Film & Video

Published on the occasion of the program Soft Notes on A Sharp Scale — The Rambling Figures of Mani Kaul, produced as part of the Courtisane festival 2018, as well as the associated Mani Kaul programme organized by the Essay Film Festival 2018, in collaboration with the Otolith Group.

Developed on the occasion of a Hong Sang-soo retrospective at CINEMATEK in 2018. Infinite Worlds Possible is compiled, edited and published by Courtisane, CINEMATEK and Sabzian. It aims to trace the development of Hong’s remarkable body of work through a collection of essays and interviews.

Produced on the occasion of Leslie Thornton's major solo exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center as well as a recent solo exhibition at Kunstverein Nurnberg, this richly illustrated volume is the first monograph on this important artist and filmmaker, offering essential, foundational scholarship on Thornton's influential work in film and video.

Since the mid-1970s, American avant-garde filmmaker and artist Leslie Thornton (born 1951) has produced an influential body of work in film and video. Thornton's early encounters with experimental, structuralist, and cinéma vérité traditions fueled her iconoclastic take on the moving image and gave shape to her practice of weaving together her own footage and voice with archival film and audio. In part through her forceful and dynamic use of sound, Thornton exposes the limits of language and vision in her works, while acknowledging the ways that language and vision nevertheless remain central to scientific discourse and narrative in general. Her work consistently interrogates modes of representation and the violence of looking, pushing beyond critiques of the gaze to consider biases in perception, or the way voice and sound can undermine an otherwise dominant visual narrative.

DWOSKINO. The Gaze of Stephen Dwoskin is the culmination of a three year research project, The Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin, at the University of Reading where his archive is housed. The book is a unique visual distillation of Dwoskin’s life and times, with hundreds of never-seen-before images taken from his archive, and texts by among others Laura Mulvey, Raymond Bellour, Raymond Durgnat, and Dwoskin himself.

Stephen Dwoskin (1939–2012) began his filmmaking career in the New York underground scene of the early 1960s, then moved to London in 1964, where he became a leading figure in avant-garde film, and was one of the founders of the London Filmmakers Co-operative (now LUX). His early works, such as Dyn Amo (1972), are synonymous with the male gaze. Laura Mulvey wrote that he ‘opened a completely new perspective for me on cinematic voyeurism’ and his work was a major influence on her influential work on the male gaze in cinema. From the mid-1970s, he focused his camera upon his own body, afflicted by polio during childhood, in such films as Behindert (1974) and Outside In (1981).

Personae is an unpublished book by Scottish filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait (1918-1999), edited by Sarah Neely with a foreword by Ali Smith

Margaret Tait (1918-1999), filmmaker and poet, is one of Scotland’s most extraordinary talents, and yet she was largely overlooked during her lifetime. Born in Orkney, she trained first as a medical doctor and served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Second World War, before studying film at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematographia in Rome in the early 1950s. After returning to Edinburgh, Tait established her film studio, Ancona Films, before eventually returning to Orkney in the 1960s, where she lived and continued to make films until her death in 1999.

While best known as a filmmaker, she was also a prolific writer and during her lifetime she self-published three books of poetry and two collections of short stories. Personae is her unpublished manuscript written over a number of years from 1945 onwards and painstakingly reconstructed by Sarah Neely from drafts found in the Tait archive. It is an undefinable work, part-memoir, part-experimental non-fiction; a meditation on the aftermath of war, the healing potential of the creative process, medicine, culture, relationships and an attempt to think towards a future born out of chaos. The book also offers a unique insight into the voice, mind and creative process of a singular Scottish artist whose work did not receive significant attention until after her death in 1999.

The 1960s and 1970s were a defining period for artists’ film and video, and the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC) was one of the major international centres. Shoot Shoot Shoot documents the first decade of an artist-led organisation that pioneered the moving image as an art form in the UK, tracing its development from within London’s counterculture towards establishing its own identity within premises that uniquely incorporated a distribution office, cinema space and film workshop.

