A series of interviews with artists/filmmakers who work with analog film, analog work with light with the medium. It captures their way of thinking, their way of working, how they start their ideas, the process from thought to creation to realization, their approach, and their inspiration.
11 Jan Kulka
Jan Kulka (1985) is a Prague-based experimental filmmaker dedicated to analog film who explores the fundamental principles of the film medium, it's phenomenology and the physiology of perception in a contemporary context. His aim is to dig to the core, reaching to the primary essence, which we all share in common somewhere deep inside and bring it into a live, shared experience. He incorporates the creation of his own instruments in the creative process. His primary focus is on inventing special projection apparatuses for live performances. Rather than telling a story, he tries to target the very senses of each spectator directly with light and sound to reveal some of the foundations of our perception, that makes our being.
https://www.instagram.com/thekulka/
This interview was recorded on 15 February 2024.
10 Vicky Smith
Vicky Smith’s practice in experimental animation includes imagery and traces of the body. Through direct on film animation, live action and performance she activates the tension between the physical and material to explore conditions of fragility, tenacity and resilience.
Her work screens internationally, in galleries and festivals, in 2023: Jewellers, Morecombe; Contact, Frieze, Cork Street; Musee D’Art Moderne, France; Musee de Beaux Arts, Marseille; Watershed Cinema, Bristol; Limasol, Cyprus; Filmwerkplatz, Rotterdam; Courtisane, Ghent; Oberlin, US. Other significant exhibitions include: We Shine, Portsmouth; 40 Years of Light Cone, Paris; Splash, Scratch, Dunk! Films Made by Hand, Barbican, London. Forthcoming 2024 screenings include at Bristol’s Qwak Club and Cinema Parenthèse, Brussels.
Publications include: Experimental & Expanded Animation: Current Perspectives and Practices, co-edited with Nicky Hamlyn (2018) and ‘Touching with the Eye’, in Film Talks: 15 Conversations about Experimental Cinema (2021) eds. Payne & Vallance.
https://vickysmith.blog/
This interview was recorded on 01 November 2023.
09 Els van Riel
Els van Riel lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Studied photo- and cinematography, and worked as a photographer, editor and producer for various photo-, film-, video- and theater productions. Her films, video's and installations explore the impact of detailed changes in moment, movement, matter, light and perception.
“With links to the tradition of structural film making, the work by the Brussels based film-and videomaker, Els van Riel, explores the basic elements for cinema -time and light- and develops a form for new aesthetic pleasure, bypassing any symbolism and narrativism. For van Riel the projector is a central figure in the cinematographical act of giving form to a screening, performance or installation. The mechanical image source becomes actively present as if it were a living object.”(L’ART MÊME, April 2009)
https://www.elsvanriel.be/
This interview was recorded on 13 September 2023.
08 Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie
Richard Tuohy is one of the most active experimental film artists currently working on celluloid in Australia. He runs Nanolab in Australia – the specialist small gauge film processing laboratory. He actively encourages other artists to work with cine film through his Artist Film Workshop initiative (see artistfilmworkshop.org). He is also a founding director of the Australian International Experimental Film Festival.
Dianna Barrie is an experimental filmmaker. She found her way into filmmaking as a middle ground between the pursuit of abstract music and philosophy. Together with Richard Tuohy she established Nanolab, which is a hand-processing lab for super-8 black-and-white and colour reversal film. This exploration has spread beyond individual work to the establishment of the Artist Film Workshop.
This interview was recorded on 25 August 2023.
07 Viktoria Schmid
Viktoria Schmid is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Vienna, who works at the crossroad of cinema and exhibition space. The different mediums she uses, like film, video and photography are the co-authors of her work. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally in exhibitions and film festivals. She studied filmmaking at the Friedl Kubelka School, holds a BA in Cinema Studies from the University of Vienna and a Masters in Time-Based Media from the University of Art in Linz.
https://www.viktoriaschmid.com
This interview was recorded on 23 August 2023.
