The Book of Film

The Book of Film

THE BOOK OF FILM
FILM SCREENINGS AT THE VERNACULAR LOUNGE
CURATED & PRESENTED BY MARTIN RUMSBY

Take a trip around the world of contemporary artists’ cinema with films from Africa, the Americas, Australia and Japan. The Book
of Film screening series presents a rare opportunity to experience contemporary international moving image art in Auckland.

Curator Martin Rumsby is New Zealand’s leading thinker on film as art.

$10.00 general admission and $5.00 concession for students & beneficiaries
Tickets on the door.

Programme One - Nights of waking dreams
7pm Thursday March 24 2011

THE HOMESTEAD ACT (35mm, 8 minutes, 2009)
Part Three of Woloshen’s DEAD SEA SCROLLS series, equates soil erosion with cinematic decay. The title is based on a Nineteenth Century American law that gave homesteaders freehold title to 160 acres of undeveloped land. Their zeal and inexperience, however, lead to unsound farming practices which resulted in erosion. Similarly, Woloshen believes, the history of film is now eroding before our eyes as poorly stored prints and negatives deteriorate.

In LABYRINTHINE (14 minutes and 44 seconds, 2010) Biermann subjects Alfred Hitchcock’s VERTIGO (1958) to digital manipulation which creates a heightened intensity in this compacted rearrangement of the original. Next Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960) gets a reworking from Biermann to become SPHERICAL COORDINATES (8 minutes, 23 seconds, 2005). Here Janet Leigh’s features are contorted way beyond the allure of surface appearances to suggest an intense inner paranoia, almost as a premonition on what may be coming next.

CENTRE SPOT (2009) - Tuohy presents subjective cinematic visions of his experience of landscape and light, abstracting from light and water in metaphysics of self, prescience and landscape.

This introductory programme, running a little over an hour, also includes PRECIPTINS a video art work by Elric Klane, a New Zealand filmmaker resident in Los Angeles, an African dance film and much more.

Programme Two - Computational Sublime Films by Gregg Biermann
7pm Thursday, March 31 , 2011

New Yorker Gregg Biermann reinvents the notion of the timeless classic by taking old work and manipulating it digitally to create whole new psychologies and histories of cinematic meaning. “My work comes out of the avant-garde tradition of film as a visual art. Avant-garde cinema is an important and relatively young artistic project (in which) the development of new tools has often determined artistic innovations. Consequently, I’ve looked to new technologies to discover vast unspoiled frontiers.” From such work we may reasonably surmis

e that art and music reside in everything, if we look and listen closely enough then we may find art and life intertwined.
Titles in this programme include, HAPPY AGAIN, THE HILLS ARE ALIVE, THE WATERS OF CASABLANCA, HIGH NOON REFLECTIONS, ANOTHER PICTURE and more.

Programme Three - Cine Abstracts - Super 8 films by Richard Tuohy
7pm Thursday April 7, 2011

Tuohy began making Super 8 films in 1990 before moving on to study philosophy. After discovering the Daylesford Super 8 group in Melbourne he began making Super 8 films again in 2004. In 2006 he and his partner founded Nano Lab, a Super 8 film processing facility.

“Mostly I film natural features or environments. I try to distill from my subjects certain features that take my fancy. I like to see my approach as a kind of cine Cubism attending to and abstracting certain features from my subject … Ultimately, they are not about ‘thinking’, they’re about looking.”

Titles include: Boot Fall, Centre-Spot, Iron-wood, Flyscreen, Red Rover, and Ripple.


Programme Four - Wet, Wild and Wonderful
7pm Thursday, April 14, 2011

We conclude our southern summer film series with a stunning line up of creative short films from North America. Words fail us in attempting to describe this collection of off-beat animation, science fiction, drama and personal documentary – with a special guest appearance by Julie Andrews and a truly twisted western Canadian couple named April and August – staggering cinematic possibilities. Must be seen to be believed.


All screenings take place at Satellite Gallery, cnr Newton Road &