FILM AND THE OTHER ARTS: CREATIVE DIALOGUES IN THE AVANT-GARDE

 

Saturday 25 February and Sunday 26 February – Filmhouse Edinburgh

 

A season of avant-garde films exploring the diverse ways in which cinema dialogues with other of art forms. Painting, drawing, architecture, dance, performance, sound and poetry coalesce and intersect throughout the four screenings, opening out to wider themes of perception, identity, time and space. The works invite us to reflect on the language of film and its ability to transform and be transformed by other creative mediums. Using the collection held by the LUX Centre for Moving Image, the programme emerges as an exercise in archival mapping, combining the historical and the contemporary, the rare and the classic, to reveal new connections across the history of avant-garde filmmaking.

Curated by Tanya Syed and Kim Knowles.

 

Architecture of Space | Saturday 25 Feb 3.15pm

In this collection of films we travel from Vancouver to London via North Russia, traversing a misty seascape, classroom corridors, an industrial wasteland, the River Thames, and London’s corporate skyline. The programme examines how architectural structures are mirrored through the language of film, and how, like architecture, the film frame contains, expands and collapses space.

 

Film as Canvas | Saturday 25 Feb 5.50pm

Drawing together a range of visual and sonic approaches, from direct mark-making – scratching, painting, drawing, printing – to techniques of alternation and repetition, this programme explores how artists have used the film frame or surface as a canvas. The works oscillate between abstraction and figuration, the painterly and the photographic, demonstrating the infinite possibilities of film as a fine art.

 

Performing Gesture | Sunday 26 Feb 3.30pm

A popular strand of cross-disciplinary investigation, dance film takes many different forms. Here we present a diverse selection of works focusing on the emotional charge of bodily movement and gesture. Ritualistic actions unravel through repetition and duplication, the mobile camera weaving a dynamic relationship between the self and the other, the filmmaker and the performer.

 

The Poetic Voice | Sunday 26 Feb 5.50pm

This eclectic programme brings together works that explore the poetic and performative qualities of language through the medium of film. From a cinematic rendering of Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Lady Lazarus’ to a portrait of the lesbian performance artist Peggy Shaw, and from film noir to documentary, the five films find common ground in themes of marginality, self-examination and transgression.