at Malakta, an amazing arts space in rural Finland. They also came on a research trip, because they're planning on creating an audio-visual element to Malakta, and wanted to see how different labs and spaces work, get a feel for them, and get some tips and ideas. Britt was 7 and a half months pregnant, and amazing with it!! Jukka did a crystal healing on me and shifted some energy that was too intense so it flowed better throughout my body, which totally worked. You know what? The personal and social element of doing Cherry Kino is so enriching - meeting brilliant people from all over the place who have similar loves, and spending time together, becoming friends, I feel very lucky, I really do.

Well I guess that's it for now!

xxx CK

Free Screening - Robert Todd, in person! Thursday 16th June, Leeds.

2011-06-11T02:20:00.000-07:00

A joint presentation from Cherry Kino and the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds, who are proud to present:

GOLDEN HOUR: A program of 16mm films by Robert Todd

On Thursday 16th June, 6.30pm, you are warmly invited to attend this free evening screening of a selection of Robert Todd's 16mm film works, complete with a talk from Robert himself who will be joining us in person, at Patrick Studios, East Street Arts, Leeds.

“Since 1989, Boston-based filmmaker Robert Todd has been quietly developing one of the most distinctive bodies of work in the American film scene. Todd’s beautifully shot films draw together documentary and experimental elements; they don’t hew to a single, clearly defined style, but nevertheless show a consistency of poetic vision, spirit, and purpose. Through suspended moments of reflection and anticipation, Todd’s films explore the difficult-to-define emotions engendered by the stresses of civilization.” – Cinémathèque Ontario (Chris Gehman)

Robert has produced over 75 short-to-medium format films that have been exhibited internationally at a wide variety of venues and festivals including the New York Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Le Rencontres Internationale, Black Maria Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, Paris Biennial, and a great many more.

"What if the Looking Glass were, at the same time, a window and a mirror, if the window was the mirror, the mirror the window? And your projection through this transparent/reflective plane did bring you to a world that is as externally rich as the self, in its internal churnings shifting through dark and light, directs it to be – the self and the world open to each other, if but for a moment? And that window offers itself to you as a space in your life, held shimmering in your being and your vision throughout that sustaining moment, that golden hour."

Programme:

Passing (14:00) 2008 - a film searching for life.
Gathering (4:30) 2009 – traces of spring, a gathering of images.
After Morning (3:00) 2010 – a composition improvised in-camera, taking its cues from
the building light of a summer morning.
Interplay (6:00) 2006 – play in three acts, a dance in three forms, three versions
of paradise.
Stable (7:00) 2003 - portrait of a New England farm: back and there again.
DIG (3:00) 2008 – a constricted frame in agitation, the sweet music of
jackhammers raging throughout: and anthem to
construction as anathema.
Golden Hour (16:00) 2010 - a conversation within a series of perspectives on a
sublimated "natural" setting – an attempt at crafting the
cinematic time sense to mimic the feel of an hour of bliss.
Arsenic (12:00) 2011 - dream webs stretch across the palette of a fading
consciousness. Tattered fragments unfurl in the gossamer
lands of wilting clarity.

Venue: Patrick Studios, East Street Arts - for a map see the bottom of the
following page: http://eaststreetarts.org.uk/workspaces/patrick-studios/ - you can also walk
there easily from the West Yorkshire Playhouse car park, crossing the bridge
Doors: 6.30pm
Screening: 7pm start (ends at 9pm)
Tickets: No tickets necessary - free entry on the door.

There will be an interval, homemade soup and bread, a bar, and you are invited to join us for a drink after the event too. We'll be delighted to see you there!

Many thanks to Simon Lewandowski (University of Leeds), and Judit Bodor, Jon Wakeman, Karen Watson and Ken Stratford (East Street Arts) for helping make this event possible. And of course a huge thank you to Robert Todd for travelling all the way from Boston to give us this experience!

x CK

Super8 Workshop 11th & 12th June!

2011-06-01T07:43:00.000-07:00

Cherry Kino is really happy to announce a Super8 workshop on 11th and 12th June!

The workshop will be two days long, and will give you a great grounding in making your own Super8 films - in colour! Participants are limited to 8 people, so book now to avoid disappointment.

Date: Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th June.

2 day Super8 Workshop (colour film!)
The perfect course to give you a thorough understanding of the Super8 format where you'll learn how to make and process your own Super8 film to keep. The course will cover:

Day One:
# a tour of the Cherry Kino Lab,
# how to use various Super8 cameras,
# different types of film currently available,
# the history of the format,
# examples of what is possible with the medium,
# shooting a film each out and about in Leeds,

Day Two:
# hand processing the film at the lab, including information on more experimental techniques
# preparing the film for projection (including splicing),
# direct animation techniques,
# transferring your films to DVD,
# and finally, projecting your film at a screening at the end of the workshop!

Oh, and lots of free tea and biscuits.

This course will demystify Super8, giving you a solid grounding of all the steps needed to make colour Super8 film yourself at home, easily and affordably, in your own bathroom. You'll take away your projection-ready film on a reel plus a DVD, and lots of valuable information to enable you to continue creating Super8 films.

Time: 11am - 5pm on both days.
Venue: Cherry Kino Lab (at ESA), Patrick Studios, St Mary's Lane, Leeds, LS9 7EH
Cost: £80 (all inclusive)
Places available: 8 (per workshop)

To book, email cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com stating "Super8 Workshop in June" as the subject. Places are limited and these workshops tend to sell out quickly, so book as early as possible!

x CK

Cherry Kino Saltaire Programme Announced!

2011-05-18T14:03:00.000-07:00

Cherry Kino – Programme of Super8 films to be screened in the Mobile Cinema at the Saltaire Arts Trail THIS WEEKEND! Totally FREE.

Above: 'Every Four Frames' by Alberto Cabrera Bernal

Films will screen between 11am - 5pm this Saturday 28th, Sunday 29th, and Monday 30th May in the tiny mobile cinema which will be situated outside the Salts building of Shipley College, opposite Victoria Hall, in Saltaire (screening at the Cherry Kino Lab to be announced separately). On Saturday between 12 noon and 4pm there will also be a free workshop run by the 'Unravel' folks, whose project is making Britain's longest hand-painted film, one piece at a time.
PROGRAMME OF FILMS BELOW!

PROGRAMME 1: TO THE STREETS

Above: 'This is a test reel' by Matoula Eolou Gekko

Hotel La Mirage – dir. Maximilian Le Cain / Ireland & Greece / 2010 / 5 mins
A melancholy vision of cinema-as-mirage. ‘Hotel La Mirage’ simultaneously weaves and unravels a romantic reverie across the ruin of space and time.

Radl (Bike) – dir. Viktoria Schmid / Austria / 3 mins 19 secs
The bikeride to my darkroom captured with my Super8 camera. After riding the bike I developed the film by myself. My love for bikeriding and filmmaking coming together in these 3 minutes.

Red Road – dir. Arturo Almanza / Colombia / 2005 / 3 mins
‘Red Road’ is an experimental film made with negative Super 8 vision 2 (ASA 500) developed as cross process, which gives a positive with a violent red shift. The development is handmade and made by Kinolab Colombia.

This is a test reel – dir. Matoula Eolou Gekko / Greece / 2010 / 3 mins
On the 8th of April I went out in the main streets of Athens to test a new Super8 camera. I asked random strangers to hold captions I had prepared, therefore making their short portraits and transforming a small Super8 reel into a collective project. This was my own way of reacting to the fear and disappointment that had been created due to ‘the crisis’ that had just been announced in Greece. Super8 was the dream medium, the one that was in opposition to the TV, to the flux, and that allowed a space for encounters, just for a reel’s time.

In the Streets - dir. Robert Harris / USA / 2009 / 5 mins 40 secs
4th of July passions in Chinatown and Little Italy, NYC 1975.

Every Four Frames (Cada cuatro fotogramas) - dir. Alberto Cabrera Bernal / Spain / 2009 / 1 min
A film constructed from destruction with the piercing or perforation of its footage, the different fragments of selected archive images. Every four frames the film’s body is punctured, the holes revealing the cinematographic mechanism’s entrails: the screen and light.

PROGRAMME 2: ELEMENTAL

Above: 'Song before dying' by Pere Ginard & Laura Ginès

The Palm Tree Song Line – dir. Dagie Brundert / Germany / 2008 / 1 min 50 secs
Los Angeles and its palm trees. They are singable!

You Can Never Hurt Me – dir. Jon Perez / USA / 3 mins 30 secs
Like film, the canopies of trees are surfaces ravaged by light breaking through the cracks. Shot while continuously spinning on a single piece of Ektachrome, the film relieves the viewer from the representational aspect of photographing a forest. The trees persist in attracting our imaginations, creating a new vision for new eyes.

Untitled – dir. Elina Street / UK / 2011 / 2 mins 40 secs
My first Super8 film, which I recently completed. My film aims to be interpreted freely, themes may be: the representation of women in film, the mystery of the cameraman, the conscious and unconscious…

LOVE – dirs. Egidijus Praspaliauskas & Rasa Juskeviciute / Lithuania / 2002 / 3 mins 30 secs
Our Motto: let’s develop film under a tree
'Love' is a DEDICATION FOR A Dream Come True, A Heart Full Of Love, A Hug A Day Keeps The Meanies Away, A Love Story, A Piece Of My Heart, A Time or Love, All You Need Is Love, Addicted To Love, As Long As A Bunny Has A Tail, My Love For You Will Never Fail, Bit By The Love Bug, Boy Meets Girl, Bucket Of Kisses, Can't Buy Me Love, Can't Take My Eyes, Off Of You, Circle Of Love Is Never Ending, First Love, First Impressions, For All Eternity, From My Heart, Gimme A Kiss...

Canción última – dir. Dan Hildred / UK / 2010 / 3 mins 30 secs
‘Canción última’ is a very short tribute to the Spanish ‘goatherd poet’ Miguel Hernandez, shot on the centenary of his birth in his native Almeria, and features a reading by the Basque video artist Marta Luque. The film explores themes of decay and abandonment in the landscape.

Song Before Dying (Canción del antes de morir) - dirs. Pere Ginard & Laura Ginès / Spain / 2011 / 4 mins
A film about ghosts (or fools or mimes or butterflies) inspired by the mystique of St. John of the Cross. Performed with joy by Laboratorium.

Fishquay – Matt Sutcliffe / UK / 2011 / 4 mins 53 secs
´I must go down to the sea again´
Loosely based around two poems, ´Two Lighthouses´ by Julia Darling and ´Sea Fever´ by John Masefield, I originally shot my first super 8 film as an accompaniment to a piece of dance choreography. Using samples and rhythm´s from the North Sheilds Fish Quay as a base for the soundtrack, I tried to capture it´s contrasting atmospheres through both sound and colour. The outdated medium of super 8 seemed an appropriate choice when filming the Fishermans declining trade.

Preludio (Prelude) – Albert Alcoz / Spain / 2010 / 3 mins 20 secs
‘Preludio’ is a filmation of a landscape with a building during one evening. Using time lapse options, shutter speed solutions and different exposures, the film transforms one simple framing of the camera in many possible moving image solutions. Some organic changes done in front of the camera allow different representations of the people in the park, the walls of the building, the trees and the sky, the main elements of this minimalistic film.

Untitled [2] – dir. Nathan Cyprys / Canada / 2009 / 3 mins
This diptych Super8 film loop explores the singularity of two people’s relationship as well as the duality of the individual when disconnected from the other. The water each is submerged in plays between the comfort of its all encompassing warmth and the discomfort of its suffocation and the subjects’ nakedness. The actions performed by both subjects in this piece reflect a form of meditation where the subject’s counterpart is sorrowfully both remembered and forgotten. They are disconnected from each other in the framing and placement of the images, yet it is evident that both are in the same location. Their actions remain simple, creating a universality for this piece to be understood.

PROGRAMME 3: ALCHEMY

Above: 'De Luce 1: Vegetare' by Janis Crystal Lipzin

Monster – dir. Marta Daeuble / France / 2004 / 40 secs
Stop motion animation, pixellation technique, painting on paper. I aim to break the storyline in different levels of time, working outside the fixed cinema screen.

Colour Stream – dir. Ian Helliwell / UK / 2002 / 4 mins 45 secs
Flowing lights and colours are the focus of this abstract film shot with Super8 through a close-up lens. Homemade electronics provide the rhythmic soundtrack.

Magic Kingdom – dir. Stephanie Wuertz / USA / 3 mins 11 secs
Waves of neon unleash a sea of pastel visions drifting through the Magic Kingdom.

De Luce 1: Vegetare – dir. Janis Crystal Lipzin / USA / 2009 / 5 mins
This work delves deeply into experiments, expanding the realism of colour expression that original film allows. ‘De Luce’ extends beyond the Kodak palette of colour, by subjecting the film material to unique influences of pigmentation. Unfamiliar colour and light sweep into and literally illuminate vegetative subjects to supply visible evidence of a surreptitious conspiracy between the artist, her materials, and photochemical occurrences. This is an artisanal hand-made work shot entirely on Super8 film and hand-processed by the filmmaker.

Love Language - dir. Elsy Benitez / UK & USA / 2010 / 3 mins 20 secs

Solar Eyes – dir. Rosie Parsons / UK / 2011 / 2 mins 34 secs
An adventure in memory haunting the future.

Nightlight – dir. Dagie Brundert / Germany / 2009 / 2 mins 22 secs
Berlin lights in time-speed-machine; the gelatin layer of the film stained red.

Above: 'Nightlight' by Dagie Brundert

Feedback from Super8 workshop 14th/15th May!

2011-05-15T10:37:00.000-07:00

Hey!

Just finished the 2-day Super8 workshop, and it was a lot of fun, with amazing people - lovely friendly artistic people willing to try something new and get enthused! Thank you to all who attended, I had a great time!

Here is some feedback I received:

"This was just a fantastic workshop! I learned tons and you (Martha) were so lovely - such a nice teacher! It's hard to break down the best thing about the course - really everything was great. Thank you so much and for helping to teach others and keep these wonderful technologies and processes alive!"

"Absolutely brilliant, really enjoyed the opportunity to find out about Super8 and ask lots of questions - so much more inspiring than reading it from an internet page. Loved being able to produce something created COMPLETELY by me, loved the tea, biscuits and the amount of knowledge CK had!"

"I've had a lot of fun! As someone who is familiar and comfortable with photography darkrooms and film/video, I never felt lost and learned something new! The coffee/tea/cookies are a big thumbs up. I really enjoyed the laid back atmosphere...it was a real pleasure and joy meeting and learning from you. Go film!"

"Clear instruction. Nice atmosphere. Nice small group size. Great printed material/instruction. Great building/facilities. Very practical course, really enjoyed it, great value for money."

"I found the whole experience really good. Small group and a lot of room to turn around, nice. Being the practical film student I am always up for testing and experimenting on what ever format or medium - so i enjoyed it a lot."

x CK

Super 8 Workshops this May! Book early!

2011-04-18T06:29:00.000-07:00

Cherry Kino is really happy to announce some Super8 workshops in May!

You've been asking for them for a while now, and the time has finally come! The workshop will be two days long, and will give you a great grounding in making your own Super8 films - in colour! Participants are limited to 8 people on each workshop, so book now to avoid disappointment.

Workshop no.1: Saturday 30th April and Sunday 1st May.
Workshop no.2: Saturday 14th and Sunday 15th May.
Workshop no.3: Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd May.

Super8 Workshop (colour film!)

The perfect course to give you a thorough understanding of the Super8 format where you'll learn how to make and process your own Super8 film to keep. The course will cover:

Day One:
# a tour of the Cherry Kino Lab,
# how to use various Super8 cameras,
# different types of film currently available,
# the history of the format,
# examples of what is possible with the medium,
# shooting a film each out and about in Leeds,

Day Two:
# hand processing the film at the lab, including information on more experimental techniques
# preparing the film for projection (including splicing),
# direct animation techniques,
# transferring your films to DVD,
# and finally, projecting your film at a screening at the end of the workshop!

