ATP FESTIVAL -UK

NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS

Programme 1 (16mm film - 88 minutes):

Saturday 11am, repeats Sunday 10pm

WATCHING FOR THE QUEEN

by David Rimmer
(16mm / b&w / silent / 11 min. / 1973 / Canada)

Inspired by Stan Brakhage's films and writings,

David Rimmer made his first important
experimental films, Square Inch Field and
Migration, in 1968 and 1969 respectively. At the
time the artist-run Intermedia Co-op in
Vancouver and supportive individuals in the
Vancouver offices of the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation (CBC) and the National Film Board
of Canada (NFB) were providing Vancouver-
based experimental filmmakers with access to
surplus film, processing, optical printers and
other post-production facilities. These
filmmakers, Rimmer included, soon became part
of the international
experimental/avant-garde/underground film
movement of the late '60s and early '70s. -
William C. Wees

THE LAST DAYS OF CONTRITION

by Richard Kerr
(16mm / b&w / sound / 35 min. / 1988 / Canada)

Richard Kerr is a visual artist/media-maker

known for his expansive body of work, which has
explored a multiplicity of genres and media since
the early 1970s. He has created over 30 films and
videos that have been screened and collected
around the world. In the mid nineties Kerr
expanded his practice to encompass meta-cinema
installation work and most notably
conceptualization of the Motion Picture Weaving
Light Box. Recent studio work includes Industry
 at Cinematheque Quebecoise in 2006.

T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G
by Paul Sharits
(16mm / colour / sound / 12 min. / 1968 / USA)

Trained as a graphic artist and a painter, Paul

Sharits became a noted avant-garde filmmaker
noted for manipulating the film stock itself to
create a variety of fascinating, abstract light and
color plays when projected on the screen. Fans
hail the effects hallucinogenic, while his
detractors find them garish. Sharits is also known
for establishing experimental film groups at
prominent universities, including one at the
University of Indiana where he studied. He later
taught and developed an undergraduate film
program at Antioch College. Between 1973 and
1992, Sharits taught at the Center for Media
Study at the State University of New York. His
films can be seen in various U.S. and European
museums, film centers, and libraries. Much of his
work can be found in the Anthology Film
Archives in New York City. - Sandra Brennan

EPILEPTIC SEIZURE COMPARISON

by Paul Sharits
(16mm / colour / sound / 30 min. / 1976 / USA)

See above for biography.

Programme 2 - programmed by Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt (DVD - 78 minutes):

Saturday 1pm, repeats Sunday at Midnight

L'ETRANGE PORTRAIT DE LA DAME EN

JAUNE
by Helene Cattet & Bruno Forzani
(DVD / 6 min. / 2004 / Belgium)

Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani were born in

1976. They met each other in Brussels where
they started to codirect and produce short films
with their own funds. Their films are cinematic
experimentations around giallo, leather, and
strange pleasures.

SATAN BOUCHE UN COIN

by Jean-Pierre Bouyxou
(DVD / 10 min. / 1968 / France) - Music by
Georges Montalba

Jean-Pierre Bouyxou (born 16 January 1946) is a

French film critic, author, filmmaker and actor.
He started his career as a writer in 1964 when his
article was published in fanzines (Mercury,
Lunatique). Some other magazines he wrote for
were Vampirella, Sex Stars System, Zoom, Metal
hurlant, L'Echo des savanes, Penthouse, Lui,
Hara-Kiri, Paris Match. He was editor-in-chief of
Fascination for thirty issues, from 1978 to 1986.
He participated in the happenings of Jean-Jacques
Lebel. He worked with Roland Lethem, Jesus
Franco, Jean Rollin and Alain Payet.

CHROMO SUD
by Etienne O'Leary
(DVD / 21 min. / 1968 / France/Quebec) - Music
by Etienne O'Leary

One of the very few films made by Etienne

O'Leary, all of which emerged from the French
underground circa 1968 and can be very loosely
designated 'diary films.' Like the
contemporaneous films by O'Leary's more
famous friend Pierre Clementi, they trippily
document the drug-drenched hedonism of that
era's dandies. O'Leary worked with an
intoxicating style that foregrounded rapid and
even subliminal cutting, dense layering of
superimposed images and a spontaneous
notebook type shooting style. Yet even if much
of O'Leary's material was initially 'diaristic,'
depicting the friends, lovers, and places that he
encountered in his private life, the
metamorphoses it underwent during editing
transformed it into a series of ambiguously
fictionalized, sometimes darkly sexual fantasias.
Chromo sud, his most sinister work by far, owes
as much to Kenneth Anger as to Mekas,
presenting the libertarian impulses of the time in
as orgiastically morbid and sadistic a vein as
Anger's Scorpio Rising biker culture. - Text from
Experimental Film Club

SOLEILS ROUGES
by Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt & Marie-Douce
St-Jacques
(DVD / 3 min. / 2009 / Quebec)

Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt & Marie-Douce St-

Jacques evoke red suns.

