As part of BEEF’s ongoing commitment to DIY analogue film practices, we present a curated weekend of film screenings, performances, discussions, critical dialogue, and a workshop.
The programme explores how DIY film labs and collectives support and stimulate new ways of thinking about cinema. It emphasises collective approaches to making and screening film, considers how shared equipment and resources, integrated models of analogue film production and presentation and also artist initiated publications play a crucial role in the ongoing experimental and artist film making ecosystem. Practices that emerge from artist run film labs push at the limits of the analogue film gauge and take time and care to acquire. This knowledge stimulates innovations in filmic language and formulates new aesthetic possibilities that this program will consider and demonstrate.
The DIY film lab community is thriving internationally. This programme brings together laboratories and filmmakers from across the world, with contributors and guests from Brussels, Berlin, Aberystwyth, Australia, and Mumbai. The programme aims to inform, inspire, and connect artists, practitioners and audiences within the evolving landscape of experimental film and expanded cinema past, present, and future, both locally and internationally. Panel discussion and film screenings will tease out and demonstrate the ways in which DIY analogue film labs and artist initiated film screenings stimulate and support innovation.
Fri 20 February // 7pm – 10:30pm // Cube Cinema
PANEL DISCUSSION
Posing the question of how DIY analogue film labs and artist initiated film screenings stimulate and support innovation and new aesthetics in cinema, the panel will discuss approaches to collective film-making and screening, the sustainability of DIY film labs in the UK in the absence of any industrial processing facility and the role of universities in sustaining 16 mm film production.
Els Van Riel (Brussels Film Lab)
Kim Knowles (Labordy Ffilm Aber)
Andrew Vallance (Contact, Film Talks)
Alia Syed (film-maker, former London Film Makers cooperative)
collective-iz (expanded cinema events)
SCREENING: THE FILM CAMERA
This screening includes films in which innovation is reflected through the camerawork and through the film material by mixing different frame rates, bi-packing, multiple passes, exploring the limits of lenses and light, incorporating found footage and working with wrong film stocks.
Featuring short films by:
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Sat 21 February // 11am – 5pm // Kit Form, Jamaica Streets Studio
PROJECTION WORKSHOP with ELS VAN RIEL (Brussels Film Lab) & BEEF
Musicians play their personal instruments for concerts, film artists prefer to play their cameras when filming. Some filmmakers play their projectors. They turn film projectors into their personal instruments to perform their film art, sometimes written, sometimes improvised.
Inspired by the work of Bruce McClure and Tony Conrad’s ‘Forty-five years on the infinite plain’, this workshop is an opportunity for participants to gain hands-on experience of experimenting with analogue projectors to explore the infinite possibilities of multiple projection.
No previous experience necessary. Materials are provided and participants are welcome to bring any of their own 16mm filmstrips to explore and improvise with.
7pm – 10:00pm
EXPANDED CINEMA EVENT
An evening of expanded cinema in which ordinarily hidden elements of cinema are performed in the present as live events.
Expect mixed gauge, multi-projection, performance-projection, mutable screens, improvisation with light, live sound, + discussion with multi-screen installation artist Louisa Fairclough (BEEF) and collective-iz.
Featuring:
Aurélie Percevault – Matt Davies – Melanie Clifford – Maria Anastassiou – Deniz Johns – Karolina Raczynski – Amy Dickson – Sewing Café Lancaster – Mars Saude – Dani Landau – David Hopkinson
This programme is funded by Arts Council England.