How to Enjoy Experimental Film

Contains brief strong language.

Legendary London-based artist-filmmaker John Smith joins H2EEF to discuss the beginnings of his career leading up to his breakthrough film The Girl Chewing Gum. Smith's films are renowned for their sense of humour, often used to illustrate a more serious underlying point. His works are shown all over the world including, at the time of recording, on Mubi. 

Popular with audiences everywhere, John's films are heavily informed by the notions of structural film, though they do not comfortably fit this, or any other description. With a deep focus on the power of language to suggest and mislead the viewer, "he has attracted admirers from way beyond the narrow confines of the Avant Garde."- Michael O'Pray, Art Monthly. 

"In John Smith’s films, the spectator is a producer as well as a consumer of meaning, bound in to the process but simultaneously distanced from the ‘naturalness’ of the film dream. This feature alone marks off John Smith’s films from the lure of cinema (to which his richly visual images nonetheless allude) and locates him firmly as an artist-filmmaker, who turns the codes of the film medium into a continual questioning of film truth." - A.L. Rees (Full essay here: http://johnsmithfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Associations.-A-L-Rees.pdf)

A number of John's recent films can be found on YouTube including Dad's Stick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx2hPQ2S08k&t=25s

Several more films and excerpts are available on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/johnsmithfilms/videos

And there is a DVD box set available from Lux Online, for which 50% of all sales go directly to the artist: https://luxmovingimage.square.site/product/john-smith-3-dvd-boxset/70?cp=true&sa=false&sbp=false&q=false&category_id=10

Filmmakers discussed in this episode include:

Peter Gidal

Guy Sherwin

Anne Rees Mogg

Malcolm LeGrice

Shifting focus from our earlier discussion, this episode focuses on Myron Ort's found footage films and film portraits. The epic 5 hour film cycle Eikono-Klastes is made up of found footage as well as hand painted film to create an enormous exploration of history and the moving image. It also includes re-contextualising of often very non-PC footage in order to create a new framework through which to view more difficult aspects of human history. 

The whole cycle is viewable on Youtube here:

And you can view/purchase Myron's films and paintings on his website:

Filmmakers mentioned in this episode include:

Bruce Conner

Joseph Cornell

Ken Jacobs

Myron Ort, filmmaker, painter, musician, composer, repairer of antique cuban drums, restorer of vintage cars and expert on Latin-American music, talks to H2EEF about his unique film works. Spanning most forms of experimental practice and heavily influenced by the 60s psychedelic scene and Gestalt psychology, using hand painted film, multi-exposure films, film portrait, found footage and more, Myron's work is really deserving of a wider audience. In this first part of our discussion, we discuss the influences of the 60s Bay Area scene on the filmmaker's work and in particular his psychedelic films and the film that Stan Brakhage referred to as "the most worked on hand painted film I've ever seen!" OMMO.

You can find his wondrous array of work on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/myronort

On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/ZenOkeanos

and on his own website, where you can buy his collected films on DVD along with his paintings!: 

Filmmakers & artists discussed in this episode include

Barbara Hammer

Steven Zailian

Stan Brakhage

Jordan Belson

James Broughton

Bruce Baillie 

Ben Van Meter

Chick Strand

Sidney Peterson

Wassily Kandinsky

Len Lye

Man Ray

Jean Cocteau

Standish Lawder

Fernand Leger

Harold Gregor

Donna Germain

Peter Kubelka

Writers discussed include:

Aldous Huxley

Hoyt Sherman

Rudolf Arnheim

Wolfgang Köhler

Siegfried Kracauer

Filmmaker Toby Tatum joins H2EEF to discuss his extraordinary body of work. Tatum's work is a landscape of the mind, with pieces often set in gardens and grottos and featuring mind-bending visual effects, particularly involving composite imagery. Meditative, dreamlike and sometimes dark, these are unashamedly romantic film works that invite the viewer to participate in a completely unique view of the world. 

