Category Archives: Electric Sheep friends

Close-Up Film Course: Surrealism in Cinema from Luis Buñuel to David Lynch

Surrealism

Close-Up Film Course: Surrealism in Cinema from Luis Buñuel to David Lynch
Lecturer: Virginie Sélavy
Dates: 26 February, 5, 12, 19, 26 March 2019
Time: 7-9pm
Venue: Close-Up Film Centre, London
Fees: £75 / £60 conc. / £50 Close-Up members
Book tickets on the Close-Up website

Electric Sheep founder Virginie Sélavy explores the influence of Surrealism on cinema in a new and expanded five-week film course running from 26 February – 26 March 2019 at London’s Close-Up Film Centre.

Surrealism is one of the art movements that has had the strongest influence on cinema and its impact has lasted to the present day. Emerging at the beginning of the 20th century when cinema was still in its infancy, its focus on dreams and the unconscious made it particularly apt to help shape the new art of moving images. Rejecting a rational approach to the world, the Surrealists led by André Breton sought to free mankind from artistic as well as moral and social conventions, liberating imagination to reveal the deeper connections between dream and reality. Their revolutionary artistic techniques had a political dimension and aimed at shaking up the established order in the widest sense. Central to this art of revolt were themes of violence and desire, their subversive intensity deployed to shock audiences out of their complacent worldviews.

This five-week course will explore the influence of Surrealism on cinema from the beginnings of the movement through to 1960s psychedelia and experimentation, up until its more recent incarnation in the films of Guy Maddin and David Lynch.

Course breakdown

Week 1 – The Beginnings of Surrealist cinema
Luis Buñuel and Salvador Duanš’s Un chien andalou (1929) and L’âge d’or (1930), Germaine Dulac and Antonin Artaud’s The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet (1931)

Week 2 – Luis Buñuel and Spanish-Latin American Surrealism
The later part of Luis Buñuel’s career, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Juan López Moctezuma and Panique

Week 3 – Post-war Surrealism in France
Georges Franju, Jean Rollin, Walerian Borowczyk, Roland Topor, Jean Ferry and Harry Kümel

Week 4 – Eastern European Surrealism 1960s-70s
Jaromil Jireš’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970), Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966), Jan Němec’s The Party and the Guests (1966), Dušan Makavejev’s W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), Wojciech Has’ Hourglass Sanatorium (1973), Andrzej Żuławski’s The Devil (1972)

Week 5 – Surrealism in contemporary cinema
Jan Švankmajer, Brothers Quay, Terry Gilliam, Guy Maddin, David Lynch

(This content is indicative and not a detailed plan of each class)

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Virginie Sélavy is the founder and editor of Electric Sheep, the online magazine for transgressive cinema. She was the co-director of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London from January 2015 to December 2017. She has edited the collection of essays The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, and has written a chapter for Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin and contributed to World Directory Cinema: Eastern Europe and Film Locations: Cities of the Imagination – London. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Sight & Sound, Rolling Stone France, Cineaste and Frieze. She lectures on film and regularly gives talks on topics ranging from women exploitation directors to Michael Reeves, sorcery and the counterculture. She is currently working on a book on Sado-Masochism in cinema.

For more information visi

Le fantastique: A Curious Tour of the French Weird

Le fantastique: A Curious Tour of the French Weird
Lecturer: Virginie Sélavy
Dates: 25 October 2018
Time: 6.30pm
Venue: BFI Southbank, London
Fee: £6.50
Tickets go on on sale at 11.30am on 25 September 2018
BFI website

Electric Sheep founder Virginie Sélavy traces the development of Le Cinéma fantastique in a talk to introduce the forthcoming BFI film season ‘Fantastique: The Dream Worlds of French Cinema‘.

“What pleases is what is terrible, gentle, and poetic”
Georges Franju

From the very first films by the Lumière brothers, French cinema has been perceived as tending towards the real; but there’s an alternative tradition that also stretches back to the dawn of cinema – that of the fantastique. It incorporates elements of fantasy, horror and science fiction into bizarre, atmospheric tales in which the unexplained and the supernatural intrude into reality. From the magical illusions of Georges Méliès, the fantastique flourished again during the German occupation, reached poetic heights in the films of Jean Cocteau and Georges Franju, found parallel expressions in Belgium, and was revitalised in the post-New Wave 1970s and beyond.