ESSAI A LA MILLE
by Jean-Claude Labrecque
(DVD / 7 min. / 1970 / Quebec) - Music by
Pierre Henry

For over 40 years, Jean-Claude Labrecque has

contributed to the development of Quebecois
cinema as a film director, director of photography
and screenwriter. He has immortalized historic
and artistic events in Quebec, showcasing
individuals who have influenced their times. His
filmography of documentaries and fiction films,
including L'affaire Coffin and A hauteur
d'homme, reflects his human touch and his
respect for the subject. He is also a highly
talented photo director, and has been associated
with numerous films by other renowned
filmmakers. As well, he has been actively
involved in the artistic community, notably as
president of the Cinematheque quebecoise, the
Rendez-vous du cinema quebecois, and the Jutra
Awards board.

FRAGMENTS D'UNE VIE ANEANTIE

by Christophe Karabache
(DVD / 8 min. / 2003 / France)
 Christophe Karabache is a Franco-Lebanese
filmmaker. Grewing up in Lebanon's war time
and socio-political oppression roots in repressive
religious idea, he then moved in Paris to study
cinema in 2000 at Universite de Paris X, Paris-I
and then Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle (Censier),
where he obtained a grant to study at The
University of Iowa in the United States. Right
upon arrival in France, he bought a super-8
camera and start shooting, before starting to use a
16mm Bolex. He directed experimental films,
poetic documentaries and fictions. His films,
where politics and universal collides with poetics
and personal (shoot on different medium from
film to digital), between anger, cruelty,
simplicity, illumination, surrealism, passions,
crisis and testimony from experience of violence
of reality, "are clusters of flesh in perpetual
subversion" (Une Encyclopedie du Court
Metrage francais - ed. yellow Now, 2004)

SMOOTH
by Catherine Corringer
(DVD / 23 min. / 2009 / France) - Music by
Laurent La Torpille

Shot in both Super 8 and video, Smooth is an

erotic, fantastic voyage through the womb and
through the body, in the world that exists before
the assigning of gender.

Programme 3 (35mm + 16mm film - 90 minutes):

Saturday 10pm, repeats Sunday 11am

MAMORI
by Karl Lemieux
(35mm / 1.85:1 / b&w / sound / 8 min. / 2009 /
Canada) - Music by Francisco Lopez

Karl Lemieux studied cinema at Concordia

University and has created several short films
including The Bridge (1998), KI (2001), Motion
of Light (2004), Western Sunburn (2007), Trash
and no star ! (2008), Passage (2008) and Mamori
(2009). He is a co- founder of Double Negative, a
film collective based in Montreal focused on the
production and screening of experimental film.
Karl has also worked on several music and
performance-based live projections.

SCHWECHATER
by Peter Kubelka
(35mm / 1.37:1 / colour / sound / 2 min. [1min.
x2] / 1957-58 / Austria)

Peter Kubelka (b. 1934) is a multifaceted artist

and theoretician who has worked in the art forms
of film, cuisine, music, architecture, speaking and
writing. Since the beginning of the fifties he has
been a leading exponent of the international
avante garde film and has had screenings in all
the European countries as well as in the USA and
Japan. In 1964 Kubelka co-founded the Austrian
Film Museum and has been its curator ever since.
Kubelka has been involved in creating avante
garde film collections, a music ensemble and has
taught at various universities in the USA and
Europe.

VARIATIONS ON A CELLOPHANE
WRAPPER
by David Rimmer
(16mm / colour / sound / 8 min. / 1970 / Canada)

Inspired by Stan Brakhage's films and writings,

David Rimmer made his first important
experimental films, Square Inch Field and
Migration, in 1968 and 1969 respectively. At the
time the artist-run Intermedia Co-op in
Vancouver and supportive individuals in the
Vancouver offices of the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation (CBC) and the National Film Board
of Canada (NFB) were providing Vancouver-
based experimental filmmakers with access to
surplus film, processing, optical printers and
other post-production facilities. These
filmmakers, Rimmer included, soon became part
of the international
experimental/avant-garde/underground film
movement of the late '60s and early '70s. -
William C. Wees

STRIPS
by Felix Dufour-Laperriere
(35mm / 2.35:1 / b&w / sound / 5:30 min. /
2009 / Canada)

Felix Dufour-Laperriere was born in 1981, in

Chicoutimi, Quebec. He studied, lives and works
in Montreal. His films have been presented in
numerous galleries, museums and festivals. He
co-founded the online gallery
www.lappentis.com.

PARTIES VISIBLE ET INVISIBLE D'UN

ENSEMBLE SOUS TENSION
by Emmanuel Lefrant
(35mm / 1.37:1 / colour / sound / 7 min. / 2009 /
France)

Emmanuel Lefrant's film work is based on

abstraction being apprehended as landscape. A
landscape that is actor or producer of emotions
and subjective experiences. The films lie on the
idea of representing, of revealing an invisible
world (the secret forms of emulsion), a nature
that one does not see. They are contemplative
movies, which are presented under the shape of a
physical experience, an experience of the body.
The time of the screening is a great ordeal (the
educated eye and ear suffer) because they are
films that work on the hallucinatory mode: they
are pure visual and kinaesthetic experiences.

