Sunday 19 April 2009, 14.00

As part of the Expanded Cinema symposium Sunday afternoon is given over to screenings and live projection events in the Starr Auditorium.

Tate Live: Expanded Cinema >
Three film artists show their work in the oil tanks beneath Tate Modern.

14.00 Shadow Play and Visual Music

Tony Hill Point Source 1973 8 minutes (performance)
A small bright light is the projector, several objects are the film and the whole room is the screen. A spatial exploration of the objects with the light projects them as big as the room encompassing the audience.

From Early Expanded Cinema Pioneers to Light Show Psychedelia. Rare classics from the archive of the Centre for Visual Music (LA), curated by Cindy Keefer.

A range of work from 1920s German experiments to Light Show psychedelia, highlighting the evolving technology and artistic sophistication of Visual Music. Includes films designed to be used in performance contexts, light shows and other expanded forms of cinema, often with independent musical accompaniment. Accordingly, one of the themes that emerge from this program is a dialogue between structure and spontaneity in visual music

Oskar Fischinger R-1 ein Formspiel 1925-1933 7 mins
Cinemascope re-creation by William Moritz using Fischinger's experiments. Includes some of Fischinger's early GasparColor tests. Intended as an example of film used in Fischinger's multiple projector performances in the 1920s.  

Oskar Fischinger Komposition in Blau (aka Lichtkonzert Nr. 1), 1935 4 mins
Fischinger wrote in 1935 of his film aspiring to be 'a Color-Light-Concert.'

Charles Dockum Demonstration of Mobilcolor Projector and 1966 Mobilcolor Performance, Film 1966 7 mins
Short documentary explaining the operation and techniques behind Dockum's Mobilcolor Projector, his analog invention to compose and perform colored light, beginning in the 1940s. Plus a film illustrating a Mobilcolor performance.

Jordan Belson Allures 1961 8mins
An early masterpiece of Non-Objective Cinema. Belson wrote, 'I think of Allures as a combination of molecular structures and astronomical events mixed with subconscious and subjective phenomena - all happening simultaneously. The beginning is almost purely sensual, the end perhaps totally nonmaterial. It seems to move from matter to spirit in some way.'

Jud Yalkut Turn, Turn, Turn 1966 10 mins 
Sound by USCO. Preserved with the support of the NFPF. A kinetic alchemy of the light and electronic works of Nicolas Schoffer, Julio Le Parc, USCO, and Nam June Paik.

SWTB Single Wing Turquoise Bird Light Show Film, 1971 5 mins
Film document of light show performance by Peter Mays, Jeffrey Perkins, Michael Scroggins, Jon Greene, Larry Janss and Rol Murrow, including film footage by David Lebrun, Pat O'Neill, and John Stehura. 'Always evolving visual-kinetic equivalents of the psycho-social climate...a movie in which each image emanates its own projector' (Youngblood)

15.30 Live Medium

Steve Partridge Monitor 1976/2009 6mins (performance)
This is the first performance of a work made in 1975-6 now recontextualised and realised as a live performance. The original work was a series of 'live' performances interleaved with successive playbacks within the television frame, like the russian dolls, one image within another. The space is simultaneously conveyed as virtual within the video feedback loop, and actual by the performance.

Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder UNTITLED 2008 (performance) Double 16 mm projector performance, electric humidifiers, glass, mixed media, original score by Olivia Block, approx. 45 minutes.

Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder's UNTITLED takes two frames of light and methodically works with their edges to an evocative sound design by Olivia Block. The piece literally creates an installation environment in the theatre, making the finale an entirely physical experience. Gibson and Recoder experiment with the possibilities of the projector and the light itself, from booth to screen, over our heads and back to our eyes. - Sundance Film Festival

17.00 UK Multiscreen
 
A performance and and rare twin-screen works by UK artists

David Dye Western Reversal 1973 S-8 6mins (performance)
A 1950`s B movie cowboy film is projected through a framework of 16 moveable mirrors.

One by one the mirrors are slowly moved so that each fragment of the projected image overlaps in the centre of the screen. The narrative slowly becomes unreadable as the film progresses and the image is imploded into a rectangle of shifting light.

Annabel Nicolson To the Dairy 1975 4mins (single screen)
'In the dark room, single images succeed each other in continous motion towards the Dairy, where she and the other english filmmakers stayed in an area of demolishion. She penetrates with the camera in rapid flicks, hesitates at single things, and glides on in a staccato flow'. -Helge Krarup (Denmark) 1976. A record of the Dairy, birthplace of much UK expanded cinema filmed by one of its pioneers.

Malcolm Le Grice Yes No Maybe Maybe Not 1967 sil 8mins (two-screen)
'The images which are used have been chosen for meanings and qualities they imply. But the impact of the film comes through the way in which they are transformed in the printing - mainly involving certain kinds of positive-negative superimposition. There is no thematic or narrative aspect to this film...it is almost entirely a present visual-movement experience'. MlG

Ron Haselden Double Portrait 1974 sil 3mins (two-screen)
Is a study for a two-screen film in which members of the audience are invited to film themselves with a 16mm camera. The abutting screens form a partnership and it was envisaged as an ongoing, developing work. This project reflected my interest in working directly with audiences and it continues today with a number of large scale outdoor performances in cities throughout Europe. 

'Expanded Cinema' evolved at a time when photography, performance and dance were rapidly rising to the surface as media in their own right, to challenge many established criteria in those fields. The environments in which it took place and negligible budgets with often hand-processing of film-stock contributed to it's energy through shows in art galleries, warehouses and abandoned spaces which were far more adaptable and liberating than the cinema or theatre. Events often took place with not much thought to preserving the actual materials involved, but rather that it would be the ideas that would persist for the future.

Gill Eatherley Dialogue 1973 10mins (two-screen)
Two cameras are used to explore the view from a window and then within a room, the camera operators closely follow and complement each other even frequently observing each other directly. The film traces the two cameras' attempts to imitate each other's action - thus making some of the subjective responses of camera handling more explicit. Malcolm Le Grice

Tony Sinden Can Can 1975 10mins (two-screen)
Can Can was made for projection in the cinema, the twin-screen version projects a dichotomous relationship that almost mirrors itself. Two prints of the film are projected simultaneously on the screen side-by-side: one print is reversed, the projectors unsynchronized, allowing the image/s and sound track/s to drift. Each time it is projected it is different. 

At the time I was interested in exploring the encounter of film: removing the projected film from the projection box and projecting it from the auditorium: extending a dialogue between the moving image, audience and surface of the screen. This period marked a transition in my film and video making: moving from cinema to the gallery, opening the door to installation: producing film-video concepts for a different audience and environment. TS

18.00 End

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
Free
This event will be on a first-come, first-served basis.