LUXWEEKLYNEWSWIRE 19 -25 February
UPCOMING EVENTS AND OPENINGS

1. 19 February - 27 March, Kenneth Anger at Sprüth Magers London

2. 22 February 7pm, ICA ARTISTS' FILM CLUB: Wendelien Van Oldenborgh

3. 23 February 8pm, LUX PRESENTS MESSAGES: GUY SHERWIN / ALAN WILKINSON / JOHN EDWARDS / STEVE NOBLE at CAFE OTO

4. 23 February 8pm HISTORIES OF THE AVANT-GARDE 4 at London Bethnal Green Working Men's Club


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SPRÜTH MAGERS LONDON
7a Grafton St, W1S 4EJ
020 7408 1613
www.spruethmagers.com

Tue-Sat 10-6

undergroundGreen Park undergroundOxford Circus

KENNETH ANGER
Opening 19th February 2010
PV 18th February, 2010

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ICA ARTISTS' FILM CLUB: Wendelien Van Oldenborgh

ICA, London

Monday 22 February 2010, ICA Theatre, 7pm

This month’s Artists’ Film Club features the work of Wendelien Van Oldenborgh, a Dutch artist who develops works from specific social or historical situations, including the colonial past of the Netherlands. Cinematic methodology is a key element in Van Oldenborgh’s work, which often features participants co-creating scripts – interactions which open up a space between performance and collective learning. Following the screening the artist will be in conversation with Emily Pethick, director of The Showroom in London.

ICA, The Mall, London, SW1Y 5AH

Nearest Tube: Charing Cross

FREE admission, booking required

Box Office: 020 7930 3614

www.ica.org.uk

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LUX PRESENTS - MESSAGES: GUY SHERWIN / ALAN WILKINSON / JOHN EDWARDS / STEVE NOBLE

CAFE OTO, ASHWIN STREET, DALSTON, E8

TUESDAY 23rd February 2010

Times : 8pm

Tickets : £5 http://www.cafeoto.co.uk

A night of film and music to celebrate the publication of a new LUX book/DVD MESSAGES: GUY SHERWIN. (MESSAGES: GUY SHERWIN will be on sale on the night at a special discount price of £15 (usually £20) NB cash only!)

3 films/ 3 musicians:

Filter Beds, 16mm film / John Edwards, bass

Flight, 16mm film / Steve Noble, drums

Views from Home Reviewed, digital

video/ Alan Wilkinson, saxophone

followed by a session of Edwards/ Noble/ Wilkinson.

A LUX event http://www.lux.org.uk

GUY SHERWIN was closely associated with the British avant-garde film movement centred on the London Film-Makers Co-operative in the 1970s. The recently published book and DVD 'Optical Sound Films 1971-2007' collects Sherwin’s ongoing work and research into one of his particular and recurrent concerns, the synaesthesic relationship

between sound and image manifest in the material of film sound. This new publication MESSAGES focuses on Sherwin's lyrical single screen films of the 80s and 90s and includes 5 films accompanied by a 60 page illustrated book designed by Paul Abbott with essays by Sherwin and child psychologist Nicholas Tucker.

ALAN WILKINSON comes blazing out of a saxophone tradition that includes the likes of Albert Ayler, Mike Osborne, Evan Parker, and Peter Brötzmann, yet with a highly vocalized and personal style. Possibly best known for the heavyweight Hession/Wilkinson/Fell trio, his other involvements have included Derek Bailey in duo and Company,

Stefan Jaworzyn, Sunny Murray, Alex Maguire’s ‘Cat O’Nine Tails’, Louis Moholo, Thurston Moore and Lee Ronaldo and Spring Heel Jack. A CD with a quartet featuring Brötzmann, Fell, and Kellers from 1997 was released recently. Other current projects include a duo and trio with Eddie Prevost (and Joe Williamson), and Spanish group ‘Laxula’. He runs a regular free music club night in London called Flim Flam.

Since taking up the bass, JOHN EDWARDS has been involved with a diversity of musical styles and situations. At home in both composed and improvised music, he has rapidly become one of the busiest musicians on the London scene. Probably best known for his work with Evan Parker, John Butcher, Sunny Murray, Peter Brötzmann, etc., he has appeared in groups such as GOD, B-Shops for the Poor, and continues to collaborate with electro-acoustic composer John Wall, Spring Heel Jack, Fundamental and play in groups with Louis Moholo, Lol Coxhill, Ingrid Laubrock, and Charles Hayward, to name a few. He also performs solo and in 2008 released a CD of solo bass improvisations entitled VOLUME on the PSI label, to great critical acclaim.

Described as one of the UK’s most creative drummers STEVE NOBLE mixes the earliest jazz drum influences with a wide range of modern, global, and free styles. From playing with Nigerian master drummer Elkan Ogunde, Rip, Rig and Panic, Brion Gysin and the Bow Gamelan Ensemble - he went on to play with Derek Bailey (including Company weeks 1987/89/90) Alex Maguire, Tristan Honsinger, Pat Thomas a.o. performing throughout Europe, Africa and America. He leads the groups N.E.W - 4tet- the Shakedown club and a trio with Lol Coxhill/ Edwards. He occupies the drum seat in SFQ-Badland-Freebase-Gannets-Aethenor and Tim Hills ‘Tongues of Fire’. Noble also runs the recording label Ping Pong Productions.