Contributions from: Antony Balch, Ian Breakwell, Bob Cobbing, John Collins, David Crosswaite, David Curtis, Fred Drummond, John Du Cane, Mike Dunford, Ray Durgnat, Deke Dusinberre, Stephen Dwoskin, Gill Eatherley, Steve Farrer, Simon Field, Chris Garratt, Peter Gidal, Marilyn Halford, David Hall, Roger Hammond, Simon Hartog, Ron Haselden, Jim Haynes, Roger Hewins, Tony Hill, Jeff Keen, Ian Kerr, Jonathan Langran, David Larcher, John Latham, Malcolm Le Grice, Mike Leggett, Carla Liss, John Mathews, Harvey Matusow, Anthony McCall, Barry Miles, Jack Henry Moore, Annabel Nicolson, Jenny Okun, David Parsons, Sally Potter, Stuart Pound, William Raban, Anne Rees-Mogg, Lis Rhodes, Carolee Schneemann, Anthony Scott, Guy Sherwin, John Smith, Chris Welsby. Illustrated throughout in full colour, this book brings together a wide variety of texts, images and archival documents, and includes newly commissioned essays by Mark Webber, Kathryn Siegel and Federico Windhausen.

LUX, London / 2016

Paperback, 288 pages incl 193 full colour illustrations

Captivated by the liberated glamour of Jean-Luc Godard’s young stars as a teenager, Joanna Walsh rediscovers his films as an adult and finds herself resisting the temptation to identify with or desire the women on film. Instead, echoing Jean-Luc Godard’s pronouncement that ‘cinema is truth at 24 frames per second’, Walsh’s essay turns its gaze on the dynamics of the camera itself and demands a new kind of art. This is an experimental, bold, and wide-ranging book that refuses to setltle for easy answers. An essential read for anyone interested in women on film.

Responses to Derek Jarman's Blue is the third publication in a series of anthologies from Pilot Press seeking contemporary responses to works of art made during the AIDS crisis.

In this third iteration, responses were sought to the 1993 film Blue by the multidisciplinary artist Derek Jarman.

Contributors

In order of appearance

Roelof Bakker
Jared Davis
Becca Albee
Linda Kemp
Ashleigh A. Allen
David Nash
Sam Moore
Anton Stuebner
Gonçalo Lamas
Olivia Laing
Nate Lippens
Jason Lipeles
JP Seabright
Andrew Cummings
Sig Olson
Maria Sledmere
Cleo Henry
Jessie McClaughlin
Lars Meijer
Scott Treleaven
Declan Wiffen
Caitlin Merrett King
Harry Agius
António Manso Preto
Adriana Lazarova
Brooke Palmieri
D Mortimer
Mary Manning
Aaron James Murphy

Printed on 100% recycled paper

Published by Pilot Press, 20 × 15 cm, Softcover, 2022

Meggy Rustamova’s (b. 1985) practice explores films and spatial installations, in which she incorporates photographs, essays and audio material; often the work has a performative character. Concerned with the relations between individual and collective memory, language and human behaviour, her works look for ways to translate the current matters and phenomena in the world.
The title of the book and the exhibition, HORAIZON, refers to the phonetic pronunciation of the English word ‘horizon’, the boundary line on which the earth’s surface and the sky seem to touch. The horizon, interpreted as ‘boundary’ or ‘line’, is equally perceptible in language, when reading between the lines, or when travelling between international borders. The contours of the land, trees or buildings, which contrast with the sky, but also the contours of shadows can be observed in many of the images in the exhibition. The works also suggest a longing for what lies behind the horizon and invite the viewer to make an imaginary journey.

On the occasion of Rustamova’s exhibition at the Vrienden v/h S.M.A.K. and the book ‘Horaizon’, the artist created a multiple. The multiple is entitled 1000 km in Vogelvlucht — 621.371 miles at Bird’s Eye View and unfolds as a storyboard, with a collection of sky views and birds the artist has captured over the past two years. From a condor in Arizona to the black-backed gulls in Iceland in the North Atlantic Ocean all through the Sea of Marmara, the book seeks to create a tale that reflects on a person’s daily need for freedom, travel and nature.

