Experiments in Time: Artists' Documentaries

Hollis Frampton 'Nostalgia' 1971

Experimentation is at the heart of cinema and the reason it exists. The first films blurred the lines of documentary depiction in the creation of an artform in moving image.
Open City Docs Fest are proud to make space for the exploration of avant-garde. The Experiments in Time: Artists’ Documentary strand pushes boundaries of cinematic time, form and content, queer aesthetics and the challenge of documenting live performance.

  We celebrate the cross-section of 'L'artiste, le savant et l'industriel' in relation to film with six specially curated programmes. This includes:

Aesthetic Queeries with works investigating the psychology and recording of queer lives,  Elegies for Ideologies, of melancholia entwined with questions: what is left, of the political Left?

We're proud to work with The Slade School of Fine Arts' to screen the Emerging Artist Showcase,
which includes four short video works by artist Sehauan Roh entitled 'Buying Eggs in Korea, Fucking Chinese, Apple Jam, Pork/Fork' promising 'a view of London and Britain from the perspective of an outsider and through the filter of a bitter humour'.

Slade School of Fine Art, Emerging Artists Showcase
Faint / Marianna Simnett / 4'
A reflection upon personal and cultural memory

Postcards from Experimental Places brings us artists that examine journeys taken and imagined, This Immortal Life, in looking at performance and documents, and This is Called Moving: Real Time and Cinema Time. The artists work here in a Tarkovskian sense 'sculpting in time', experimenting with movement, montage, slow shots, found footage, reconstructions and deconstructions.

Tickets are available here.

If Chris Marker's La Jetee became a morbidly beautiful decomposing artist's diary, Hollis Frampton’s 38-minute 1971 film 'Nostalgia' would fit that spot. Black and white photographic stills of Hollis' early artworks are slowly burned on the element of a hot plate, with a commentary that connects the past to the present of each successive image read by artist Michael Snow.

Experimental filmmaker, Barbara Hammer

Also screening, is Barbara Hammer’s 'Audience'. Open City worked with the Tate Modern to bring together a Study Day event earlier in the year discussing the pioneering feminist filmmaker's body of work.

 Other highlights include: Phil Collins’ 'Marxism Today', Vivienne Dick’s 'Visibility Moderate', Peter Kubelka’s 'Our Trip to Africa', the late George Kuchar’s 'Mongroloid' and Youmna Chlala and Larissa Sansour’s 'Trespass the Salt.'