FILM FEEDBACK (SCREENING/TALK)
SAT 25 APRIL, 20:00 - SPHINX

A key figure in British avant-garde cinema for already more than three decades, Courtisane’s Artist in focus Guy Sherwin pushes the limits of cinema with his films, installation works and performances, in which he explores film’s fundamental properties: light and time. After studying painting at the Chelsea School of Art in the late 1960’s, Sherwin taught printing and processing at the London Film-Makers’ Co-op during the mid-70s, at the heyday of the British Structural Film Movement. He now teaches at Middlesex University and University of Wolverhampton, and collaborates on expanded cinema performances with his partner, Singaporean film and sound artist Lynn Loo. Concerned with seriality and live intervention, his work investigates questions such as the physical relationships between sound and image, the digital re-working of film, the mechanisms of projection, the methods of printing and the live interaction between performer and film.

In the course of his screening / talk at Courtisane, Sherwin will discuss ideas about time-looping and feedback that have influenced his film practice and show a series of films that were abandoned in the making, then resumed after a time lapse. As part of An evening on... landscapes (FR 24 APRIL), Guy Sherwin will present his live film-performance Paper Landscape for the first time in Belgium.

Film Feedback
Tony Conrad, US, 1974, 16mm, colour, silent, 14’

Film Feedback was produced in ‘real time’ by processing and projecting the film while it was being shot. A negative image is shot from a small rear-projection screen, the film comes out of the camera continuously (in the dark room) and is immediately processed, dried, and projected on the screen.

Camden Road Station
Guy Sherwin, UK, 1973/2003, 3x16mm, colour, silent, 9’

Stationary shots of a station platform repeated across three screens. Trains and people waiting and departing, arriving and leaving.

Views from Home
Guy Sherwin, UK, 1987/2005, super 8 on miniDV, colour, sound, 10 mins.

Light and shadow in (Sherwin’s) East London apartment perform a gloriously elegant ballet.

Cycles #3
Guy Sherwin, UK, 1972/77/2003, 2x16mm, colour, optical sound, 9’

A twin-projector version of a film made in 1972 without using a camera: holes were punched into a length of clear film and paper dots stuck onto it…

Da Capo: Variations on a train with Anna
Guy Sherwin, UK, 1975/2000, 16mm, b/w, optical sound, 9’

Several interpretations of a prelude by J.S.Bach accompany a repeated shot taken from a train leaving a station.