The Light & Shadow Salon
presents
INCOHERENT CINEMA: BERTRAND MANDICO and KATRIN OLAFSDOTTIR
Doors open at 7:00pm, programme begins at 7:30pm sharp
(£5 entry on the door)
A selection of films and Incoherence Manifest presented by the authors : Bertrand Mandico, Elina Löwensohn and Katrin Olafsdottir
curated by PAPAY GYRO NIGHTS
"International / INCOHERENCE manifesto was written on the 12th October 2012 by artists and film makers Katrin Olafsdottir and Bertrand Mandico as the declaration of the principles of Incoherent Cinema based on Incoherence of Screenplay, Manufacturing, Sophistication, Effects, Style, Time and Geography, Taste, Economy, Creativity, Acting and Cinematography.
This very special event in London is a rare chance to see recent films and to meet the authors. Most of the films included in the programme have never been seen on the British Isles before (with the exception of a special screening at Papay Gyro Nights Art Festival on the small and remote island of Papa Westray in Orkney.
We’d like to see Papay Gyro Nights as Incoherent Festival where works of art are shared equally with the landscape, the sea, irrational animals of the island and inarticulate magical beasts of folktale as well as human inhabitants and visitors. Some art works and ideas arrive to the island as a shipwreck and later become part of the place.
With Bertrand Mandico and Katrin Olafsdottir’s works, from the beginning, we had a feeling they were growing from the rocks and grass, from the forgotten lives and magic of the island. When the stories are told from the heart – the speech may stutter, become incoherent connecting unnameable. Incoherence is the sign of being honest in conversation with the elements of the surrounding world – the way to become a human, a beast, again and again and again in the world which is not only transforming and flowing, but also ceaselessly transmogrifying
The definition “short film” is not the right one for Bertrand Mandico and Katrin Ofafsdottir films – they can’t be defined by minutes of duration in the same way as poems can’t be defined by the number of lines, and dreams by timelines. The present time in the films is the past, present and future at every single moment – like in one single phrase from Bertrand Mandico’s film BORO IN THE BOX:
"My name is Walerian Borowczyk...
I'm dead polish filmmaker.
All my life I was locked in a box with a hole in it.."
..where every single present moment of the film is here and now and in the same time is going beyond of the time of birth and the time of death; where the camera is not an invention defined by technological progress, but the organic extension of the film maker"
Ivanov + Chan / PAPAY GYRO NIGHTS /
www.papaygyronights.papawestray.org
About the artists:
Bertrand Mandico was born in Toulouse, 1971. He got his degree in directing from the Gobelin animation school in Paris. A draftsman and photographer as well as a filmmaker, it was obvious from an early age that he had a very personal imaginary, full of macabre black humor. His short films have been successfully screened in Annecy and Cannes.
Elina Löwensohn is a cosmopolitan actress born in Romania, American and living in France. Her acting career includes films, videos, photos, performances and theater plays with a pronounced desire for metamorphosis. Starting her career in the early 90s, in the independent New York theatrical and cinema scene, she is remarked in the most famous films of Hal Hartley « Simple Men » and « Amateur », in « Basquiat » by Julian Schnabel and « Nadja » by Michael Almereyda. Her taste for the art of performance as well as her interest in the visual arts, leads her to collaborations with artists such as Marcelline Delbecq, Tom de Pekin, Valerie Mrejen, as well as the filmmaker Bertrand Mandico, for whom she played in many of his films: « Boro in the Box », « Living Still Life », « Our Lady of the Hormones »...
Together with Mandico, she imagines a series of films and polymorphous creations, exploring the mise en abyme of the director-actress relationship.
Katrín Ólafsdóttir’s background is dance and choreography and she started making Super 8 films as a teenager. She has directed and produced several short films and documentaries and is currently in post production of her first feature film The Wind Blew On, made religiously with a home made formula of Mutual Aid. Along with Bertrand Mandico she is founder of the film collective International/Incohérence. Katrin also does photographic work, video performances and installations. She and collaborator Steinunn Gunnlaugsdóttir have been in the habit of taking over abandoned spaces and perform symbolic attacks. Katrin has exhibited in museums and galleries and done installations in abandoned man made structures.
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The Light & Shadow Salon is a place for artists, writers and audience to meet and share ideas about the past, present and future of the moving image in all its forms.
The Salon is a place for exchange, interaction and cross-pollination and it welcomes active contributions and interventions from all its participants.
The Salon endeavours to support a structured and informed dialogue around film, the moving image and all that it involves: from magic to science, from sound to the eye, from ritualism to storytelling, from myth-making to hypnosis.
The Salon intends to act as a temporary and ephemeral container for all the work, ideas and people with an independent, radical and idiosyncratic nature, who renounce to find a home in existing movements/institutions but rather embrace the nomadic and transitory nature of art.
The Salon supports individual thought, inquisitive minds and a desire to further knowledge through dialogue and exchange.
‘So when you hear yourself invited to ‘see’, it is not the sight of this eye (of the flesh) that I would have you think about. You have another eye within, much clearer that that one, an eye that looks at the past, the present, and the future all at once, which sheds the light and keenness of its vision over all things, which penetrates things hidden and searches into complexities, needing no other light by which to see all this, but seeing by the light that it possesses itself.’ (Hugh of St Victor)