The materials collected in the publication have been developed departing from the documentation, transcription and translation of textual, visual, sculptural and audio materials produced between March and November 2021 for STILI DRAMA. 

STILI DRAMA is an open-ended episodic para-cinematographic project, which functions as a spontaneous expression of MRZB research. STILI DRAMA XVIII-XXI and LA GIOSTRA DI LULU XLI-XLIV are the two first fragments of the work.

Language: English, Italian
Edition of 100 copies

Poet, editor, filmmaker, actor, child star in Mussolini’s Italy, founder of The Dead Language Press and of the Paris Filmmakers Cooperative, Piero Heliczer (1937–1993) was an essential yet secret agent of the 1960s and ’70s counterculture. In the course of his nomadic existence in Rome, New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Préaux-du-Perche, where he spent the last few years of his life, he met and worked with a constellation of avant-garde writers, forged friendships with figures from the Beat Generation and the British Poetry Revival as well as the New York art scene. At the crossroads of many underground experiences, Heliczer’s name appears in books dedicated to the artists and poets he collaborated with during his lifetime—names by the likes of Gregory Corso, Barbara Rubin, Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Ira Cohen, or The Velvet Underground, a band he participated in creating with his friend Angus MacLise.

This myth obscures the fact that Piero Heliczer was first and foremost a poet. Today, this part of his work is overlooked; it is all the more difficult to encounter because Heliczer himself never collected it. So it was scattered, or lost, in the course of his wanderings. Heliczer favored the circulation of his works rather than their archiving: he was committed to the production of mobile forms—flyers, broadsides, and other ephemera—disseminated his verses in magazines, and preferred public readings and performances to the finished form of the book.

The present volume gathers a significant number of Heliczer’s poetic works through facsimile reproduction of his contributions to more than thirty periodicals—mostly stemming from poets’ presses or universities—published between 1958 and 1979. This collection isn’t “complete”—but it makes available again poems that, in some cases, never circulated after their initial publication. 

Un recueil de poèmes de Piero Heliczer (1937–1993), auteur, éditeur et cinéaste, figure de l’underground et de la contre-culture, proche de Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, et Jack Smith. Sa poésie, héritière de la Beat Generation, restitue en métaphores et images saisissantes des expériences et des visions personnelles, tout en s’appuyant sur des formes héritées de la tradition anglaise et des partis-pris typographiques originaux. Ce recueil rassemble des facsimilés des publications originales de poèmes de Heliczer – périodiques d’artistes, revues miméographiées, petits magazines… – accompagnées de leurs traductions en français, ainsi que de plusieurs documents, parmi lesquels une reproduction intégrale d’une publication rare de 1961, Wednesday Paper, et, en insert, un facsimilé d’un placard de 1975, The Handsome Policeman.

Traduction des poèmes: Rachel Valinsky
Publié avec l’aide du CNAP

Fieldnotes is a biannual print journal publishing new writing and artworks with a focus on practices that work between disciplines and against type. There is always a third thing between two things that are known; we are interested in whatever there is between translations/transitions, things-in-progress, converging genres, methods of excavation and formal innovation. The purpose of the journal is to provide a test site for ideas and research; a space for experimental modes and new prototypes. 

The third issue of FIELDNOTES contains new work by:

CAConrad & George Finlay Ramsay
Charlie Hawksfield
Yvonne
Angus McCrum
Peter Gizzi
McKenzie Wark
Kate Paul
Michelle Williams Gamaker
Georges Bataille & Rachelle Rahmé
Declan Wiffen
Rosa Barba
Travis Jeppesen
Robert Glück & Arnold Kemp
Cecilia Pavón & Jacob Steinberg 
George Lynch 
Yuhan Shen

Edition on Moyra Davey's film Wedding loop, in which a wedding party is being reflected through the work of 19th-century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

Design by Will Holder

A new kind of queer art writing.

