As Murray gave a brief introduction, the audience, initially huddled together in clusters, intuitively organized itself into two defined groups, the first adjacent to the long brick wall to the right of the entrance, and the second at the front of the gallery, along its street-front window. A small number of materials had been laid out on the grey concrete floor, suggesting a delineation of space between us and the domain of the two actors, Pour Hosseini herself and, performing with her in this piece, artist Anja Mahler. Marking out two corners, parallel with the front and back walls, were a laptop positioned on a tall white plinth and, across from this, two bags of charcoal powder resting on a square white base just above ground-level. In between these two objects lay the projector, in a square outlined with white tape. This ascetic arrangement had its own poetic subtlety, a compound of normally irreconcilable constituents, drawing attention to the chasm between the terrestrial and the digital.

 
When the gallery lights dimmed and the room was in almost total darkness, Mahler, dressed in black, at times with Pour Hosseini but predominantly on her own, began to lay out seemingly arbitrary measures of red tape onto the walls and the floor of the gallery. Sometimes one would help the other in securing a long stretch by walking the tape onto the ground but mostly the task was carried out by each of them separately, with no interaction. Gradually, each artist assumed entirely discrete roles, with Pour Hosseini working from her laptop while Mahler assuredly continued to lay down strips of tape, forming geometric shapes in disarray, implicating an agreed upon disorder that somehow demanded compliance.

 
At the back of the gallery, on the wall opposite the window, the first few frames of footage came into view, signalled by a vertical strip of red film leader coursing down the screen. This drew a curious kinship between the red tape Mahler was fixing to the floor and the celluloid film used as raw material here. On the makeshift screen, a moving shape came into view in flickering images marked with scratches and imperfections; emerging from extensively re-edited and re-filmed footage, a figure dressed in a beige Mac could be made out walking with aplomb toward the camera across a desert landscape. At times, Mahler paused from her work and stood near or in front of the projector’s light, so that her silhouette could be made out on the wall, thereby creating a new, live image over the film scene, obliterating one figure with another.

 
The sound of something akin to a kango hammer played for long stretches but would then stop abruptly, creating an absence in which the pummelling noise of what came before seemed to reverberate on. After some time, Mahler took one of the bags of charcoal powder from the white base and, while standing fully upright, started pouring small amounts of it on to the ground, causing eruptions of black dust that the projector’s light cast on to the wall, a startling, unique effect that cast a murky and billowing edge at the bottom of every frame. This she did a number of times until there was enough charcoal on the ground for her to spread it into the shape of a perfect black circle. On her hands and knees, Mahler skilfully outlined an arc, filled it in and then mirrored it above itself. Every now and then she ceremoniously rose to her feet and shed more black powder on to the ground, each time as though she was engaged in some self-ascribed ritual.

 
The unfeeling desert scene projected on the back wall dissipated early on and in its place, silent footage of a group of friends relishing a day of summer heat emerged. Here, the camera captured its subjects in hazy sunshine and close-up, resting in togs under the shade of a tree, devouring strawberries, swimming right up to and looking into the lens and then turning around and swimming away. A sense of camaraderie pervaded, an idyllic picture of union and a spirit of togetherness, a democracy of sorts, at intriguing odds both with the austere film sequence that preceded it and the performance’s other facet, its sure-footed routine and dark aspect.

 
When the black circle was complete, Mahler drew out a cable with a contact mic attached and rubbed it into the powder on the ground, amplifying the substance’s grainy texture. This jagged sound gave rise to the suggestion of restless activity, of energy born from earth that is, like a mirage, discernible but intangible. Unlike an hallucination, a mirage is not a figment of human imagination. Instead it is an optical phenomenon, that a camera can record, created when light rays are refracted. However, what makes it so beguiling is that the form the image takes is determined by the viewer’s interpretive bent. Is there a way to use this as a metaphor for the art of cinema, and indeed for this performance, where the potential for meaning, and its power, rests with the spectator?

 
Leaving the sequestered gallery and stepping into the dark and inclement night, I had the feeling of having attended more of a kind of ceremony than a performance, where the purpose of codified ritual lay, at least in part, in shared albeit short-lived experience. Pour Hosseini’s performance as a whole, and her commanding, notably subsidiary role within it, provoked a heightened awareness of the enduring strength and force of the mystic and primordial, offering ways in which they can continue to have an impact, particularly if we are canny and curious enough to know how to use the materials at our disposal to find a way to channel them.