Oh, and lots of free tea and biscuits.
An added bonus is that you can also submit your film to be considered for the Cherry Kino event at the Saltaire Arts Trail at the end of May.

This course will demystify Super8, giving you a solid grounding of all the steps needed to make colour Super8 film yourself at home, easily and affordably, in your own bathroom. You'll take away your projection-ready film on a reel plus a DVD, and lots of valuable information to enable you to continue creating Super8 films.

Time: 11am - 5pm on both days.
Venue: Cherry Kino Lab (at ESA), Patrick Studios, St Mary's Lane, Leeds, LS9 7EH
Cost: £80 (all inclusive)
Places available: 8 (per workshop)

To book, email cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com stating "Super8 Workshop 1" (or 2 or 3) as the subject. Places are limited and these workshops tend to sell out quickly, so book now to avoid disappointment.

ALSO: Cambridge Super8 Festival is very, very soon!!! - here's their latest info:

The 2011 Cambridge Super 8 Film festival will take place from the 28 of April to the 1st of May 2011.
It will comprise a programme of more than 50 films from around the world! Full programme is now online: http://www.cambridge-super8.org/festival-2011/programme/
and a Super 8 workshop: Make a film on Super 8 black-and-white in 2 days and process it at the end. Limited numbers, so book promptly

x CK
http://www.cherrykino.blogspot.com

Call for Super8 Submissions!

2011-04-04T11:15:00.000-07:00

Call for Super8 Submissions!

Cherry Kino is delighted to be curating a programme of films in partnership with the world's first UNESCO recognised 'City of Film' - Bradford! The programme will be presented during the Saltaire Arts Trail, a volunteer-run arts festival on the last weekend in May, and will also be presented as a special evening screening, at the Cherry Kino Lab in Leeds.

Submissions are welcomed from all, adults and children alike, whether you are a Super8 beginner or a well-seasoned afficionado.

The only restriction is that the films are originally made on Super8 (submitted as a DVD), and under 10 minutes in length. During the Saltaire Arts Trail, the films will be presented numerous times in what could possibly be the world's smallest purpose-built cinema, seating only 10 people!

Saltaire itself is a fascinating UNESCO World Heritage village in the Bradford region of West Yorkshire, built by Titus Salt, a philanthropic businessman whose 'model village' raised living and working standards for workers in the textile mills. Saltaire stood in stark contrast to the nearby 'dark satanic mills' of Bradford's city centre, offering a different vision of how industrial working life could be. The name of the town comes from Titus' surname, Salt, and the name of the river that runs through it, the river Aire. Titus made countless very secret experiments with alpaca wool (from Peru), a material which was considered rough and virtually unusable by everyone in the trade, and he managed to transform it, through his knowledge of spinning and a bit of innovation and improvisation, into a wonderful textile which made him his immense fortune, and led to the building of Saltaire in the 1800s.

In some ways, Super8 can be seen as similar to alpaca - overlooked by many as obsolete or unusable, but with a bit of patience and experimentation it reveals itself to be a magical material capable of fantastic textures and light reflections, the mini cine format that can be woven into countless patterns, spinning endless tales and abstractions. Film and textiles share many traits - in fact, some early film projectors were modelled after sewing machines!

Saltaire also has strong links with the synaesthetic artist David Hockney, whose photo collages, some of which are housed in part of the old textile mill (now a gallery of his work), somehow always make me think of what is perceptually possible with Super8!

Submission is free. To submit your film to Cherry Kino, send a DVD with a brief description and contact email address to:

Cherry Kino
c/o Patrick Studios
East Street Arts
St Mary's Lane
Leeds LS9 7EH
West Yorkshire
UK.

The closing date for submissions is 15th May, so get spinning that film!

x CK

P.S. In terms of screening format, due to the frequent screenings (the cinema only seats 10 people So the films will be shown repeatedly over 3 days), originals won't be shown, and the showreel will be compiled onto DV Cam for the event. However, if you'd like your original to be shown at the second event (an evening screening at the Cherry Kino Lab premises), a very careful projectionist will show the films, on an Elmo ST-1200 in great condition.

Find out more about the Saltaire Arts Trail and the village's history here: http://www.saltaireartstrail.co.uk/location.htm

DIY Colour Separation in Film

2011-04-04T06:11:00.001-07:00

Above: 3part Harmony: Composition in RGB #1, by Amanda D. Christie

This is an email sent by the ace filmmaker Amanda Dawn Christie, to the Frameworks list, about how to do colour separation the simple way (she has done it many ways, including a very labour intensive way, like in the image above). It's always brill to find out about good and fairly simple DIY techniques! Her films are great, and distributed by Light Cone and CFMDC.

Ah yes... doing it all in camera from the get go and the filters...

It can be quite simple really.
You can see some other examples (more fluid and less precise) of
colour separation in the opening sequence of my film "Fallen
Flags" (the first minute is black, but after that, the roof of a
train is colour separated from a single piece of colour source film.
You can also see an example of colour separation from a single piece
of black and white in my film "Knowledge of Good and Evil" (the scene
where I am swimming toward the camera under water and the colours
trail from my hands and arms)

Above: Fallen Flags, by Amanda D. Christie

I'll try to quickly describe a bit more clearly about additive and
subtractive primaries and how the filters work.

LIGHT AND COLOUR:
all light (even seemingly white or colourless light) is made up of
various colours.

ADDITIVE PRIMARIES: Red, Green, and Blue (RGB)
Red + Green + Blue = White LIght

SUBTRACTIVE PRIMARIES: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow (CMY)
White - Red = Cyan
White - Green = Magenta
White - Blue = Yellow

(and it gets more complicated from there and there are some lovely
diagrams and colour wheels showing how you can add and subtract them
from each other... but those are the basics... think additive, because
RGB added together = white... and the subtractive ones are what you
get when you subtract either RG or B from white.

WAVELENGTHS AND FILTERS
Light is made up of various wavelengths. Each different wavelength is
a different colour.
If you want to use true RGB filters to do colour separation, you want
to choose 3 filters, that will INCLUDE all of the wavelengths but that
will not have too too much overlap with each other... you want them to
be discrete... the tricky part comes in the borders between the
colours... you either wind up with a gap or with overlap.

MAKING THE RECORD (WAS REFERRED TO A MATRIX IN THE DYE TRANSFER ERA OF
TECHNICOLOUR)
if you film onto black and white film, with no filter... you have a BW
record of the light... that photographic image is a record of all of
the wavelengths (depending on which wavenlengths the emulsion was
sensitive to, of course... but that's another topic all together... so
let's assume we have an emulsion that is equally sensitive to all
wavelengths.. ha!)

to see this illustrated clearly, imagine a woman's face with pale
skin, freckles, green eyes, and bright red lips.
now, if you take a photo on black and white film with a red filter on
the lens, her freckles and lips will be very pale... it will be a
black and white image but her skin tone and lips will be quite pale,
and her eyes will be almost black... if you do this with a green
filter, then the freckles and the lips will pop like crazy and you
will see lots of texture on her face, but her eyes will be very pale.
you can try this out really easily in photoshop if you take a colour
image, and then go into your channels panel, and just look at the red,
green, or blue channel alone... you will see a black and white
image... but each of the three black and white images will be very
different. each black and white image is a record of something
totally different... one is just the red light, one is just the green
light, and one is just the blue light.

Above: Colour Separation, by Chris Welsby

okay... so colour theory aside... here's some practical easy stuff you
can do.

DOING IT IN CAMERA (NO OPTICAL PRINTER NECESSARY)
load your camera with colour film.
slap on a red filter
film
rewind the camera
slap on a green filter
film
rewind the camera
slap on a blue filter
film.
process it
ta-da!

DOING IT IN THE OPTICAL PRINTER FROM COLOUR SOURCE FOOTAGE
same as above

DOING IT IN THE OPTICAL PRINTER FROM BW SOURCE FOOTAGE
you can take a single piece of BW source footage and print 3 times
onto colour film, through RGB filters, and if you throw each layer out
of sync by just a few frames in each pass, you get a black and white
image with gentle trails of RGB and CMY at the edges where there is
movement.

phew... again... lots of info.
it's hard to describe this stuff without visuals.

hope that was somewhat clear and useful.

amanda

THANKS AMANDA! xx

Above: 3part Harmony: Composition in RGB #1, by Amanda D. Christie

Cool links!

2011-04-04T04:19:00.000-07:00

Just thought I'd start a running post that I'm going to add to each time I find new DIY filmmaking resources online, or interviews, or other interesting filmy stuff!

Reversal processing, including a cool way to do it without sulphuric acid! Hooray!

Processing film in TEA!!

Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie from Nanolab have written this brilliant document on black and white reversal processing

Website about Bauer Super 8 cameras

A really good website about Super8

Graeme Hogg (founding member of the Cube in Bristol) has made this great film website

No.w.here Lab Super8 Page

Good Super8 tips and advice!

Cherry Kino DIY Film Booklet

Ace blog! Ace blog! including picture of Standish Lawder's DIY contact printer

Document on E6 processing from Jobo

Website/blog in the UK about alternative filmmaking called "Film is Fine" - like it! The cartoon's funny too. Find it here

A nice interview with Daichi and Karl from the Double Negative film collective in Montreal.

I'm going to this at Close Up Film Centre - fancy joining me?!

Cool article - transform 16mm Steenbeck into a contact printer

And some dark room techniques here!

A really awesome resource from Australia (Richard from nanolab is involved in it too) - I love this! Check it out!

Check out this website (gazelluloid on twitter 2) - ace films embedded from vimeo

Interview with Gunvor Nelson from a few years back by Greg Kurcewicz for Vertigo

Article about Paolo Gioli's films by Patrick Rumble

Film processing resources from The Handmade Film Institute

26 film labs from all over the world!

The Dog Movement who do interesting screenings and events

British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection

Light Industry in Brooklyn, New York (weekly screenings and events, currently moving location)

Part of an interview with PAOLO GIOLI

2011-03-10T09:29:00.000-08:00

HERE IS PART OF AN INTERVIEW WITH PAOLO GIOLI!
It can be found in the bilingual (Italian and English) book called 'Un cinema dell'impronta' which comes with a DVD of six of Gioli's films and can be bought here: http://www.kiwido.it/dvd/scheda.asp?id=36
You can also buy the DVD box set of Gioli's work at Rarovideo here: http://www.rarovideo.com

Many thanks to Paolo Vampa, the producer of Gioli's films, for sending me this excerpt and allowing me to put it on the blog. And of course, huge thanks to Paolo Gioli, for his astonishing work.

“If I want to have fun I don’t go to the movies.” A conversation with Paolo Gioli
Giacomo Daniele Fragapane

In this interview I’d like to bring to light, as much as possible, the logic behind your creative process. I’ll begin with a rather obvious question, but which I believe contains a number of complex ramifications. Jean-Michel Bouhours wrote that in your work, “The image is no longer the analogon of the thing represented but the metonymy…of a mental process.” (Jean-Michel Bouhours, “Paolo Gioli, L’uomo Senza Macchina da Presa,” in Paolo Gioli. Fotografie Dipinti Grafica Film, Art&, Udine 1996, p. 197). Your films, like most of your photography, are difficult to categorize as “representation” or “narration.” Instead, they seem to play out as an “exploration” (a term you use frequently) of an idea. As if an idea – which is often very technical, or even connected to daily activity – once set in motion cannot help but produce a film, almost automatically. What is the standard genealogy—if one exists—of one of your ideas? How does it first manifest itself and how does it evolve over time?
It’s hard to say, because each of my works starts from a very different context. For example, literary context is very important – what I read, titles especially, as well as any fragment that I might find in a literary text. It often begins with a sentence – you give me a sentence and I’ll make a film out of it. Or a word, for example “leaf” or “life”… The title could be “The Life and Death of a Leaf.” I can even wait an entire season: I won’t tear off a leaf to make it fall, but I will wait for it to decompose, to be consumed. Described this way, it seems like the first thing that comes to mind, but it actually coincides with my vision of nature and the seasons.
So, literary context is important, and the fact that it sparks an association of ideas. For example, yesterday I was in a film lab giving instructions for several works I’m making, including a film entitled Interlinea. I pulled out a piece of 35mm color film from this garbage can they have, where they throw away outtakes and discarded material, and when I started looking at it with a magnifying lupe it occurred to me that I could re-frame some parts, examining what there is between the frames. I also imagined a hypothetical title, Outside the Frame which would be the exact sequel to Interlinea.
So, we are inside the film material, the film strip, the base of the film, prior even to an image being registered on it. Often, the thought of having to create the images myself distracts me – sometimes I consider it lucky, a luxury, to be able to work in a medium that already contains anonymous images made by someone else. In this case I imagined myself moving beyond the frameline, moving outside the frame – not unlike in the movie theatre when the film isn’t properly aligned in the projector and someone in the audience yells: “Frame!” to explore the material, the grain, [to] find out what’s inside it and only at the end return to order, to the frame, and reveal why I was outside the frame. I don’t know if I answered your question. I think maybe I went “outside the frame.”

No, I think you actually gave me more than one answer. That is, you said that a film of yours can come from something you’ve read, from an image that’s not yours, from a play on words, and so forth. But above all from how your work progresses.
It’s essentially unconscious, and I generally discover it later.

I’d like to better understand how these different aspects are interwoven and, since there is essentially an inexhaustible creative dimension to your approach, how do you know when one of your works is finished, when a film is done?
It’s a trivial reason that actually derives from a reflection, which is, actually more complex. Working in film rather than video – this in and of itself requires a very long and very controversial discussion – I know from the onset that I have a certain running time available, let’s say five minutes, and that within that running time I can’t make any mistakes and must include everything I’ve imagined. I’ve said over and over again that, to me, working digitally is like having an eraser, it always allows you to go back and redo everything, whereas film is like a fountain pen – in the end, what’s done is done, if you made a mistake, you made a mistake.
In that sense, I don’t think that working digitally has enriched the creative process much, precisely because it introduced the possibility of deleting. Working digitally allows you to create an infinite number of variations and only in the end choose the one you like best – and this, I believe, leads you to work in a much more approximate way. With film, you have to use a much more precise process, you’re forced to hypothesize a series of possible mental solutions—ten, twenty, fifty— then decide to make the one that seems the most convincing to you.
If you work in video, I think you have to train yourself to have that same attitude: work as if you had only one possibility, as if you had only one battery that was dying, for example, to have an exact vision of what you want and stay very concentrated on what you’re doing.

Does this also mean having a set approach to the subject? (I use the term rather broadly since many of your films don’t have a true “subject”). Roberta Valtorta spoke of a constant “theatricalization” of the subject in your work, of a dramatization achieved through a created pose or other means. For example, the use of framing, screens that frame other screens; or how you simultaneously upset and highlight something, through mirrored doubling or by offsetting the frame, the most “theatrical” part of the image that in the Western tradition has always been at the centre of the frame. To what extent does this theatricalization influence your way of filmmaking? Does it differ from your approach to photography?
Yes, definitely. What I show is never something captured “on the fly,” as photo-reporters do. I always mull it over, I come back to it several times, over a long period of time. So, I must admit, I don’t like experimenting. The very designation of “experimental cinema” seems absurd and old to me (another designation I hate is “art cinema,” which makes me think of a painter making films).
My films are completed works, they’re not experiments! That sounds as if after all these years I’m still trying to see what will happen, as if I’m doing experiments without knowing whether or not they will succeed. When actually it’s obvious that what I’m doing must succeed, because 70% of it is technique and the rest is talent or pure creativity – whether or not you have that is another matter.
I can’t accept the possibility of having to stop because I can’t do something I’ve imagined. Are you kidding? Within two seconds I have to throw myself into it and find a way of doing it, even if it means just using a piece of cardboard and scissors. Technically, I don’t have any problems, I can do anything. The point is never to find the technique; the point is what comes to mind, what you have to do, what direction to take. I know someone who’s never shot women’s sexual organs, yet he’s very good and would be capable of extracting something interesting from that. But he doesn’t want to. I, on the other hand, never exclude anything on principle. I’ll film every corner, especially those where dust gathers.
Anyway, to get back to your question, it’s obvious that a lot of preparation goes into everything I do. Even if I’m simply shooting someone for a portrait, just from that fact that I tell him “stand there,” speak to him, or choose and prepare a location, I am in some way theatricalizing the situation, but it has to do more with life than with film or photography. I don’t try to relax him, make him seem natural – on the contrary. For me, the tenser he is, the more insecure and/or uncomfortable, the better it is. But then it’s all over, it’s not like I’m serious, it’s just an image that I have to extract.

