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Kosmica is a monthly event run by The Arts Catalyst that brings together people interested in sharing cultural ideas about space and will take over The Box at FACT tonight (check out this previous blog for more info)
We were excited to find out that there will be a special screening of Ulrike Kubatta’s She Should Have Gone to the Moon, a documentary about the American Pilot Jerri Truhill. She was a pilot in the 1950s and joined 12 other people to be secretly trained to become America’s first female astronauts as part of the Mercury 13. Originally more than 100 pilots had been invited, those with more than 1000 hours of flight time, but it was only 13 that could pass the strenuous testing. (This involved the freezing of the inner ear and electric shocks!) Unfortunately the Mercury 13 never made it to the moon, the male prejudice at the time proved too much. The first woman in space was Russian, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963, American had their first woman in space 20 years after this.
She Should Have Gone to the Moon explores the question - what was it like to get so close to leaving the Earth’s atmosphere but still keeping your feet firmly on the ground? Instead of making a “normal documentary”, the director puts herself in Jerrie’s shoes, trying to get just a taste of what it might have been like to be her in the 1960s as well as interviewing Jerri in the present day.
Kosmica will take place between 7pm – 10pm tonight and Ulrike be on hand to introduce her film. Entry is free, but tickets required. Book online, in person at the Box Office, or by calling 0871 902 5737.
Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans is a tale of sex, threats, murder and a bit more of all three for good measure. Made in 1927, it was one of the last great films of the silent film era as Hollywood was moving onto the “talkies” and directed by German director, F.W. Murnau.
A 1920s femme fatale (dress head to toe in black satin smoking that all important cigarette) has arrived in a small farming community on vacation and has set her sights on a young farmer. That wouldn’t be so bad, except the farmer is already married. She dances a crazed dance and the farmer cannot get her, and her promises of a better life, out of his head. There is witchcraft afoot. Soon the femme fatale entices the farmer into plotting the plan for a perfect murder, the murder of his wife.
The characters in Sunrise don’t actually have names, this is meant to give the viewer the sense of a universal love story (though how universal a love story is which involves the murdering of your wife… I am not sure!) The first intertitle reads, “this song of the Man and his Wife is of no place and every place; you might hear it anywhere, at any time”. Pretty menacing...
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans will be screening at 4.30pm on Sunday. You can buy tickets online, in person at the Box Office, or by calling 0871 902 5737
Michael Szpakowski, one of the artists featured in tonight's Artist Cine Club tells us what to expect...
For the last four or five years filmmaker Kerry Baldry has been curating and organising national and international showings of selections of artist made films united by the sole criterion of being a minute or less in length. Each ‘volume’ is between 50 minutes and an hour in length and features both long standing and well known makers of artist film, such as Guy Sherwin, Steven Ball and Catherine Elwes but spans the whole gamut to newcomers and ‘outsiders’ too.
The first three volumes were compiled on an invitation basis, volumes 4 & 5 as the result of both invitations and an open call.
Baldry has received no funding for this; it is a labour of love and it is all the more impressive that she not only compiles and elegantly sequences the volumes but seems, in a quiet way, to be unable to take no for an answer when it comes to arranging screenings.
There’s a long history of valuing the miniature in most art traditions; the Japanese netsuke (and of course the haiku, a form that springs insistently to my mind at least when I watch many of these films), the Indian and Persian miniature, the place of the study, sketch, album-leaf and impromptu at the heart of the European cultural tradition and a cult of the fragment arising out of the material circumstances of the transmission of the European Greek and Roman heritage – Catullus, Sappho &c. and the subsequent reflection of this, particularly in a strain of 19th century romanticism.
Apart from the general cultural antecedents of the One Minutes there’s a particular tale to tell in moving image: the quality of being both lapidary and epic that pertains to the early films of the Lumière brothers, then the gigantism that gripped some of the greats of the experimental film tradition –Brakhage, Markopoulos, Frampton, the pithy one-liners (even when long!) of Fluxus and the narrowing down of size that came with the opportunity in the, perhaps less market driven than today, late sixties through to the early eighties for artist film to get a showing on TV, sometimes as ‘interventions’, sometimes in small gaps between programmes, sometimes in dedicated late night strands, the influence too of a growing tendency to present in galleries as well as screenings.
Finally, of course, in 2005, came YouTube. I’m not arguing that the films you’ll see here tonight have all been directly influenced by YouTube and video on the net (some clearly have, but the making of a number of them preceded both innovations) but that our tolerance of and understanding of short form video, which enables a programme like this to seem not only possible but almost inevitable, arises out of the new relationship with the moving image that sitting closely in front of a monitor and watching (until very recently) works that were of necessity somehow miniature, has gifted us. (Miniature, initially, both in window size and length, now to some extent still length, though the whole ground is shifting again substantially.) Actually I’d argue that the one thing missing in the public showings of the One Minutes is that ability to pause, to replay, almost to ‘handle’ characteristic of the PC – perhaps a DVD for sale sometime?
I want to say a bit about the films themselves.
There are some kinds of content that extreme short form moving image seems to make particularly welcome:
Finally, and in conclusion I throw this down as a kind of gauntlet, there’s a very special kind of one minute film where, after seeing it, we blink our eyes in disbelief that only a minute has passed because what we have just seen seems to have been so packed with incident or so suggestive of the breadth and wonder of the world we live in, or has brought forth so many powerful and (we thought) long buried resonances from our unconscious.
I have no intention of identifying my two or three candidates in this volume for that kind of richness. I leave it to you, dear reader, to watch attentively and thoughtfully and decide which are yours.
Michael Szpakowski Jan 2012
Artist, writer and Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at Writtle College
Note:
(1) There’s a fairly substantial review by me of the first four volumes of the series in the forthcoming first issue of the Moving Image Review and Journal, which should be out in the next few weeks. www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=207/
In connection with that review I posted a few examples from previous volumes on the curated video site I edit: DVblog.org www.dvblog.org//?p=8049 / www.dvblog.org//?p=6212
and there’s another piece by Kerry Baldry here: www.dvblog.org//?p=6270

Kosmica Liverpool will take place at FACT on the 31 January from 7pm – 10pm. Entry is free but booking is required. You can get your tickets online, in person at the Box Office or by calling 0871 902 5737. Watch this space for a preview of other featuring artists in Kosmica!