 
Mirage took place on 3 December 2015.

 
We are constantly being reminded, typically for selfregarding purposes, and more frequently than not as part of awards speeches, that the making of a film is a collective process. Typically this is a process configured around the director as organising principle, but the dysfunction at the heart of this process has rarely been laid bare as bitterly or as vividly as it is in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s little-seen 1971 film Beware of a Holy Whore. Fassbinder frequently cited the film as his favourite of his own works and of the many, many films about the filmmaking process, it uncovers truths typically left out of other accounts. This was also the last of Fassbinder’s films to be created in collaboration with the Anti-Theater group, a collective of actors, writers and other creatives that formed in Munich in 1968, a key era in terms of alternate structures modelled around the collective rather than the individual. In their attempt to reconfigure the dramatic arts as a medium for social change the Anti-Theater had looked to Bertolt Brecht for inspiration, but by 1971 Fassbinder had grown weary of these methods and was ready to break ties and go out on his own.

 
In Beware of a Holy Whore a group of actors, producers, and technicians hang out in a hotel in France. They are in the process of making a film, the details of which remain blurry, but mostly they just kill time and wait. Initially they wait for the director (he arrives by helicopter, starts shouting at people, drinking heavily, and being terrible), they wait for film stock, they wait for actors, and they wait for money. While they wait, they bicker, occasionally have sex, some debate the merits of socialism but mostly they seem distracted by more bodily concerns. Beware of a Holy Whore is a fictionalised record of everything that goes into making a film except for the actual activity of shooting a film. This is also, not incidentally, most all of what making a film is: a muddied, confusing, financially restrictive collaborative process; a system that has taken this shape not because it had to, and not because this was the best possible scenario, but because we never discovered a more viable alternative, or at the very least a viable alternative that would adequately meet the demands of the profit-based economy in which it continues to be embedded. In Beware of a Holy Whore Fassbinder presents an image of filmmaking as a form of collective insanity, a very particular kind of unreality which these figures inhabit for a fixed period of time, a shared fever-dream of controlled excess and debauchery interrupted by occasional bursts of inspiration and productivity. The mode of filmmaking Fassbinder describes, as corrupted as it seems, is also now something of a myth; rarely will we see a director granted the degree of freedom and influence depicted here. Already far from ideal in 1971, the system has, it seems, only become harder to navigate in the interim.

 
The director’s role as organising principle within a loosely-formed hierarchy doesn’t hold the same symbolic power it did in the 1960s and 1970s. The auteurism that helped define cinema’s promise for so long has shifted and other models have developed. As the business has changed the industry can look to television’s recent success for an alternative, incorporating the notion of the ‘showrunner’, a much less clearly defined figure: not writer, not director, not producer, but frequently likely to dip in and out of several roles; an individual who can create consistency across a variety of loosely connected properties. The showrunner-as-auteur will become a useful alternative for what is increasingly a franchisedriven economy, but along the way there were a number of more radical alternatives.

 
In Alexandre Astruc’s 1948 essay ‘The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo’ he dreams of something else entirely. Although most frequently associated with the auteur movement, what Astruc describes in his essay is a democratisation of cinema that will be brought about through technological means, made possible by the increased affordability and accessibility of smaller-gauge film production and exhibition. In 1948 Astruc felt technology could soon transform cinema and the film camera into something more fully resembling a ‘pen’ (‘camérastylo’). Cinema would no longer be just entertainment, it would serve more than just commerce. It would become a fully versatile tool that would be used to a greater number of ends. Astruc’s utopian logic foresaw in this regard new systems of distribution and exhibition – ‘projectors for everyone’ – which echo the aspirations of our own digital age. This, however, is not how change works: the impacts of technological development are rarely as totalising as we initially expect or hope. Cinema’s current status has certainly been made precarious, but much of the same logic continues to apply. If anything, in an era of dried up revenue streams, the industry that has grown more calcified. In order to continue to uncover the kind of utopian promise described by writers like Astruc we should look instead to the periphery, to those aspects of film-culture which continue to exist in the margins.

