LAZARUS TAXA and RAVINE/MACHINE at Braziers International Film Festival 2022

(Live Cinema evening: 9pm – 11.30pm, Sat 3rd Sept)

Bugs in the Barn! Deviant studies of the nature documentary via magic lantern optics, Super 8 pedagogies, rural 3D anaglyphs, and scratch video. ‘Lazarus Taxa’ is a term for species which disappeared from the record and were presumed extinct, but then sprang back to life. From ‘crocodile tears’ to synthetic birds and machine learning glitches, this international programme of short-form artist cinema explores the ways “species” of obsolete cinema can be revived, rediscovered, and reinterpreted. Followed by a live 16mm film reel performance by the audio-visual duo RAVINE/MACHINE (Amy Cutler and Scott Pitkethly) inspired by fireflies and water insects, working with hacked music boxes and projectors.

Braziers International Film Festival is an independent film festival in the unique historical setting of Braziers park estate and residential community. Films are projected to audiences in a cinema-style environment, with screenings taking place inside a large, historic 17th-century barn adapted for public performances, in addition to the Gothic manor house and custom-built outdoor structures.

Concerning Flight: Five Illuminations in Miniature – Charlotte Pryce, 7 min (2004)

A Kinematographic Film Comprised of Five Brief Fictions in Which is Explored the Mystery of Insect Flight. Interpretations of a Mythological and Fantastical Nature are Illuminated in Motion and Time.

Con cierto Animal (Animal Within) – Ivonne Sheen & Rebeca Alván, 12 min (2018)

By the appropriation of 16mm educational images, Humans, Animals, Earth, Wind and Water converge with the same energy of a filmic fire, which crosses and relates them.

Lazarus Taxa – David Spittle, 8 min (2022)

Stop-motion animation, gay dragonfly nightclubs and the undying song of the weevil.

Looking Glass Insects – Charlotte Pryce, 4 min (2012)

Delighting in the act and play of observation, the film finds a visual metaphor for the cinematic process in Through the Looking Glass; making use of magnifying glasses as an optical pun, pointing to the instruments used by both entomologists and filmmakers alike.

3 Songs for Saturn – Misho Antadze, 12 mins (2021)

In May 2020, an alligator died in the Moscow zoo. What did he remember? 3 Songs for Saturn uses found-footage from cinema history and YouTube to reconstruct the journey of a real-life alligator, whose biography echoes a lesser-known mass deportation of the 20th century.

Codex Entropia – Rich Pell, 9 min (2021)

A dystopian epic in the form of a 3D anaglyph informational film. Using archival stereoscopic images that document the work of Western Pennsylvania laborers, the film narrates an alternative history that speaks to the entanglement of biological life forms, computational data, and political ideology.

All Her Beautiful Green Remains in Tears – Amy Cutler, 11 min (2018)

Sexist nature documentary archives are re-mixed and re-narrated by machine learning. This film’s narrator is an artificial consciousness which has learned its existence entirely from reading the female protagonist voice in 14 million passages of romance novels. Using image recognition/ closed captioning, it tells an entirely different story of the “birds and the bees” of nature documentary: one of female desire, trauma, masochism, and emotional fantasy.

RAVINE/MACHINE – Live Set (30 min)

RAVINE/MACHINE are the duo of live cinema artist and geographer Amy Cutler and sound designer and DIY instrument maker Scott Pitkethly. They create audio-visual fieldtrips with various forms of manipulated analogue tools, from 35mm carousels to 16mm reels to toy harp and rotary candles. Their holograms, zithers, and hacked music boxes are inspired by the do-it-yourself style of early cinema’s “phantasmagoria” (assembly of spectres). For LAZARUS TAXA they will be performing a live set designed for Braziers barn, inspired by fireflies, water insects, and The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift. Source footage includes reels spliced from educational 16mm made for schools.