I wrote down a comment of yours on the film Immagini Travolte Dalla Ruota di Duchamp, where you say: “I could do a film on every single work of Duchamp’s because intellect, irony and alchemy belong precisely to cinema.” Besides the homage you pay to one of the most important artists of the 20th century, this also seems like a good way to describe your approach to cinema. Can you speak a little of this Duchampian aspect to your work?
I like complicated things, challenges. I made films removing the shutter from my camera and using external shutters. For example, my hand or, in the film on Duchamp, a bicycle wheel. I would have liked to show Duchamp the results, to see his reaction, because if you think about it, the wheel is a shutter. You need only to black out its spokes, leave some openings and spin it in front of the camera. If the camera doesn’t have a shutter you can decide the shutter speed by spinning the wheel quicker or slower, like they used to at the shooting galleries at county fairs.
I find it fascinating that a completed work becomes part of another work: Duchamp could never have imagined that “his” wheel would have become a shutter used to shoot another film. I could say the same about Duane Michaels and many others whose work I’ve used to make my own, trying to show that within their works lay hidden infinite possibilities to make completely different things, whereas,—and herein lies the irony—perhaps they thought of their work as something finished, closed. For example, you might imagine that a photograph’s final destination is to end up, in the form of ink, on the pages of a book. Yet when I animate the ink that image begins to move, it becomes a film. The same holds true for the wheel: it is no longer an inert object, it produces images because I transformed it into a shutter similar to one of Étienne-Jules Marey’s discs.

There’s another aspect to Duchamp’s approach that makes me think of your work. Duchamp knew very well that the idea of ready-made was dangerous, that it could become gratuitous, an infinitely repeatable formula. So he gave himself rules: he forced himself to make very few and examined each aspect of them meticulously. It seems that what you two have in common above all is this slowness, this working through a complex sedimentation and stratification of ideas and reflections.
Which in my case develops from literature, cinema, photography books and painting. Naturally, if I’m working on an idea that has to do with blood, I can’t ignore certain paintings of Caravaggio’s, or all the Christian and Jewish iconography on the sacrificial lamb – I must necessarily develop a series of historical correlations. In Children I began with Richard Avedon’s Kennedy photos, in which you see this beautiful house with the Kennedy children playing – united by their tragic destiny – which I associated with images of the My Lai massacre and the dead children of Vietnam. As well as with several renowned, 19th century daguerreotypes of the poor holding their children in their arms; Jacob Riis’ images of child laborers; and the elderly woman of The Battleship Potemkin, whom I isolated in order to depict her as if she were screaming.
In other words, I developed correlations. There is familial intimacy, a rich family captured by a famous photographer, and then there is the massacre, which took place in the past and could happen again in later years. According to some film historians, in experimental films there must be a maximum of semantic concentration, nothing of what is shown must be lost. Not unlike a poem by Montale or Elliot – you can’t get distracted, you must weigh each word carefully. My films aspire to be that: small poems into which I try to concentrate the greatest amount of things.

On various occasions you have distanced yourself from those who interpreted your continuous examinations of the past (on origins, art history, etc.) as a kind of nostalgia…
Me, nostalgic? Nostalgia is reactionary! Whoever said that about my work understood nothing about it…

In fact, you always take great pains to point out that there is absolutely no nostalgia in your work. And I agree with that because, if anything, I see a much more “post-modern” attitude, a constant re-mixing of elements that denies the very idea of history as an evolutionary process, a teleologically linear progression. What is your relationship with the past and with history, and how is this related to your creative process?
I always look at history, at proto-history above all, because I want to understand how much of it is valid and could still exist in the present. I find that re-reading history, even at a distance of two or more centuries, there are often unthinkable recurrences. I see the same things happening over and over again.

That’s similar to what Benjamin wrote in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, that coincides with an idea that I’ve gotten from this aspect of your work. That is, you tend to work on historical material – today the term is found footage, which I don’t really like because I find it reductive – to bring back to light fragments of what could have been. This is the exact opposite of nostalgia.
Yes, this idea is very beautiful. Even though I usually use short inserts in many of my works. But not always: Traumatografo, for example, is full of archive material, which at the time I took from b&w television. I remember that I created a collection of fragments taken from television, which I then inserted into the film. So I’d begin with that, before even making the film, thinking in those terms. For example, if I knew that they’d be showing a Dreyer film that evening on TV, I’d decide to take some fragments [from it] thinking that sooner or later I’d use them. Also, I work on three or four things at once and therefore always think it’s useful to gather archive material even if at that moment I don’t know exactly what I’ll use it for, and that’s how my films grow.
The process is similar to keeping notes in a diary, good notes, let’s say, a constant series of reflections on things, on nature, that is not limited to just chronicling what happened during the day, or, even worse, that is not purely note-taking. On the contrary, I usually begin with a fragment and interpret it in a completely different way, but starting from the principle that I couldn’t understand what happens around me if not as a reflection of the past. Observing what happens, I always think, “This reminds of something that already happened”, or “[Italo] Svevo already said this,” and so forth. I’m never at peace with what I see: looking, or reading, I always grasp the correlations and multiple recurrences, as if closely watching a loop that always ends up closing in upon itself.
This is one of the reasons I’m very sorry I didn’t study the classics, and I don’t understand why people don’t want to study the classics, Latin and Greek. The same is true for technique. Having digital technology at your disposal shouldn’t lead you to forget past techniques. Photoshop exists, and that’s fine, it’s good to use it, but dexterity also exists, and is fundamental because you’re in the dark in a darkroom, you meditate, your gestures spark certain ideas in you… Thus, on a mental level the dark aids you, it envelops you, it causes you to reflect while you wait for the image to emerge. For me, the two things go together, I’m very interested in what is technologically advanced – so much so that often I think of things that could be done with new technologies, or discover that they’re already doing them or that they don’t exist but are being developed – but I don’t think we should lose sight of our relationship to older techniques.

If I’m not mistaken, you’ve made only one film in digital format so far, Volto Telato.
Yes, even though it’s not actually a true digital film. I extracted it from rolls of 35mm film negatives, made with the photofinish technique. It is analogue photographic material that I animated image by image. But I shot it with a digital camera that was lent to me. So the process isn’t entirely digital. This is a very important thing to understand: if you want to be really pure with the medium, you can’t consider something digital that actually comes from film. There’s still a lot of confusion about this. For example, I wonder if the term “digital film” is correct. If there’s no film stock, technically speaking there’s no “film.”

Does your choice to work with the pinhole camera tie in with your search for a “pure” relationship with the medium? If, as you maintain, it is sometimes impossible to distinguish an optically produced image with one produced with a pinhole camera, how do you explain your penchant for a more primitive technique in which, as you’ve said repeatedly, you don’t actually see what you’re shooting but are forced each time to make a comparison for yourself with an hypothesis, a “mental measurement”?
But that’s exactly what’s interesting! With the pinhole camera you construct an image out of nothing. You take a shoe box, poke a little hole in it and you can make images. If the image doesn’t come out, you can always put the shoes back in the box, you haven’t lost anything, you haven’t spent anything. That’s why each time I tell myself I should buy a camera, I continue to put if off. To me, the essential thing is being able to work, being able to produce images. I remember that in the 1980s, when they began producing technically more and more complex cameras, with automatic exposure, various priorities of shutter speed and f-stop, then auto-focus and so forth, at exhibitions I’d often see numerous, sad-faced amateur photographers who’d have two or three cameras hanging round their necks yet wouldn’t know what to do with them. But isn’t it much more interesting to make images with the same immediacy as picking up a pencil and drawing on paper? But let’s be clear about it: it is not an exhibition of “poverty,” of a “poor” technique (if that’s the right way to put it), as much as personal satisfaction. I’m always asked, and sooner or later I’ll kill someone over this, “Do you create your work for yourself or for others?”

To avoid any misunderstandings, I’d never dream of asking you that.
Good, because it’s obvious I do it for myself, out of personal curiosity. If I’d had to wait for other people to become interested, I’d never have done anything, I’d never have painted a painting. You do it for yourself, even if only to see what comes out, what happens if you do a certain thing. And if nothing comes out you throw it away. Where’s the problem? Not everyone thinks that way, however. There are artists who work only when commissioned, for the market, and if there’s no market they don’t do anything, they literally don’t know what to do. That’s not how it is for me, I can only work nurturing my curiosity. I’ve never cared about money – I don’t even have a car, I don’t know how to drive, I either walk or bike everywhere…
All I need is some film stock, or whatever I need to work. I only think about what interests me, and I’m satisfied when the work gets made and someone likes it (although I must admit that my work is much more sought after abroad than in Italy). Of course, if you think like this you’re considered depraved, someone who “wanders around the house”, like a writer whose name I unfortunately don’t remember used to say. He said that on certain bad days all he could do was roam around the house, and would tell his wife, who insisted that he do something: I am doing something. He wasn’t doing anything practical, but he was doing something. So now I’d like to ask you something: can a person be arrested for vagrancy at home? I think we’ll be reaching that point soon.

I’d rather not answer… Instead, I’ll take the risk of re-raising the question that will drive you to murder. Although you only work for yourself, it is nevertheless just as obvious that someone sees your films. With regard to that, have you ever asked yourself, as they say in critic-speak, who is your “hypothetical spectator”? What public do you imagine for your films (or would like for them)?
The kind that sits in a movie theatre knowing that they’re subjecting themselves not to a form of entertainment but to a kind of test. There’s nothing that says that a film must be liked at all costs. Where is it written that anyone has to like it? A film can also be irritating and tiresome. The point is that you have to watch a film and ask yourself the “why?” of what you’ve seen. Watch it as if you were putting yourself to a test, as if it were a form of self-analysis or a game with your psychological mechanisms. If you don’t want that, there’s no point in coming to see my films: go see Moretti! These days, “Morettism” is a true scourge, people no longer watch Russian films, they might even laugh at The Battleship Potemkin without ever having seen it but never miss a film of Moretti’s and those who emulate him. If they have to make an effort to understand, if they have to exert themselves, even just for a minute – and obviously I’m not talking about only my films – people flee, because everything has to be spoon-fed to you, it must come to you with no effort. This is precisely the goal of entertainment cinema: pure fun.
But if I want to have fun I don’t go to the movies, I take a walk or talk to someone. However, I don’t mean that a viewer must be terrified of my films. He must simply understand that it’s not a form of entertainment. For example, if it is a truly cinematic work, he has to know that it can disturb him or even cause an epileptic seizure (some filmmakers say so before their films, to avoid problems).
In other words, my films are tests: of your physical and psychological reactions, of what you know about cinema, literature, music, etc. I want my viewer to have a reaction: even a rejection. At the very least, I’d like to see him yawn or run away from the cinema, just so long as he reacts in some way. Because there is no middle ground: either you accept it or you don’t accept it. In my case, my public is certainly not the kind you see coming out from a movie theatre contented and peaceful.

This idea of a spectator who acts as if he were being tested makes me think of those perception and cognition experiments that Wittgenstein called mental exercises, or linguistic games. It seems that some of your films, like Interlinea, function in a similar manner, like “cinematic paradoxes,” in which the images play out like mental exercises.
That’s true, though that doesn’t mean there’s always a solution. Sometimes the paradox remains a paradox. Moreover, Wittgenstein he was often stumped by problems he posed, and would ask his students to help him because he’d reached a point from which he couldn’t find the way out. Reading Wittgenstein you find paragraphs – which he chose to publish! – in which he simply wrote things like “It’s cloudy today.” Because apparently that day he thought of nothing, he didn’t make any advances in his research.
What you say of Interlinea is very true because in that sense the film is a way to pose a problem, to recall that without the frameline we wouldn’t have the composition, the framing. So I ask myself why these things are left out of films. Why do we tend not to consider them, when they’re part of the medium, when they’re what carries the image? Without the perforations we wouldn’t see the image: that’s why the perforations exist. Some could object that we should then show every element of the process, even the reels through which the film passes: sure! Paul Strand, for example, photographed the entire insides of his movie camera. I can’t leave anything out: the mechanism, the various elements, the medium and so forth. Everything is part of the story and I’m interested in all of it.
If later, when exploring the image, I discover an element that strikes me, a detail, a hand, a window or anything else, then I decide to stop and see what happens. I always find it interesting to observe what happens in a cross fade, and don’t understand why people don’t tend to use them anymore today. Only in film, however, because the electronic one is completely different. It becomes smoky, cloudy, and flat. I’d like to show you the difference between a film fade and an electronic fade. In the former you see that the image lasts until the very last moment, even when there’s only a glimmer of light left you continue to perceive the skeleton of the image. Whereas in the latter the entire screen gets misty, there is a world of difference.
For me, a filmmaker is a “someone who works with film.” In this sense at least, even if my work were worthless in terms of the results, it’s still worth something because of my approach, which has unknowingly always been as pure as possible towards the medium and what I do. My methods have remained the same ever since I began making films: I go a store, I buy a roll of film with my own money, 30 very precious meters of film that I use to create the idea I have in my head. Then I develop it myself, because you can’t go to a lab and ask them to develop 30 meters, you have to bring them at least 300!
In the beginning, I used to go to a lab in Rome, in Via Tomacelli, which would process film for amateur filmmakers and where they used to process even small quantities of film for me. I remember at the time I’d get offended because I didn’t want to be mistaken for an amateur filmmaker. Those people wanted to become Rossellini, they shot thinking of the big screen and I used to think: “Idiot! Film your wife, do whatever you want but leave the real filmmakers alone!” I always get angry when they call me a “cineaste”. Cineastes make industrial, commercial films, backed by a production company. The term “filmmaker” is more exact, even though those who use it generally don’t know what it really means. A filmmaker carries out every aspect of making his work himself; his works are born entirely from him, and then he goes around with his reels to show them.

So what do you call yourself? What term do you prefer to use?
What’s on my ID card: photographer.

I’d like to speak of the temporal dimension of your films, which is their most specific aspect, what (necessarily) most radically separates them from your photography, paintings, engravings. I’m interested in delving into this aspect of your work, in particular from the point of view of what we might call the “generative logic” of film time. What determines that a certain film have precisely that running time. In narrative cinema, the average running time is imposed by the genres themselves (narrative features, shorts, documentaries, etc.), and is also the result of precise market needs. However, in your case – I don’t know if we could extend this idea to experimental cinema, period – it’s obvious that each film constructs its own running time, so to speak, it finds it internally. What exactly determines that a given initial idea develop to a certain point and then is exhausted? Are there any recurring patterns or logical processes?
I generally start with the film I have, from the five or ten minutes I have in a roll. Obviously, sometimes a certain work remains suspended for a while until I can get more film stock. I often begin working on several meters of film that I then leave suspended as notes, with a working title that reminds me that I have to finish that work, like Joyce, who surrounded himself with notes, little pieces of paper that he’d add day by day. The important thing is really to begin setting down a title.
Then “movements” happen. This word always makes me think: a movement goes up and down, is precarious, it happens little by little; it was typical of the first screenings at the birth of cinema. Many inventors at the time could shoot film but couldn’t make a projector. It’s like having a book but no ink. The Lumières, on the other hand, who were geniuses and above all thought like industrialists, took a little bit from here and a little bit from there and synthesized the best of it all, taking the idea of the perforation from Edison. The process is still the same today: without perforations, cinema would never have existed. But they were true filmmakers, they did everything themselves. So to get back to the discussion about time, I don’t care if a film lasts only two minutes – it’s still a film! Who said it has to last an hour and 45 minutes? The industry. Through tests they performed on audiences they realized that at a certain point attention drops, but this is a purely commercial principle.

