Join us for a special screening of short experimental films selected and presented by Helena Gouveia Monteiro and Sébastien Ronceray and projected on 16mm film.
Devoured Lands, 16mm experimental film screening with Association Braquage
Join us for a special screening of short experimental films selected and presented by Helena Gouveia Monteiro and Sébastien Ronceray and projected on 16mm film. From misty fields and inanimate bodies to newsreels and found images rearranged, reanimated, and preserved through film, we find the echoes of haunted and devoured territories delivering a material, political, and emotional candour.
Are We There Yet ?
Moira Tierney, Ireland, 2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 10min.
Music by Macdara Smith & the Bahh Band.
Shot on the road between Leitrim and Fermanagh in foggy landscapes captured on super8 film, Are We There Yet? gives form to the paradox of the Irish border and the struggle one faces when attempting to describe it.
The film was commissioned by the Leitrim Sculpture Centre, in Manorhamilton as part of the EU Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland and the Border Region of Ireland.
Old Western Movie
Sébastien Ronceray, France, 2000, 16mm, sound, 5min.
Music by William Burroughs & Tomandandy.
Montage of Super8 images from John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon showing a face to face encounter between a native american chief and a cavalry division headed by John Wayne.
Story of the Unknown Soldier
Henri Storck, Belgium, 1932, 16mm, sound, 10min.
Created entirely of newsreels from 1928-1929, this ferocious collection of images of civilians and soldiers endlessly parading denounces the alliance of the Army and the Church, the blessers of wreaths, the windbag orators, the inaugurations of monuments to the dead. Storck sarcastically juxtaposes the heart-warming utopia of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, when sixty countries signed an agreement outlawing war, with the presages of what was to come: burgeoning nationalism, repressive law enforcement, unrestrained colonialism, and bellicose politics.
Man of Aral
Helena Gouveia Monteiro, Ireland/France/Portugal, 2023, 16mm, sound, 7min
Music by Nicolas Clair
As a staged tale of a sea with no water, Man of Aral presents the erosion of the landscape and of the film material itself as competing human and geological timelines through distant views of a rapidly yet almost invisibly changing territory, the disappearance of the Sea of Aral in Central Asia, as a key event of unprecedented scale.
Sirius Remembered
Stan Brakhage, USA, 1959, 16mm, silent, 11min.
“I was coming to terms with the decay of a dead thing and the decay of the memories of a loved being that had died and it was undermining all abstract concepts of death. The form was being cast out by probably the same physical need that makes dogs dance and howl in rhythm around a corpse. I was taking song as my inspiration and for the rhythm structure, just as dogs dancing, prancing around a corpse, and howling in rhythm-structures or rhythm-intervals might be considered like the birth of some kind of song.” Stan Brakhage
Lion Light
Cécile Fontaine, France, 1996, 16mm, silent, 2:30min.
“The film uses telephoto close-ups of felines, as photographers and cameramen do. The lions and lionesses are having fun, resting, and impassive. All this reminds me of the paparazzi flashing the star without his knowledge, looking for an intimate or sensational moment. I combined these images with those from a film made without a camera to create a lighter version of the flicker.” Cécile Fontaine
Absences
Collective Ø, France, 2018, 16mm, sound, 6min.
Made in Bure, in the Meuse region, about a nuclear waste disposal project, by a small group of Scotcheuses attempting to manufacture film itself independently of Kodak & Co. Absences questions how films could be made when we no longer have access to the energy powering the cameras or the film factories.
You Can’t Keep a Good Snake Down
Moira Tierney & Masha Godovannaya, Ireland, 2000, 16mm, sound, 4min.
For a long time Saint Patrick has been touted as the redemptor of Pagan Ireland: the man who rid the country of its snake population. We felt it was time the snakes got their due – You can’t keep a good snake down redresses this historical imbalance. The All-Star cast includes Maria Montez, Jackie Chan and an assortment of noted Irish and British politicians.
Total running time: 55 minutes
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Founded in 2000 in France, Association Braquage is a collective whose aim is to promote knowledge of cinema by organising screenings, festivals, meetings with filmmakers, workshops, and exhibitions. The organisation promotes and disseminates a singular type of cinema, with a handmade approach akin to the visual arts, taking an interest in experimental forms as well as documentaries, animation, and early cinema.
Traveling to diverse and sometimes remote locations to introduce people to these unique works and practices, as well as to the machines that enabled the birth and creativity of cinema, they have programmed over 800 film screenings, in both alternative places and institutions.
Sébastien Ronceray is an experimental filmmaker, lecturer, and critic, and the co-founder of Association Braquage.
He regularly publishes in magazines, catalogues and collective works and works primarily in independent creative spaces such as L’Abominable/Navire Argo laboratories in Paris, Mire in Nantes, LaboBXL in Bruxelles, or Double Négatif in Montreal, often collaborating with musicians, dancers, and performers.
Free, book on Eventbrite or come on the day subject to availability
Image caption: Are We There Yet ?
Moira Tierney, Ireland, 2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 10min.