Queer Formalism: The Return expands upon William J. Simmons's original, influential essay “Notes on Queer Formalism” from 2013, offering novel ways of thinking about queer-feminist art outside of the critical-complicit and abstract-representational binaries that continue to haunt contemporary queer art. It therefore proposes a new kind of queer art writing, one that skirts the limits imposed by normative histories of art and film. 

Artists addressed in Queer Formalism: The Return include: Sally Mann, David Lynch, Lars von Trier, Math Bass, Lorna Simpson, Laurie Simmons, Alex Prager, Lana Del Rey, Jessica Lange, and Louise Lawler, among others.

An extensive and comprehensive polyphonic exploration of the work of The Otolith Group, coming at a pivotal point in their practice.

The work of this London-based artist's collective comprised of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun covers politics of race and diversity and incorporates film making and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face. 

Presenting all bodies of work contained in the Xenogenesis exhibition, this publication includes many materials and graphics from The Otolith Group's broader practice, including performance, lecture and research material. The outcome of over four years of collaboration, research and conversation, the publication is not a chronological exhibition catalogue or retrospective but a cross-section of their work which includes substantial contributions from the artists themselves, in the form of writing and direct engagement with its production.

The publication also brings together important thinkers, scholars, art historians and writers from disparate fields, who know and have worked with the group, as well as those who are writing from a contemporary perspective. They include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Annie Fletcher, Anselm Franke, Shanay Jhaveri, George E. Lewis, Mahan Moalemi, Fred Moten, Grant Watson, Vivian Ziherl and the late Mark Fisher each of whom reflect on a particular aspect of the Group's practice with supplementary materials such as archival images, documented conversations, early lecture performances as well as other accompanying texts and examinations of their research sites.

BE GOOD, IF YOU CAN’T BE GOOD, BE GOOD AT IT Boom Boom Boom Boom is a publication composed of letters, notes, anecdotes,translations, stills and images: all traces of the creative process. The artists Rebecca Jane Arthur and Eva Giolo bring together their correspondence on the act of writing and of filmmaking, in all its complexity, struggles and playfulness.

The letters unpack themes such as the challenge of making personal work and the strength found in sharing vulnerability; the act of writing itself, language and translation; writing on moving images, on their practices and that of others; and the notion of a place as a container of memories, of interiority and the confrontation with home. The publication uses words and texts as images, and all images of persons or things are hidden. The publication acts as a negative to the films that we create, revealing that which cannot be.

Publisher: Les éditions du CVB
Publication Date: March 2021
Language : English & French
ISBN: 978-2-9601799-7-2
Softback, 311 pages, fully illustrated

Marking the first UK commission by Brooklyn-based filmmakers Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer in collaboration with Oba, Gasworks has published a 176-page book that explores the ever-expanding vampiric universe of Nosferasta.

Spanning 500 years of colonial destruction, human trafficking and blood sucking, Nosferasta is a Rastafarian vampire film that reimagines Oba’s origin story in the late 15th century, when he is seduced by the vampire Christopher Columbus, ensuring his undying allegiance to the colonial project. Combining film forms and jumping across multiple timelines, Nosferasta examines the guilt of being complicit in imperial conquest, while acknowledging the extreme difficulty of unlearning centuries of vampiric conditioning. Ultimately, the film tackles an uncomfortable question:

How can you decolonise yourself, if it’s in your blood?

Interspersed with excerpts from Oba’s literacy diaries, Nosferasta: The Book features critical essays, speculative fiction and visual contributions by Peggy Ahwesh, Lou Cornum, Alex Esco, Sabel Gavaldon, Adam Khalil, Mutabaruka, Oba, Austin Sley Julian, Bayley Sweitzer, and Laura Vallés. Designed by fag tips (aka Virgil b/g Taylor).