In defining your films, do you think it’s correct to use the word “anti-narrative”? Or do you think it’s more exact to speak of an alternative form of narration?
I definitely experiment with alternative modes of narration. It doesn’t seem like it, but there’s always a story in my films. Not in the sense of a traditional story, obviously, because I also like to include some irony… Take Filmarilyn, for example, in which you see Marilyn has a scar because she had her gall bladder removed, and we know that she didn’t want Bert Stern, the photographer who the took the photos from which I then made the film, to shoot her. If she hadn’t died beforehand, she’d never have let him publish those photos.
What I did was to squeeze the pus out of that wound, and then let her die, even if in those images she’s alive, she’s playing and rolling around the bed. I framed her probably like the coroner found her, with her face turned downwards and her hand reaching for the phone. My images search for the exact position in which her body was found, but in those photos she assumes a position as if she were dead, nude, her eyes closed and her mouth wide open. Ultimately, all I did was tie those frames together, as if they were part of a found film that was never shot.

So, the story is about an investigation of yours…
Yes, I interpreted those photographs that were taken for a fashion shoot in my own way, looking at them as if they were images of when Marilyn was found dead. I closed down the f-stop so that her hands would look a bit more like the flesh had been stripped off, I used a long fade, which slowly dies out. If she were alive obviously I’d never have done anything like that. In other words, the story is somewhat of a parable, like Operatore Perforato, in which in an old Pathé-Baby film with central perforations, which I found totally ruined, you see a worker at work. He moves around and often almost disappears near the perforation, which is right at the center of the film. So I thought: sooner or later the perforation will kill him! That’s what I mean by irony. I try to keep him alive as long as possible in the film, on the margins, before the perforation kills him.
The irony and sarcasm in my works are always connected to death, with a backdrop of melancholy that probably derives from my thinking about it all the time. Moreover, Traumatografo I dedicated to the subject of the massacre, both in terms of war as well as car accidents, with an interlude with children intended to create a contrast. I also inserted fragments that I took from television, like the wonderful scene from Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, in which a soldier moves to capture a butterfly and is killed by a shot to the forehead. It is an extraordinarily intelligent scene, done without any rhetoric, in which you understand that the soldier dies solely from the sudden movement of his hand. The soldier falls into the mud and I make him roll around several times until his hand is consumed. I stop on his hand, I create a loop that plays continuously in the camera, and which I explore.
Actually, what I did was to have a loop made of the image of the hand, and then ran it through the camera putting it in front of some raw stock [that was loaded into the camera at the same time]; by rewinding the rawstock and running it again and again the image got more and more superimposed on itself so that you see the hand of a dead man, which then dissolves, it’s consumed so that at the end just the skeleton of the image remains. The frame fills up more and more, until the screen is suffocated by the images and you see only a kind of glimmering. I stopped there because I wanted to take the film in another direction, but the experiment is very interesting: you can continue until the image completely saturates the screen by being superimposed upon itself by this repeating loop and there is no room let for anything else. Everything closes and fades because the image has consumed itself.

The reference to the butterfly in Milestone’s film makes me think of your film, Farfallio, whose main subject is the beating of butterflies’ wings.
Yes, but the main intent there was to be ironic about the so-called “flicker” of proto-cinema, the effect that remained in stroboscopy and from there moved to experimental cinema. In the earliest projections of film, this flicker effect was due to the fact that there were no good shutters and the film jerked when it moved.

Yet there is much more in the film. The theme of the butterfly is tied to sex (you associate with it images of a vulva, nipples, and even a rather explicit fellatio scene at a certain point) and above all you re-connect it to the theme of the gaze, beginning with the image of the eye that appears on the wings of butterflies, which then becomes a figure dear to Bataille and surrealism, later taken up by Caillois and Lacan with regard to the phenomena of animal mimicry and the fight for survival. It seems to me that a series of philosophical reflections develop from this minimal element of flickering, reflections that run deeply through all of your work. Would you agree?
The butterfly’s very form, which has so much mirror symmetry to it, is reminiscent of a vulva. I certainly didn’t insert those images gratuitously. The central part of a butterfly’s body is very hairy, the wings open up like a book and when the butterfly closes them it does so to camouflage itself. This way, seen from above, it practically disappears. And it always seeks out places with its same colors. In my work, I observe all of these things a great deal, I’m particularly interested in everything that has to do with mimicry: how animals recognize color and camouflage themselves.
Once, looking at one of my trees, I saw a leaf vibrate slightly – but there was no wind. So I became curious and when I looked closer saw that there was a butterfly there that had taken on the same exact color as that leaf. I ran inside to get my camera, hoping it wouldn’t move, and I first took a close-up, National Geographic-style. The butterfly didn’t move even though I was very close. It must have felt my presence, my breath, my warmth, but it didn’t move because it was convinced I couldn’t see it, it knew it was a leaf. I then took other pictures, of the tree and from farther and farther away. I like showing them and telling people there’s a butterfly hidden in that tree, and gradually revealing it.
I don’t know what drives me to observe leaves. As you know, I really love the Brackhage film Mothlight (1963). It's made entirely with the wings of moths that he and his wife captured, placing a candle in a cylinder to attract them, before killing them to tear off their wings and film them. The film is beautiful but I could never do that, I can’t even tear leaves off of a tree. At most, I can gather them to film or photograph them, I do it often and sometimes I think of how idiotic it is when some people say that autumn is beautiful because of the color of the leaves, not realizing that they’re dying… Yet if you think about it, this is extraordinary, because when we decompose we’re disgusting whereas the leaf is beautiful. It’s dying, it’s crumbling to become fertilizer, to be devoured by other creatures, yet to us it’s beautiful!

At this point it seems almost mandatory to speak of another of your films, Metamorfoso, which pays homage to Escher and in which all the visual possibilities of metamorphosis develop to the extreme. The idea I came away with was that metamorphosis itself runs deeply through all of his work. Is that true?
It is. Animating Escher was very difficult, a real challenge. In the original sequence there’s a figure – an animal, a salamander, a crocodile, etc. – that in just a few instances, no more than four or five, dissolves and becomes a leaf or something else. But to make it truly move you need many more intermediate frames, otherwise the movement is flat. So you need to create some interpolations to create a sense of flow.

This is what you also do with Duane Michaels’ photographic sequences, as well as, obviously, with the images of Muybridge, Eakins and so forth.
Yes, in Piccolo Film Decomposto, which is a film about movement. The idea is to take Michaels’ few photos and make them move as if the woman in the pictures were actually stripping in front of the photographer. The inspiration comes from an old trick: if I photograph you in an intermediate position, let’s say between standing and sitting, from the image you can’t tell whether I’m standing or sitting, or, likewise, whether I’m extending my hand to you or pulling it away: these are suspended movements. Thus, if I have only a single gesture indicated, I necessarily have to repeat it.
For example, take the four images of the advancing wave photographed by Albert Londe. Alone, they don’t render the effect of movement, so I shot them in both directions, to have the illusion of the wave retreating, which obviously doesn’t exist in the original. I did the same with the image of the diver [Giorgio] Cagnotto in Del Tuffarsi e Dell’Annegarsi, in which I shot a very brief fragment and then expanded it in every way possible. For me, this aspect of the relationship between transformation and repetition is fundamental, even though the term is ugly, it gives the idea of boredom. I prefer speaking of iteration, such as in, for example, the music of Satie, a musician I adore, or even Stockhausen and Glass, where there is always a build-up, an evolution, which comes from mechanisms of repetition.

I’ll take advantage of your answer to look at an apparently marginal aspect of your films: sound. In fact, just a few of your films are shot with sound, many are made silent and remain silent, and others still have been synchronized with sound in post-production (by someone other than you) for the DVD edition. I’d like to know how interested you are in the sound/image relationship, and how you work on the acoustic dimension of your films?
I’m definitely interested, and in some instances worked on it quite a lot. But I’m more and more convinced that a film “in silence” offers greater possibilities because working without the medium and the aid of music makes you more aware of the visual dimension. There are so-called experimental films that no longer work if deprived of sound. For example, I was at a Zbigniew Rybczynski retrospective yesterday and at a certain point there were technical problems with the sound: [without it] the images no longer made any sense.
There is nothing more interesting than silence, because total silence actually doesn’t exist, that’s even been proven scientifically. But I had more proof when, during a retrospective of my work at the Filmstudio in Rome, I screened Quando la Pellicola è Calda, which is a silent film made from fragments of porn films. There was silence, but actually it was a silence made up of sounds of the people laboring over it: there were sighs, someone moved, others mumbled, perhaps because they were uncomfortable. I remember that Cosulich wrote a beautiful review in Paese Sera, in which he said it was a sound film. Then I began to think about how often silence can be more effective than sound. Because the image can show you something happening, for example a gun being fired, and make you perceive the sound even if it doesn’t exist.

On another occasion you said something similar about the relationship between light and dark, that darkness is fundamental to giving a full perception of light.
Yes, your intuition is right. I spoke of that in an interview with Bruno Di Marino, so I don’t want to repeat myself, but essentially I was saying then that when I print my photos, naturally I close the windows and it always takes me a while to get used to the dark. I tell myself that the room is dark even though it’s not truly dark, because in that period of time there is always some light left, the light impressed upon my retina.
Suddenly, I’m the bearer of light. Reading Wittgenstein led me to reflect on these paradoxes taken to the extreme, because paradoxes conceal an infinite number of things that can then also be narrated. To return to the previous discussion, in Metamorfoso I tried to animate the animation, doing justice to those artists who dreamt of creating images in which there was even just a glimmer of movement. In this sense, the proto-history of cinema can always be rewritten, because those artists did not fail – they simply couldn’t project that which they captured so perfectly.

I’d like to return to something we touched upon just incidentally. It seems that there is always a latent sexual tension in your films, even when you don’t present it directly, with explicit images. Sometimes one gets the impression that you tend to eroticize the camera itself, cinema, photography, even certain particularly “sensitive” objects like the lenses and the shutters. You tend to treat them like living organisms, not unlike [Hans] Bellmer and his dolls. Could you speak about this aspect of your work?
I can’t deny that this is somewhat of an obsession, but it’s also something that releases an enormous amount of ideas and energy in me. It may sound trivial, but above all you must consider that lovemaking produces endorphins, which is the body’s natural drug. After making love I get tons of ideas for titles. I randomly open various books, of literature or something else, I make a pile to create a single book full of marks. Afterwards, I may look at five books simultaneously, randomly opening to the places that I’ve marked, and I begin mentally editing the images leafing through the books and making connections between them. This is normal for me: at night I can’t fall asleep because I’m always thinking about what I saw during the day, what I could do, how to do it, how to connect it all…

What role does chance play in your way of working?
None. Even though I sometimes talk about randomly found images, I’m always gathering and putting them together. What’s more, we are also born by chance, from a mix of things that we cannot control… Sure, chance exists, but then chance is always replaced by choice, by will and the capacity to grasp your situation.
Once a friend and I conducted an experiment. We were in Venice and had two similar film cameras, two non-reflex Bolexes. We loaded them with the same film, splitting a 30-meter roll, and at two different times we covered the same route – which we both knew really well because it was one we walked daily – to see if we had shot the same things. In the end, we saw completely different things. This would be a really good test for photography schools.

Do you think that your work has been truly understood?
There are so few people interested in these things [that] I’ve never even thought about that. I was speaking to you about the loop I created of the soldier’s hand in All Quiet on the Western Front. Well, obviously no one forced me to use that image, I could’ve used my hand or some other scene taken from television. But I wanted it to be a reference to a simulated death, to something that doesn’t happen in reality but in film history, so that the viewer seeing that film would recognize it. More generally, to answer your question, I’m always sorry that whoever sees my films can’t fully grasp what they mean, or what I include, because they don’t know how I made them technically.
In my films, the technical dimension is fundamental. I’m convinced that if I told you how I made a certain film that you’ve already seen – for example, Filmfinish – you’d see it again right away and you’d discover a ton of things that you hadn’t grasped. Yet, as I said, I can’t stand those who speak of my work as films of “pure experimentation.” Certain films by Rybczynski, for example, are pure experimentation. When you see them you get the impression that the only logic to them is to demonstrate the underlying assumptions of his experiment… To show Lucas that he’s better than him! Yet he hasn’t done anything since the 1990s. Despite everything, the technology and the economic resources he has, he’s at a dead end. He produces software and makes music videos and commercials!
I’ve also been asked to make commercials, they offered me a ton of money but I’m not the slightest bit interested. Perhaps if they’d offered me a lot of film stock I’d have accepted.

Rome, November 20, 2008

Above image: Quando l'occhio trema / When The Eye Quakes 1989 16mm

"As a premise for my way of making films and working with film, the most important thing is the movie-camera understood almost as a laboratory (for the shooting and printing of films)... I express my love for the cinema through the movie-camera; in terms of time requirements and production costs, I'm beginning to invent them for myself. Free films made freely." - Paolo Gioli

Above image: Farfallio / Flutter 1993 16mm

Having originally studied painting with a focus on portraiture, Gioli swapped canvas for celluloid, working with film in a distinctly artisan way. Since 1969, Gioli has made over 30 films, most of them on 16mm, using a huge variety of unique hand-constructed mechanisms to explore the phenomenal world, including his pioneering "stenopeic" camera - a tube with multiple pinholes in it, used to expose many different areas of the film simultaneously, disregarding the traditional frame line.

Above image: Filmfinish 1986-9 16mm

Gioli's concerns seem to be phenomenal (in the sense of being rooted in the physical world), treating "pellicola" (the italian word for "film", coming from "pelle" meaning "skin") as a phenomenal body. His investigations into multiple perspectives include the use of hand-made makeshift "cameras", using objects like sea shells, his own body, a loaf of bread, and even a walnut! This enables him to explore the world more directly, without optical lenses, and without imposing a single, stable perspective. He often crafts hand-made and imprecise camera shutters, relishing the freedom from technology this entails. Some of his films seem to pursue Eisenstein's call for the "vertical composition" of cinema, challenging the received norm of the "horizontal" screen (and frame) in cinema (e.g. in "Filmfinish").

One of Gioli's motivations for making camera technology artisanal is to avoid what he believed to be the consumerist technology of the cinema - he wants "to make free films freely" - and resolutely believes in exercising personal control over every aspect of filmmaking, including film development, editing, and printing.

Above image: L'operatore perforato / The Perforated Operator 1979 16mm

Gioli's aesthetic concerns are simultaneously political ones - his films often contain political stances about such things as war, social control, and consumer culture (e.g. "Filmarilyn"). Yet Gioli refuses to distinguish aesthetic exploration from the necessity of ideological/revolutionary change. Gioli's art has an ethical basis, found in its focus on the body and its sensual encounter with the earth - the phenomenal experience of life. For Gioli, the film camera is a place where the earth can register itself onto the photo-sensitive material of film, and the cinema that results helps us experience our own phenomenal selves.

Above image: Filmarilyn 1992 16mm

Gioli's films offer cinema the chance of a new beginning. By whittling away the technology, he allows for a pre-original approach to the moving image - one where the act of becoming aware is intrinsically bound with the awareness itself. In short, Gioli is a phenomenological artisan, and his films are treasures to be perceived.

Screening in Bristol, at The Cube Cinema - Sunday 27th March, 8pm
Screening in Leeds, at ESA (Patrick Studios) - Tuesday 29th March, 7pm

The Leeds screening will be FREE, with a bar/cafe serving hot and cold drinks and food!

