Film Screenings / Programs / Series
AFTERIMAGE: COUNTER CINEMA, RADICAL CINEMA
March 4 – March 17
March 4-17, 2024
“This series of screenings celebrates the publication by The Visible Press of “The Afterimage Reader”, a selection of editorials, essays, interviews, and filmmakers’ statements from the British film journal Afterimage, which was published irregularly between 1970 and 1987. Afterimage was founded on the principle of an on-going commitment to avant-garde cinema, to radical cinema, to ‘new’ cinema understood both aesthetically and politically.
Afterimage emphasized the importance of the writings of filmmakers themselves. Over 13 issues, alongside critical essays by important critics such as Noël Burch, B. Ruby Rich, and Regina Cornwell, it published manifestoes, scripts, theoretical texts, polemical essays from filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard, Glauber Rocha, Julio García Espinosa, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey, Malcolm Le Grice, Yvonne Rainer, Raúl Ruiz, Stephen Dwoskin, Jan Švankmajer, and many others, as well as by important precursors for a radical cinema like Dziga Vertov and Jean Epstein. Special issues were devoted to Michael Snow and to Derek Jarman. Each publication was effectively a special issue around a theme or filmmaker.
Presenting this series at Anthology Film Archives offers the opportunity to acknowledge how indebted Afterimage was to Film Culture magazine. It was a model for us of a partisan publication that came to be deeply committed to the promotion and representation of the New American Cinema and its rich avant-garde manifestations of the 1960s and 1970s.
Afterimage similarly prided itself on its design. So just as important was our admiration of the handsome issues of Film Culture designed by Fluxus founder George Maciunas. As a consequence of this influence every issue of Afterimage had a distinctive and different design with title pages and full-bleed images.
If the first six issues circled around the ‘two avant-gardes’ and debates in cinema theory, later issues continued the commitment to new, radical cinema but also considered ‘neglected’ works and figures, like BORDERLINE in the past and – at the time of publication – Raúl Ruiz.
Toward the end of Afterimage’s run, new editorial energies steered us in the direction of ‘troublesome cases’: first a festschrift on Derek Jarman, then our final issue featuring the Quay Brothers, Švankmajer, Bokanowski, and other visionary animators.” –Simon Field
“The Afterimage Reader” will be available at Anthology for a discounted price during the series. For more details on this and other books from The Visible Press, visit www.thevisiblepress.com
“Afterimage: Counter Cinema, Radical Cinema” is curated by Simon Field and Mark Webber with Jed Rapfogel. Special thanks to Haden Guest (Harvard Film Archive).
SIMON FIELD, CO-FOUNDER AND EDITOR OF 'AFTERIMAGE', WILL BE HERE TO INTRODUCE THE FOLLOWING SCREENINGS:
--MONDAY, MARCH 4 AT 7:00: AFTERIMAGE NO. 1: FILM AND POLITICS
--SUNDAY, MARCH 10 AT 6:00: AFTERIMAGE NO. 12: DEREK JARMAN...OF ANGELS AND APOCALYPSE
--SUNDAY, MARCH 10 AT 8:30: AFTERIMAGE NO. 13: ANIMATING THE FANTASTIC
[We expected Mark Webber, the publisher and editor of "The Afterimage Reader" to be here in person as well, but due to unforeseen circumstances, he is unable to join us.]
Thanks as well to Bret Berg (AGFA); Hanan Coumal (LUX); Jack Durwood (Paramount); Matthieu Grimault (Cinémathèque française); ISKRA; Brett Kashmere & Seth Mitter (Canyon Cinema); James Mackay; Laura Mulvey; Beth Rennie (George Eastman Museum); Elena Rossi-Snook (NYPL); Emily Russo (Zeitgeist Films); Valeria Sarmiento; Katie Trainor & James Layton (MoMA); Pedro Lijeron Vargas (Fundación Grupo Ukamau); George Watson (BFI); Todd Wiener & Steven Hill (UCLA Film & Television Archive); and Klaus Wyborny.
Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Henri Roger
BRITISH SOUNDS (aka SEE YOU AT MAO)
1970, 52 min, 16mm-to-DCP
Preceded by:
CINÉTRACT 12 1968, 3 min, 16mm-to-digital
CINÉTRACT 14 1968, 3 min, 16mm-to-digital
Total running time: ca. 65 min.
Mon, Mar 4 at 7:00, Fri, Mar 15 at 7:00, and Sun, Mar 17 at 5:30. [The CINÉTRACTS will only be included on Mar 4 & 15.]
AFTERIMAGE NO. 1: FILM AND POLITICS
PROGRAM 2:
Ken Loach
THE BIG FLAME
1969, 85 min, 16mm-to-digital
“The first Afterimage carried an extended interview with the unashamedly socialist Tony Garnett. He produced the BBC TV series ‘The Wednesday Play’, known for its hard-hitting working-class subjects and union themes, and which included such landmark broadcasts as UP THE JUNCTION and CATHY COME HOME. The series also included this feature length program, scripted by regular collaborator Jim Allen and directed by Ken Loach, who worked with Garnett for 30 years. THE BIG FLAME, a docu-drama in Loach’s politically-aligned realist style, describes how dock workers under the threat of redundancy work day and night in an attempt to stay employed by running the workforce themselves. It stands in fascinating contrast to BRITISH SOUNDS, which was also produced by Garnett’s company Kestrel Productions.” –Simon Field
Mon, Mar 4 at 9:00 and Fri, Mar 15 at 8:30.
AFTERIMAGE NO. 2: AVANT-GARDE FILM
David Larcher
MARE’S TAIL
1968, 143 min, 16mm-to-digital
“From one flick of the mare’s tail came an unending stream of images out of which was crystallised the milky way.” –David Larcher
“One of the forgotten masterpieces of the British avant-garde, this epic film was assembled from quasi-autobiographical footage, shot over several years, that was processed, manipulated, and edited into a dense, durational viewing experience. Generously employing assorted optical and aural trickery, MARE’S TAIL unravels into a 2½ hour anarcho-mystical voyage of psychedelic revelation. One of the true mavericks of artists’ film and video, distinguished for his visual ingenuity and uncompromising nature, David Larcher passed away in early 2023. MARE’S TAIL can now only be shown digitally as it awaits preservation of what is possibly the only surviving, very fragile, 16mm print.” –Mark Webber
Tues, Mar 5 at 7:00.
AFTERIMAGE NO. 3: THIRD WORLD CINEMA
Jorge Sanjinés
BLOOD OF THE CONDOR / YAWAR MALLKU
1969, 70 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Spanish and Quechua with English subtitles.
“One of the milestones of the politically radical Latin American cinema that emerged from a ‘new wave’ of directors that included Sanjinés in Bolivia, Glauber Rocha in Brazil, Julio García Espinosa in Cuba, and Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas in Argentina. Militant manifestoes ‘towards a third cinema’ were translated and published in Afterimage 3 as the films began to enter into wider circulation. They demanded a different aesthetic, new forms of distribution, and different relations with subjects and audiences. Sanjinés saw his second feature YAWAR MALLKU as a necessarily political film speaking for the indigenous peoples and their culture. He cast farmers and miners in the lead roles, speaking in their own language, in a dramatic story around the suspected ambition of the Peace Corps to sterilize the native population.” –Simon Field
Wed, Mar 6 at 7:00 and Mon, Mar 11 at 6:45.