One of the strangest and subtlest films ever made, the Maysles Brothers' 1975 documentary Grey Gardens today boasts as devoted a following as Harold and Maude. Shot at Grey Gardens, the dilapidated East Hamptons mansion of Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, aunt and cousin to Jackie Onassis, this classic of cinema vérité tracks the Beales' eccentric and sequestered lives, which consist mostly of doing nothing, but with a mesmerizing zest and volubility.

This volume offers a myriad of illustrations, photographs, film stills, production notes and other archival materials alongside transcripts of the Beales' own stories and conversations edited from unreleased Grey Gardens sound recordings. Structured to mirror the Maysles' approach to the world of the Beales, it resembles the enchanting clutter of the mansion, a self-contained world littered with mementos and ephemera. It also reproduces unpublished photographs by both Albert and David Maysles. With an introduction by Albert Maysles, drawings and illustrations by Albert's daughter, Rebekah Maysles and an appendix with the full transcript of Grey Gardens, as well as an audio CD of sound recordings capturing the Beales at their best, this book is the essential companion to the film and a beautiful testimony to its legacy.

The 60-minute CD that comes with the book contains conversations with the Beales and their friends, songs and poetry recited by the two Edies and audio of the Beales during and after watching the film for the first time.

First monograph devoted to the work of video artist and performer Wolfgang Stoerchle (1944-1976), an artistic figure of the Californian scene in the 1970s, based on extensive research and three international exhibitions.

Wolfgang Stoerchle is a particularly notable artistic figure of the early seventies who left a certain but little advertised mark on a generation of Californian artists, especially through videotapes and performances involving his body as raw material. His short but eventful life is surrounded by rumors, and his abrupt death in 1976 may have emphasized the myth around him even more. His entire body of work was produced in eleven years, between 1965 and 1976. Forty-five years after he passed away, his name still drifts across the West Coast art world, awaiting wider recognition.

Wolfgang Stoerchle: Success in Failure is the first monograph on the artist's work, written by Alice Dusapin who has dedicated extensive research into his life and work since 2017 and organized several international exhibitions during this time (Ampersand, Lisbon; Gallery Overduin & Co, Los Angeles; Gallery Air de Paris and Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome). 

The publication includes interviews with Daniel Lentz, Paul McCarthy, Matt Mullican, David Salle, Helene Winer, and an unpublished review by James Welling, alongside ephemera and documentation of Stoerchle's video works and performances, as well as rarely seen sculptures, installations, and paintings.

Edited by Alice Dusapin, with Justin Jaeckle.
Texts by Alice Dusapin and James Welling; interviews with David Salle, Helene Winer, Matt Mullican, Paul McCarthy, Daniel Lentz.

Over the last four decades, American artist and filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh has forged a distinctive moving image practice in the ruins of originality and authority. monWith contributions from Erika Balsom, Elena Gorfinkel, Tendai Mutambu, John David Rhodes and Shola von Rheinold, Peggy Ahwesh: Vision Machines explores how she has extended and contested the paradigm of experimental cinema.

Since the early 1980s, Peggy Ahwesh (born 1954 in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania) has produced one of the most heterogeneous bodies of work in the field of experimental film and video. A true bricoleur, her tools include narrative and documentary styles, improvised performance and scripted dialogue, synch-sound film, found footage, digital animation, and crude Pixelvision video. The work is primarily an investigation cultural identity and the role of the subject, in various genres. Ahwesh work with subversively amateur forms, and also a discourse that yielded traditionally female-gendered themes like home and family, relationships, and confessions, which she appropriated as scenarios. Her practice insists on political and social topicality, handled with theoretical and formal rigor, with a nod to popular culture forms. She draws the audience into the world and traditions of avant-garde film and video, where, as she has remarked, "there's nothing to prove and no money to make," only the pleasures of the text.