Above image: Paolo Gioli's film work space

You can find Paolo Gioli's website HERE
and the website for Lightcone (an excellent Paris-based film distributor who are supplying the 16mm prints) HERE

Maybe we can think about Paolo Gioli with reference to what Lenny Lipton writes at the end of his awesome book, Independent Filmmaking (from the '60s):

"The day is not so very far away when all of these detailed descriptions of splicemaking and zoom lens focusing, when these words of advice on laboratory communications and projector setup will grow dim. Handmade films will have to be seen in the new light of purely mindmade films. Our most sophisticated light shows and brilliantly programmed computer films, and all that cunning and ingenious farrago called mixed media, or expanded cinema, will pale. However, the most straightforward handmade home movies will, I believe, still be the most lucid contribution, for they will transcend invidious comparison with the technocratic artist's dream finally fulfilled. So it is that we wait in the dawn of the age of the autocerebroscope."

The Cube Microplex is an inspiring venue in Bristol run entirely by volunteers with a passion for film/theatre/dance, functioning as an engaged community space. Tickets will be available on the door. For directions to The Cube, go HERE

The Cherry Kino Lab is an independent DIY film lab housed at Patrick Studios, East Street Arts, St Mary's Lane, Leeds. No need for tickets as the event is free. For directions, go HERE

x CK

Cherry Kino now has a JK OPTICAL PRINTER!!! OH MY GOSH!!

2011-03-03T06:08:00.001-08:00

Um, I can't quite believe it yet, kind of trying not to think about it too much in case it isn't real!

Yes, Cherry Kino has acquired an optical printer - a JK 107 Optical Printer, no less! In new condition, used only once since it was bought. I am totally over the moon! The possibilities with this machine are blooming endless, and it has been THE favourite tool of countless wondermental filmmakers the world over since the '60s. I feel like dancing down the street, I am so happy!!! I've dreamt about this machine for about 3 years, and now it is really coming to the CK lab. Feeling like the jammiest person in the world right now. Lucky lucky lucky. So effin lucky!!!

So CK will start running optical printer workshops soooon! It is so unbelievably versatile. You can do so much with it, including fades, double exposure, flickr, reverse filming, dissolves, slow motion, zooms, pans....it really encourages a huge amount of creativity with filmmaking. AND... you can do blow-ups from Super8 to 16mm, as well as transferring from 16mm to 16mm! So magic! PLUS... you can make copies of films, or "strike a print" if you need to, instead of using a contact printer. With the Deluxe/Soho Film Lab stopping their production of 16mm prints, this facility is going to become really needed. Everything is still hand processed at the CK lab, there's no processing machine yet, but it's not really needed at the moment (and unless I find a portable one, I don't think it'd fit!).

There's an OpenLab session going on at the moment, and Robin is in the dark room making a rayogram film as I write. The lab is much more orderly now, and in full working order. Watch this space for announcements about future workshops and courses.

Vive le film analogue et sa (al)chimie magique! Long live analogue film and its (al)chemical magic!

Oh my gosh, an optical printer... I am totally in awe. My heart is singing! Oh my sweet gaia, an optical printer!!! WOW!!!!! Martin P - I love you!

xxxxxxxxxx CK

Urgent Action Required by UK Filmmakers to Save 16mm in the UK

2011-02-28T08:03:00.000-08:00

Dear UK-based 16mm filmmakers,

As you probably know, the UK's last major commercial film lab, SOHO LAB, has decided to stop 16mm printing, due to a takeover by Deluxe, an American-owned company. To take some action, I am compiling a list immediately of all the 16mm print work UK filmmakers will need carrying out by 1st May (some known, some realistically projected), and will send this to Deluxe/Soho Film Lab, as evidence that as well as still presenting a viable economic return to them, their service is of enormous artistic and cultural value RIGHT NOW. If you know of anyone else who needs work done there, who isn't on Frameworks and might not get this message, please pass this message to them and ask them to email me the work they'll need in a concise way and I'll include it (cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com).

Please email me at cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com brief details of what the required work is, with your name and email contact written below it (for the lab's purposes). I will copy and paste this into a document to send to them, and will post the final version on this blog, Frameworks and the Labos forum next week.

Sunday is the deadline, giving us all 7 days to do this. Please take action now!
x CK

For more information on the situation, see Tacita Dean's article in the Guardian HERE

You can also sign the petition HERE

Blue Cherries - Experimental Sex Films, Star & Shadow in Newcastle, Wed 16th Feb

2011-02-05T15:10:00.000-08:00

"Erotica is good and we need it. We truly believe that it is possible to create an alternative to the mainstream porn industry by making sexy films we like."
Number 10 of the Dirty Diaries Manifesto.

Image: Fuses, by Carolee Schneeman, 16mm.

As an antidote to the commercially induced fever of Valentine's Day and its accompanying money sweat on plastic consumables and conventional toss, Cherry Kino invites you to a screening of experimental sex films made by artists including Valie Export, Dietmar Brehm, Carolee Schneeman, Albert Sackl, and films by the Swedish feminist porn filmmakers responsible for "Dirty Diaries".

Combining the exhiliration of "Fuses", body-politics of "Man & Frau & Animal", decade-long erection experiment in "Stiffness 1 & 2", reworked found footage in "Halcion", raw unfettered sex in "Night Time", beach bathing in "Red Like Cherry", sensual unveiling of folds of "Skin", and cross-dressing in "For the Liberation of Men" - this is alternative Erotica!

Image: Stiffness 1 & 2, by Albert Sackl.

Screening in Newcastle at the Star and Shadow Cinema on 16th February. Entry by donating whatever you can afford. Hope to see you there!

x CK

FREE Larry Jordan screening on Thursday 9th December!!!

2010-12-02T16:51:00.000-08:00

"If I had to name one dozen really creative artists in the independent avant-garde film area, I'd name Larry Jordan as one. His animated collage films are among the most beautiful short films made today. They are surrounded with love and poetry. His content is subtle, his technique is perfect, his personal style unmistakable." - Jonas Mekas

Christmas is a period when our consumer world explodes with price tags and "invitations" to buy things. As a little reaction to this, Cherry Kino's Christmas present to Leeds will be a free screening of Larry Jordan's films (all on 16mm), with free drinks and fairy cakes too! Come with bonhomie in your hearts, and bring the kids too, as I'm sure they'll love the films just as much as you - they're gorgeous! The screening will finish early evening, so they can get to bed on time too (or not!).

Lawrence "Larry" Jordan is one of the finest animators working in wondermental film. A really exceptional artist, whose disciplined approach (he works unfailingly for at least 3 hours daily) and rigorous methodology combine with a superbly fantastical and dream-like sensibility (he likes Jung). I first saw his work in 2009 at the Light Cone Preview Show, with Larry present - there were 2 programmes of work, each of them about 2 hours long, shown one after the other, in chronological order. Wow, what a show. I am very very happy to be able to show them in Leeds - a shorter programme, of 87 minutes, with a selection of diverse films spanning his filmmaking career - a career of well over 50 years (he started making films in 1952!). Formidable work. It'll be at the Leeds Town Hall, in the Albert Room (the room where lots of people get married!), next Thursday (9th December). Doors open at 5.30pm, and the films start at 6pm, and will finish by 7.45pm. And it's totally FREE, with free drinks and fairy cakes! See you there!

x CK

Kodachrome! Kodachrome! Kodachrome!

2010-12-01T06:01:00.000-08:00

Use up your Kodachrome and send it to Dwayne's Photo Lab!!!! SOOOOON! Get it to them as soon as possible, coz the very last day for processing is 30th December (which means they have to have all the films with them before then!). It's snowing like a bitch here in Shipley, looks amazing, great for filming! Gonna go charge up my Beaulieu R16 now and hop to it!

If you miss the Kodachrome deadline, DON'T DESPAIR! You can still process it as b/w!

For old stock, or stock that hasn't been unfailingly kept in the fridge:
Martin Baumgarten recommends processing it to negative, rather than as reversal, coz otherwise it will probably come out very muddy.

For stock that has been brilliantly preserved, or very recent stock:
Martin Baumgarten says that it will probably be fine to process it as reversal.

Maybe this snowy weather would be good for shooting high con stock when the sun is out to play!

xx CK

Post-Festival Phews!

2010-11-26T10:32:00.001-08:00

No, I haven't got post-festival blues - I've got post-festival phews! (excuse the crappy pun - it seems the festival stress has removed my sense of humour).

CK booklets have gone down a storm!!! I never imagined it'd be like this! I just wanted to make it coz it's what I would like to come across myself (and have, thanks to others). The enthusiasm and warmth I've got back from people makes me want to make another one right away!! But I have no money left. And I probably need to learn a few more techniques to make it an interesting second edition! Or maybe invite people to contribute? I've gotta keep the ones I have left for giving to people who visit the lab, so I hope that's the last of the orders now. If I come into some money I could do another print run of them, but that looks seriously doubtful!!! I am skint now. Skint, but happy. And cold!!!

Just finished tying loose ends up after the festival. That's the kind of boring part, but it needs doing. And now I can get ready for... the Cherry Kino screening of Larry Jordan's Short Films on 9th December in the Leeds Town Hall!!! I am really looking forward to it - to just be doing that and nothing else will be bliss! Still need to book the films from Lightcone asap...

I'm trying to finish shooting all the K40 I have left on Super 8 - including some 16mm - but my favourite camera needs servicing, which is really annoying! Actually about 5 of my cameras need servicing, and so do all my Super 8 projectors... I hardly have any money. I have a brilliant but not brilliantly paid film job, and I spend what I do earn on cameras and equipment that always needs repairing!!! But it was such a gorgeous day today. Freezing, but so sunny. I shot a whole roll of K40, filming the beautiful nature that has come out to play in this cold and inhospitable climate!

Getting down to the lab over the next week to spend some time on my own work - feeling so inspired from what I've been watching during CK at the fest, and wanna put it to use! It's a wonderful world, innit?!!

Think I seriously need a massive detox too - stress just aint good for the body or the soul! Ok ok, it gets things to happen, but my god, the festival is 18 days long - too many things need doing all at the same time, and it's crazy! (During the festival, Cherry Kino isn't my only responsibility - as Deputy Programme Manager I've got about a zillion others!). But it's over now - til we start planning the next one in, oh, about a week!!!

peace out! bring on the fresh veggies...

xx CK

"Children" by Paolo Gioli

2010-11-21T03:33:00.000-08:00

The "After the Empire" screening includes the film "Children" by Italian filmmaker Paolo Gioli. I really appreciate the films I've seen by him. His political consciousness also speaks to me, in the fire he has about politics. The anger transformed into art. I was just thinking that many of the films I chose for this screening of political wondermental film happen to be films made from photographs - "Children" by Paolo Gioli, "Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph" by Chen Chien-jen, and "K (Acugher/Acimi)" (in a way) by Frederique Devaux. Quite a few of the other films are reworking of footage or reinterpretations of footage (the "Holly Would..." screening was also in this vein a lot, and was also quite politically minded). I'm thinking - is there something inherently political about the marriage between film and photography? There is something certainly inherently political about the image and its appropriation/power/representation. But what of motion and stasis of image occurring at once? Is this what helps make Chris Marker's "La Jetee" so politically resonant? I'm thinking about it, anyway. I am also of the view that aesthetics are political - maybe even super-political, and therefore outside the narrow defines of "politics" as we understand it. Hmm. The use of the optical printer also makes you see film as photographs. I wish I had one!!

x CK

CK events this weekend!!

2010-11-16T09:35:00.000-08:00

All the screenings this weekend will be at ESA Patrick Studios, St Mary's Lane,
LS9 7EH - see www.esaweb.org.uk for directions!

Perestroika
Friday 19th, 7pm

Holly Would...
Saturday 20th, 3pm

Gunvor Nelson
Saturday 20th, 6pm

After the Empire
Sunday 21st, 1pm

Warren Sonbert
Sunday 21st, 4pm

x CK

DIY filmmaking booklet!! - FREE!

2010-11-01T16:11:00.001-07:00

I've put together a DIY filmmaking booklet, with TONS of information on how to make analog films, DIY techniques, cameraless filmmaking, processing film by hand, what film stocks to use, where to find them, and loads of stuff! It is now here and looks really nice! I'm giving them out for free. If you want one, email cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com with "CK booklet" in the title and your postal address (anywhere in the world is fine!) and I'll send you a few in the post!

I basically put together what would have been really really useful to me when I started out with making films the analog way. A few things in there are from other places, I've written down lots of techniques I've learnt from different people - please give it away as much as you like, use it, cut it up in different forms - whatever spreads film techniques is brilliant.

WORM Filmwerkplaats in Rotterdam made a great booklet called "To Boldy Go" and you can find it at http://filmwerkplaats.wormweb.nl/pdf/to%20boldly%20go.pdf and Helen Hill (who tragically died in 2007) compiled "Recipes for Disaster" and you can find that at www.angoleiro.com/cine_texts/recipes_for_disaster_hill.pdf

Both were inspirations for the Cherry Kino booklet, as well as everyone who has shared their friendship, time, love, films, and techniques with me (yes, that involves you, former EXP24!!) I hope that it'll be a useful guide for folk who are interested, and that it helps people find a way into DIY filmmaking - where you don't need a director, producer, editor, technician, etc etc etc and you've got the capacity to do it totally economically, and to make whatever the hell you like, however you like, with whomever you like. It is a very free form of filmmaking, and one that too few people know about. The resources and knowledge do exist! Express yourself however you want to.

If you're attending the Leeds International Film Festival, you will probably be able to pick it up at all CK events, including the film exhibition at Blenheim Building Cafe at Leeds College of Art. It's designed by the lovely and talented Claire McLoughlin, a student of Leeds College of Art, and an ace lady! And thanks to Edwin M Harmer printers in Leeds too for a really good price on the printing!

Also, the Cherry Kino Cards have now been made, so if you want to join the Lab to use the filmmaking resources, you can! Cards will be available at all CK events during the Leeds International Film Festival, or you can email cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com

x CK

Cherry Kino Festival! 4 - 21 November

2010-10-20T03:33:00.000-07:00

Between 4 - 21 November, there are 12 Cherry Kino events, spread over the three weekends of the Leeds International Film Festival!

Each of the 12 events are listed on the blog, after this post - some of them are under the "older posts" link at the bottom of the page, too!

You can also find the Cherry Kino programme on the Leeds IFF website HERE

After the Empire

2010-10-20T03:32:00.000-07:00

Running Time:120 mins
Showing: Sun 21st Nov, 2010 - 13:00Sun 21st Nov, 2010 - 13:00Ticket link @ East Street Arts (ESA) - £5.00 / £4.00

Wondermental cinema can be a politically discursive art form, with its ability to question, subvert, oppose and rebel. This programme presents an array of recent works chosen for their political engagement with the idea of empire, whether overt or subtle, asking you to think again. Controlled fury at the hypocrisy of the priveleged, the quietly powerful flag on the mountain, cinema and dictatorship in North Korea, a multi-screen subversive ethnicity, a cry of ‘why’ in Algeria, a revised Heart of Darkness, Leo Strauss’ connection with torture, photography as colonial appropriation, and rethinking the urban. Includes work by Gioli, Smith, Bärtås, Wong, Devaux, Breuer, Sanborn, Chen and Lurf.