AFTERIMAGE NO. 4: FOR A NEW CINEMA
HOLLIS FRAMPTON / PAUL SHARITS
“In an extensive interview in Afterimage 4, Hollis Frampton remarked: ‘I do in fact believe that that is one of the valuable civic functions of works of art, that they do tend to provide intimations of permanent clarity and order in the mind, and that they have thereby a rejuvenating, restorative, curative, nourishing function within society.’ Artists have taken a multiplicity of approaches towards achieving this status in their work, and for Frampton and Sharits this involved interrogating the very stuff of film itself. Sharits: ‘This has nothing to do with “pleasing an audience” – I mean to say that in my cinema flashes of projected light initiate neural transmission as much as they are analogues of such transmission systems and that the human retina is as much a “movie screen” as is the screen proper.’” –Mark Webber
Paul Sharits INFERENTIAL CURRENT 1971, 8 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
Paul Sharits ANALYTICAL STUDIES I: THE FILM FRAME 1976, 25 min, 16mm, silent. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
Hollis Frampton REMOTE CONTROL (HAPAX LEGOMENA VI) 1972, 29 min, 16mm, silent
Hollis Frampton SPECIAL EFFECTS (HAPAX LEGOMENA VII) 1972, 11 min, 16mm
HAPAX LEGOMENA was preserved through a major cooperative effort funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and undertaken by MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, and Bill Brand, professor in the NYU program and project conservator.
Total running time: ca. 75 min.
Thurs, Mar 7 at 7:00.
AFTERIMAGE NO. 5: AESTHETICS/IDEOLOGY/CINEMA
Fritz Lang
SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR
1947, 99 min, 35mm. 35mm preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preservation funding provided by The Film Foundation.
“Two critics of modernist cinema important to Afterimage were Annette Michelson and Noël Burch. The latter, whose ‘Theory of Film Practice’ had been recently translated, wrote several pieces for the magazine. At the center of our theory-oriented issue 5, which Burch guest edited, was the polemical text ‘Propositions’, written with Jorge Dana. It proposed a new ‘taxonomy of cinema’ which categorized films according to their relationship with the dominant codes of cinema and of narrative. For them, Fritz Lang’s psychological thriller SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR – knowingly a polemical choice – fell into ‘the category of a film totally accounted for and informed at all levels by the dominant codes.’” –Simon Field
Thurs, Mar 7 at 9:00 and Mon, Mar 11 at 8:45.
AFTERIMAGE NO. 6: PERSPECTIVES ON ENGLISH INDEPENDENT CINEMA
“Made in parallel with their respective, influential writings on a radical avant-garde and feminist cinema, PENTHESILEA was Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s significant first step into directing. Inspired by Kleist’s play, and by the examples of Godard and Rainer, the film is in five chapters; sequence shots of fixed length. Each relates to different means of representation: a mime version of the Kleist, voice-over section, the theme of Amazons in painting and sculpture, film, and finally TV and video. In Stephen Dwoskin’s MOMENT, an extended close up of a woman’s face offers a complete contrast with PENTHESILEA in its way of dealing with the ‘look’ of the spectator and of the camera. Dwoskin’s work was controversial but importantly re-assessed by Laura Mulvey and Paul Willemen.” –Simon Field
Laura Mulvey
PENTHESILEA
1974, 99 min, 16mm-to-DCP
Preceded by:
Stephen Dwoskin MOMENT 1970, 12.5 min, 16mm
Total running time: ca. 115 min.
Fri, Mar 8 at 6:30, Tues, Mar 12 at 7:30, and Sat, Mar 16 at 8:30.
AFTERIMAGE NO. 7: HEARING : SEEING
Yvonne Rainer
KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES
1976, 90 min, 16mm. Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with support from the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation.
“Having established herself as a foremost contemporary choreographer, Yvonne Rainer turned to cinema to make a remarkable series of features between 1972 and 1996. KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES is ostensibly the story of a lion tamer who has moved from Budapest to New York to become a dancer, but these narrative fragments are just one device in a collage that unpacks filmic construction, raising questions on representation, coherence, and truth. Rainer’s early films were exemplary of an emerging tendency towards ‘new narrative’ features that were featured in the 1976 Edinburgh Film Festival and Afterimage 7.” –Mark Webber
“Within its form of shifting correlations between word and image, persona and performer, enactment and illustration, explanation and ambiguity, KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES circles in a narrowing spiral towards its primary concerns: the uncertain relation of public act to personal fate, the ever-present possibility for disparity between public-directed conscience and private will.” –EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Fri, Mar 8 at 9:15 and Wed, Mar 13 at 6:45.