VILLE MARIE
by Alexandre Larose
(35mm / 1.37:1 / colour / sound / 12 min. / 2009 /
Canada)

Alexandre Larose is a canadian filmmaker based

in Montreal. Larose began practicing cinema
while graduating from engineering school in
2001. He went on studying experimental film at
Concordia University from 2003 to 2006. His
work explores, through extensive formal
treatment of the film medium, fear and anxiety
that stems from the search for identity.

OBSERVANDO EL CIELO
by Jeanne Liotta
(16mm / colour / sound / 19 min. / 2007 / USA)

Jeanne Liotta was born and raised in NYC where

she makes films and other cultural ephemera
including photographs, works on paper and live
projection performances. Her latest body of work
takes place in a constellation of mediums
investigating the cosmic landscape at a curious
interesection of art, science, and natural
philosophy. Her film OBSERVANDO EL
CIELO received the Tiger Award for Short Film
at the Rotterdam Film Festival and was named
TOP Ten 2007 on Artforum Magazine as well as
Top Ten of The Village Voice.

TREES OF SYNTAX, LEAVES OF AXIS

by Daichi Saito
(35mm / 1.37:1 / colour / sound / 10 min. / 2009 /
Canada) - Music by Malcolm Goldstein

Originally from Japan, Daichi Saito is an

independent filmmaker based in Montreal. Saito
co-founded the Double Negative Collective in
2004 and has been active as a catalyst for the
renewed interest in celluloid filmmaking in the
local artistic community. His films have screened
in numerous venues both in Canada and abroad,
including: The New York Film Festival; The
International Film Festival Rotterdam; The
Toronto International Film Festival; The London
Film Festival; The Edinburgh International Film
Festival; The Hong Kong International Film
Festival; San Francisco MOMA; Cinematheque
Ontario; Anthology Film Archives, among
others. His films are distributed in Europe by
Light Cone (Paris) and in North America by the
Canadian Filmmakers' Distribution Centre
(Toronto), where he currently serves as a member
of the Board of Directors. His Trees of Syntax,
Leaves of Axis (2009), a film commissioned by
the Images Festival in Toronto, won the Best of
the Festival Award at the 48th Ann Arbor Film
Festival and the Jury Grand Prize at the 16th
Media City Film Festival.
 BATTEMENTS SOLAIRES
by Patrick Bokanowski
(35mm / 1.37:1 / colour / sound / 18:40 min. /
2008 / France)

Patrick Bokanowski, French filmmaker and artist,

has developed a manner of treating filmic
materiel that crosses over traditional boundaries
of film genre : short film, experimental cinema
and animation. His work lies on the edge between
optical and plastic art, in a " gap " of constant
reinvention. Bokanowski challenges the idea that
cinema must essentially reproduce reality, our
everyday thoughts and feelings. His films
contradict the photographic " objectivity " that is
firmly tied to the essence of film production the
world over. Bokanowski's experiments attempt to
open the art of film up to other possibilities of
expression, for example by " warping " his
camera lens (he prefers the term " subjective " to
" objective " - the French word for " lens "), thus
testifying to a purely mental vision, unconcerned
with film's conventional representations, thus
affecting and metamorphosing reality, and
thereby offering to the viewer of his films new
adventures in perception. - Pierre Coulibeuf

Programme 4 (16mm film - 71 minutes):

Saturday Midnight, repeats Sunday 1pm

TWILIGHT PSALM II: WALKING

DISTANCE
by Phil Solomon
(16mm / colour / sound / 23 min. / 1999 / USA)

Since the late 1970's, Phil Solomon has been

crafting visually stunning works, first in 16mm
and now in digital video. His early films were
mesmerizing tactile landscapes of crackled
emulsion, which complimented the complicated
nostalgic tone of his imagery. A sense of longing
and inevitable decay gave his work a distinct and
unique voice in avant-garde cinema. More
recently, Solomon has been mining the rich and
evocative images found in the Grand Theft Auto
video game series, by-passing the violence of the
originals to create mournful eulogies for an end
time. Solomon teaches at the University of
Colorado-Boulder, where he worked alongside
the master experimental filmmaker Stan
Brakhage. The two developed a deep friendship
and influenced each other's work; they also
collaborated on several films.

PASSAGE THROUGH: A RITUAL

by Stan Brakhage
(16mm / 2 reels / colour / sound / 48 min. / 1990 /
USA) - Music by Philip Corner

Working completely outside the mainstream, the

wildly prolific, visionary Stan Brakhage made
more than 350 films over a half century.
Challenging all taboos in his exploration of
"birth, sex, death, and the search for God," he has
turned his camera on explicit lovemaking,
childbirth, even autopsy. Many of his most
famous works pursue the nature of vision itself
and transcend the act of filming. Some, including
the legendary Mothlight, were made without
using a camera at all, as he pioneered the art of
making images directly on film, by drawing,
painting, and scratching. - Fred Camper