Art Sonje Center and Moving Image Forum will present Play for Today’s second-half program of the year, commencing from forthcoming September 14 until December 20. Play for Today, a title borrowed from the historical BBC TV program aired from 1970 to 1984, will introduce various contemporary stories and forms of their images that may be easily approachable for the general audiences on a regular basis. The screening program will introduce films by Nobuhiro Aihara, Peter Nestler and Red Hollywood, along with a lecture by Andrew V. Uroskie, at Art Hall, Art Sonje Center.

*Moving Image Forum is an organization supports the creation of the film based project with Spacecell, an artist-run film Lab, and dissemination of moving image-based artwork by artists and filmmaker from Korea since 2004. Through a regular program of screenings, performances and lectures, and annual platform called EXiS, its goal is to explore new models for the presentation of cinema. Bring together the worlds of experimental film and video art, contemporary documentary, artist’s cinema, Moving Image Forum looks to foster an ongoing dialogue a wide range of artists and audiences.

[Lecture]
2018. 9. 14, Fri 5pm
Beyond The Whole Earth? David O’Reilly’s Everything
Andrew V. Uroskie

Over the last fifteen years, the Irish artist David O’Reilly has produced a body of aesthetically innovative experimental animation that has accomplished the rare feat of achieving both popular and critical acclaim. Working both inside and outside of industry, he has produced short films independently and for Cartoon Network, created video walls for concerts of the Sri Lanken Tamil musical artist MIA (Mathangi Arulpragasam), and has produced animated sequences for “indie” Hollywood films such as Her (Spike Jonze, 2013). Most recently, he has produced the experimental, quasi-interactive animated “games” Mountain and Everything, the latter of which has spawned the first video-game trailer ever to be nominated for an academy-award.

Despite his popularity and critical acclaim, O’Reilly’s body of work remains largely untheorized, yet seems to offer a wide range of new ideas for the conceptualization of the moving image in the present age of social media. From the beginning, his work has mined online “meme” culture for its iconography and structure, and his recent foray into game-design has radically challenged banal notions of interactivity still rife within this burgeoning field.

O’Reilly’s Everything is a work of the present that is nonetheless conceptually rooted in that past: its premise conjoins Charles and Ray Eames’ 1968 iconic animated short Powers of Ten with a soundtrack culled from hundreds of hours of taped lectures by the late philosopher Alan Watts, perhaps the most influential popularizer of Non-Western philosophy from that era.

My talk will focus primarily on a reading of this new work as model of quasi-interactive cinema that challenges us to think differently about still pervasive models of narrativity and spectatorship in our theorization of the moving image, as well about emerging hybrid forms of practice that traverse the traditionally segregated fields of fine art, experimental film, social media, and game design.

Andrew V. Uroskie

Based in New York City, Andrew V. Uroskie serves as Associate Professor of Modern Art and Media at Stony Brook University. Focusing on postwar and contemporary artists working in film, video, sound, performance and installation, his writing explores how durational media have helped to reframe traditional models of aesthetic production, exhibition, spectatorship, and objecthood. His essays on modern and contemporary art, film and media culture, performance, and sound studies have been published in academic journals and anthologies in the US, England, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil and South Korea, and have been translated into five languages.

His first book, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art, was published in 2014 with the University of Chicago Press, and recently translated into Korean with a new forward. He is currently engaged in two book projects: The Kinetic Imaginary, winner of the 2017 book grant by the Creative Capital/Arts Writers Foundation, is a revisionary history of the idea of movement across postwar American painting, sculpture and film.  Remaking Reality, from which this talk is taken, focuses on contemporary video art that takes up the transformation of narrativity, affect, fictionality and realism in the era of social media.