Taking in fairy tales, horror and science fiction, the marvellous and the strange, the dreamlike and the uncanny, Le Cinéma fantastique is a French filmic tradition ripe for rediscovery. In this talk, Virginie Sélavy will trace its development from Georges Méliès to Lucile Hadžihalilović, looking at the influence of Surrealism, the wartime golden age and the experiments of the 1970s, up to the present day.

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Virginie Sélavy is the founder and editor of Electric Sheep, the online magazine for transgressive cinema. She was the co-director of the London branch of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies from January 2015 to December 2017. She has edited the collection of essays The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, and has written about Jean Rollin, Michael Powell and Victorian London on film. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Sight & Sound, Cineaste and Monstrum. She regularly gives talks and runs courses on topics ranging from women exploitation directors to Surrealism and May 68. She is currently working on a book on Sado-Masochism in cinema.

Witches and Witchfinders: Sorcery and counterculture in the films of Michael Reeves

Witches and Witchfinders: Sorcery and counterculture in the films of Michael Reeves

Lecturer: Virginie Sélavy

Dates: 17 October 2018

Time: 7pm – 10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital, London

Fees: £8 advance/£10 on the door

Tickets are on sale via www.wegottickets.com

Horse Hospital website

To mark the 50th anniversary of the release of Witchfinder General, Electric Sheep founder Virginie Sélavy explores the sorcery theme that runs through director Michael Reeves’s work.

Best known for his savage tale of religious persecution Witchfinder General (1968), director Michael Reeves only completed three feature films in his short life. Despite this, he remains a hugely influential figure of 1960s British cinema, and a singular voice in the countercultural context of the time. Through his three films, Reeves offered a unique and contrary take on the dominant themes of the period, notably freedom and rebellion, which he strikingly framed, in all three cases, within stories of sorcery.

Indebted to Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960) and sharing its female star, Barbara Steele, Reeves’s first feature film, Revenge of the Blood Beast (1966), drops a hip young English couple into an Eastern European backwater steeped in legend and superstition. His following film, The Sorcerers (1967), locates witchery in contemporary London and connects it with the nascent psychedelic scene. With its tale of a young couple tormented by a spiteful witch hunter, Witchfinder General is no less permeated by contemporary concerns with generational conflict, oppressive authority and individual revolt, despite the fact that it is set in the 17th century.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the release of Witchfinder General, this talk will examine the sorcery theme that runs through Reeves’s work in relation to key countercultural ideas and place it in the context of other witch films of the period. It will show that under the cool, liberated, thrill-seeking, free-love, anti-authoritarian surface of the 1960s Reeves sees the dark side of the cultural revolution and reveals mankind’s eternal propensity for violence.

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Virginie Sélavy is the founder and editor of Electric Sheep, the online magazine for transgressive cinema. She was the co-director of the London branch of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies from January 2015 to December 2017. She has edited the collection of essays The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, and has written about Jean Rollin, Michael Powell and Victorian London on film. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Sight & Sound, Cineaste and Monstrum. She regularly gives talks and runs courses on topics ranging from women exploitation directors to Surrealism and May 68. She is currently working on a book on Sado-Masochism in cinema.

For more information visit the Horse Hospital website.

21 May 2018: Sex, Politics, Art and Revolution: French Cinema in 1968

21 May 2018: Sex, Politics, Art and Revolution: French Cinema in 1968

Lecturer: Virginie Sélavy
Dates: 21 May 2018
Time: 7pm
Venue: Close-Up Film Centre, London
Fees: £15 / £12 conc. / £10 Close-Up members
Close-Up website

Electric Sheep founder Virginie Sélavy explores the influence of May 68 on the major French films released that year and looks at their contrasting vision.