This screening is on the Leeds IFF website HERE

Double Tide

2010-10-20T03:31:00.000-07:00

Director Sharon Lockhart
Country Austria,USA
Running Time: 99 mins
Showing: Sat 13th Nov, 2010 - 12:00Sat 13th Nov, 2010 - 12:00Ticket link @ Leeds Art Gallery (ART GALL) - £5.00 / £4.00

Utterly hypnotic and spell-binding, Sharon Lockhart’s minimalist exploration of landscape and labour as a female clamdigger works the low tides of dawn and dusk. Shot in only two takes with a static camera, we are lulled into meditation by the calm repetition of her (arduous) task in the mudflats, surrounded by the rolling mist and rosy orange hues of sunrise and sunset. Perhaps it’s also political comment: ‘There is something so primal about clamming – the act of reaching into the earth, the dependence on the rhythms of nature. All this struck me as indicative of a pre-industrial time and type of labour, so different from the industrial rhythms of a workplace.’ – S. Lockhart

This film is on the Leeds IFF website HERE

Gunvor Nelson

2010-10-20T03:30:00.001-07:00

Director Gunvor Nelson
Country Sweden,USA
Running Time: 90 mins
Languages English
Showing: Sat 20th Nov, 2010 - 18:00Sat 20th Nov, 2010 - 18:00Ticket link @ East Street Arts (ESA) - £5.00 / £4.00

A rare screening of extraordinary work by Gunvor Nelson, the best kept secret in American experimental film. Magnetic intimacy combines with distance, a tension mirrored by astonishing camera work and editing. Respecting the filmed material, she lets it speak, from a portrait of her daughter Oona with a hypnotic soundtrack, to a comical feminist take on a stripper, to an indescribably beautiful swim, to a complex exploration of family. To filmmakers she offers this advice – ‘when you are really immersed, you, yourself… then the film emerges.’ As spectators, becoming immersed in Gunvor Nelson’s films is one of the best things you can do – something incredible emerges.

This screening is on the Leeds IFF website HERE

Holly Would...

2010-10-20T03:29:00.001-07:00

Running Time: 90 mins
Showing: Sat 20th Nov, 2010 - 15:00Sat 20th Nov, 2010 - 15:00Ticket link @ East Street Arts (ESA) - £5.00 / £4.00

Ah, Hollywood. Light of our lives, thorn in our sides…This programme, mostly screened on 16mm, celebrates the delicious way wondermental filmmakers continue to subvert Hollywood and media ‘norms’, by turns dismembering it to re-member it as something new; pointing to the queer aspects that are present either through absence or identification; a deconstruction of linear narrative; a life of imitation; recontextualised film scenes breathing new life; a clever backwards door slamming scene in a Hollywood domestic; a lascivious recreation of a B movie; a very unusual ‘B star’ on a moving couch; and Peter Tscherkassky’s award-winning new work (yes, wondermental cinema has a Hollywood too!). With work by Tartaglia, Vaughan, Swiczinsky, Wong, Schreiner, Mahé, Czioska, Marte, and Tscherkassky.

This screening is on the Leeds IFF website HERE

Mare’s Tail

2010-10-20T03:27:00.001-07:00

Director David Larcher
Country UK
Running Time: 160 mins
Languages English
Showing: Sun 7th Nov, 2010 - 14:00Sun 7th Nov, 2010 - 14:00Ticket link @ East Street Arts (ESA) - £5.00 / £4.00
Sun 14th Nov, 2010 - 13:30Sun 14th Nov, 2010 - 13:30Ticket link @ Leeds Art Gallery (ART GALL) - £5.00 / £4.00

‘Mare’s Tail is an epic flight into inner space…the film-maker’s personal odyssey, which becomes the odyssey of each of us. It is a man’s life transposed into a visual realm…There are spots before your eyes, as when you look at the sun that flames and burns. We look at distant moving forms and flash through them. We drift through suns; a piece of earth phases over the moon. A face, your face, his face, a face that looks and splits into shapes that form new shapes that we rediscover as tiny monolithic monuments…The moon again, the flesh, the child, the room and the waves become part of a hieroglyphic language…Larcher’s trip becomes our trip to experience. It cannot be watched impatiently, with expectation; it is no good looking for generalization, condensation, complication or implication.’ – from Film Is, by Stephen Dwoskin. This screening is presented with the kind support of the Leeds College of Art, and all students of the College will be granted free access to both screenings on presentation of their student cards.

This film is on the Leeds IFF website HERE

My Love Has an Exquisite Corpse: Elemental Film Exhibition

2010-10-20T03:25:00.000-07:00

Running Time: All Day
Showing: 6th – 21st November, daily except weekends, 10am-5pm

Leeds College of Art hosts Cherry Kino’s exhibition of elemental film, including work made by students on Super 8 and 16mm. Playing with the idea of the ‘exquisite corpse’ where each person contributes a ‘body part’ to make a whole, film is treated as an organic form and literally subjected to the Taoist idea of the 5 elements of Chinese medicine – water, wood, fire, earth and metal – putting it through various processes such as ‘drowning’ (water), wrapping around trees (wood), burning (fire), burying (earth), and chemical processing to reveal the silver (metal) in the film emulsion itself.
Fri 6 – Sun 21, 12:00 – 17:00
Leeds College of Art, Blenheim Building café
FREE

This event is on the Leeds IFF website HERE

Mysterious Matter

2010-10-20T03:24:00.000-07:00

Running Time: 90 mins
Showing: Sat 6th Nov, 2010 - 19:00Sat 6th Nov, 2010 - 19:00Ticket link @ East Street Arts (ESA) - £5.00 / £4.00

‘Transformation is the thing’ states Larry Jordan at the beginning of his new film, Cosmic Alchemy. This selection of films focuses on the magical transformations that can occur through entering into the material of life. From Jordan’s hotly anticipated and stunning work, to Rebello’s great new piece full of substantial questions, to Rouhi and Fouchard’s astonishingly transcendental meditation, to the indescribably awesome ‘Li: the Patterns of Nature’ by Campbell, full of extreme close ups of nature’s processes on 16mm. These magical films remind us that ‘forms are not self-subsistent substances’ (Rebello), and that through the shared flesh of the material world, we can reach the stars.

This screening on the Leeds IFF website is HERE

Night Jewels, Day Blooms

2010-10-20T03:23:00.000-07:00

Running Time: 90 mins
Showing: Sat 6th Nov, 2010 - 19:00Sat 6th Nov, 2010 - 19:00Ticket link @ East Street Arts (ESA) - £5.00 / £4.00

Startlingly beautiful and unique recent works of filmic art. Includes astonishing layers of light reflections on Super 8, a wondrous animated trilogy about clouds, a high contrast b/w film on the shore, a mesmerising study of swirling stars in a child’s toy, a divinely simple disorientation device, dreamlike sequences in red, yellow, orange, a wonderful film whose image plays the sound, a cricket’s song from beyond the frame, the dawn chorus of a new beginning, a jazz trumpeter, rain, night fireworks, and a glorious film shot in the ripples of a puddle. With work by Clipson, Tsuji, Cailleau, Harris, Machacek, von Greve, Miller, Dorsky, Henderson, Barthofer, Brundert and Scacchioli.

This screening on the Leeds IFF website is HERE

Perestroika

2010-10-20T03:21:00.000-07:00

Director Sarah Turner
Country UK
Running Time: 115 mins
Languages English
Showing: Sat 13th Nov, 2010 - 14:30Sat 13th Nov, 2010 - 14:30Ticket link @ Leeds Art Gallery (ART GALL) - £5.00 / £4.00
Fri 19th Nov, 2010 - 19:00Fri 19th Nov, 2010 - 19:00Ticket link @ East Street Arts (ESA) - £5.00 / £4.00
Watch trailer

An absolutely mesmerising journey into psycho-geography, this unique and highly lauded film examines landscape and ghosts, amnesia and representation, innovatively linking global warming to both an artistic and a personal crisis. On Turner’s initial trip to Siberia in 1987-8, she continuously filmed the passing landscape. After 20 years (during which time her two closest friends died), she ‘repeated both a train journey to Siberia and a process… And in this way I realised that photography as an act actually creates rather than records experiences…for me the film very explicitly functions as an environmental allegory. Are we all ghosts passing through as the world moves outside the frame of our (overheated) windows?’ – S. Turner

This film is on the Leeds IFF website HERE

Rituals

2010-10-20T03:20:00.000-07:00

Running Time: 90 mins
Showing: Sun 7th Nov, 2010 - 18:00Sun 7th Nov, 2010 - 18:00Ticket link @ East Street Arts (ESA) - £5.00 / £4.00

The idea of journeys, rituals, trips is present in a lot of wondermental cinema. This selection of work from contemporary artist filmmakers delights in explicity tripping – from a gorgeous Super 8 ritual shot in the Lithuanian countryside, to a man’s search through a tropical forest for the god Apoekoe, a ritualistic camera dance with flowers, a (literally!) gutsy ritual of a taxidermist, a visionary journey through a metaphorical tunnel, a trip inside the body of film, and many more. Featuring well known and lesser known artists alongside each other, this screening will largely be on 16mm film, with an open atmosphere and a bar. With work from Garbštienė, Doing, Lowder, Gent, Cogan, Fleisch, Brundert, and others.

This screening on the Leeds IFF website is HERE

Unravel – A Direct Film Animation Workshop

2010-10-20T03:18:00.000-07:00

Sun 14, 12:00 – 16:00
42 Gallery (42 New Briggate, Leeds)
FREE

Come along and drop into this free hands-on workshop where you can paint, draw and animate directly onto 16mm film! Suitable for all ages. The project is called Unravel, and through workshops all over Britain an epic 16 hour long hand-painted film will be created, which correlates in length with the 874 miles between the two extreme edges of Britain; John O’Groats and Land’s End (one 16mm frame = one metre). The film will link together and be created by local communities throughout England, Scotland and Wales. Truly collaborative filmmaking! This is a drop-in event, so no booking is necessary – come and stay as long as you like.

A sign language interpreter will be present for the whole event to encourage participation of deaf and aurally impaired people.

This workshop is on the Leeds IFF website HERE

Warren Sonbert (1947 – 1995)

2010-10-20T03:11:00.001-07:00

Director Warren Sonbert
Country USA
Running Time: 60 mins
Showing: Sun 21st Nov, 2010 - 16:00Sun 21st Nov, 2010 - 16:00Ticket link @ East Street Arts (ESA) - £5.00 / £4.00

A celebration of just a small part of the superb oeuvre of Warren Sonbert, one of the seminal figures of American wondermental film and rarely shown in the UK. He started making films in 1966 and was given a retrospective before he was 20! His early films feature denizens of the Warhol scene, with his late works culminating in astonishing symphonic montages, both silent and sound, uniting universal human gestures into singular works of moving image artistry. A prolific theorist and critic as well as filmmaker, his films display a deep love and understanding of cinema. The programme, curated by Jon Gartenberg, is entitled ‘Silent Rhythms / Sound Symphonies II’ and includes the films ‘The Cup and the Lip’ (1986, colour, silent) and ‘Short Fuse’ (1992, colour & b/w, sound), both on 16mm.

Read more

Review of Takahiko Iimura in Leeds

2010-10-20T02:52:00.000-07:00

This was a really interesting evening, with a full house at the ICS cinema at the University of Leeds, with Takahiko and Akiko Iimura both present. I want to say a really big thankyou to the following people and organisations, for help with putting on the event:

Takahiko and Akiko Iimura, for coming to Leeds and giving us the pleasure of your presence, and of course to "Taka" especially for his wonderful films!

Julian Ross, friend and co-organiser of the event, who liaised with Taka in Tokyo (and interviewed him), picked up the film prints, found some funding, and just generally co-organised it!

Jenni Rauch at WREAC (White Rose East Asian Centre, at the University of Leeds), who helped us to finance the event

Lucia Nagib, Head of the Centre for World Cinemas at the University of Leeds, for continuing support and enthusiasm

Arts Council England, who are supporting Cherry Kino until next year

Leo Enticknap, who was the projectionist on the night, and who has been so very helpful to Cherry Kino on all things tech-related

Michael Burkitt, who designed and made the original screen-printed posters for the event

Ollie Jenkins for taking some ace pictures

Will Rose for lending us a lens

And finally, everyone who made it along to the event - thankyou thankyou thankyou, you made it a really special evening!

Hope to see you all at future CK events during the Leeds International Film Festival, 4 - 21 November!

x CK

Cherry Kino programme in the Leeds International Film Festival!

2010-10-12T14:42:00.000-07:00

The Cherry Kino programme as part of the Leeds International Film Festival is finally HERE!!!

There are 12 events in total - you need to click onto page 2 for the 11th and 12th events.

And the Leeds International Film Festival brochure is all over town - Cherry Kino stuff starts on page 75. Dates are 4 - 21 November! A Festival pass only costs £80 early bird offer, which is really good value I reckon - and I'm not just saying that coz I'm involved in the festival! It is blindlingly good actually - you get 18 days worth of unlimited films.

Hope you like the look of it! The CK screenings will take place over the 3 weekends during the film festival (my my it's a long festival!). The first and last weekends will be at Patrick Studios, ESA, and the middle weekend will be at the Leeds City Art Gallery's new screening space. Gotta come!

x CK

TONIGHT: FREE Takahiko Iimura film screening + director!

2010-10-11T01:47:00.000-07:00

TONIGHT! Monday 11th October, 6.30pm, ICS Cinema, University of Leeds
http://www.mixedcinemanetwork.org/node/84

The address of the cinema is: Clockworkers North Buliding LT 2.31
Here are directions:

Go down University Road, located on the left-‐side of the Parkinson Building, walk past Baines Wing and Great Hall and there will be some big gates on your right. Go through the gates into Clothworkers Court and the building straight in front of you is the Clockworkers North Building. Please check here to download the campus map

Takahiko Iimura will be joining us for a very special screening of a selection of his films, most on 16mm. Come a little early to avoid disappointment, as there are only 70 seats in the cinema.

And for an interview with the director, carried out by Julian Ross (who is co-organising the event with me), see here

See you there!

x CK

Paul Clipson & Gareth Hardwick Gig Review!

2010-09-24T01:40:00.000-07:00

Here's Paul's website so you can keep updated about what he's doing.

Paul has just gone to catch the plane to Le Havre for his next show - it's so windy outside today! The gig on Wednesday night at ESA Patrick Studios was really mind-blowing - he shoots almost every day, and makes himself film even if he really doesn't feel like it, and you can tell that his work is the work of someone who is dedicated, who knows their tools. The colour saturation of his films is also incredible, and the clean image he gets - wow. It's often hard to believe it has been shot on Super 8, and looks more like 16mm at times. He uses these amazing overlaying techniques with multiple exposures to mesmerising effect, and also moves the camera from side to side and up and down and zooms in and out and uses far away shots and macro ones, and all this combines to create some stunning textures and layers of film, as if you're moving right into the stargate itself! He uses the Super 8 colour stock Velvia a lot, and reckons it's similar to Kodachrome in colour quality, and also loves the b/w stock Plus-X (which Kodak have stopped making but which you can still find in one or two places, including Super8 Reversal Lab in Rotterdam). Paul gets the films processed at labs and pretty much spends all his money on film! Yep, I know THAT feelin! (Paris, Texas...)

So on the evening of the gig, Gareth was performing too (great stuff!) to one of Paul's longer pieces, and it worked beautifully. The two artists, Paul and Gareth, were working on their own pieces, and Gareth was working without seeing what Paul was projecting, and that way it's up to the audience to work to draw them together and make connections between them. The atmosphere was really, really good. Paul commented on that afterwards too. I think everyone had an ace time - I know I felt really elated from the show. We also did an informal Q&A at the end, which was really good - no awkward silences, people had a lot to ask, and Paul and Gareth were really good at explaining their art to us, it was brill.

