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A part of the three day festival This is Experimental: Australian Film Art on tour in New Zealand June 11-13 2009 made possible with the support of the Australian High Commission.

Brisbane-based arts collective OtherFilm present Isolationist Eye Openers: Historic Australian Film Art 1962-1998, a collection of Australian experimental classics from 1962-1998 that explore the nature of film, alienation, the poetics of perception, and the Australian landscape.

While Australian experimental filmmakers have been aware of their European and American counterparts, they have largely made their films in isolation. In doing so they have produced their own highly developed experiments with the formal properties of film; using split screens and mattes, optical sound, collage animation and optical techniques such as colour separation processes.

This programme has been curated by OtherFilm, a hybrid arts collective based in Brisbane, Australia and two it’s founders, Sally Golding and Joel Stern have travelled to New Zealand with the programme.

The describe OtherFilm as being dedicated to avant-garde, experimental, abstract, expanded and other cinemas. They host regular screening programs, performance events, exhibitions, workshops, articles, research, discussions and arguments, as well as a bi-annual Expanded Cinema festival. These diverse programs offer up a short but sweet taste of both historical and contemporary movements in the dynamic, demanding, engaging and exciting Australian scene. Isolationist Eye Openers: Historic Australian Film Art 1962-1998 features work by a number of important pioneers of Australian experimental film who inspired the Other Film collective.

Arthur and Corinne Cantrill are the internationally recognised 'elders' of Australian film art. For nearly half a century they have been tireless investigators of films possibilities; making single channel film works and Expanded Cinema performances. Two of their works feature in this programme, including their remarkable 1970 film 4000 Frames, An Eye Opener Film which in just three minutes includes four thousand single-frame images.

David Perry is an Australian photographer and filmmaker. During work on the production of The Theatre of Cruelty in Sydney, July 1965, he was one of a group of young film makers who established Australia's first consciously avant -garde filmmaking group, Ubu Films. Perry’s 1966 film Halftone explores the abstract graphic potential of newspaper photographs to create a visual score as well as produce optical sound.

Another Ubu founder, Albie Thoms, is represented here with Man and his World, an 'expanded cinema film' in which a single-second explosion is elongated to a minute, and re-presented in split-screen format.

While abstraction is a key theme of the programme, other works such as Paul Winkler’s Bondi (1979) addresses the theme of the landscape, while Dusan Marek’s
 Adam and Eve (1962) uses cut-outs to animate the life cycle from creation to apocalypse and rebirth.

Isolationist Eye Openers: Historic Australian Film Art 1962-1998 screens as part of This Is Experimental, an annual festival of experimental and avant-garde film that began at the New Zealand Film Archive in 2008. Following last years visit by UK film maker Guy Sherwin and a number of New Zealand film-makers, this years focus is on Australian experimental film. As well Isolationist Eye Openers this years programme includes live expanded cinema performances by Abject Leader and Dirk de Bruyn.

Film Archive Project Developer Mark Williams says ”The aim of this This Is Experimental in 2009 is to remind us that film and digital are distinctly differing mediums. As curators Joel, Sally and Dirk celebrate the best historical works, as artists they keep the discipline of film as art alive and kicking. It’s important for young moving image makers in New Zealand to understand that digital technology was preceded by celluloid film which remains a medium with it’s own 21st century possibilities”.


All films from the historical program are shown on 16mm, prints courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, and courtesy of the artists.

www.otherfilm.org


www.abjectleader.org

National Film and Sound Archive

Dusan Marek (1926 -1993)

Adam and Eve, 1962, 10 minutes

Animation using cut-outs symbolising the life cycle from creation to apocalypse and rebirth. Czech-born Marek's paintings and films brought a distinctly dark European modernist slant to Australian surrealism.

David Perry (UBU) (1933- )

Halftone, 1966, 1 minute
Halftone explores the abstract graphic potential of newspaper photographs to create a visual score as well as produce optical sound.



Albie Thoms (1941- )

Man and His World, 1966, 1 minute

Man and his world is an 'expanded cinema film' in which a single-second explosion is elongated to a minute, and re-presented in split-screen format.

Arthur and Corinne Cantrill (1938- and 1928- )

4000 Frames, an Eye Opener Film, 1970, 3 minutes
A montage of four thousand single-frame images builds up on the retina to create graphic superimpositions.

Paul Winkler (1939- )

Bondi, 1979, 15 minutes

The iconic Aussie beach scene at Bondi Beach is presented in composite images using in-camera matting techniques, dividing the frame horizontally into multiple sections. Amos Vogel has described this manipulation of pictorial space as 'reminiscent of Max Ernst's surrealist collages'.



George Gittoes (1949- )

Rainbow Way, 1977, 11 minutes

An experimental study of the effects of light on water. Lyrical abstract patterns are created through the reflection of sunlight through a number of prisms and lenses.

Arthur and Corinne Cantrill
Waterfall, 1984, 18 minutes

One of a series of 3-colour separation studies in which the same scene is shot 3 times on B&W negative successively through red, green and blue filters. These three strips are printed onto one strip of colour stock producing both 'strikingly realistic colour' and dazzling artificial multi-coloured tints where there is movement.

Dirk De Bruyn (1950- )

Light Play, 1984, 7 minutes, Music by Michael Luck.

An abstract play of light, colour, geometric shapes and patterns synchronised with synthesised music. The image patterns have been created by scratching, drawing, painting and overlaying directly on clear and opaque film, and fragments of photographed positive and negative images.



Gregory Godhard (1966- )

Mind’s Eye, 1998, 5 minutes

Comprised of over 1200 photographs, this rollercoaster journey through urban Australian environments transports the viewer along the little-used z-axis of pictorial space.