Introduction to The Book of Film

Film screenings at The Vernacular Lounge curated and presented by Martin Rumsby.

Take a trip around the world of contemporary artists’ cinema with films from Africa, the Americas, Australia and Japan. The Book of Film screening series presents a rare opportunity to experience contemporary international moving image art in Auckland.

Curator Martin Rumsby is New Zealand’s leading thinker on film as art.

Programme one - Nights of waking dreams

The Homestead Act (35mm, 8 minutes, 2009)
Part Three of Woloshen’s Dead Sea Scrolls series equates soil erosion with cinematic decay. The title is based on a nineteenth-century American law that gave homesteaders freehold title to 160 acres of undeveloped land. Their zeal and inexperience, however, lead to unsound farming practices which resulted in erosion. Similarly, Woloshen believes, the history of film is now eroding before our eyes as poorly stored prints and negatives deteriorate.

In Labyrinthine (14 minutes and 44 seconds, 2010)
Biermann subjects Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) to digital manipulation which creates a heightened intensity in this compacted rearrangement of the original.

Next Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) gets a reworking from Biermann to become Spherical Coordinates (8 minutes, 23 seconds, 2005). Here Janet Leigh’s features are contorted way beyond the allure of surface appearances to suggest an intense inner paranoia, almost as a premonition on what may be coming next. Centre Spot (2009) - Tuohy presents subjective cinematic visions of his experience of landscape and light, abstracting from light and water in metaphysics of self, prescience and landscape.

This introductory programme, running a little over an hour, also includes Preciptins - a video art work by Elric Klane, a New Zealand filmmaker resident in Los Angeles, an African dance film and much more.

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