1968 was a year of revolutionary turmoil all over the world, from anti-Vietnam war, feminist activism and civil rights protests in the USA to student demonstrations in Japan and Mexico and uprisings in Poland and Czechoslovakia. In France, student protests and a general workers’ strike brought the country to a standstill in May 68, marking a key moment of social, ideological and generational rupture.

Continue reading 21 May 2018: Sex, Politics, Art and Revolution: French Cinema in 1968

Rainer Werner Fassbinder at the BFI

fassbinder-on-set-01
Fassbinder on set

RW Fassbinder

April and May 2017

BFI Southbank, London

BFI website

Dead by 37, openly bi-sexual, constantly controversial: Rainer Werner Fassbinder was arguably post-war Germany’s greatest filmmaker. Now the BFI celebrates the maverick director with a major retrospective. Here’s the line-up announcement:

Running from Monday 27 March – Wednesday 31 May, BFI Southbank’s major Fassbinder retrospective will celebrate the constantly controversial and fearless filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, arguably post-war Germany’s greatest director. This extensive retrospective will feature most of the great auteur’s huge body of work, from gangster movies to melodramas, social satires to queer dramas. Fassbinder is perhaps one of the most prolific filmmakers of the 20th century; his first 10 features were astonishingly made in less than two years, and he went on to make another 30 by the time he died young at 37. A fearless artist who knew no taboos, Fassbinder combined scathing social criticism with profound psychological insight.

The season kicked off last month with a special screening of Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) and an introductory talk Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Wunderkind, Iconoclast, Star by Martin Brady (King’s College London, GSSN), followed by the re-release of Fear Eats the Soul (1973) on Friday 31 March. Playing on extended run during the season, this was Fassbinder’s international breakthrough. A bold reworking of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Fear Eats the Soul is an unconventional love story which combines lucid social analysis with devastating emotional power; arguably Fassbinder’s best loved film, it is still, 40 years on, burningly relevant.

Forthcoming highlights in April and May include a Fassbinderian Politics Study Day and The Bitter Tears of Fassbinder’s Women: A Symposium. There is also a Fassbinder collection available on BFI Player+ from 31 March, comprised of 10 of his best-loved films including Fear Eats the Soul (1973), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) and Fox and His Friends (1974). BFI and Arrow Films, who will be distributing the re-release of Fear Eats the Soul, have also worked together to make a number of the films available across the UK in new DCPs.

An insatiable film addict from early childhood, Fassbinder drew inspiration from the French New Wave and, later, from the Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk and others. Running alongside the season, the BFI’s regular Big Screen Classics series will showcase some of these films; Fassbinder’s Favourites will include Sirk melodramas All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959), pioneering French New Wave films Vivre sa vie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962) and Le Signe du lion (Eric Rohmer, 1962), as well as Hollywood classics such as All About Eve (Joseph L Mankiewicz, 1950) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953). The series will also continue in May with further titles Fassbinder has cited as influential to him.

Study Day: Fassbinderian Politics
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films – whether about rebellious housewives, gay hustlers, or communist terrorists – are all deeply political. But he was a contradictory and provocative artist who defied categorisation. At this study day we’ll attempt to reveal what Fassbinder really stood for. Through thoughtful presentations and engaging discussion, we’ll examine his preoccupation with marginal figures (and intersectional solidarity among them), re-evaluate his provocative representations of LGBT characters, and consider how his forensic analysis of class exploitation contrasts with his critique of left-wing institutions. Join us to discover a radical filmmaker whose complex politics have profound relevance today.
Tickets £6.50
Sat 22 April 12:00-15:30 NFT3

Fassbinder: Television Pioneer
From ambitious series like Berlin Alexanderplatz to TV-movie melodramas, Fassbinder embraced television as a medium and a platform. In this talk, film scholar Mattias Frey (University of Kent) explores how Fassbinder exploited TV’s artistic potential, how the funding it offered made his career possible (he would surely be making Netflix series today), and how he seized upon TV as a way of communicating provocative ideas to a
mass audience, in their own homes.
Tickets £6
Tue 2 May 20:30 Library