Including writing about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Linda Manz, Sadie Benning, Sarah Maldoror, Cecilia Mangini, Agnes Martin, Peggy Ahwesh, Kira Muratova, Alina Szapocznikow, Jean Genet and more… 

On subjects including an interrogation on cinephilia and gender, surveillance, infant observation during the pandemic and the screen as psychic portal, Beirut on film, devotional labour, prisons during lockdown, the notion of solidarity, reproduction and futurity, and much more... Roundtables about Sarah Maldoror; hands and fate, work, pleasure, touch, and surveillance; early women's travel films… 

Plus, the year in review… 

Featuring writing and contributions by María Palacios Cruz, Lizzie Borden, Kathryn Scanlan, Yasmina Price, Nicolas Russell, Rebecca Liu, Georgie Carr, Pooja Rangan, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Nuotama Bodomo, Phoebe Campion, Janaina Olivera, Cassie da Costa, Frank Beauvais, AS Hamrah, Awa Konaté and many more…

The project initiated by artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson and typographer Will Holder, based on the eponymous score written by Cornelius Cardew in 1967.

In 2010, a production process was instigated by filmmaker Beatrice Gibson and typographer Will Holder, with the intention of using British composer Cornelius Cardew's musical score The Tiger's Mind as a means of producing speech. Since the score concerns the changing relations between six characters in production, practitioners from other fields (musicians and visual artists) were invited to three conversations at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Kunstverein in Amsterdam, and CAC Brétigny. 

After each conversation, a printed document was made and distributed amongst the characters, to serve as a score for subsequent conversations. Any other ends would be found in conversation. After some time it became clear that a film would be made: Beatrice Gibson's The Tiger's Mind. This book is a document of its making.

Fascinating letters and ephemera from experimental filmmakers such as Maya Deren, Nathaniel Dorsky, Jim Jarmusch, Harun Farocki, Jean Vigo and more.

More than 50 postcards, manuscripts, typewritten letters and even emails are presented alongside stills, drawings and storyboards to create a stunning epistolary archive many years in the making. Curator and Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival director Garbiñe Ortega has compiled these materials in an effort to "create echoes and reverberations between materials which, as in a film, thanks to the editing, take on another meaning beyond their specific content."

The volume includes correspondence exchanged among filmmakers Jodie Mack, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Jorge Honik, Claudio Caldini, Lech Kowalski, Nicole Brenez, Marcel Hanoun, Nathaniel Dorsky, George Kuchar, Nazli Dinçel, Norman McLaren, Maya Deren, Jean Vigo, Richard Leacock, Monica Flaherty, Richard Linklater, Gabe Kingler, Robert Breer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Fernando Trueba, Jean-Marie Straub, Jim Jarmusch, Hanun Farocki, Robert Frank, Fred Wiseman, Margaret Tait, Ute Aurand, Terrence Malick, Lynne Sachs and Gunvor Nelson.

This is the first monograph on the internationally acclaimed French Algerian artist Neïl Beloufa (born 1985). Love, hatred, war, technology, social unrest, bodies and words in crisis: this is the material of which Beloufa’s work is made. His films, sculptures and multimedia installations audaciously explore how art can address today’s issues, challenging contemporary representations of social relationships, power games, and political and economic structures. An artist favoring collaborations over authorship, and responsive strategies over predetermined intentions, Beloufa has invented his own work methods, and a particular approach to the studio.

The catalog presents the artist’s projects over the past 12 years, including recent experiments with online platforms and NFTs; it takes as its starting point Beloufa’s solo show, Digital Mourning, at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, and offers a non-conformist take on the genre of the monograph, thanks to Olivier Lebrun’s playful and inventive book design.
 
Beloufa’s work has been exhibited at the ICA, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; MoMA, New York; Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt. He took part in the Venice Biennale in 2013 and 2019. His work is present in public and private collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; and Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf & Berlin.
He is represented by François Ghebaly (Los Angeles / New York), Mendes Wood DM (Sao Paulo / Brussels / New York), kamel mennour (Paris / London), and Zero… (Milan).