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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.

Light Piercing the Nerve - a performance by Abject Leader

“In the era of digital proliferation, (Abject Leader’s) emphasis on the analogue, the handmade, the photo-chemical and the acoustical, is pleasingly defiant... “ - Danny Zuvela

Abject Leader is an ever–evolving film and music project between Sally Golding (film, projectors) and Joel Stern (concrete sound).

Based in Brisbane, Abject Leader perform ‘expanded cinema’ pieces with multiple 16mm projectors. They describe the key ingredients of their performances as handmade and hand processed film, feedback systems, incongruous foley noise, sprockets and flicker, trumpets and strings, specially prepared screens and alienated narration.

Writing in 2007 Danni Zuvela described Abject Leader;

“... Stern’s aggressively textured, complex noisescapes serve to contour the space in which Golding’s projections explore the bewitching possibilities of the celluloid medium, creating ephemeral cinematic experiences of startling sensuality. Hinging on the frisson of the moment, their work courts chance, improvising the performance of sounds and films. This is what makes their work so beautiful, vital, surprising, compelling: Abject Leader perform cinema.” – Danni Zuvela, 2007

Sally Golding is a filmmaker, projectionist and audio-visual archivist whose work moves between abstraction and dreamlike narrative. Using 16mm technologies and photographic darkroom processes, Sally deconstructs cinematic materials and apparatus, creating unique works realised as performed projection.

Joel Stern is a soundmaker, curator and academic who lives in Brisbane. He lectures at Queensland University of Technology on sound in experimental and avant garde film. He has designed sound and composed scores for a number of independent film projects. In 2004 he was invited to the Cannes Film Festival with the film Footnote (directed by Pia Borg) for which he designed the sound.

Together, Sally and Joel they formed Abject Leader in late 2004. Alongside their own live performances they created abjectleader cinema; a film society programming screenings of avant-garde, experimental and artist films on 16mm. In 2006 abjectleader cinema morphed into OtherFilm which is now one of Australia's foremost experimental film collectives, and is the only collective focussed on expanded and performed cinema.

Abject Leaders visit is 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 as the performance by Abject Leader this years programme includes a screening of historical Australian experimental film works and a live performance by film maker and animator Dirk de Bruyn.

New Zealand 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”.

www.otherfilm.org


www.abjectleader.org