The film collectives of the 1960s and ‘70s

 
In one of his earliest writings on film Vsevolod Pudovkin celebrated ‘collectivism’ as the true ‘foundation of cinematic work’ –

(i)t is not a lone director who is called upon to resolve the creative task (of filmmaking). Only a community united by a shared idea and a unified understanding of a goal (zadachi), creative and controlling itself can do such work (of real filmmaking).¹

 
The Soviet cinema of the 1920s was a key influence in the emergence of a new form of collectivism in the 1960s and 70s, a debt made all apparent by the emergence of two groups: the Medvedkin Group, centred around Chris Marker, and the Dziga Vertov Group, centred around Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin.² Dziga Vertov Group was Godard at his most expressly political, part of his resolve to make ‘political films politically’. This would involve a dissolution of individual authorship, a radical shift for a figure that had been at the forefront of Cahiers du Cinema’s influential auteur-driven mode of film criticism, a movement that had now taken hold in the U.S. through the unyielding allegiance of recent converts like the critic Andrew Sarris.

 
During this same period Julio García Espinosa wrote his manifesto ‘For an Imperfect Cinema’, and as Masha Salazkina notes, what we find there is a similarly ‘utopian call to democratize cinema’, an aim that would be achieved by ‘abolishing individual film authorship and dismantling film’s status as art, thereby opening cinematic production to the masses and in the process liberating humankind’.³ Espinosa rails against film as perhaps ‘the most elitist of all the contemporary arts’ – ‘[f]ilm today, no matter where, is made by a small minority for the masses’. In response he calls for ‘a new poetics for the cinema’ which will ‘above all, be a “partisan” and “committed” poetics, that is to say, an “imperfect” cinema’. Espinosa rejected the elitism of the avant-garde and evoked instead the legacies of ‘folk art’. He called for a cinema that would no longer have ‘personal selfrealization as [its] object’. An imperfect cinema will aspire to be, above all a revolutionary cinema, and in citing cinema as ‘a pluralistic art form’ rather than a ‘specialized form of expression’, Espinosa reignites something resembling the utopian promise described by Alexandre Astruc in 1948.

 
There were in the 1960s and 1970s, a number of radical alternatives to the hierarchies which continue to dominate modern filmmaking. These alternatives could begin to unravel, it was felt, the existing framework upon which the film industry had been modelled up to that point. The hierarchy of the classical Hollywood system, perfected by the film studios of the 1930s and 1940s as they adapted Fordist principles and deftly annihilated competition, had by this point faded into the middle distance, and in the 1960s opposing tendencies began to emerge. This period of instability had the effect of bringing about a brief moment of relative freedom, as directors within the studio system were granted a degree of authorial control they had heretofore rarely known, but the same period also witnessed the re-activation of avant-garde/experimental cinema, an emerging network of filmmakers, critics, and institutions forming around key figures like Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage in the U.S., Peter Kubelka in Vienna, or the London Filmmakers Cooperative in the U.K.

 
With the political and social upheavals that define this era, artists and filmmakers began to seek out forms of creative endeavour that would play a more pronounced and transformative role in effecting change. These alternatives tended to be articulated in relationship with more clearly defined political motives and often grew out of existing social movements. By 1975 Peter Wollen would describe an emerging split between, on the one hand, the high modernist allegiances of the avant-garde, celebrated by critics like P. Adams Sitney, and an altogether different element which was emerging in Europe. Certainly post-1968 there were those that had begun to seek out a more active role for cinema in terms of social transformation, relying on an approach to filmmaking that could be more clearly modelled around collectivist principles. The emergence of collectivism offered an alternative to the ‘art as art’ allegiances represented by existing avant-garde movements. This involved a sharp rejection of individual authorship, an insistence that a film-work be considered as the product of all involved, the various roles in the production being treated as interchangeable. The collective, it was felt, would offer a more democratised, non-elitist understanding of what cinema could be and do, replacing ‘art as art’ reflexivity with ‘art as activism’, shifting its focus from what art could be to what art could do. It announced a new realm of possibility, but it also introduced, in the shape of a cinema more clearly focused on articulated aims and objectives, the possibility of failure.

 
These practices of course were not without precedent, and if we are committed to uncovering a lineage (rather than looking back to the handful of artists turned filmmakers that make up the ‘historical avant-garde’) it makes sense to focus on Soviet cinema and Britain’s documentary film movement of the 1930s. Not a film collective in the truest sense, at its height the documentary film movement under John Grierson experimented not only with a cinema that played a more active role in shaping society, but a cinema that could also experiment with form. The documentary film movement was aspirational, occasionally dogmatic and condescending, but it functioned also as a school of formal experimentation, and for a brief moment it was an enclave for a mode of practice that otherwise seemed to have gone into hibernation at the end of the 1920s.