[Screening]
2018. 10. 25, Thu, 7pm
Nobuhiro Aihara: Animated Psychedelia (相原信洋, 1944-2011)

“We do not make animated films by labouring over each frame in order to achieve a polished perfection. On the contrary, we grab ideas on the spur of the moment and let our inspiration guide us in order to put it on film as soon as possible. Improvisation is a very important aspect of our work. For example, we don’t want to make films that would take a year of tedious labour to complete. A sketch is a rough picture drawn by hand in a few seconds. Our way of working is similar. We make films as if we were sketching [映像スケッチ]. If Aihara needed lots of time to create while I wanted to improvise we’d never be able to work together. Fortunately, we both like this loosely sketched style of filmmaking. I think it suits us well.”

(About the collaboration with Aihara, Keeichi Tanaami, 2009)

Aihara’s filmography includes <Shelter> (1980) and <My Shelter> (1981) which can only be referred to as experimental documentary, and <apple and girl> (1982) which projects images from the projector on the walls and roof of houses There are many heterogeneous works, such as <Tonbo> (1988) where women’s nude and dusk fields are exposed multiple times. I think that it is Nobuhiro Aihara who is an animator with a heterogeneity that is not limited to animation
filmmakers in a narrow sense, and that refuses easy classification and interpretation.

Rhabdophis Tigrinus（山かがし）, 1972, 16mm, 5min
Moh-Doh （妄動）, 1974, 16mm, 3min
Stone （ストーン）, 1975, 16mm, 8min
Karma （カルマ）, 1977, 16mm, 3min
My Shelter （マイ・シェルター）, 1981, 16mm, 9min
Image/Shadow （映像／かげ）, 1987, 16mm, 8min
Memory of Cloud （メモリー・オブ・クラウド）, 1997, 16mm, 7min
The Third Eye （ザ・サード・アイ）, 1999, 16mm, 5min
Wind （ウインド）, 2000, 16mm, 5min
Zap Cat （ザップキャット）, 2008, 16mm, 3min
(Overall 56min.)

Nobuhiro Aihara was born in Kanagawa prefecture in 1944, where he studied at the design school. He has made dozens of animation films since 1968 and his work has been shown internationally. He started his career in TV animation in 1965 and was a professor at the Kyoto University of Art and Design. His aesthetic is distinctive for his use of flowing lines, highly complex drawings, and his love of psychedelic colours.  He was a prolific artist who often produced several animated shorts a year either on his own or in collaboration with his friend and fellow artist the Keiichi Tanaami.  At the time of his death, he left behind 85 animated works. Nobuhiro passed away in 2011 while on a trip to Bali.

2018. 11. 29. Thu, 7pm
Peter Nestler (1937~)

Wie macht man Glas? (handwerklich) (How to Make Glass (Manually))
Wie macht man Glas? (maschinell)(How to Make Glass(Mechanically))
Peter Nestler in collaboration with Zsóka Nestler, Sweden 1970, 16mm, b/w, 24 min

Peter Nestler was born in Breisgau, Germany in 1937. His films initially recorded the changes affecting rural and industrial communities in the early 1960s. Since then, he has developed a politically and aesthetically uncompromising body of work in which history, the working class, labor and production, immigration, the environment, and the struggle against fascism have been recurring themes. And in 1966, he immigrated to Sweden. After moving, he and his wife Zsóka made a series of educationally purposive films for Swedish television on the production of glass, paper, iron, and the history of the printing press, to name but a few. These “biographies of objects” observe the history of working techniques, production processes, and materials, as well as the history of their representation. The term “biography of objects” comes from a 1929 essay by Sergei Tret’iakov about Soviet novels. The end of the essay is especially relevant, “The compositional structure of the ‘biography of the object’ is a conveyer belt along which a unit of raw material is moved and transformed into a useful product through human effort. The biography of the object has an extraordinary capacity to incorporate human material.” These “biographies of objects,” as Nestler has called them, are esthetic, didactic, and seemingly very simple, but inside of their learning and unspectacular quality, is a complicated critique of how the production methods are controlled and by whom. In their simplicity, the films still have plenty to tell us about production and its stamp on us.