06 Mars Saude
Mars Saude’s films engage with documentation, marginal histories, landscape, speculative fiction, radical politics, and text(s), using 16mm film as a method to complicate ideas of linear progress and question capitalist temporalities. Their wider time-based media practice includes illustrated lecture performances and sound. A Portuguese national raised in California, they are a member of Bristol Experimental and Expanded Film (BEEF) and currently facilitate Labordy Ffilm Aber in Aberystwyth, Wales.
https://marcysaude.net/
This interview was recorded on 06 July 2023.
05 Alexandre Larose
Alexandre Larose Alexandre Larose (1978, Canada) is a moving-image artist based in Montréal, Québec. Larose began making films in the early 2000s, almost systematically involving close collaborations with engineers and film technicians to expand the point-of-view of the camera. His current practice heavily relies on in-camera techniques and hand-processing, which are the result of extensive experimentation with cinematography.
This interview was recorded on 17 May 2023.
04 Erin Weisgerber
Erin Weisgerber is a Montreal-based filmmaker originally from Edmonton, Alberta. Photo-chemical filmmaking is at the core of Erin's practice. She produces poetic single-channel films that hover between figuration and abstraction employing techniques such as in-camera manipulations, hand-processing, and re-photography. More recently she has begun working with film-based installation and performance, incorporating her interests in music, sound art, and electronics. She is excited by the idea of artists' cinema as a scavenger art feeding off the refuse of the film industry. She is equally inspired by Montreal's DIY, underground arts movements and the emergence of an international network of artist-run film labs. Along with creating her own works, Erin contributes to documentary and narrative films as a cinematographer. Erin is a member of the Double Negative Collective, a group of moving-image artists dedicated to the creation and exhibition of experimental and avant-garde cinema and who maintain an artist-run film lab. Her films have played in Canada, France, Italy, Britain, the United States, Iceland and Lebanon. https://vimeo.com/user5748123
This interview was recorded on 14 April 2023.
03 Charlotte Pryce
Charlotte Pryce has been making experimental films, photographs and optical objects since 1986. Born in London, Charlotte Pryce graduated with a BFA from the Slade School of Art, University College London and completed an MFA in Fine Art/ Film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her films have screened in numerous festivals including Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Toronto, San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong, Ann Arbor and London. In 2013 the Los Angeles Film Critics Association honored her with the Douglas Edwards Award for Best Experimental Cinema Achievement, and in 2014 she was the recipient of Film at Wits End Award, and in 2015 she received the Gil Omenn Art and Science Award from the Ann Arbor film Festival. In January 2019 she presented a career retrospective at the Rotterdam Film Festival and her work was performed at the Velaslavasay Panorama in Los Angeles, Bozar in Brussels and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. https://charlottepryce.net/
This interview was recorded on 27 March 2023.
02 Esther Urlus
Esther Urlus (1966, the Netherlands) is an artist working with analog projection and film. Resulting in films, performances, and installations. Her works always arise from DIY methods. Kneading the material, by trial and error and (re) inventing, she creates new work. Her processes and techniques are often re-inventions from the pioneers of photo- and cinematography. In addition, she developed (or recreated) her own mechanical devices to generate new (color) film printing and projection methods. She is co-founder and chairman of Filmwerkplaats, Rotterdam, the only artist-run film lab in the Netherlands. https://estherurlus.hotglue.me/
This interview was recorded on 17 February 2023.
01 Gaëlle Rouard
Gaëlle Rouard (1971, France) is a filmmaker, alchemist, and performance artist. Since the early 1990s, Rouard has been making handmade films, specializing in film processing. She is a longtime member of Le 102, rue d’Alembert, and led the do-it-yourself film lab Atelier MTK for 12 years until 2006. She recently established a new lab close to Grenoble, deep in the mountains. https://www.gaelle-rouard.com/
This interview was recorded on 3 November 2022.