 
The influence of this movement, inadvertent or not, can be seen in groups such as the Berwick Street Film Collective, London Women’s Film Group, and Cinema Action which begin to emerge in Britain during the 1960s/1970s, groups whose concerns seem to exist somewhere between the tenets of documentary and the formalism of the avant-garde. In many cases, these collectives grew out of existing social movements; again their intention was to democratise and liberate the filmmaking process so as to make it more readily available as a tool for activism. In the U.S. groups like the Winterfilm Collective and the Newsreel Film Collective were established along similar lines, announcing a more socially engaged cinema which would pay first-person testimony to the atrocities of the war machine (e.g. Winter Soldier [1972]) or the corrupting influences of multinational corporations (e.g. Delaware [1968-69]).

 
This brief history serves as a framing device for a recent screening series at the Irish Film Institute, which attempted to reconsider the role of the collective in contemporary moving image practice. After its heyday in the 1960s and 70s, the utopian and revolutionary promise of the collective for cinema seemed to grow obsolete, or became displaced into new and emerging technologies. This screening series offers a number of perspectives in which the role of the collective continues to ignite the spark of utopian promise, disrupting any sense of stagnation that may otherwise infect our current understanding of cinema and its role. The series opened with Marylene Negro’s feature-length work X+ (2010), a palimpsest work made up of extracts taken from ten major activist films of the 1960s and 1970s. Few films have reconfigured the position of the individual in relation to the collective in more inventive and productive ways and Negro achieves this by returning to the kinds of activist cinema that helped define the role of the collective in the late sixties and early seventies.

 
Included in Negro’s film are excerpts from Here at the Water’s Edge (Leo Hurwitz, 1961) The Exiles (Kent MacKenzie, 1961), The Bus (Haskell Wexler, 1963) Losing just the Same (Saul Landau, 1966) One Step Away (Ed Pincus, 1967) Black Liberation/ Silent Revolution (Edouard de Laurot, 1967), In the Year of the Pig (Emile de Antonio, 1968), Winter Soldier (Winterfilm, 1972), Wattstax (Mel Stuart, 1973) and Underground (Emile de Antonio, 1976). From these varied sources, Negro’s X+ weaves a singular work. The film looks back to a key historical period for collectivism, especially as it relates to politically committed and socially engaged film practices and in doing re-inscribes its possibility for our own era. Throughout X+’s 68 minutes, Negro moves continuously and back and forth through these ‘monuments’, as images from different sources overlap and intersect. In each case the material being drawn upon is highly evocative, capturing moments of high intensity in terms of its cultural and political impact.

 
X+ has narrative drive, sequences in which momentum builds, but this is achieved through texture and form. One of Negro’s chief achievements in X+ is the way she directly confronts history’s cluttered, shape-shifting and often destructive aspects. For instance, X+ draws our attention to the ways in which cinema, as a predominantly figurative art,

relentlessly records silhouettes, groups, crowds, masses – fleeting passers-by of a period they are going through, tiny extras of a zeitgeist that carries them along. (Nicole Brenez)⁴

 
Cinema enjoys the spectacle of the aggregate, a body of people. The disorienting effect of seeing carefully overlaid examples of this, with horizontal strips of one film used as a framing device for another, means we become conscious of how accustomed we have grown to looking for a film’s centre, for a site where it can land. Negro’s decision to have the relationships between these materials play out not just in time, through montage, but to instead have these sequences overlap and inhabit the same timespace is essential. This is never a strictly analytical or rhetorical pursuit for Negro, a way to insert distance or objectivity – in spite of her disruptions, the material retains its immediacy – but what becomes clear through these interventions is a more unifying objective as we keep circling similar ideas expressed in different ways. What we are asked to consider here is the very idea of collective history and our place within it, a history rendered unstable by the particularities of Negro’s intervention.