2018. 12. 20, Thu, 7pm
Red Hollywood: Thom Andersen & Noël Burch

USA, 1996 – 2013, B&W, Stereo, HD, 114 min

Made in collaboration with Noël Burch, Red Hollywood is one product from Andersen&s years of research into the Hollywood blacklist, a larger project that comprises several essays and the book Les communistes de Hollywood: Autre chose que martyrs (also written with Burch), which has never appeared in English.

At the heart of Andersen‘s project is the conviction that, contrary to the claims of their milquetoast liberal apologists, many of the writers, directors and producers who refused to testify before HUAC were not only committed leftists of one sort or another, but that many of them produced films of political significance. As he wrote in his first essay on the subject, It would be an injustice to those who were blacklisted to say they did nothing to deserve it. A history of the blacklist must first be worthy of them all. In the film, this argument is persuasively advanced through Billy Woodbury’s narration. But it is much more than a cinematic extension of the arguments Andersen and Burch have made elsewhere. Through extended excerpts from more than 50 films and in interviews with blacklisted artists, including Abraham Polonsky, Paul Jarrico, and Alfred Lewis Levitt, Andersen and Burch give the films and filmmakers space to speak for themselves, sometimes to confirm, sometimes to contradict the filmmakers‘ own claims. The video’s dialectical structure produces a three-dimensional monument to the polysemous powers of cinema. Even more than any of its particular claims, Red Hollywoodinsists upon the political necessity of popular art forms and the dignity of the sometimes unpopular artists who use them. (Colin Beckett)

Thom Andersen 

Over a 45-year career that has combined filmmaking, criticism, and teaching, Thom Andersen has completed a handful of carefully crafted documentaries that demonstrate an exquisite regard for both intellectual and aesthetic rigor. Comprised primarily of found images and video clips, unified by voiceover, Edward Muybridge, Zoopraxographer(1974), Red Hollywood, and Los Angeles Plays Itself(2003) analyze the production of images and their theoretical, social, and political consequences. Get Out of the Car(2010) is a direct response to Los Angeles Plays Itself. However, it also returns him to his unself-conscious roots. This is Andersen‘s other side, last heard from in the 60s with Melting(1964-65, a time lapse shot of an ice cream sundae), the deliberately unpronounceable — —– (1966-67, with Malcolm Brodwick, a sensory exploration of rock and roll subculture in Los Angeles) and Olivia’s Place(1966/74, a portrait of a Santa Monica coffee shop and its patrons). These short 16mm films reveal an artist with an original take on film as document, who is energized by popular music and an idiosyncratic sense of humor. In 2012, Andersen completed Reconversão, described as “… an elegiac quest into the essence of [Portuguese architect] Eduardo Souto de Moura‘s work.” In the last couple of years, Andersen, who teaches at the California Institute of the Arts, has worked on remastering and re- editing his two most famous works, Los Angeles Plays Itself and Red Hollywood.

Noël Burch 

Born in San Francisco, USA in 1932, Noël Burch has been living in France since 1951. He graduated from the Institut Des Hautes études Cinématographiques (IDHEC) in 1954. While primarily known for his theoretical writings, he has always positioned himself as a filmmaker and has directed over twenty titles, mostly documentaries. Burch has been publishing written works since the 1960s. Among his numerous publications are his first and most famous book Theory of Film Practice(New York: Praeger, 1973) and To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema(Berkeley, 1979), which remains the most robust history of Japanese cinema as written by a Westerner. From 1967 to 1972 he collaborated with Janine Bazin and André S. Labarthe on the celebrated series Cinéastes de Notre Temps and directed seven programs that are considered to have renewed the &filmmaker portrait& in the golden years of French public television. It was during that same period that Burch was co-founder and director of the Institut de Formation Cinèmatographique, an alternative film school that emphasizes association between theory and practice. His essay-film, The Forgotten Space(2010), co-directed with Allan Sekula (1951-2013), won the Orizzonti Award at the Venice International Film Festival.