Experimental cinema at Chocolate Theatre

Len Lye’s living cinematic successor the Canadian film artist Steven Woloshen has worked in camera-less animation since 1982 and in 35mm Cinemascope since 1999, appropriating the work of earlier filmmakers. Inspired by music, particularly jazz, he has made numerous abstract works in which the images are created in synchronization with the music track. As in jazz, improvisation and chance are important aspects of his work. Because his films are self-funded and the tools of his craft (film leader, markers, inks, brushes and craft knives) are readily available, he can seize on an inspiration and act on it immediately.

LA DOLCE VITA (2 minutes, 6 seconds. 2008) resulted from Woloshen’s trawling through Montreal pawnshops, (surely one of the great pleasures of living in a big city) digging up fragments of lost and discarded film footage which he then reworked into imaginary new contexts. Seeing himself as an errant anthropologist (‘a ghoul with credentials’) Woloshen willfully misinterprets the found footage.

“I surmised – based solely on the facial features, musical instruments and dress codes – that the source was Mediterranean or Balkan in origin. Whether I was actually right or wrong was unimportant. I deliberately used hasty and unsound logic to draw my conclusions. I titled this film LA DOLCE VITA, knowing it was not Fellini’s classic.”

Woloshen believes that after a century of poor storage conditions analogue films are decaying, becoming brittle, eroded and unwatchable. He seeks to find regeneration in this decay as the actual, unintended, life of the film.

“I have always wanted to bury film in the ground. Rot and deterioration hold a beautiful organic quality, the resulting images shrouded in living matter … Erosion and decay are symbols of change. Destruction and damage offer opportunities for rejuvenation.”

American artist Gregg Biermann appropriates segments from classic Hollywood movies, digitally restaging them to create new psychologies and histories of cinematic space, extracting meaning from within meaning.

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

Australian film artist Richard Tuohy began making films in 1990, later abandoning the activity whilst he studied philosophy. After discovering the Daylesford Super 8 group in Melbourne in began making films again in 2004.

In BROKEN WAVES (5 minutes 40 seconds. 2009) Tuohy presents subjective visions as ephemeral phenomenon, abstracting from light on water in a metaphysics of self, prescience and landscape.

“Mostly I film natural features or environments,” says Tuohy, “I try to distill from my subject 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.”

The programme also includes African dance and visions of Latino religious miracles and much more, running at slightly over an hour.

Chocolate theatre is the new art-space in Albany, in the community of Kawai Purapura. 

Concerts, events, workshops, dance, theatre, drawing, painting...

Kawai Purapura

14 Mills Lane, Albany

Please, note that Kawai Purapura is a alcohol and smoke-free area