 
X+ is a series of encounters between discrete political struggles (Negro seems at pains to stress that the collective can be used to impose tyranny just as it can be used to bring about positive social change); it skilfully pronounces resonances between these by placing the veil of one on top of another. Negro frequently allows scenes to play out in full, inviting us to engage completely the full impact of what we see and hear, while at other times the source material recedes into abstraction as it becomes super-imposed visually upon footage from a number of sources. There is a structural unity to these interventions, with each shift back into abstracted form functioning as a kind of interval, interrupting our immersion in scenes that we would otherwise have trouble distancing ourselves from emotionally and intellectually. As we watch a young black teenager separated from his mother stoically being carted off to prison, or passers-by observing a Vietnamese monk as he commits an act of self-immolation in protest at U.S. involvement in the war, the impossibility of maintaining an objective relationship with what appears onscreen becomes apparent but Negro uses this to her film’s advantage. She remains sharply aware of the power and emotional impact these images have on viewers, herself included, in spite of the historical distance between then and now.

 
In the second part of this programme the collective materialised in a different form, re-situating the limits and capacity of cinema as a political apparatus in the shape of five films which shift from the figurative to the abstract. The programme opens with Mountain Fire Personnel (2015) an experimental documentary by Alex Tyson which describes the impacts of a 2013 wildfire in the San Jacinto Mountains in Southern California. Alongside footage he shot himself, a good portion of Tyson’s film is made up of material from numerous on-line and media sources: GoPro sequences from firefighters and paramedics, radio reports, satellite imagery, and a good deal of amateur documentation shot and narrated by local citizens. The idea of an event or a catastrophe generating a sense of community is compounded by the methods Tyson employs in making the film, building up a multidimensional portrait of the event as it affects a wide range of people and places:

My footage was narrow in that it was only one snapshot of a particular area and timeframe. The other media helped illustrate the scale of the fire, which was huge (27,531 acres / 11,141 ha). All these different sources enabled me to organize the film chronologically and spatially beyond my own direct experience, and to construct something that appears linear with elements that are not.⁵

 
This is a kind of crowd-sourced collectivism that has become a frequent practice for artists engaged with the moving-image. Tyson’s gathering of material to convey the magnitude of the fire acknowledges a useful tension between what can be achieved by a larger entity and the individual. Another aspect of Mountain Fire Personnel that resonates here is Tyson’s own personal experience making the film. He describes how he arrived at the Aerial Tramway with a group of TV journalists and, being mistaken for one, is able to travel by cable car to the mountain station where firemen and state prisoners have set up a makeshift camp while battling the fire. Long after the journalists leave, Tyson stays on, befriending a couple of the prison guards, eating with them and filming this large group roaming the smoke-filled landscape and living together in close quarters. These sequences depict an enforced collective, a tight-knit group, out in the wild under constant surveillance, but it also captures Tyson’s more precarious position within the group, a position we can see from the lingering stares in the direction of the camera. The camera’s gaze is returned and viewed at least with curiosity if not suspicion.

 
Captivity is also at the centre of Iowa-based filmmaker Kelly Gallagher’s experimental cut-out animation Pen Up The Pigs (2014), in which she draws out connections between the history of slavery in America and present-day institutionalised racism and mass incarceration. Interested in ‘exploring, or détourning ideas of feminine imagery and then subverting them with intense militancy’, Gallagher’s collage-like films combine flowers, gunshots and glitter in equal measure.⁶ In the work of the Japanese [+] collective, we then shift from the explicitly political to the abstract. Africa I is a study of movement composed of a four-second, irregularly edited close-up of a slowly walking elephant. It suggests a post-colonial politics, but by focusing entirely on the animal’s richly textured skin, the motion gradually becomes hypnotic as the subject is transformed from a material to an immaterial realm, and the film’s politics quickly dissolve into a more abstract form. Under scrutiny, particularities erode and start to fall apart, and Rei Hayama’s film Inaudible Footsteps (2015) considers the idea of aimlessness of the mass by evoking the energy and urgency of a drove of horses on the run, through short, analogous passages which, in every instance, resist both narrative and resolution.

 
The concept of a persistently elusive ending also pervades Ana Vaz’ Sacris Pulso (2008), where finality is always out of reach. Here empty, tenebrous passageways curve from left to right without leading us anywhere and the figure of an elegantly dressed woman filmed from below never quite makes it to the top of the set of steps she is climbing. Borrowing a diverse range of material, including extracts from the film Brasiliários (1985) and super 8mm home movie footage, Vaz ‘invites us to think about the relative and fragile boundaries between the personal and the collective, the private and the public, and ultimately the self and the other.’⁷ In dream-like passages of whispered prayer, amongst talk of a ‘landscape of insomnia’, Vaz considers the significance and peril of a deeply receptive collective memory and, as with Inaudible Footsteps and Africa I, linearity is supplanted by something more cyclical.

