AWL_008 // 88:88

by Isiah Medina                                                                     
Canada / 2015 / 65min / DV / English

You cannot pay your bill. – . Your heat and lights are cut off. -. You pay. The clocks initially flash 88:88, –:–. You set the clocks. You cannot pay. -. You pay. 88:88. –:–. Repeat. 88:88, –:–. Cut. -. You stop setting your clock to the time of the world. 88:88, –:– . Subtracted: – : you make do with suspension. 88:88, –:–, -.

88:88 is a multilayered, affectively disruptive experimental feature debut about the staticness of poverty, the fluidity of friendship and finding new ways of seeing things.  The film was extremely well received by young filmmakers worldwide, as they recognized a voice that only spoke in whispers before. With an introduction by film activist Kaya Erdinç.

88:88 is preceded by

CHRIST MASS SEX DANCE by Stan Brakhage  
US / 1991 / 16 mm / 6min / no dialogue

One of the few Brakhage films with a soundtrack, composed of six superimposed reels of images and the electronic sound piece 'Blue Suede' by James Tenney, sampling Elvis' semi eponymous hip shaker.

AWL_008 // 88:88 + CHRIST MASS SEX DANCE
Wednesday September 14
doors open: 8PM
tickets: WORM
address: Boomgaardsstraat 71, Rotterdam

AWL_007 // ARABIAN NIGHTS VOL.2 / THE DESOLATE ONE

by Miguel Gomes
Portugal / 2015 / 132 min. / Portuguese with English subtitles
 

the desolate one.jpg


An elderly criminal becomes a folk hero as he successfully evades hordes of police; a stern judge oversees a case involving 13 stolen cows, mail-order brides, a genie and a machete-wielding human lie detector; a Maltese poodle shuffles between households in a recession-stricken housing block.

Arabian Nights vol. 2 // The Desolate One is the centerpiece of Gomes’ triptych of tales about the lives of ordinary people and imaginative resistance in times of austerity. Loosely structured vignettes paint a distressing, vivid panorama of a European country in crisis.

 

AWL_007 // ARABIAN NIGHTS VOL.2 / THE DESOLATE ONE
Wednesday June 1 2016
doors open: 8PM
tickets: WORM
address: Boomgaardsstraat 71, Rotterdam

AWL_006 THIS IS NOW / PERFORMING THE SELF

The early 1980s saw an explosion in alternative and independent moving image production. Clubbers, art students, new romantics and members of the postpunk scene used cheap domestic technologies to subvert the mainstream media and to find new modes of expression. Artists defied conventional ideas about how film should be made and who should make them. New ways of thinking about identity, the self and the body were all part of punk’s powerful legacy. Female, gay and black filmmakers pushed forward; squatting flats, clubbing and developing new styles and techniques together.

In collaboration with EYE, who will present two other excellent programs from the THIS IS NOW series on June 14, introduced by curator Will Fowler. More info => here!


 

John Maybury, The Union Jacking Up, 1985

PERFORMING THE SELF
 

This unlikely cocktail of visionary experimental films and bright, brash pop videos shows how visual culture changed radically at the start of the 1980s. Genre boundaries became blurred and the use of masks and make-up challenged the conventions of identity construction and representation – often to the sound of a catchy electronic melody.

Still Life With Phrenology Head, UK, 1979, dir. Cerith Wyn Evans, 14 min

Human League: Don’t You Want Me, UK, 1981, dir. Steve Barron, 4 min

Chat Rap, UK, 1983, dir. John Scarlett-Davis, 15 min

Adam Ant: Stand and Deliver, UK, 1981, dir. Mike Mansfield & Adam Ant, 3 min

Adam Ant: Prince Charming, UK, 1981, dir. Mike Mansfield & Adam Ant, 3 min

The Modern Image, UK, 1978, dir. John Maybury, 13 min

Solitude, UK, 1981, dir. John Maybury, 13 min

Bungalow Depression, UK, 1981, dir. Grayson Perry & Jennifer Binnie, 4 min

The Private View, UK, 1981, dir. The Neo-Naturists, 7 min


THIS IS NOW: FILM AND VIDEO AFTER PUNK is a major touring project that looks at artists’ film and video from the post-punk era (1978–85) in the UK, developed by LUX in partnership with the BFI National Archive.

