LFF: Experimenta Avant-Garde Weekend

Gareth Evans explores the imaginative landscapes of the LFF's Experimenta Avant-Garde Weekend Film festivals allow us a rare chance to sample from the margins of cinema

So it is that, among the global riches washing up on the shores of the Thames during the LFF, nothing tells us more about the possibilities of the moving image than the Experimenta Avant-Garde Weekend. Here we are brilliantly reminded that film and video are visual media, and closest in their material, rhythmic qualities to painting, poetry and music. This annual global trawl through the oceans of artists’ works has again netted some shimmering gems.

Via themed compilation programmes and with artists in attendance, the weekend reveals all the major territories – from performance to playful abstraction, found footage re-appropriation to heightened documentary and visionary landscape studies to an eroticised immersion in the sensual matter of the world.

Saturday kicks off with a programme called ‘The “I” and the “We”’ (NFT3, 2pm), a quintet of radical portraits, including the colour coded ‘Seeing Red’, in which Su Friedrich riffs on ageing alongside Glenn Gould; the pole-dancing provocation of Elodie Pong’s ‘Je suis une bombe’ and Jay Rosenblatt’s witty deconstruction of Anita Bryant – pop princess, Florida orange advocate and homophobic social crusader. Rosenblatt’s deployment of existing material leads us effortlessly into a programme tagged ‘Past Imperfect’ (NFT3, 4pm), where half a dozen raids on the archives of cinema tease out unfinished histories far from the official record. Highlights here include ‘Dangerous Supplement’, a lyrical lifting of Korean mountain footage care of US military surveillance, and ‘0.65, 0.85, 1.0fps’, where the sufferings of Resnais’ ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ are filtered and further fragmented. After this, the consolations of the body as uniquely expressed in the loving restoration of Carolee Scheemann’s ‘Fuses’ (NFT3, 7pm) come as balm and invigoration. Scheemann’s epiphanic mid-’60s ode makes love with the potential of celluloid, crafting a cine-sexual dream of affection.

The programme ‘Mysterious Emulsion’ (NFT 3, 9pm) edges further into the stuff of cinema, with Sandy Ding’s ‘Water Spell’, alchemical in its incarnations of the molecular, and Carl E Brown’s ‘Blue Monet’, where the impressionist receives a two-screen crystalline chemical makeover.

Sunday afternoon brings journeys care of Patrick Beveridge’s ‘Ivalo River Delta’, with its time-lapsed Northern Lightshow, and ‘At Sea’, Peter Hutton’s epic voyage through the life cycle of vast container ships, from their conception in South Korea to their demise on the beaches of Bangladesh (both NFT 3, 2pm). Open waters give way to a programme called ‘The Percipient Image’ (NFT3, 4pm): ‘The Sky Walks Me Home’ wanders the Chinese hinterlands with empathy, and the compassion continues with Robert Beavers’ ‘Pitcher of Coloured Light’, finding solace in the seasonal house and garden.

A very different kind of womanhood is featured in ‘Seven Easy Pieces’ (NFT 3, 7pm), a documentation of the performances of legendary live artist Marina Abramovic, and the evening ends with a collection of shorts called ‘The Anagogic Chamber’ (NFT 3, 9pm). Unsettling perspectives emerge in the sinister domesticities of Samantha Rebello’s striking ‘The Object Which Thinks Us’ and continue in the Ballardian melancholy of ‘Victory over the Sun’, anatomising the overgrown future visions of various World Fairs. Progress… who knows? But there is a ‘Progress’ of sorts in the day-long Studio installations of that name – radical interpretations of the past and present tense – by Ken Jacobs and Rachel Reupke. Thus, the retina is full. Another way of seeing is possible.

The Experimenta Avant-Garde Weekend at the London Film Festival is at BFI Southbank the weekend of Oct 26 2007.

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