This trio has become one of the hottest bands on the London scene, reaching a new and enthusiastic young audience for the music. Comprising three of the capital’s most experienced and hardest working musicians, they play ‘free jazz’ with one foot firmly in the European school of free improvisation, group music where the twists and turns are born exclusively out of intense listening and an almost intuitive creativity. However, their willingness to embrace a broad spectrum of styles is redefining traditional barriers and prejudices, making the music vibrate with a renewed sense of freedom.They have released two CDs OBLIQUITY (2007) and ‘LIVE AT CAFE OTO’ (2009) on the Bo’weavil label.


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4.
HISTORIES OF THE AVANT-GARDE 4
London Bethnal Green Working Men's Club
Tuesday 23 February 2010, at 8pm

HISTORIES OF THE AVANT-GARDE 4: SUBJECT TO MUSIC

Presented by Close-Up and curated by The Dog Movement

Five American masters all explore dailiness, film as a stage for performance, and most importantly the possibilities of using music with equal importance to image in tonight’s screening.

ALL MY LIFE by BRUCE BAILLIE 1965 16mm 3min colour sound
In All My Life (1965) you see a slow pan from left to right of a fence and rose bush with an Ela Fitzgerald song, the simplicity of which is contrasted with the brilliance of its technicolour. Like a single line in Bruce Baillie’s diary, the film represents a fragment of the filmmaker’s oeuvre and its unashamed brevity (see also Baillie’s only notes on the film) keeps you hanging on expectantly despite the song’s and pan’s completion. The roses, the intensity of colour, the full orchestra and Ela’s unmistakable sound produces the sensation of a lush glimpse into a world long gone.

One shot, early summer in Mendocino. Song, All my life by Ella Fitzgerald with Teddy Wilson and his orchestra. — Bruce Baillie

BESSIE SMITH by CHARLES I LEVINE 1964 16mm 10min b&w sound
A cinematic tribute to the late blues singer Bessie Smith, with Bessie Smith as she appeared in the 1929 film St. Louis Blues and songs sung by her as well as a commentary read by Joseph Marzano. “It’s the best film I’ve seen this year …. A masterpiece.” — Lenny Lipton, Berkeley Barb

HARMONICA by LARRY GOTTHEIM 1971 16mm 11min colour sound

Larry Gottheim’s Harmonica (1971) is a celebration of improvisation and it is the film that bridges Gottheim’s sublime single-shot works of the early Seventies with the introduction of sound that would preoccupy the filmmaker for the next forty years. Enthusiasm and playfulness intertwine as a man playing the harmonica rides around New York State in a car. The sunlight and the wind are the elemental forces behind image and sound. Music becomes sound and sound becomes music in a nod to Coleridge’s Romanticism.

An interview with Larry Gottheim by Luke Burton will be published on Close-Up’s website this month.

LITTLE STABS AT HAPPINESS by KEN JACOBS 1963 16mm 15min colour sound
Ken Jacobs' seminal Little Stabs at Happiness (1963) has a magical, beguiling soundtrack that utilizes Jacobs’ own 78’s record collection and a humourous, self-referential voice-over. The music allows for the perfect platform for the subtle lived-performances of Jack Smith, Jerry Sims and co. who seem at once so embracing and all-knowing of the camera and yet resigned to their New York City-dwelling destitution. Humour and melancholia synthesize in both music and image with a sense of ease and lucidity that sustains the film’s vitality to this day.

'Material was cut in as it came out of the camera, embarrassing moments intact. 100′ rolls timed well with music on old 78s. I was interested in immediacy, a sense of ease, and an art where suffering was acknowledged but not trivialized with dramatics. Whimsy was our achievement, as well as breaking out of step'. - Ken Jacobs

THE BLUES ACCORDIN' TO LIGHTNIN' HOPKINS by LES BLANK 1967 16mm (digital transfer) 30min colour sound
It took a lot of false starts before I abandoned the usual documentary approach of having a narrator explaining the blues and Lightnin’s place in its development. Instead, sequences are threaded together with stitches of feeling that move the film along much like the structure of music itself. With the exception of Burden Of Dreams, all of my films since have been essentially narrator-less. And the film style tends to resemble the spirit of the music contained.

In his own words and his “own own” music, Lightnin' Hopkins reveals the inspiration for his blues. He sings, jives, ponders. He boogies at an outdoor barbecue and a black rodeo, and takes you with him on a homecoming visit to his boyhood home of Centerville, Texas. The film reaches past the impish bluesman himself into the Blues itself, into the red-clay Texas, into hard times, into blackness, into the senses. - Les Blank

at

Bethnal Green Working Men's Club
44-46 Pollard Row, London, E2 6NB
Nearest Tube / Train: Bethnal Green

Tickets: £5 / £3 Close-Up members
Telephone: 020 7739 7170

www.close-upvideos.com
www.thedogmovement.org