Curated by Guest Filmmaker Tadhg O'Sullivan
18.50pm / 26 Nov 2012
Irish Film Institute (6 Eustace Street, Temple Bar, Dublin)
EFC have invited the filmmaker Tadhg O' Sullivan to present "What Remains", his new film co-directed with Pat Collins. To contextualise this work in progress, he has curated a program of contemporary films that push the boundaries of the found footage/archive form. He expands ideas beyond film and explores meaning gathered from fragments of the world around us. With films derived from a surprising range of sources and media, and featuring works by Irish and International filmmakers such as Sylvia Schedelbauer, Ben Rivers and Michael Higgins, In Back of the Real frames a deeply contemporary look at the vibrant tradition of the archival film. Presenting works that explore personal and shared memory, the programme asks challenging questions about cultural and private artefacts and the meanings that time and the film-makers' art draw from them.
This programme has been facilitated by Aoife Desmond.
This programme has been facilitated by Aoife Desmond.
WHAT REMAINS
Pat Collins & Tadhg O'Sullivan
IRL, 11min 2012
THESE HAMMERS DON'T HURT US
Michael Robinson
US, 13min 2010
Michael Robinson's works bring together images and sounds from a wide range of original and pop-culture sources, forging new and uncanny correspondences. For These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us, footage of Elizabeth Taylor’s 1963 Hollywood epic Cleopatra is seamlessly combined with images of Michael Jackson’s mid-1990s Egyptomania, culminating in a mesmerizing phantasmagoria of hypnotic color strobe. Here and elsewhere, Robinson makes familiar media strange again, exploring collective memory through a poetics of devotion and loss.
SOUNDING GLASS
Sylvia Schedelbauer
A man in a forest is subject to a flood of impressions; rhythmic waves of images and sounds give form to his introspection.—Sylvia Schedelbauer
“Waves of consciousness roll in, roll out, leave some writing, and just as quickly new waves roll in and erase it. I try to quickly read what’s written there, between one wave and the next, but it’s hard. Before I can read it the next wave’s washed it away. All that’s left are puzzling fragments.”—Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
POOR HOUSE REVISITED
Michael Higgins
IRL, 13min 2012
Fifteen years after the making of the original Poorhouse, the discarded film rushes were discovered outdoors on the Ringsend Peninsula, Dublin – literally unearthed – by film-maker Michael Higgins. Restored, re-worked and re-edited, and set to a haunting score by Brian Conniffe and Suzanne Walsh, the story emerges from beneath a harsh new layer of archeological detritus, their pathos accentuated by their delicate state of fragmented survival.
CONFESSIONS WITH AN OPEN CURTAIN
Eli Cortinas
Spain, 6min 2011
As in her previous works, the video which is based on found-footage, deals with the construction of female identity, as well as with the portrayal of pictorial details, the interpretation of the specifics of a dramaturgic scene and the relevant film scenography. Things which within the context of film history are already “embedded” in the film material and could thus be overlooked, are brought to the forefront.
TWO CORONATIONS
Stephen Connolly
UK, 14min 2011
Two Coronations reworks material from a family archive, temporally framed by footage of the two coronation ceremonies in England in 1937 and 1953. An activity of 'procession', staged for the camera both in public and private contexts, features strongly in the archive. These images have been recombined to reveal latent notions of social relationships and collectivity.
PHANTOM OF A LIBERTINE
Ben Rivers
UK, 2012, 10 minutes
Evoking the still photographs that mysteriously punctuate his feature Two Years at Sea, Ben Rivers' Phantoms of a Libertine is an enigmatic portrait (channeling Marcel Broodthaers as much as Raymond Depardon) of a lost friend told through two sets of photographs--professional and private--and the objects that remain.
