The legendary American filmmaker, critic and artist Jonas Mekas discusses I Had Nowhere to Go, his provocative collaboration with Turner Prize-winning artist and filmmaker Douglas Gordon that is based upon Mekas’ diaries beginning in World War II.
Tag: avant-garde
Ben Rivers & Ben Russell (A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness)
Ben Rivers is an English experimental filmmaker and artist whose work blends fiction and non-fiction, exploring themes of community, utopia, hermetic living and investigating spaces more broadly. His works include I Know Where I’m Going, Slow Action and Two Years at Sea, which won the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize at the 68th Venice Film Festival.… Continue reading Ben Rivers & Ben Russell (A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness)
Jennifer Chan Interview
Jennifer Chan is a Canadian artist who was selected as the Canadian Spotlight honoree at the 2014 Images Festival. Rated as one of the most notable ‘post-Internet’ artists, her work spans video, performance, installations and animated GIFs, among other new media, and deal with a complex interweaving of subjects, including gender, sexuality, web kitsch and nostalgia,… Continue reading Jennifer Chan Interview
Evan Calder Williams Interview (Violent X)
Evan Calder Williams is an American writer, theorist, and artist. He is the author of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, which looks at apocalyptic fantasies in culture, including in cinema. Evan was in Toronto for the Images Festival, where he premiered Violent X, a film created through thousands of digital stills from Italian poliziotteschi films and… Continue reading Evan Calder Williams Interview (Violent X)
Barbara Hammer Interview (Maya Deren’s Sink)
Barbara Hammer is a legend of experimental cinema, creating bold and affecting works on a wealth of subjects, including feminism, lesbian cinema, queer and hidden history, the body, art in the context of war, mortality and much more. Beginning in the 1970s, Barbara’s work has consistently grown in scope and stature, including the avant-garde classics:… Continue reading Barbara Hammer Interview (Maya Deren’s Sink)
Issue 9 (Peter Mettler [THE END OF TIME], Ernie Gehr [SERENE VELOCITY], and more…) is now available!
Happy Holidays from The Seventh Art! Our slowly-trickling-out 9th issue features interviews with Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler, whose new film The End of Time is finishing up its end-of-the-world run here in Toronto. We also had the incredible good fortune to be able to talk to experimental cinema legend, Ernie Gehr , who brought two… Continue reading Issue 9 (Peter Mettler [THE END OF TIME], Ernie Gehr [SERENE VELOCITY], and more…) is now available!
Ernie Gehr Interview (Serene Velocity)
Ernie Gehr is an American experimental filmmaker, whose film Serene Velocity (1970) remains one of the best known works of structuralist cinema and perhaps experimental cinema more broadly. Further works, such as Shift (1972-74) and Side/Walk/Shuttle (1991), continued to show how inspired Gehr’s placement of a camera could be, while the personal quality of Signal – Germany… Continue reading Ernie Gehr Interview (Serene Velocity)
Profile on Loop Collective (Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof & Dan Browne)
Founded at Toronto’s Ryerson University in 1996, the Loop Collective is a group of independent media artists dedicated to exploring the roots of experimental cinema by creating a dialogue with other art disciplines. The collective produces and exhibits experimental films, including works by its members and experimental filmmakers from across the globe. A DVD collecting… Continue reading Profile on Loop Collective (Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof & Dan Browne)
Loop Collective Interview
Loop Collective is a group of independent media artists dedicated to exploring the roots of experimental cinema by creating a dialogue with other art disciplines. We sat down with two of Loop’s members, co-founder Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof and Dan Browne (memento mori), in a film editing room at Toronto’s Ryerson University – where the collective itself was… Continue reading Loop Collective Interview
Video Essay: Surveillance Camera Cinema (Faceless, Der Riese, Influenza)
Section 2 of our first issue is a video essay on surveillance camera cinema: films made entirely out of surveillance camera footage. Essay written and edited by Christopher Heron and narrated by Amy Cunningham.