The Films of Experimental Film Society

 
The realms of possibility and pluralism Alexandre Astruc and Julio García Espinosa once sought out in cinema are fully evident in a group of recent works by members of Dublin-based collective the Experimental Film Society, which made up the third and final part of the ‘Collectivism’ programme. Generally speaking, each EFS work is produced as part of a collective of like-minded artists and attributed to a single figure. In most if not all cases the filmmaker controls every aspect of production from concept to post-production. It is impossible, however, to ignore the collaborative aspect of EFS, a feature which becomes discernible in the way in which the various members frequently appear in each other’s work, an expression of unequivocal support. In practice this goes beyond support to become something else entirely, an internal process of shared provocation in which each filmmaker pushes the other to delve deeper, to look beyond. Each of the works shown demonstrates a shared, reciprocal interest in provocation, using cinema to dauntlessly probe what others routinely and systematically avoid, to wonder about the very nature of cinema, our peculiar drive to generate images and meanings.

 
What we encounter here is a cinema of enquiry, a cinema discovered in the process of its becoming. This rules out any pre-formed objective or agenda but it also helps account for the group’s intimidating prolificacy (in a two-year period Rouzbeh Rashidi produced fourteen feature-length or close to featurelength works). Through the works of EFS cinema remains in a state of productive instability. Here, cinema can function as a sketchbook – a way of exploring some of the possible lives of an idea. This is what we encounter, for example, in Rashidi’s visceral and abrasive Homo Sapiens Project (161-170) in which he takes apart and reassembles a 35mm trailer for Brain De Palma’s The Black Dahlia (2006). An interaction with popular cinema also surfaces in Michael Higgins’ Funnel Web Family, a foreboding and sinister inspection of domesticity for which music and soundbites from Jack Arnold’s Tarantula (1955) make a fitting albeit unexpected coda.

 
The ‘avant-garde’ has always described both a mode of practice and a realm of speculative philosophy, and the works of EFS find a shared sensibility in the realm of science-fiction, an informing feature of many of the films here. In Funnel Web Family Higgins shoots using baby monitors and in doing so grants us access to queasy scenes of everyday domesticity which are both familiar and otherworldly. The highly creative uses of technology we see here, and in Jann Clavadetscher’s use of CCTV in Controle No. 6, remind us of the more mundane uses to which the moving-image is put, but the concerns driving a work like Funnel Web Family are also more deeply felt and personal: the unsettling power of the film is rooted not only in the way in which it makes us as viewers into voyeurs, but in the way it seems to tap into an acutely felt fear of familial responsibility (the film is ultimately more Eraserhead than 1984).

 
Funnel Web Family reminds us of the invasions of privacy made possible by surveillance cameras, a contemporary technology that Controle No.6 counterintuitively uses to create something curiously reminiscent of a silent era comedy. In this way, both filmmakers find distinct means of subverting the ways in which the camera has been co-opted as an instrument for scrutiny and control. Shot entirely on CCTV cameras during a period working at a suburban chain cinema, Clavadetscher’s Controle No. 6 is not budget filmmaking in the truest sense (we arguably have to factor in all the work Clavadetcher is not doing while he is making the film). Shot over a period of weeks, Clavadetscher surreptitiously and gradually performed his film, at first for nobody in empty car parks and lifts, later going back to comb through these tapes in an attempt to retrieve the material that makes up the film. With movie star looks and an affection for body comedy, Clavadetscher can be situated as the Harold Lloyd of the group, as unlikely as that sounds. Lloyd serves as a model here for a naturally physical performer, but also for the ways in which Clavadetscher gracefully skips over what would otherwise be impossibly restrictive conditions in which to make a film.

 
The works produced by EFS have a raw immediacy that is a product of the charged, instinctive way in which the group functions – certainly the case with Dean Kavanagh’s Friends with Johnny Kline, a fearless work made up entirely of archive material in which innocuous, familiar images of public or communal life are set in opposition to illicit sequences that delve into the realm of the private, the sexual, the calamitous, and the criminal. In every instance there appears to be a degree of heightened performance for the camera, as though appearing to be human is always an act, regardless of context. Kavanagh’s is the angriest of the works included in the programme, its emotional register sits closest to the surface. It is impossible to shake off the history of institutional abuse in the film’s use of archival material but what the film seems to really kick against is the notion that sexual desire, whatever shape it takes, is something shameful, something which needs to be hidden.