AWL_006 THIS IS NOW / PERFORMING THE SELF
Wednesday 25 May 2016
doors open: 8PM
tickets: WORM
address: Boomgaardsstraat 71, Rotterdam

AWL_005 SPRING BREAKERS

A selection of short films about growing up, celebrating resilient force, disruptive energies and the ongoing power of the détournement.

Memorias sin Batallas y Otros Muertos
by Nathalie Alonso Casale
16mm/ NL/ 1992/ 22 min.

In this short documentary we follow director Alonso Casale in the town of Aragon on her demythologising quest for the truth about the Spanish Civil War. The black-and-white film is a surrealist reconstruction of what her grandfather, who was executed by a firing squad at the time, went through.


The Thought Leader
by Liz Magic Laser
HD video/ USA/ 2015/ 9 min.

For The Thought Leader, Laser used the format of the increasingly popular TED Talk. She directed 10-year-old actor, Alex Ammerman, to deliver a monologue she adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864) - Courtesy of Wilfried Lentz


She’s All That
by Lisa Gliederpuppe
DV/ NL/ 2015/ 5.30 min.

She's All That is a video work containing 210 stills and moving images of and by Paris Hilton, collected from different online sources. The sound accompanying the slideshow is a live recording of the poem Fast Speaking Woman read by the author Anne Waldman. Each line of the poem is paired with an image. Together they survey the diverse physiognomy of Paris Hilton as a female icon.


We Will Go Far
by Laure Prouvost
HD video/ UK/  2015/ 9 min.

Laure Prouvost structures her work as independent stories that weave and intersect from piece to piece. We Will Go Far centres on teenagers living in the countryside experiencing their first amorous adventures- dreaming of escaping and striking out on their own-and for whom a scooter provides the path to freedom and independence. Unpredictable imagery, fragments of texts and sounds disrupt expectations and trigger new sensations.


Mutiny - Is This What You Were Born For? Part 3
by Abigail Child
16mm/ USA/ 1989/ 10 min.

Mutiny employs a panoply of expression, gesture, and repeated movement. Its central images are of women: at home, on the street, at the workplace, at school, talking, singing, jumping on trampolines, playing the violin. The syntax of the film reflects the possibilities and limitations of speech, while “politically, physically, and realistically” flirting with the language of opposition.



AWL_005 // SPRING BREAKERS
Friday 15 April 2016
doors open: 8PM
tickets: WORM
address: Boomgaardsstraat 71, Rotterdam

AWL_004 ERASERHEAD

Dream or nightmare, David Lynch’ feature debut never really left our collective subconscious.

ERASERHEAD (1977) follows a short period of the life of Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), a printer on vacation. Henry discovers that his estranged girlfriend, Mary X (Charlotte Stewart), has given birth to a bizarrely deformed baby. He marries her, and, after a tumultuous and brief time living together, Mary leaves Henry who then cares for the ill baby himself.

What follows is not really possible to describe. That's because ERASERHEAD (1977) doesn't seem to be narrated through a written plot (the script was only 20 pages long) but through its sounds and images, which fluently transmit a stream of fears and desires, as if the camera and microphone were plugged straight into the artist’s subterranean brain- but with better lighting.

The screening of ERASERHEAD will be preceded by the Dutch premiere of SPECIAL FEATURES by Brooklyn based James N. Kienitz Wilkins. The 12-minute short seems to give us an eerie behind-the-scenes look at staged storytelling, becoming a staged story in itself. The film premiered at CHP-DOX in Copenhagen and won the Grand Prix at 25fps Experimental Film and Video Film Festival in Zagreb.

 

Wednesday 23 March 8.15 PM
tickets: WORM
 

AWL_003 P'TIT QUINQUIN

Coming Wednesday at WORM we’ll be showing a full miniseries by French renegade director/philosopher Bruno Dumont. P'tit Quinquin has the structure of a murder mystery, opening with the discovery of human body parts stuffed inside a cow on the outskirts of a small channel town in northern France.

But like with most of Dumonts work, this narrative structure is essentially a Trojan horse, sliding in an absurd and tender family chronicle and a critical reflection on contemporary Western European society.


Wednesday 24 February 7.15 PM
tickets: WORM
 

AWL_002 FREE SPIRITS IN CONSTRAINED AREAS

Pages from AWL_002 Nova Dubai 1 print Raksa V2,1.jpg

Displaced is a radiating if somewhat awkward silent 16mm film by William English (UK, 2000, 13 min). In it, we view several sites and situations that don’t have any apparent relationship to each other, but turn out to have a strong coherence as a whole.
 
