Grace Davies, Suzanne Mooney and Uriel Orlow have each chosen an artist’s film and written a short text on all three films that we have compiled into a handmade booklet (edition of 50).

We start the evening with The Future’s Getting Old Like The Rest Of Us by Beatrice Gibson from 2010: “…The film opens to conversations amongst a group of elderly care home residents, each telling a different story. Some are confident, verbose and theatrical, others drift in and out of the scene, as if reflecting their own hazy stream of consciousness…” Followed by a rare chance to see a 16mm film screening of Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) from 1971: “…One by one, the photographs are put into view and placed onto a circular hotplate …But, as the surface beneath the image heats up, their stillness is interrupted and is literally given movement. The images disintegrate before our very eyes as they smoke, stain, warp and finally burn into a pile of ash…” We close with Chris Marker’s La Jetee from 1962: “…I remember that this seemed like the most still image of the entire film. I remember that the woman’s image was the unnamed man’s madeleine, the force that allowed him to travel to the past, which looked like the present of the film itself. I remember that they became lovers of sorts but that he never found out her name either…”

Accompanying the screenings is a handmade booklet (edition of 50) in which each curator has written a short text on all three films.

SVA, Thursday 17 March
7.30pm. £4.00 on the door

(Images courtesy of LUX, London)

Mezz #12 Guy Sherwin

“The action of light on photo-sensitive emulsion arrests a fleeting event. Chemical changes take place that turn light into dark and dark into light. The camera gathers the light, the projector throws the light out onto the screen.”

For Mezz #12, we are pleased to bring one of the key artist film-makers who came out of the Structuralist film movement in the 1970s – Guy Sherwin. He will introduce a number of his 16mm film- performances in which the projectors are either stacked, tipped sideways or aligned in a row, and talk about how he sees his films as an investigation of the fundamental qualities of light and time in cinema. Included in this event will be Cycles #3 (1972/2003) in which the shuddering image of a circle and the thumping sound that roars from the two projectors is generated from holes cut into, and dots stuck onto, the film; Bicycle (1978) is a short film about relative motion; in Railings (1977) the images of railings are simultaneously scanned by the optical sound playback head in the projector and transmitted as sound; whilst Camden Road Station (1973/2004) and his recent film Wires (2009) both use three projectors. Sherwins’ films has been featured in a number of seminal shows including ‘Film as Film’ at the Hayward Gallery (1979), ‘Live in Your Head’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (2000), ‘Shoot Shoot Shoot’ at Tate Modern (2002) > and most recently ‘Moving Portraits’ at De La Warr Pavilion (2011).

SVA, Thurs 28 April 7.30pm
£4.00 on the door

Mezzanine is a series of artists’ talks, screenings and performances organised by Louisa Fairclough and Simon Ryder.

http://www.mezz.info/