16mm: Martha Colburn

In her final years, Maria Lassnig (1919-2014) became one of the most exhibited female artists in the fine art world. A year before her death she received the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award at the Art Biennial in Venice. Since then her work has been presented at museums including MoMA PS1 in New York, Fundació Tàpies in Barcelona, Tate Liverpool, the Albertina in Vienna, the National Gallery in Prague and the Kunstmuseum, Basel. Her work is characterised by a strong ‘body consciousness’ and a satirical and deeply emotional self-awareness. What is not known so well internationally, is that Lassnig also worked as a filmmaker. Between 1970 and 1972 she studied animation film at the School of Visual Arts in New York and made six 16mm short films during that period. These animation films are very simple in their execution, but Lassnig is able to present her messages in a very direct, unpretentious, and often funny way. What is really striking is her ironic critique of the instruments and structures of the male-dominated world of the 1970s.

Karl Wratschko

What’s On? • Evil of Dracula

1899: Cinema as a performing art

So many scientists, industrialists, mechanics and photographers, plus a number of producers, camera operators and directors played a part in the invention and development of cinematography. But there has been only one Georges Méliès. Like the magic homme-orchestre of his own invention he played all the parts of artistic and managerial functions necessary to run a theatre and to make and sell films. Maybe the point is not so much that he introduced soitdisant fiction to cinematography and vice versa or invented fundamental technical tricks such as the scene change by dissolve in Cendrillon or that his films are fun. Maybe the films of this singular artist are only a superficial and very incomplete record of a prodigal productive energy. But they channel enough reality of 1899 to make a tangible encounter with Méliès possible and to transport us into his realm, the evanescent empire of 19 th century entertainment.
If you need early films to be useful you may find Cendrillon a cue to talk about fairground cinema or the féerie. Otherwise you can simply marvel at how he packed an evening’s extravaganza into less than six minutes and still included four ballets – aristocratic Rococo, uncanny clocks and clock-spirits, idyllic youth with their onstage violinist and a classic ballerina’s solo – several transformations and a spectacular apothéose. Méliès appears too, unrecognisable in his disguise as the clock sprite.

Mariann Lewinsky

Le Portrait mystérieux • Cendrillon • L’Illusioniste fin-de siècle • Danse du feu

1899: Screening the news story of the Century

It is a well known fact that in 1894 a French court-martial wrongly convicted capt. Alfred Dreyfus of treason. He was sentenced to solitary confinement for life on Devil’s Island. Even after a forger of evidence had both confessed and committed suicide and the real culprit had been found, the army refused to review the judgement until it was forced to do so by the Supreme Court in 1899. In the retrial Dreyfus was again found guilty, with the military tribunal preferring to repeat a miscarriage of justice rather than admit it. There was then a public outcry and Dreyfus was immediately offered a pardon by the French president.
Luke McKernan has investigated how filmmakers recorded the Dreyfus affair and turned it into entertainment: “Georges Méliès documented the Dreyfus affair creating a multi-part drama that demonstrated great fidelity to genuine incident and appearance. […] He did not consider filming actuality – he got nearer to his idea of the truth through dramatic recreation. He took great care to replicate locations, using newspaper illustrations and photographs as reference, and employing performers who looked like the leading players in the real-life drama. […] Biograph’s major contribution to the Dreyfus affair […] are effectively news reports filmed outside the courtroom at Rennes during Dreyfus’ second trial […]. The films are extraordinary to witness, not just because they document the actuality, but because they do so with a camera style that comes across as all too modern. This is the inquisitive news camera, eagerly gazing on history in the making, making us news voyeurs, as we urge the camera to give us whatever glimpse it can of the personalities involved. […] The most remarkable achievement was to capture a few seconds of Dreyfus in his prison yard […] snatched by the ingenuity of the operator”.
As space only allowed us these two short quotations, we recommend you read the full, excellent report on thebioscope.net.

Mariann Lewinsky

The American Biograph at the Palace • Capt. Alfred Dreyfus • Amann, the Great Impersonator • L’Affaire Dreyfus Accompagnamento al piano di Stephen Horne

16mm: Margaret Tait

I think that film is essentially a poetic medium, and although it can be put to all sorts of other – creditable and discreditable – uses, these are secondary.

Margaret Tait

Margaret Tait (1918-1999), filmmaker and poet, is one of Scotland’s most extraordinary talents, and yet she was largely overlooked during her lifetime. Born in Orkney, she trained first as a medical doctor and served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Second World War, before studying film at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome in the early 1950s. After returning to Edinburgh, Tait established her film studio, Ancona Films, at 91 Rose Street before eventually returning to Orkney in the 1960s, where she lived and continued to make films until her death in 1999. Tait produced over thirty short films and became Scotland’s first female feature filmmaker with the release of her film Blue Black Permanent in 1992.
This programme, part of a wider series of screenings and events marking the centenary of Tait’s birth, showcases the full breadth of work produced by this extraordinary filmmaker. Tait’s films capture the people and places she was familiar with. They are celebrations of the everyday, approaching their subjects with great intimacy, and unravelling the mystery of the commonplace through the details of the everyday often overlooked.

Sarah Neely

Portrait of Ga • My Room. Via Ancona 21