 
Dean frequently obscures his images or has objects pass in front of them, so that it feels like we are looking through a keyhole, or peering from inside Dorothy Vallens’ closet.⁸ As with each of the works in this programme, he is feeling around in the darkest recesses of what cinema can be. Cinema is rediscovered here as a more fully heterogeneous space, a space which ‘can contain all galaxies and forms of life, even ones we can sense but can’t fully comprehend’ and the works shown here continue to make visible and engage cinema’s plastic nature, its wider worlds of possibility. Nothing is fixed or stable here and many of the works take a variety of forms, with aspects of HSP (161-170) likely to resurface again in Rashidi’s upcoming feature Trailers. Rashidi’s film feels like a form of archaeology. He returns to 35mm material as artefact, and what he uncovers there is a great realm of projected possibility, not only what the artefact is but the furthest realms of what the artefact could have been. Foregrounding discarded, depreciated or flea market-sourced media, collected and re-used without any sense of mawkishness or nostalgia, Rashidi produces a structuralism which transcends any impassive or non-emotive quality associated with the genre.

 
Maximilian Le Cain and Vicky Langan’s collaboratively made Brine Twice Daily (which reads like a productive misunderstanding of Niall O’Flaherty’s ‘bathe twice daily’)⁹ feels like another work that is discovered rather than conceived, its final shape as much of a surprise to the filmmakers as it is for the viewer. The film initially appears to announce itself as an exercise in transgression, but slowly reveals itself as a form of portraiture, a warmly felt love story – a Platonic love story but a love story nonetheless – and like all great love stories its joys are tempered by frustration and self-doubt: love as an act of self-immolation.

 
Moving beyond a purely conceptual realm, these films are what happens when experience is allowed to overtake expectation. This rules out the possibility of failure as each film exists in an indeterminate state of becoming, but they also retain their capacity to upset the continuum, to disrupt the seeming stability of our current condition. No film in the programme better captures that state of fragility than Atoosa Pour Hosseini’s Clandestine. Along with Rashidi’s work, Clandestine is the film that is perhaps most at one with existing in what seems to be some forgotten aspect of cinema’s projected futures. The onscreen space of Pour Hosseini’s film suggests a space-time that is continuous with our own but also altogether foreign. It directly evokes the many worlds of possibility cinema has suggested, and through it the apparent solidity of our own existence is also rendered fractious and plastic.

 
This article coincides with a series of screenings which took place at the Irish Film Institute between March and May 2016. Curated by Daniel Fitzpatrick and Alice Butler for ‘aemi’– a newly developed platform for the support and exhibition of artists’ and experimental moving image – the series explores the role of the collective within contemporary moving-image practices. For more information please visit http://aemi.ie/

 

NOTES
1. Cited in Masha Salazkina, ‘Moscow-Rome-Havana: A Film-Theory Road Map’, October 139 (Winter 2012): 97–116.
2. These two have been the most heavily historicised of the film collectives in France but there were many more besides including the Peasant Front, Cinema Libra, and Cinéma Politique.
3. All citations taken from Masha Salazkina’s ‘Moscow-Rome-Havana: A Film-Theory Road Map’, October 139 (Winter 2012): 97–116.
4. Nicole Brenez: Political Cinema Today – The New Exigencies: For a Republic of Images (2011), http://www.screeningthepast.com/2013/09/political-cinema-today-%E2%80%93-the-newexigencies-for-a-republic-of-images/
5. Alex Tyson in conversation with Herb Schellenberger, Vdrome (2015), http://www.vdrome.org/tyson.html
6. Kelly Gallagher in conversation with Kelsey Velez, Incite! (Dec 18th, 2015), http://www.incite-online.net/gallagher.html
7. Oana Chivoiu: ‘Toward an Aesthetic of Displacement in Ana Vaz’ Sacris Pulso, Cinémathèque: Annotations on Film, Issue 68 (September 2013), http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/cteq/toward-an-aesthetic-of-displacement-in-ana-vazs-sacris-pulso/
8. The closet that held Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet
9. O’Flaherty was the front man for the Sultans of Ping, a bandname that already bastardises the Dire Straits song ‘Sultans of Swing’.