Thanks to everyone who made it down - really enjoyed the vibe, and hope you can make it to the other CK gigs. Feels ace knowing that people are loving experimental film, makes all the effort totally worth it! Big thanks to ESA for letting us use their space for the event, and the sound was also ace - thanks to Stu for that, great job!
And of course, massive thanks to Paul and Gareth for making the night what it was!

x CK

Japanese Experimental Cinema: An Evening with Takahiko Iimura

2010-09-05T14:56:00.000-07:00

Cherry Kino and the University of Leeds present:

Japanese Experimental Cinema: An Evening with Takahiko Iimura

Date: October 11th 2010

Time: 18:30-21:00

Venue: ICS Cinema, University of Leeds

Price: FREE

Takahiko Iimura is an experimental filmmaker, video artist and writer on experimental film who has been working with the moving image since the 1960s. His work explores the relationship between media, time and language and has strived to redefine the exhibition of cinema as a mode of performance. He has worked closely with members of the Hi-Red Centre and Fluxus, as well as Yoko Ono, Jonas Mekas, John Cage, Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek and many others, bridging boundaries between film, art and performance. He moved to New York in 1966 and has since been a conduit of intercultural communication between Japan and America, introducing Japanese experimental cinema to the West and vice versa. He recently began self-releasing his work on DVD and continues to travel around the world to show his films.

"Although Taka was and continues to be an active part of the New York avant-garde scene, he always remained an enigmatic, mysterious presence, pursuing his own unique route through the very center of the avant-garde cinema. While the intensity and the fire of the American avant-garde film movement inspired him and attracted him, his Japanese origins contributed decisively to his uncompromising explorations of cinema's minimalist and conceptualist possibilities. He has explored this direction of cinema in greater depth than anyone else." – Jonas Mekas

“From early sixties, though Japanese, Iimura was well known as one of the first generation of the New York Underground ... For many years, Japanese experimental film was Takahiko Iimura” - Malcolm Le Grice

Cherry Kino and the CWC-MCN University of Leeds have invited Takahiko Iimura to join our screening of a selection of his films, which will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker himself. Many thanks to WREAC (www.wreac.org) who are helping us fund the event and ICS who kindly offered their venue.

Other dates in the UK include:

October 5th: London, Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club (http://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/)

October 6th: London, Nowhere Lab (Workshop)

October 7th: London, Central St. Martins, University of Arts London

October 11th: Leeds, University of Leeds

October 13th: Bristol, Arnolfini (http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/)

For more information on Takahiko Iimura, please see: http://www.takaiimura.com

Films:

Ai (Love) (1962) - with music by Yoko Ono

Iro (Colour) (1962-3)

Kuzu (Junk) (1962) - with music by Takehisa Kosugi

One Frame Duration (1977)

Cine-Dance: Anma (1963) - with butoh dancers Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno

Ma: Space/Time at the Garden of Ryoan-ji (1989)

Performance of White Calligraphy (2008)

Paul Clipson event on 22nd September!

2010-08-25T15:42:00.001-07:00

Hey!

Paul Clipson is coming to Leeds!!! His only tour date in the UK. On 22nd September he'll do a show, hosted by Cherry Kino, down at ESA Patrick Studios. Gareth Hardwick will collaborate on sound for the show. Check out Gareth's myspace page here: http://www.myspace.com/garethhardwick - he also has a new album out called "Aversions".

Paul Clipson works mainly with Super 8 film, and will be projecting his work live on Super 8, with 2 works on 16mm. Here's his statement about his work:

Filmmakers Statement

“My approach to making films is to bring to light subconscious preoccupations that begin to reveal themselves while filming in an improvised, stream of consciousness manner. Aspects of memory, dreams and recordings of the everyday are juxtaposed with densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments vast and small, all within a flowing formal and thematic experimental aesthetic that encourages unplanned-for results.

Maintaining a predominantly intuitive process in conceiving and creating films, where improvisation, utilizing mistakes, and “wrong” images (for example images that are overexposed or out of focus) are part of my filmmaking methodology, I’m less concerned with a preconceived end result and more with being immersed in a visual exploration of the moment. I employ a mainly handheld camera, often set at the two extremes of the focal spectrum, macro and telephoto (extreme macro close-up, extreme long shot), which maximizes the saturated textures of Super 8mm, the format I most frequently shoot in. The films are a personal recording, like a diary or essay, rendering color, light, focus and shadow in many forms, in the hope of allowing for un-thought, unexpected elements to reveal themselves.

To a large degree, the editing in the films is “in camera”, meaning that many of the shots and their order are as they were conceived at the time. Many of my films are the result of collaborations with sound artists or groups, such as Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Gregg Kowalsky and Joshua Churchill, all of whose methods of experimenting with sound and instrumentation, incorporating improvisation, mistakes and accidents into live performances and recordings, have greatly influenced my work.

I initially create 40-60 minute films, shooting rapidly and almost daily, to collect specific thematic and formal elements as they occur to me. The films are often screened at live musical performances (in the Bay Area and at international music venues) with the largely “in-camera” edited footage in its most effective order. These performance screenings provide me with an exciting environment in which visual and sonic permutations can be studied for future films. There’s no discussion or effort made by the musicians I collaborate with to synchronize or edit the films in a way that will better suit their being experienced by the audience. Over time, shorter film pieces, such as ECHO PARK (2007) or SPHINX ON THE SEINE (2008), are carefully created from this work, utilizing the accidental, unexpected juxtapositions of sound and image that have been discovered live. Along with the influence of experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Marie Menkin, Bruce Conner, and Bruce Baillie, many of my recent discoveries and journeys as a filmmaker are the result of my work with musicians and bands.”

A Day at the Beach - mini review!

2010-08-20T16:42:00.000-07:00

Well that was an awesome adventure! Oh my. Just got home from doing the Cherry Kino "A Day at the Beach" screening down at ESA, it felt so so so so so so good to be projecting, watching and sharing those films. I feel as though my dreams will be stunning and glorious tonight :)
The films I showed were:

At Land - Dir. Maya Deren
Tides - Dir. Amy Greenfield
The Birth of Aphrodite - Leland Auslender
By the Sea - Pat O'Neill
Seashore - David Rimmer
Beach Walk - Jack Walsh
To the Beach - Robert Schaller

All on 16mm. Such a beautiful format! Had a good zoom lens so managed to get a good, big image. Was in heaven. :)))))

Thanks to East Street Arts for use of Patrick Studios as a venue!

xx

Friday 20th August - MicroCinema screening "A Day at the Beach"

2010-08-14T08:12:00.001-07:00

Cherry Kino MicroCinema event – “A Day at the Beach”!

6.30pm – 10.30pm, Friday 13th August, ESA (Patrick Studios, St Mary’s Lane, LS9 7EH – over the bridge from the WYP), £5 on the door (£4 with a CK card)

A screening of wondermental “beach” films!

Inspired by a brief but intense boiling hot few weeks this summer spent longing for the sea, “A Day at the Beach” takes the beach as its inspiration. Artists have always been fascinated by that liminal, shifting border between sea and land, and have used it as a means of expressing a multitude of ideas and feelings. Found home movies on Super 8 are often of beach holidays, glittering waves, castles made of sand… it’s a place that fascinates, where normal modes of behaviour don’t apply (a holiday from normal life), and it draws us in with a hypnotist’s skill, inviting us to let go of land and try floating for a while, or emerge primordially from the rich sea, newly born.

The films chosen for this programme include work by Pat O'Neill, Amy Greenfield, David Rimmer, Robert Schaller, Maya Deren, Leland Auslender and Jack Walsh, and they celebrate and explore the beach in its plethora of meanings. After the screening there will be a specially curated selection of music, all chosen according to the theme, to turn the screening into a bit of a party! Needless to say there will also be a bar, and some BBQ’d veggie sausages for your enjoyment! Hope to see you there! And feel free to wear swimwear. Or nothing.

x CK

How was OpenLab?

2010-08-14T06:46:00.000-07:00

Ah, it was ace!!

So, it seems there actually is demand for an analogue film resource and do you know what? I've been wanting to run a lab for about two and a half years, ever since I got back from my trip around Germany and France staying at DIY film labs (Sector 16, L'Abominable, L'ETNA, Atelier MTK). I feel so so happy that it is finally happening!

Lucy and Naomi borrowed a Super 8 camera and shot a roll of film, then came back to the lab and processed it, and hung it up to dry.

Tom brought some really interesting 16mm films and showed them.

Rosie checked out the space, bought a Super 8 film from the lab fridge and sussed out what type of light meter battery she needs to buy to make her Super 8 camera work.

I demonstrated how to splice Super 8, 16mm and Standard 8 film, and gave people tours of the resource, showed how the LOMO tank works, helped Naomi mix up some chemicals for processing, and just generally explained things and pointed people in the right direction to find things out.

I got a lovely Standard 8 camera (made in former USSR in the 60s, called "Quarz") and loaded it with Fomapan R b/w reversal stock (from the Czech Republic), and am shooting it this weekend and trying out the 6 different lenses that came with it! It's a wind up camera, totally love it!

I know OpenLab being 1 day a month isn't that much, but I'd rather that it grows in frequency rather than starts off too ambitiously and then becomes a chore, you know? This way is just perfect for now, and maybe in the winter I'll do a few extra OpenLabs if I've got more time to spare!

The lab is pretty well stocked now, and everything that needs fixing is being fixed, which takes a lot of time and money, but it's soooo worth it!

I'm really keen to get on with my own filmmaking too, and share films with other people. I shot lots of K40 in Tenerife - went to this amazing volcano! - so when I get that processed I can start the lengthy process of editing. I've got a lot of footage I've shot over the years, and a form has been taking shape for a while now, so all I've got to do now is ... oh, tons and tons of stuff! Shooting and processing is only the beginning! I'm in no rush though.

Already looking forward to the next OpenLab, on 10th September. It feels so good to be doing this!

x CK

And a few more!

2010-08-05T04:02:00.001-07:00

Still images from my Super 8 films

2010-08-05T03:56:00.001-07:00

OpenLab!!! First one is on Friday 13th (oooh!) August

2010-07-25T01:44:00.000-07:00

Photos of some of the resources you'll be able to use at OpenLab

OpenLab is one day a month when Cherry Kino will open the film lab space up for people to come and use the resources to make films on Super 8 and 16mm. The lab is mainly analogue (the equipment is quite hard to find these days), and in terms of digital there are only 2 digital VHS cameras at the moment (and Apple Macs downstairs) but you're free to use them, and there's access to DV cameras. Hopefully the lab can embrace more digital forms in the future so if you work with mainly digital forms, don't feel excluded! You'll need a Cherry Kino Card (£30 - used to cover running costs of the space, maintenance of the equipment etc), which gives you access to OpenLab until July 2011, £1 off all CK MicroCinema events and at least £3 off all CK MicroLab events! This works out as totally worth it I think (there will be lots of CK events during Leeds International Film Festival too, which your card will be valid for), and gives you access to some really great equipment that's quite hard to find all together in one place. Email cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com to buy a card, or you can buy one on one of the OpenLab days (2nd Friday of the month - first one is on Friday 13th August).

There will also be film and chemicals for sale at good rates, and extra bits like film reels, leader, lab gloves etc.

There are 3 rooms: a lab space, a dark room, and a screening space!

Equipment includes:

Super 8: Viewer, Projectors, Splicer, Reels, Cameras

16mm: Steenbeck editing table, Projectors, Splicer, Rewind Arms, Reels, Cores, Camera

Processing: Chemistry for E6, C-41, b/w reversal, b/w negative developing

Film for sale: Super 8 colour and b/w, high contrast 16mm print film, 16mm b/w negative (all kept in a fridge!)

Library of film books and magazines
Library of DVDs of experimental film

LOMO developing tank (for Super 8, 16mm, and 35mm), DIY Super 8 developing tank, film drying machine, thermometer, timer, red safelight (for use only with print film or making photo prints), photographic enlargers, developing trays, and lots of buckets!

Plastic bottles of all sizes are always welcome so if you have some you were going to recylcle, bring them with you when you come. Hope to see you there!

x CK

Photos from the 16mm Workshop!

2010-07-25T01:33:00.000-07:00

From the top: 4 photos of the film we made, 16mm projector, 16mm splicer, D-19 high contrast b/w developer, and lastly, another photo of the film!
x CK

16mm Film Workshop 24th July: Cherry Kino MicroLab event

2010-07-24T10:48:00.001-07:00

Ah, that was amazing!! People travelled from Glasgow, Wolverhampton, Huddersfield, London, and even Berlin for the Cherry Kino 16mm Film Workshop!! I was pretty gobsmacked. Not a Leeds loiner among em! (There was one but she couldn't come at the last minute) I guess it shows that there really is national need for more of these film workshops and events. I'll put some pictures up in the next post!

We used the "rayogram" method to make a b/w film, processed it in high contrast developer, dried it, then made a positive copy of the film, dried that, and then mixed up some colourful tinters and toners and treated the film to some colours. We essentially made a film WITHOUT A CAMERA. All the people who came to the workshop are so ace and we all got on really well together, there was a real sense that we were happy to meet others who were interested in handmade film, it felt exciting. The film we made together was a collaborative affair, and it came out with some really interesting and "wow" bits. It was something of an experiment for me too, as I've never run that particular workshop before, but it was such a laugh and worked so well that maybe I'll do another one. Not right now though - am knackered, but very very happy.

x CK

Paul Clipson Teaser!

2010-07-12T06:49:00.001-07:00

Just some images to get you excited about Paul Clipson's Super 8 performance with live sound on 22nd September! http://vimeo.com/user2911089/videos/page:1/sort:newest

Cherry Kino MicroCinema, MicroLab and OpenLab!

2010-07-05T03:31:00.000-07:00

Cherry Kino's activity can be seen as split into 3 areas:

MicroCinema - this is a term coined in San Francisco in the 90s (I think..!) to describe a small scale, independent and alternative mode of screening film, often showing work that exists outside the mainstream. It can be an actual location - for example the Cube in Bristol - or it can be peripatetic (roving, with no particular home), which is what Cherry Kino will be. Screenings will take place at different venues, though quite a few of them will happen at Patrick Studios (big thanks to ESA for offering the space!) Screening capacities include Super 8, 16mm and digital formats.

MicroLab - this term describes hands on film workshop events that Cherry Kino will run, such as the 16mm film workshop to take place on 24th July! (email: cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com to book and see the blog post about it). Cherry Kino will also invite artist filmmakers to give workshops on specific filmmaking techniques, giving people the chance to learn things that are often quite hard to find information about. They can then go on to practise these techniques at OpenLab...

OpenLab - Cherry Kino will run a film lab at Patrick Studios (top floor) on the 2nd Friday of every month, starting on 13th August, so that people can use the analogue filmmaking resources to make films! It's quite hard to find lots of analogue equipment available for use concentrated in one space, so it's a really good chance to make use of it if you're interested in analogue filmmaking. There's film processing capacity (including a dark room), chemicals and films for sale, Super 8 and 16mm cameras to borrow, projectors etc. There's also a tripod, a screen to use for DIY telecine (transferring Super 8 and 16mm to digital formats), a library of useful resources, and a variety of booklets on different processing/toning techniques. OpenLab is largely inspired by DIY artist-run film labs across Europe and North America, and will be operated as a resource, not a service. You'll need a Cherry Kino Card to gain access to the OpenLab days, which costs £30 (this helps pay for the running costs of the space) and gives you lots of discounts on the MicroCinema (£1 off) and MicroLab (£3 off) events too. During Leeds International Film Festival, Cherry Kino will also organise around 10 events, so the card is really good value, and lasts until 1st July next year. You can buy one by sending a cheque payable to Cherry Kino to: Cherry Kino, Patrick Studios, St Mary's Lane, LS9 7EH, and including your name, address and email, and I'll send you one in the post!

x CK

16mm Film Workshop!

2010-07-01T07:42:00.000-07:00

Cherry Kino 16mm film workshop!

Saturday 24th July
East Street Arts, Patrick Studios, St Mary’s Lane, Leeds, LS9 7EH
11am – 3pm
£30 (£27 with a Cherry Kino card!)

To book: email cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com

The photo above left is of a film people made at a workshop run by Alex MacKenzie using the rayogram method.
It might come as news to you, but 16mm filmmaking does not have to be a costly pursuit! And you can still get all the materials you need to do this type of filmmaking, a favourite medium for countless artists since it was invented in the 1920s, inspiring so much creativity through the many different ways it can be used. It is truly alchemical!

