Afterimages 3: Lis Rhodes Volume 1

An autobiographical documentary, a fiction that's also an essay and an extended poetic meditation on the ability of the image to represent experience. Sarah Turner's film is a ghost story that explores what we forget and how we remember. The stunning imagery comes solely from the window of the Trans-Siberian train, shot first in 1987-8 and then again in 2007-8. The re-enactment of the journey is a memory work, a re-enactment of the past in the present through the process of filming. But the return journey is haunted by the voices of two dead friends that dominate the soundscape of the 'archive' footage. The film culminates at the haunting expanse of Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world.

Perestroika: Reconstructed re-mixes and extends Perestroika, into two sequences. Sequence one constitutes the 2009 version of the film, whilst the second sequence constructs a new framing narrative that reinterprets and reconfigures both the imagery and the experience of the first. Part psycho-geography, part dream and part environmental allegory, both sequences of Perestroika : Reconstructed conclude at Lake Baikal, contrasting experiences of terror and apocalypse with those of beauty and tranquility, the one contaminating the other. In this uncanny return, form stages thee through twinning the instability of memory and re-enacting that within the projective experience of cinema. This extended work delves further into ideas of momentary truth, identity, and how an uncontaminated experience of landscape is literally and metaphorically something that only exists in memory.

Publication contains DVD of Perestroika, which was released theatrically, blu-ray of Perestroika:Reconstructed, first exhibited as a gallery installation at London's Carroll/Fletcher Gallery April-May 2013, and a booklet of three essays by Elizabeth Cowie, Sophie Mayer, and Paul Newland.

A unique limited edition accessible publication documenting a project to make Black Audio Film Collective’s seminal 1986 film Handsworth Songs more, and differently, accessible. Designed by Daly & Lyon it presents a new commissioned annotated audio description script from Elaine Lillian Joseph and new creative captions commissioned from the Care-fuffle Working Group alongside new essays by Clive Nwonka and Sarah Hayden.

The publication was produced in collaboration with Voices in the Gallery and with the support and advice of the UK Association for Accessible Formats and financial support from AHRC. The publication is also available in website form designed by An Endless Supply at slowemergencysiren.org.uk

Fidback est une nouvelle revue de cinéma éditée par le FIDMarseille. Chaque printemps, Fidback fera retour sur l’année écoulée : retour sur la dernière édition du FID, retour sur l’actualité mondiale du cinéma, retour sur le travail d’un·e cinéaste proche du festival, en-dehors de toute actualité.

À partir d’une dizaine de films choisis et éclairés par des textes, entretiens, documents et matériaux inédits, chaque numéro composera une image du cinéma défendu par le FIDMarseille : l’image inattendue d’un cinéma aventureux.

"Ask audience to cut the part of the image on the screen that they don't like. Supply scissors."—Yoko Ono, Tokyo, June 1964

A dazzling range of unconventional film scripts and texts, many published for the first time, make up Scott MacDonald's newest collection. Illustrated with nearly 100 film stills, this fascinating book is at once a reference work of film history and an unparalleled sampling of experimental "language art." It contributes to the very dissipation of boundaries between cinematic, literary, and artistic expression thematized in the films themselves. Each text and script is introduced and contextualized by MacDonald; a filmography and a bibliography round out the volume.

This is a readable—often quite funny—literature that investigates differences between seeing and reading. Represented are avant-garde classics such as Hollis Frampton's Poetic Justice and Zorns Lemma and Morgan Fisher's Standard Gauge, and William Greaves's recently rediscovered Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. Michael Snow turns film loose on language in So Is This; Peter Rose turns language loose on theory in Pressures of the Text.

Some of the most influential feminist filmscripts of recent decades—Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx, Su Friedrich's Gently Down the Stream, Trinh T. Minh-ha's Reassemblage, Yvonne Rainer's Privilege—confirm this book's importance for readers in gender and cultural studies as well as for filmmakers and admirers of experimental writing, independent cinema, and the visual arts in general.

Eponymously titled with his award winning 2014 film, “A Certain Amount of Clarity” is the first monograph dedicated to the artistic practice of Emmanuel Van der Auwera, whose work describes our experience of digitized life operating at intersections of documentary, reconstruction and fiction. 

His practice is one that demonstrates the impact of emerging technologies on perception and civic dialogue, building platforms for marginalized actors and engaging with technicians and scientists to explore the balance of ethics and aesthetics in new media. Through filmmaking, video sculpture, theatre, printmaking, and other media, Van der Auwera sets up encounters with found images that provoke a questioning of our visual literacy: How do images of contemporary mass media operate on various publics, and to what end? 

With the formal rigor of a logician, Van der Auwera dissects how images are engineered, mastering specialized industry techniques and intervening on their protocol. In so doing, Van der Auwera brings us no closer to a monolithic truth, but constructs new paradigms for reading images and understanding our relationships with them. 

Published as appendix to the Yvonne Rainer Retrospective (November 6-28 2024), organised by Terrassen at Palads Cinema, Copenhagen.

Yvonne Rainer (b. 1934), one of the great American artists of her generation, revolutionised dance and choreography in the 1960s. Yet over the course of two decades - from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s - Rainer also directed seven feature films, each intensely discursive and consistently inviting critical reflection. Radically diverse and impossible to categorise, her films carve out their own space between documentary, fiction, performance, and the avant-garde. For decades, these films have been difficult to access, and when shown, they were often confined to small monitors in large museum settings. Now, newly restored in 4K, they were presented in a retrospective by Terrassen in 2024 - the first of its kind in Denmark. 

The retrospective culminated in the publication of a new Yvonne Rainer filmography, with contributions from Babette Mangolte, Ursula Andkjær Olsen, Mira Adoumier, Emily Wardill, Emily LaBarge, Amelia Groom, Valérie Massadian, Iman Mohammed, Frida Sandström and Yvonne Rainer herself.

This collection of essays celebrates the work of international feminist filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Featuring contributions from leading scholars, filmmakers, essayists and activists, On Feminist Films is the second volume in the South London Cultural Review series. Contributors include: Stuart Bell, Catherine Grant, So Mayer, Louisa Wei, Emma Wilson.