The Bitter Tears of Fassbinder’s Women: A Symposium
TRT 210min
Stories of female desire, pain, and resilience are at the heart of Fassbinder’s films. The glamorous divas, heartbroken cleaners, rebellious housewives, and transsexual sex workers that populate his cinematic world were forged in the heat of vital (and sometimes turbulent) creative collaborations with female actors who would return again and again to work with him. Join us at this essential symposium to explore Fassbinder’s
complex creative and personal entanglements with key female actor-collaborators (such as Hanna Schygulla, Margit Carstensen, Brigitte Mira and Irm Hermann), and the mixture of cruelty, fascination and empathy he showed for his vital and compelling female characters.
Sat 13 May 12:00-15:30 NFT3

Philosophical Screens: Repression and Release in Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette
TRT 70min
In the latest in our popular series exploring cinema through a philosophical lens, we consider Fassbinder’s spiky, provocative critique of German bourgeois values. Chinese Roulette depicts a savage world riven with infidelity and loathing, where people cruelly goad each other into revealing their deepest secret thoughts and desires – but what truths does Fassbinder unearth? Join film philosophers William Brown, John Ó Maoilearca and Catherine Wheatley as we explore how Fassbinder gives expression to the darkest chambers of the German soul via his repressed characters and their relation to space, objects and each other.
Free to ticket-holders of Chinese Roulette on Wed 10 May (but must be booked via the box office due to limited capacity), otherwise £6
Wed 10 May 20:00 Blue Room

BFI Course: The Many Faces of Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Martin Brady and Erica Carter (King’s College London, GSSN) will co-ordinate guest speakers and present sessions themselves in this eight-week course to accompany our Fassbinder retrospective. Illustrated discussions and lectures will take a closer look at Fassbinder’s obsession with Hollywood genres, the stars he cast and the West German context from which his films emerged – from student revolts, through queer
culture to terrorism! Beginners and experts welcome.
Course fee £96, concs £80 *No session on Thu 18 May
Every Thu* from 13 April – 8 June 18:30-20:30 Studio

Full listings and booking details for all the films included in the Fassbinder season as well as ‘Big Screen Classics: Fassbinder’s Favourits’ can be found on the BFI website.

Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin

Lost in New York
Lost in New York

The Canadian micro-publisher Spectacular Optical is pleased to announce a new book focused on the career of French fantasy and horror filmmaker Jean Rollin, Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin, penned by all women critics, scholars and film historians. Set to be released in the summer of 2017, this collection of essays covers the wide range of Rollin’s career from 1968’s Le viol du vampire through his 2010 swansong, Le masque de la méduse, touching upon his horror, fantasy, crime and sex films—including many lesser seen titles. The book closely examines Rollin’s core themes: his focus on overwhelmingly female protagonists, his use of horror genre and exploitation tropes, his reinterpretations of the fairy tale and fantastique, the influence of crime serials, Gothic literature and the occult, as well as much more.

Lost Girls is the third book in Spectacular Optical’s ongoing series of limited run film and pop culture books, which includes Kid Power! (2014) and Satanic Panic: Pop Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015) and will precede the previously announced Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror in Film and Television, which will be released in fall of 2017.

Curated and edited by Samm Deighan (Diabolique), contributors to Lost Girls include some of the most important critical voices to emerge over the last decade of genre journalism: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (Senses of Cinema), Kat Ellinger (Diabolique), Virginie Sélavy (Electric Sheep), Alison Nastasi (Satanic Panic: Pop Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s), Marcelline Block (Art Decades), Rebecca Booth (Diabolique), Michelle Alexander (Cinemadrome), Lisa Cunningham (The Laughing Dead: The Horror-Comedy Film From Bride of Frankenstein to Zombieland), Heather Drain (Dangerous Minds), Erin Miskell (That’s Not Current), Gianna D’Emilio (Diabolique)—and more to be confirmed.

More details, including cover art, full table of contents, and information about the book’s forthcoming crowdfunding campaign will be announced in April 2017.