This workshop will teach 6 people how to make 16mm positive and negative films using a simple method and without the use of any cameras at all! We’ll be using 16mm print film, which is normally only used by labs for making positive copies from negatives, and is far cheaper than “shooting” stock (though you can shoot on it too). Plus, you can use a red darkroom safelight when using it, so you can actually see what you’re doing! We will use the “flat printing” and “rayogram” methods, where you put film and objects on the film strip and expose it to light, making a negative copy and rayogram respectively.

We’ll then process the film in a high-contrast b/w developer to make the images boldly stand out, and from there we’ll flat print it to make a positive copy. Next, we’ll use a unique set of tinters and toners to make the b/w filmstrip explode into colour (this is really good fun and you can get some amazing results!). Then we can take a look at the film strip on the 16mm editing table (a 6 plate Steenbeck – a great machine!). The Steenbeck can slow the film right down so you can view the film frame by frame, and we’ll have a look at basic editing, splicing and 16mm projection. The workshop is suitable for beginners as well as those who already have some experience with film, and is a good way to learn a really economical filmmaking technique that requires hardly any equipment.

Cherry Kino will be presenting an event every month from July until July next year. This will be a mixture of MicroCinema events (screenings) and MicroLab events (workshops) in Leeds and Bradford, so you can watch unique, engaging, beautiful "wondermental" films and also learn some fun and inspiring lab techniques for working hands-on with 16mm and Super 8 film! The events will take place in various locations, with some taking place at ESA, Patrick Studios http://www.esaweb.org.uk/. I'll be writing a monthly newsletter too, and keeping the blog updated (and the website - when it's ready!). From 13th August, Cherry Kino will also be running OpenLab on the 2nd Friday of every month, where Super 8 and 16mm filmmaking resources will be open to the public! You'll need a Cherry Kino card to gain access to OpenLab, which also gives you lots of discounts to Cherry Kino events year round (£1 off screenings and £3 off workshops, including CK events during Leeds International Film Festival). It costs £30 and is valid until 1st July 2011 - email cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com if you want one!

x CK

My Name is Oona

2010-06-24T04:25:00.000-07:00

It is a stunning film that I saw for the first time in Leeds (at olsen) and just couldn't shake out of my being. It struck the strongest chord in me, and I recently saw it again at Oberhausen Short Film Festival, where Gunvor Nelson herself was in attendance. Wonderful, wonderful filmmaker, and a phenomenal woman. I'm going to research her work for my research MA in synaesthesia and film. Her films have been badly overlooked in the avant-garde circle, for many reasons, but two DVDs of her work coming out soon (one from re:voir and one from Film Form I think) and HOPEFULLY newly struck 16mm (and maybe 35mm?) film prints will enable her incredible "personal films" to be circulated more widely and enjoyed by more and more folk. She has pretty strict stipulations about how her films should be screened - in ABSOLUTE darkness (many film screenings aren't truly dark if you think about it! exit signs, lights on the stairs, light leaks, people coming in and out etc.) and with specific instructions. I really want to organise a screening of her films this year - I'll try! She is a MASSIVE inspiration to me. Does something physical to me just thinking about her films, like a feeling of huge waves of freshness in the sea on a sunny day, or the explosion of a thunder and lightning storm that clears the air so you can breathe again.

Thankyou Gunvor!

x CK

cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com

Some thoughts on hand-processing film

2010-06-24T03:24:00.001-07:00

Hey,

I really recommend hand-processing your films. Commercial labs are expensive, and mean that you can't intervene in the process to get effects you want or try things out. The exception to this are artist-run film labs, which I wholeheartedly love and support!

Places like L'Abominable in Paris, MIRE in Nantes, MTK in Grenoble, no.w.here lab in London, Sector 16 in Hannover, LaborBerlin in ... er... Berlin (!), WORM Filmwerkplaats in Rotterdam, LABA in Athens, Super 8 Picnic in a Hand in Vilnius. At the moment Cherry Kino is based at East Street Arts in Leeds and is trying to make a film lab! EXP24 started it up as a resource (which I was part of), but has since kind of disbanded as we've all gone on to do our own projects etc. so Cherry Kino is going to keep it running and build it up. There's film processing capacity, chemicals to use, films for sale, Super 8 and 16mm cameras to borrow, projectors, and a big 6-plate Steenbeck editing table for 16mm film. There's also a library of useful resources, and various booklets on different processing/toning techniques. Watch this space, coz the lab will be opened up to the public for one day a month starting on 13th August (and on the 2nd Friday of every month thereafter), so people can use the resources to make films!

Artist-run film labs are absolutely awesome resources where artists/filmmakers use the equipment themselves, and work on every stage of their film. It's a move away from the "service" idea of a film lab (which can sometimes be useful, sure), to a resource where the filmmaker's agency is paramount. With a lot of personal "wondermental" films, they are often made by either one person or a small group, not like big budget films, and so the roles don't tend to be neatly separated into "director" "producer" "editor" etc. I don't know what defines an "artist" as separate to a "filmmaker", but I guess I mean films made with artistry in mind, not commerce or industry.

Anyhow... process your own films! Once I've got the website up and running I can put resources on it to show you how to do it. Depending on how many different film stocks you use, it can be a little perplexing to get your head around the different processes, but start simply by getting to grips with one film stock, learn its process, and the rest will follow.

Strangely enough, with Super 8, processing colour reversal film (this means film that is projectable when it's done - not a colour neg) is easier than processing b/w reversal film! You just need to heat the chemistry up to roundabout the right temperature. Professional labs would have you believe that it is an absolutely exact science, but this is more if you're after an absolutely pristinely correct image. My guess is, if you're using Super 8, you like it for its quirks, its grain, its dream-like beauty, and all of these things can be enhanced by the freedom which hand processing gives you. Don't be put off by things that tell you "you MUST have the temperature to this precise degree" or "you MUST process 64T in E6 chemistry" (try C41, like I suggest in my earlier post, for example). There are some hard and fasts, for sure, but the process of image making is way more open than we are told by "professionals"! And it is the exploration of these beautiful, solarised vistas that will help you find some truly magical visions.

I like to think of developing film as a "revelation" - the latin-derived term for film developer is (in french) "revelateur", meaning "revealer" - I like it better than "developer" or "processor". Somehow, this term suggests the film itself has some agency, and can surprise you, and that the chemicals don't just act on the film in a predetermined way but they are like an aid to revealing something magical which lies not just in the chemicals and not just in the film, but in the synergy that comes from their combination with your own vision, pleasurable union and circumstance. Even though I've never given birth, processing film is a bit like that! You conceive the film, you "labour" (ie the term "lab" work), and you "reveal" it when it's born. And it's part of you, but has an essence that comes from the synergy of - chemicals, material (film), vision, pleasurable union and circumstance!

Ah, that was quite a long post!

I'm so utterly thrilled by film, it speaks to me so strongly. I really like the idea that film isn't a "language". That term just limits it. Nor is it a "visual medium" but it is a "temporal" one. Film is rooted in time. And rhythms. I am in love with it!

x CK

cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com

Super 8 Film Stocks!

2010-06-21T06:03:00.000-07:00

Hey!

A quick update for all you film freaks out there!

Kodachrome 40 (aka K40) - Dwayne's photo http://www.dwaynesphoto.com/ is the only place in the world that still offers colour processing of this colour movie stock, the epitome of saturated "home movie" colours. Gorgeous, gorgeous stuff. Filmmakers the world over were distraught when Kodak announced its discontinuation in 2005. And... Dwayne's have announced that they will cease processing at the end of December 2010! Oh no! That gives you only another 6 months or so to use up and send off all your old K40 stocks - check your freezers to see if any is lurking there! Or buy some online on ebay now and shoot shoot shoot it!! It's the film stock of choice for Nathaniel Dorsky's mesmerising works. What will we do after December?...

Ektachrome 64T - The colour Super 8 stock that wasn't quite as saturated as K40 but does the job well. And it's really easy to hand-process in E6 chemicals, or cross-process in C-41! Kodak are discontinuing this too.... It's what Cherry Kino has always used in Super 8 workshops.

Ektachrome 100D - Kodak are bringing this out to replace 64T. You've been able to get it as 16mm for a long while, but now you'll be able to buy Super 8 cartridges of it. Apparently it has stronger colour saturation than 64T and can still be processed in the E6 process. Good news! But I've bought a few rolls of 64T too, just for old time's sake.... And the 100D will be harder to hand-expose, coz it's a faster film...

Plus X - this is a really really nice b/w stock that works great in daylight, it's 100 ASA. Seriously lovely, and Kodak are discontinuing it, both as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm! Big mistake.

Tri X - a fast (200 ASA) b/w film stock good for "night sports photography" (!?) and night time shooting. This will now be the only b/w stock available on Super 8. A real shame.

My advice? Stock up on Plus X while you can, even the older stuff you can get, stick it in the freezer, and save it for a rainy (or sunny!) day! You can also develop K40 as b/w - there's an old film with David Niven in it, by Powell and Pressburger, called "A Matter of Life and Death", and the scenes where they're in heaven is K40 processed as b/w! Not bad. Google it. If you do this, though, you need to overexpose the film by about a stop, and also increase the developing times (both developer and redeveloper) to between 12-14 mins.

Speaking of cross-processing, try processing an Ektachrome film in C41 chemistry - you get colours that really pop, it's unpredictable (therefore exciting!), and can be totally awesome.

Buying film: You can buy all of the above, except K40 (which you can only find on ebay) from http://www.silverprint.com/ and you can also buy Ektachrome 64T cheaply at http://www.7dayshop.com/

If you want me to email you a document on how to process your own Ektachrome Super 8 films (either 64T or 100D) in E6 just email me at cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com and I'll send it!

See ya!

x CK

Things people have said about Cherry Kino

2010-06-16T06:25:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the comments Cherry Kino got from people immersed in the world of experimental film. Check out their websites too, they are all doing brilliant things, more power to them! Doubtless you'll be hearing more about these organisations and artists - MTK, Lightcone, Alex MacKenzie - in the future and on the website when I get it up and running!

"The experimental film community is being exposed to some of the most exciting explorations occurring within film culture that also happen to intersect with the media and fine arts. The exposure generated by Cherry Kino is crucial in developing new audiences for the many discreet experimental film communities currently operating around the UK, and internationally." - Etienne Caire, Filmmaker and Director of Atelier MTK, an artist-run film lab in Grenoble - here's a website of LaFoxe, another of Etienne's projects http://www.mtk.ecrandamour.org/?s=english

"I would like here to give you my full support regarding your projects for Cherry Kino. The work you have been doing for Leeds International Film Festival for a few years now truly contributes to the transmission of experimental cinema culture in England and to let British audiences discover the diversity of experimental filmmaking. I remember that 25 years ago, when Light Cone and our regular screenings called Scratch were just created, barely anyone in Paris knew about this practice. Today - and I believe Light Cone contributed massively to this - it is possible to see experimental films almost every day, and it is not rare to receive French filmmakers’ testimonies explaining how Scratch was, and still is, important to them, and above all stimulating for their work. As a result, I think it’s really important to organize regular screenings of experimental film in the UK in other cities than London that pretty much concentrates all cultural activities. It would help building a community because people then can count on it happening each month. Inviting filmmakers to present their work, inviting guest curators for “carte blanche”, or organising film lab workshops for young artists, is crucial too...All my best & good luck for the future of Cherry Kino!" - Emmanuel Lefrant, Artist Filmmaker, and Director of Lightcone http://www.lightcone.org/

"I recently attended the Cherry Kino section of the Leeds International Film Festival, invited by programmer Martha Jurksaitis to present my expanded cinema piece “The Wooden Lightbox: A Secret Art of Seeing”, as well as a workshop on creating Rayograms on 16mm film. I can’t say enough good things about how vital, inspiring and crucial Cherry Kino is. The energy and support around the work and the extremely high quality and commitment of the programming was a revelation...and, speaking personally, my work needs venues, audiences and zones of immersion and dialogue precisely like the ones that Cherry Kino creates. I strongly urge you to support this project!" - Alex MacKenzie, Artist Filmmaker, Founder of the Blinding Light Cinema and the Vancouver Underground Film Festival http://www.alexmackenzie.ca/

Cherry Kino plans for 2010!

2010-06-15T17:10:00.000-07:00

Hello!

Cherry Kino is a maker, lover and shower of wondermental film in Leeds and Bradford, and I've got some plans for this year that I am really truly tickled inside about, fills me with pleasure! In July there will be a 16mm flat-printing and rayogram workshop on b/w print film, done without a camera and using a red safelight, so you can actually see what you're doing in the dark room! Then I'll show people a few techniques using a really ace set of film tinters and toners, you can get some magical images.

Then in August there will be a screening of wondermental film, in September Cherry Kino will host the San Francisco based filmmaker Paul Clipson http://vimeo.com/videos/search:paul%20clipson to show his incredible films, and in October, we'll witness the splendid films and expanded cinema performances of Takahiko Iimura! http://www.takaiimura.com/ Then in November the Cherry Kino Festival will take place as part of Leeds International Film Festival http://www.leedsfilm.com/ So I'm feeling fully inspired and up for it! This really is what I love doing (as well as growing fruit and veg, making films, visiting film festivals, swimming, concocting homemade potions with essential oils and herbs, natural healing, and experimenting with raw vegan food!). I'm trying to build a website at the moment, so bear with me a bit for that (!) and meanwhile this blog will be my way of expression.

I'll be announcing the workshop dates and info soon - I think there will be space for between 6 and 8 people on it - and if you need to get in touch with me you can email me at cherrykinocinema@yahoo.com

Ok, see ya! xCK

MetalkinG event on 9th April!

2010-06-15T03:12:00.000-07:00

http://vimeo.com/3899764

http://vimeo.com/9268166 - links to MetalkinG performing El Kino Up Your Ears (not at Bradford - I was way too immersed to film it!)

When Cherry Kino welcomed MetalkinG to Bradford in April earlier this year they put on a thoroughly mind-blowing show at the Bradford Playhouse, and got me thinking a lot about collective spectatorship, and embodied spectatorship. I remember my foot was pounding a drum beat with the spectacle, as Riojim (Etienne Caire) did magnificent things with his film and projector and Richarles Bronson played noise on old electronics junks to palpably mesmeric effect. Seriously, there was a moment when a scene from "The Shining", transferred as it was to b/w 16mm film and enhanced by the manual insertion of an anamorphic lens in front, became obliteratingly present!

I stupidly didn't take any photos of the night - which also featured awesome instrumental noise from the Brass Archivist, whose work I always love, and the vocal manipulations he collected, as well as music from the very talented Rinkadon (both accompanied by Super 8 projections/performance) - so I'm just going to include a still image here from part of the film - the colours are insane. It's not digitally enhanced or touched in any way, it's simply a 16mm frame from a film Riojim (Etienne) made at his Grenoble-based artist-run film lab, MTK. I love those two - they really have a strong feeling for what they're doing, and serious artistry and skill. To be honest, I felt pretty poor in comparison, but instead of feeling bad about it I see it as an honour I was there with them, and something to totally aspire to! We had a joke that we'd have a "projector duel" the next time we meet, with me having learnt to handle my machine with a finesse worthy of the Wild West's best gunslinger... hmmm...! They did lug a really heavy EIKI xenon 16mm projector all the way to England for me...

Also a big thankyou to Bradford Playhouse for providing the venue and lots of good cheer - that venue is one of my favourite places to be in Yorkshire, and now the Love Apple has closed down (noooo!), I will be going even more! I totally enjoyed the whole night, and I think others did too! Oh yes, and a big thankyou to Chris, who invited us all back to his HUGE house near Lister Park for an impromptu after party! That was really ace of you. Ok, I'm signing off now - getting overexcited about the fact I now have a blog! It's ten past three in the morning and I've still got wellies on...(humanely re-locating the slugs from my allotment earlier!).

xCK