AFTERIMAGE NO. 8/9: BEGINNING AND BEGINNING AGAIN
PROGRAM 1:
Klaus Wyborny
THE BIRTH OF A NATION / DIE GEBURT DER NATION
1973, 65 min, 16mm-to-digital
“Reporting on the Independent Festival of Avant-Garde Film in London, 1973, Jonas Mekas announced Wyborny’s film as, ‘one of the extraordinary and original works…among the most interesting experiments in narrative direction that anybody’s doing today.’ Wyborny’s films and theories were celebrated in a double issue that looked at the relationship between the avant-garde and early cinema. ‘At first appearing to spin out an elementary yarn of social organisation (the predictably fraught establishment of a rudimentary commune in the Moroccan desert of 1911) in the “authoritative” language of D.W. Griffith, Wyborny proceeds to break down that language to its constituent elements and produce fragmentary hints of alternatives.’ (Time Out). Wyborny was beginning his life-long exploration of the possibility of other systems for organizing filmic images.” –Simon Field
Sat, Mar 9 at 4:00 and Sat, Mar 16 at 6:45.
AFTERIMAGE NO. 8/9: BEGINNING AND BEGINNING AGAIN
PROGRAM 2: PERSPECTIVE CORRECTION
“Noël Burch, who edited the theory-heavy Afterimage 5, was an important presence in London, teaching at the Slade and RCA art schools. His peculiarly didactic film CORRECTION PLEASE explores the mechanics of ‘primitive’ filmmaking and the ways that such ingenuity developed a cinematic language. Philosophical concepts are conveyed in a stilted but mysterious, art deco-laden dramatization of the viewer’s journey into ‘the kingdom of shadows’. It’s a subject that resonates with the editorial theme of Afterimage 8/9. In that double issue, Rod Stoneman’s brilliant essay ‘Perspective Correction’ drew parallels between early film and the avant-garde in a moment when many filmmakers like Malcolm Le Grice and Guy Sherwin were themselves employing rudimentary, historical techniques in making new works.” –Mark Webber
Noël Burch
CORRECTION PLEASE; OR, HOW WE GOT INTO PICTURES
1979, 50 min, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
With:
Malcolm Le Grice AFTER LUMIERE (L’ARROSEUR ARROSE) 1974, 12 min, 16mm-to-DCP
Guy Sherwin SHORT FILM SERIES: BREATHING 1978, 3 min, 16mm
Guy Sherwin SHORT FILM SERIES: METRONOME 1978, 3 min, 16mm
Guy Sherwin SHORT FILM SERIES: PORTRAIT WITH PARENTS 1975, 3 min, 16mm
Total running time: ca. 75 min.
Sat, Mar 9 at 6:00 and Sun, Mar 17 at 7:15.
AFTERIMAGE NO. 10: MYTHS OF TOTAL CINEMA
Raúl Ruiz
THE HYPOTHESIS OF THE STOLEN PAINTING / L’HYPOTHÈSE DU TABLEAU VOLÉ
1978, 64 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles. Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française and Valeria Sarmiento.
“Proposed as a documentary on the French philosopher and novelist Pierre Klossowski, Ruiz instead took some of the writer’s themes to weave into this fictional portrait of an art collector. With the speculative seriousness of a Klossowski, the collector takes us through his rambling mansion while explaining the themes of his ambiguous series of paintings by the 19th-century French painter Frédéric Tonnerre (a character invented by Ruiz) and their connection via different ‘tableaux vivants’ to a mysterious and cruel ceremony. Ever playful, Ruiz diverts us into a vertiginous narrative of different characters and tableaux. Deliriously inventive – and beautiful – with glistening, smoky, black and white images.” –Simon Field
Preceded by:
Raúl Ruiz COLLOQUE DE CHIENS 1977, 22 min, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française and Valeria Sarmiento.“COLLOQUE DE CHIENS makes inspired low-budget use of the French tradition of the ‘photo-roman’.” –Simon Field
Total running time: ca. 90 min.