View Toby's films at: https://vimeo.com/tobytatum

Figures discussed in this episode include:

Alex Cox

Borja Calvo

Erik Davis

Simon Payne produces works almost exclusively with video, often without using a camera. In these video pieces, patterns work themselves out quite systematically, through colour and well-defined shapes to create unique cinematic experiences, which compel the viewer to reflect upon what they are seeing as well as their relation to it. Sometimes, these are frenetic and colourful, and other times, subdued and meditative, these pieces are shot through with a true spirit of experimentation, exploring what unexpected results might be produced by using shape, light and colour in various ways. In short, they are driven by a quest to see what happens!

Some of Simon's works can be found at his Vimeo page:

https://vimeo.com/simonpayne

And two DVDs of his works (Colour Field Videos & Systems Cinema) can be purchased in the Lux Store:

https://luxmovingimage.square.site/shop/dvds/10

Simon has also edited a number of books, most recently Fields of View, a posthumous collection of writings by A.L. Rees and the first English Language study of the work of Kurt Kren called Kurt Kren: Structural Films.

Filmmaker MM Serra discusses her extraordinary film work. Serra's work often incorporates documentary in a textural exploration of the film medium. Her films empower the viewer by allowing them to share in the empowerment of her film's subjects, often real people pushed to, or testing limits, but always viewed in the most humane and approachable manner. As Jonas Mekas put it: they are REAL films about REAL people "One of the most difficult things to do in cinema."

Filmmakers discussed in this episode include:

Jonas Mekas

Marcel Duchamp

Shirley Clarke

Josh Lewis

Carolee Schneemann

Abel Ferrara 

Todd Browning

Writers discussed in this episode include:

Baroness Elsa von Freitag Loringhoven

Filmmaker and Executive Director of the New York Filmmakers' Co-Op MM Serra talks to How to Enjoy Experimental Film about the work of the Co-Op and and her extraordinary work in keeping the amazing institution running. Founded by a group of artists in the 60s, the NYFMC is one of the most exciting and diverse non-profit collections of artists and experimental film on the planet. 

You can support them by visiting https://film-makerscoop.com

View some films in distribution here: https://vimeo.com/nacgfmc

Or purchase films on DVD co-produced by the Co-Op and Re:Voir at the Re:Voir website. Available titles so far: MM Serra ArtCore; Storm De Hirsch Mythology for the Soul; Larry Gottheim Fog Line and Taylor Mead Home Movies.

Filmmakers mentioned in this episode include:

Jonas Mekas

Shirley Clarke

Andy Warhol

Lindsay Anderson

Jack Smith

Edward Owens

Saul Levine

Abi Child

Carolee Schneemann

Stan Vanderbeek

Martha Colburn

Art Jones

Ken Jacobs

Marie Menken

Helen Levitt

Carmichael George

Stan Brakhage

Catherine Aldridge

Writers Discussed:

P. Adams Sitney 

Artist and filmmaker Joost Rekveld discusses his singular approach to creating image works. Making films using machinery and software, often of his own design, his abstract works are mesmerising and incorporate a scientific research alongside a lifelong interest in musical composition (Rekveld trained as a composer) to create work that is as rigorous in its attitude to content as it is to form. 

Read about his research project Dialogues with Machines at http://www.joostrekveld.net

Buy his films on DVD & Blu Ray at: https://re-voir.com/shop/en/joost-rekveld/1040-joost-rekveld-11-films.html

Filmmakers discussed in this episode include:

Bart Vegter

Karel Doing

Kurt Kren

Andrei Tarkovsky

Jürgen Rebele

Coming soon, 10 new episodes of How to Enjoy Experimental Film!

Featuring (in order of appearance in this trailer)

MM Serra

Joost Rekveld

Toby Tatum

Anna Thew

Myron Ort

John Smith

&

Simon Payne

Something a little different for our 10th epsode. Here, we have a very welcome return from Steven Woloshen along with Charlie Hewison, an expert on experimental film & PhD candidate currently in Paris. We discuss our own personal interpretations of some of Deren's puzzles as well as discussing the ways in which her influence has been felt ever since.