This film programme is a cinematic presentation of the short films featured in the first chapter ‘Material Experiments: From Scratch to Digital’ of the exhibition Altered States: Experiments in Moving Image, which pays homage to the early experimental pioneers and contemporary filmmakers working in experimental cinema today.
Discarding the camera and traditional narratives for sensorial and abstract visuals, these artists took to scratching, bleaching, submerging, burying, pasting and painting on celluloid to capture unexpected cinematic qualities of both medium and material.
Total duration: 30min
Rating: PG
Header image: sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars, 2014, Tomonari Nishikawa. Image courtesy of the artist.
4 min | 35mm colour (original Dufaycolor), sound
Courtesy of the British Postal Museum and Archive.
Digital Version from 35mm Eastmancolor restoration by the BFI National Archive
An innovator in animation techniques, Len Lye painted and scratched directly on film stock, pioneering the style of direct animation or camera-less filmmaking where the camera is abandoned for direct interventions on celluloid.
Set to a lively Cuban jazz soundtrack, bold colours and fluid patterns dance in a rhythmic motion in A Colour Box (1935), creating dynamic, vibrant visuals that defined a new era of pure abstraction in cinema that emphasised colour, sound, and movement. The film was originally made as an advertisement for the British General Post Office Film Unit, becoming the first direct animation screened to a general audience.
3 min 13 sec | 16mm colour, silent, digital translation of 16mm film
Courtesy of the Estate of Stan Brakhage and Criterion.
Stan Brakhage’s avant-garde films, marked by non-narrative storytelling and experimental techniques, profoundly influenced experimental cinema.
In Mothlight (1963), Brakhage eschewed traditional filmmaking techniques for organic materials - pasting moth wings, leaves, and other natural detritus directly onto the film strip. The result is a tactile, sensorial visual experience that connects moving image with the fragility of nature, a poignant cinematic encounter with the natural world.
3 min 34 sec | 16mm colour, sound, digital translation of 16mm film
Courtesy of buttonijo.
A pioneer of experimental films in Indonesia, Gotot Prakosa made non-narrative short films with discarded 16mm film stock, echoing his philosophy of film pinggiran (film from the margins) which countered traditional and mainstream cinema in Indonesia in the 1970s.
Meta-Meta (1978) was a visual manisfestation of a dream Prakosa had at 12 years old. A trained painter, he combined moving image and sound - “I made this film in the same way that I paint” - with brightly painted circles and spirals vibrating and jumping to an erratic beat composed by Slamet Abdul Sjukur, father of contemporary Indonesian music.
5 min | 16mm colour, silent, digital translation of 16mm film
Courtesy of LIGHT CONE.
Since 1982, Cécile Fontaine has made over fifty films. Her signature style of film collaging reflects her interest in working directly with the medium. Fontaine often manipulates the original footage (usually found footage rescued from the trash or purchased at flea markets) by cutting, splicing and soaking them, subjecting the material to chemical reactions caused by household products like bleach and cleaning agents.
In Almaba, film segments are lifted off their celluloid surface to recompose a new film where textures, colours and images are transformed.
5 min | 35mm colour, sound, digital translation of 35mm film
Courtesy of LIGHT CONE.
A key figure of the North American experimental film scene, Louise Bourque spent twenty years in the United States making and teaching film before relocating to Montreal.
Based on the French-Canadian expression of menstrual periods as ‘être dans ses fleurs’ or ‘to be in their flowers’, Bourque incubated 35mm film stock in her own menstrual blood for nine months. The photochemical result is a mesmerisingly dark yet poetic nod to the flowering nature of experimentation.
9 min | 16mm colour, sound, digital translation of 16mm film
Courtesy of LIGHT CONE.
A New York-based filmmaker working primarily on 16mm film, Jennifer Reeves' body of work is visceral and personal, immersing viewers in intricate, unfamiliar cinematic territory.
Alarmed by the amount of film waste in landfills, she buried her footage, allowing soil enzymes and fungi to decompose the film image. After exhumation, she painted on the film to give it new life – an act of ‘recycling’ that points to the beauty of resurrecting the image.
2 min | 35mm colour, sound, digital translation of 35mm film
Courtesy of the artist.
Japanese artist Tomonari Nishikawa lives and works in Japan and USA. His practice explores the idea of documenting situations/phenomena through a chosen medium and technique, often focusing on the process itself.
In sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars, he buried 35mm negative film under fallen leaves in a forest near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Exposed to possible radioactive elements, the retrieved film sports a ghostly cerulean hue – an analogue trace of destructive human activity.
“I buried a 100-foot 35mm negative film under fallen leaves alongside a country road, which was about 25 km away from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, from the sunset of June 24, 2014, to the sunrise of the following day. The night was beautiful with a starry sky, and numerous summer insects were singing loud. The area was once an evacuation zone, but now people live there after the removal of the contaminated soil.”
This project is made possible with funds from the Media Arts Assistance Fund, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts, Electronic Media and Film, with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; administered by Wave Farm.