About Spectacular Optical:

Owned and operated by film writer and programmer Kier-La Janisse (House of Psychotic Women) with managing editor Paul Corupe (Canuxploitation.com), Spectacular Optical is a Canadian indie press that specialises in film and pop culture books, in addition to featuring articles, essays and interviews on the Spectacular Optical website on a year-round basis. www.spectacularoptical.ca

Little Houses, Big Forests (desire is no light thing)

Siouxzi Connor

Little Houses, Big Forests
By Siouxzi Connor
Repeater Books
88pp. £12.99

We are pleased to announce the publication of Little Houses, Big Forests (desire is no light thing), an anthology of essays, short fiction, novel extracts and film stills – the first containment in one place of the writing and visual work of Electric Sheep contributor Siouxzi Connor. The book is an invitation to get lost within varied landscapes of its pages: middle-of-nowhere Australia, the minds of Susan Sontag and W.G Sebald, and, most prominently, the proverbial forests of all of our childhoods. There are, however, a few thematic paths to trace through these landscapes. Coming-of-age desire, our uneasy sense of self when isolated in nature and female sexuality become the mile-markers. The invitation to get lost is an invitation to come out the other side with the sense that being lost is not necessarily a state to be avoided but one in which we can occasionally luxuriate in.

About the Author

Siouxzi Connor is an Australian-born writer and experimental filmmaker. Her work, which explores ecology, anthropology and female sexuality, has appeared in galleries, anthologies and cultural journals internationally. A former fellow of the Berlin Institute for Cultural Enquiry, she is based in Berlin with the creative collective uferlos.Berlin Studios.

Watch an interview with Siouxzi Connor about her new book:

Close-Up Cinema Opening

Close Up cinema opening party.docx

Date: Saturday 4 July 2015

Doors: 8pm

Venue: Close-Up

Address: 97 Sclater Street, London, E1 6HR

Price: FREE

Close-Up website

Join us in celebrating with our friends at Close-Up who have just opened their new independent cinema in Shoreditch. As other cinemas are converting to digital, Close-Up will continue to offer 16mm and 35mm reel-to-reel as well as digital projection, showcasing classic, contemporary, documentary, experimental and artists’ films. Plus, if you become a member, you can also enjoy 20% discount on cinema tickets for you and a guest, along with free unlimited access to their extensive Video Library and 10% discount in the cafe and bar.

Running from 8pm till late on Saturday 4 September 2015, there will be screenings of a selection of films throughout the night, while the door to the projection booth will be kept open so you can marvel at the two restored 35mm projectors in all their glory.

To mark the launch of the cinema Close-Up present six films by John Cassavetes during July, including Faces, Shadows, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, A Woman under the Influence, Love Streams and, of course, Opening Night.

For more information on the regular Close-Up cinema programme visit the Close-Up website.

Jason Wood becomes Artistic Director of Film at HOME Manchester

Home_Manchester
Plan for the cinema at HOME, Manchester

Electric Sheep friend and contributor Jason Wood has announced that he is leaving Curzon to become Artist Director of Film at HOME, Manchester. Jason will programme the best in international contemporary cinema as well as commissioning, curating and encouraging cross-art form collaboration in conjunction with his co-artistic directors. The film programme at HOME will embrace the evolving the role of cinema space as an environment in which live performance and cross-art events can play an increasingly important role.

Jason takes the role following five years at Cuzon Director of Programming at Curzon. Curzon praised his service to the company, his passionate commitment to cinema, immaculate taste and wealth of expertise and thanked Jason for his contribution to all aspects of the group.

HOME is a £25m new cultural centre for Manchester, opening to the public in Spring 2015, which will produce and present an ambitious programme of contemporary visual art, film and theatre. Formed from the merger of two of Manchester’s cultural organisations, Cornerhouse and the Library Theatre Company, HOME’s programme will directly involve artists and audiences. The new building, designed by Dutch architects Mecanoo, will feature five purpose-built cinema screens as well as digital production and broadcast facilities, a 500-seat theatre; a 150-seat flexible theatre; a 500m2, 4m high gallery space; five cinema screens and a café bar and restaurant.