Friday 24 April, 7pm at BEEF, 25 Portland Square

Tickets: £3 on the door

BEEF’s series of monthly screenings kicks off with a theme close to our heart. The 16mm films in this programme were all made using a range of artisanal processes: cameraless techniques and direct-on-film animation such as hand painting, scratching, drawing or applying bodily fluids; rayography; hand-tinting, and pinhole photography.

The event also includes a presentation of work by Echo Park Film Center (Los Angeles).

FILM STENOPEICO / Paolo Gioli / 1974-1989 / 13 mins
A cameraless film made with a device custom made to free images from optics and mechanics. Film is pulled manually through a simple hollow metal tube, the images enter simultaneously through 150 holes distributed along one side making up 150 tiny pinhole camera obscuras, causing alternations of time and space.
Substituting my device for a traditional movie camera is part of a project to wean myself from a consumer technology, a toxin to pure creativity.

BLACK IS / Aldo Tambellini / 1965 / 4 mins
A film made entirely without using a camera.

ALL OVER / Emmanuel Lefrant / 2001 / 7 mins
Whilst ALL OVER is a film made without “instrumentation” (like a camera), it also differs from direct films in that the film remains untouched by any tool (not even the hand). As in dripping, materials and color are spontaneously laid down on the film in semi-controlled gestures, which create a shower of colored dots. The soundtrack functions according to the same principle: the sound, in all its expressions, is formed using one single formal element.

LORETTA / Jeanne Liotta / 2003 / 4 mins
An abstract moving rayogram in the form of a woman or an aria. Living in time experienced as high drama, dissolving into the infinite. A dialectical manifestation of phenomena in flux, like any other movie.

KONRAD & KURFURST / Esther Urlus / 2013-14 / 7 mins
A fictional re-enactment of a 5 minutes happening that took place during the Olympic games in Berlin 1936. Made on home brew emulsion and color toned with the helping hand of technical publications from early cinema and photographic experiments. The home brew emulsion as fragile metaphor for the heroism of Konrad and his horse Kurfurst. Falling from his horse he became a national hero but overtaken by history, an anti-hero.

NOISY LICKING DRIBBLING AND SPITTING / Vicky Smith / 2013 / 4 mins
Noisy Licking and Spitting is from my series of ‘physical’ films, in which  films marked using the full body advance upon the more commonly found manual methods for making films without cameras. Physical stains are hosted by film as it absorbs and holds juice and saliva in its gelatin skin. The soundtrack is similarly structured, so as measured licks explode into random spits,  the metric rasping noises burst into a clamour of ‘speech’.  In this reversible process, film is made more physical,  while the body moves mechanically; the trace of bodily flows and pulses joined to film’s beat generate distinctive rhythms. 

NUCLEAR FAMILY / Kayla Parker / 1990 / 4 mins
Autobiographical film in which the filmmaker’s mother recalls incidents from her daughter’s childhood in a Somerset mining village and the three imaginary friends, two with red hair and one with dark hair, who ‘came down from the stars’.

My mother has told me this story, my own personal fairy-tale, ever since I can remember. I have no memory of the time she speaks of, and can only experience it vicariously, coloured by her nostalgia and her feelings as a mother. I tried to recover a meaning of my own by drawing directly on the surface of the film – like the wax crayon and scratch pictures I made as a child. But the persistence of my mother’s memory still overpowered anything I almost remembered.