Sat, Mar 9 at 8:30 and Wed, Mar 13 at 9:00.
AFTERIMAGE NO. 11: SIGHTING SNOW
“In balancing ‘The Two Avant-Gardes’, the Afterimage editors were guided by their admiration for Jean-Luc Godard (representative of the political, independent filmmakers) and Michael Snow (on the side of the aesthetic, formalist radicals), referring to the pair as ‘emblematic figures of those remarkable years in the transformation of the possibilities of cinema.’ These three films by Snow explore camera movement and its effect on the recorded image and the viewer’s perception. STANDARD TIME swirls around the artist’s living space whilst BACK AND FORTH sculpts light by relentlessly panning across a university classroom. Despite the apparent austerity of some works, Snow’s playful humor is rarely out of view. In BREAKFAST (TABLE TOP DOLLY), an advancing camera crushes everything in its path; a part-parody of his early classic WAVELENGTH.” –Mark Webber
Michael Snow
STANDARD TIME 1967, 8.5 min, 16mm
<---> (BACK AND FORTH) 1969, 50 min, 16mm-to-35mm. Restored by Anthology Film Archives with funding provided by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Film Foundation.
BREAKFAST (TABLE TOP DOLLY) 1976, 15 min, 16mm
Total running time: ca. 80 min.
Sun, Mar 10 at 4:00.
AFTERIMAGE NO. 12: DEREK JARMAN … OF ANGELS AND APOCALYPSE
“Derek Jarman exemplified a new direction in British independent cinema: queer, sensual, theatrical. IMAGINING OCTOBER, a more rarely screened work, is one of his most powerful. Employing his textured, stop-motion Super-8 style, he weaves together a visual meditation on a trip to Moscow and a visit to Eisenstein’s apartment with painterly images of a homoerotic group of soldiers and texts that conjure a passionate denunciation of Thatcher’s Britain. ‘Probably one of the most emblematic productions of the independent/avant-garde at the end of the silent era’, Kenneth Macpherson’s BORDERLINE is an ambitious experimental narrative featuring Paul Robeson, made with a group that included literary figures such as Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and Winifred Bryher. Inspired by psychoanalysis, BORDERLINE depicts the inner state of characters involved in an interracial triangle and hints at a homoerotic subtext.” –Simon Field
Derek Jarman
IMAGINING OCTOBER
1984, 27 min, Super-8mm-to-digital
Kenneth Macpherson
BORDERLINE
1930, 65 min, 35mm-to-DCP. Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum.
Total running time: ca. 95 min.
Sun, Mar 10 at 6:00 and Thurs, Mar 14 at 9:00.
AFTERIMAGE NO. 13: ANIMATING THE FANTASTIC
Patrick Bokanowski
THE ANGEL / L’ANGE
1982, 70 min, 16mm
“Afterimage’s final issue turned to a very different tradition of original cinema, one rooted in surrealism and the fantastic, the uncanny and the alchemical. Jan Švankmajer and the Quays were celebrated, as was the lesser-known work of Patrick Bokanowski, then described as ‘the most exciting experimental film-maker working in France today.’ Of his major work L’ANGE, Jayne Pilling wrote, ‘The intensity of imagery and the sonorous music’s alternate plangency, threat and poignance create a terrifying universe of obsessive behaviour. Five sequences are separated – connected? – by half-glimpsed, strobe-like effects of a nightmare journey through corridors and along stairways.’ This mesmeric film combines live action, animation and painting with a concrète, modernist score by Michèle Bokanowski.” –Simon Field
Sun, Mar 10 at 8:30 and Thurs, Mar 14 at 7:00.