Followed by Nova Dubai by Gustavo Vinagre (Brazil, 2014, 50 min), a film that's set in a middle-class suburb of São Paulo. A group of friends use the building site for a monumental new housing project to fuck around and contemplate the construction of dreams, relationships, and gated communities.
It’s a stunningly sharp and candid film about (re)claiming territories and using sex as a weapon to fight a perverted real-estate system that threatens to take over physical and affective space.

Wednesday 7 October 8.15 pm
tickets @ WORM

AWL_001 MY TALK WITH FLORENCE by Paul Poet

During the first edition of the new AWL series at WORM we'll present a highly charged documentary by Austrian artist Paul Poet. The film's set up is amazingly simple and effective: Florence Burnier-Bauer tells her life story, seated in a comfy arm chair, holding a molested doll. What she tells sheds a new light on the artistic practice and legacy of Otto Mühl, one of the founders of Viennese Aktionism. The way she tells it opens up worlds that evoke the emotional and physical landscapes of the films of Agnes Varda.

The screening will bepreceded by Kurt Kren's first actionist film 6/64 Mom and Dad (An Otto Mühl Hapenning). In it, Kren introduces subjects and images that were revolting and highly explosive at the time, both politically and culturally.

Wednesday 7 October 8.15 pm
tickets @ WORM

 

THE LAST MESSENGERS

INTOLERANT FILM COLLECTIVE presents four interdisciplinary evenings with work by artists and philosophers who reflect on the contemporary *condition humaine*, while not shying away from conveying an articulate, moral message.

When God died he took the words and gestures that kept him in the saddle with him. With that, we lost a language that had been applied and understood collectively for eons. This loss prefaces an era and a new language, in which everything can mean everything and which allows everyone to create his own truth. Will this lead us – after ages of monotheism – back to a pantheistic and wild state of unknowing? And what would happen if it did?

Illusions1.jpg

the Last Messengers #3

the Holy Fool


NO PLACE FOR FOOLS (2014, Rus/ Bul, 82 min.) is a schizophrenic portrait of the dark side of contemporary Russia, told through the video's of the openly homosexual vlogger Sergei Astakhov, a Christian Orthodox pro-Putin activist. With a special intervention and a Q&A with the director, Olev Mavromatti.

Wednesday 30 September, 8.15pm
WORM Rotterdam
program + tickets

Астахов Сергий

Астахов Сергий

 

the Last Messengers #2

the System

In 2005, Nathalie Alonso Casale interviewed the Russian film director Alexei German (1938-2013). By then, he had already been working for six years on a film that would consume the last 15 years of his life before being finished: “Hard to be a God” (2014). In his lonely fight against the system, he left behind a total oeuvre of six films, in which he continuously portrayed the struggle of the honest and straight hero against the coincidences of fate. In “The Last Messengers #2,” Nathalie presents us with unique material from the interview with German, which will serve as a starting point for the documentary she is presently working on.

In “Gefängnisbilder” (Prison Images, 2001) by Harun Farocki (1944-2014), fragments of feature films by Robert Bresson, Jean Genet, and documentaries from the Nazi period enter into a dialogue with camera images from high-security US prisons. The images are ordered in such a way that they bring out the ideology hidden behind the technology, as well as the way in which that imaging technique is capable of generating completely new structures of thought. As with most of Farocki’s work, this film is set in an arena, in which the human eye is no longer able to distinguish what is “real” from what is “false.”

 wednesday 3 June, 8.15pm
 WORM Rotterdam
 program + tickets

"Prison Images" © Harun Farocki, 2000

"Prison Images" © Harun Farocki, 2000

 

the Last Messengers #1

the Downfall

We kick off the series with Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse and a performative lecture of the 1st chapter of Friedrich Nietschze's 'Also sprach Zarathustra' by Koen van Kaam. In Dutch with English translation.
 

 wednesday 6 May, 8.15pm
 WORM Rotterdam
 program + tickets

 

INTOLERANT FILM COLLECTIVE is a collaboration between Rotterdam based filmmakers Nathalie
Alonso Casale, Tim Leyendekker, André Schreuders and Parisa Yousef Doust.

 

Mercuriales

Teenage angst and magical Mayhem in the Parisian suburb of Bagnolet

Feature debut by Virgil Vernier
 

Wednesday April 1st
WORM Rotterdam
info + tickets


excited to share the Dutch premiere of one of my favorite films of 2014