Sunday, September 22, 2019 at 7:30 pm

Doors 7 PM; LA Filmforum pricing applies for this event. See below for details.

L’Abominable is an artist-run film laboratory near Paris.

Since 1996, it offers filmmakers the tools to work with silver-based film material: super-8, 16mm and 35mm. Different machines used for film production have been pooled together: one can develop negative or reversal originals, create blow-ups or optical printer effects, edit, work on sound or strike prints.

Over the years, a wide array of makers have hand-produced an astonishing selection of films outside the realm of large corporations, including “live” film performances or installations using the film medium. The scope of what is produced there and the specificity of practices make L’Abominable a unique place of creation, a living conservatory of cinematographic techniques.  Very much akin to the Echo Park Film Center, L’Abominable’s filmmakers retain the art and the artisanal in each hand-crafted frame.  Filmforum hosts a new touring program of recent works by filmmakers there, all films having their LA premieres.

Tickets: $10 general; $6 students (with ID)/seniors; free for Filmforum Members. Available in advance from Brown Paper Tickets at https://labominable.bpt.me or at the door.

For more information: www.lafilmforum.org or 323-377-7238. 

Screening:

Les films du dés-apparaître – #1 – Mes cheuvs dans ta*
By Oscar Hache
2018, 16mm, b&w, silent, 4’
“Les films du dés-apparaître” is a film collection of films aiming to descend toward the deepness of the film’s technical properties.
Grain, negative/positive, continuity/discontinuity, movement/steadyness and others constituent oppositions are dismembered in a progressive and recurrent way, or on the model of the methodical determination with which the vulture emaciates his prey.
“#1 – Mes cheuvs dans ta ********” is the first step of the dismembering
*(the pun of the title doesn’t work in english, cause “apparaître” is appearing and “disparaître” is disappearing (the two words are too close in english) but it means appearing and disappearing in the same time…)

Cailloux, rocher, algues
By David Dudouit
2018, Super 8 blown up to 16mm, b&w, silent, 5’40
In this film David Dudouit reworks some Super8 images filmed on the île de Sein.
Using an optical printer he compose three paintings in black and white of a blazing beauty.

David Dudouit has been filming for years, frame by frame exclusively. He was a friend and comrade of many of us at L’Abominable ; he passed away in 2015. When he did he was still just starting to assemble and organise his images in order to share them with an audience. With the complicity of his family, Stefano Canapa and Guillaume Mazloum started to select a number of reels and produce 16mm prints of them, leaving them untouched. Those rushes offer a unique gaze upon the places he travelled through during his various trips. The 24 frames per second that are being screened often come from hours if not entire days of reality. The perception of time and space is deeply modified. From this singular practice, a delicate and almost magical cinematic act is being expressed.
Midnight Orange

By Gautam Valluri

2018, 16mm, color, opt. sound, 11’

A film about unresolved crescendos, thwarted anticipations and unmanaged escalations told through architecture gone awry.
Filmed in the tombs of the Paigah family in Hyderabad, India, noise and silence, flicker and stillness tell the tale of a tradition of architecturally outdoing your ancestors, even in death’s eternal sleep.

El Oro de Cajamarca

By Alexandre Regol

2019, 16mm, b&w and color, opt. sound, 16’

A black and white ballad through Tolima’s green mountains, talking to its inhabitants. The eye sees the surface of things, but it seems that hidden behind the visible, something could reshape this whole world.

Trilogie carnassière #1
By Carole Thibaud; Sound: Mariane Moula

2018, 16mm, color, opt. sound, 3’

The first part of this carnassial trilogy is a chicken slaughter. This film was made with a JK optical printer, of 30 meters of 16mm color negative, shot in a small farm in Maine-et-Loire. It was print, re-print, cut, edited, sometimes manhandled. To bring out the beauty and the music from images of struggle and blood. Made at Mire lab (Nantes), Crater-lab (Barcelona) and L’Abominable (La Courneuve).

Dos sueños después (Two Dreams Later)
By Pilar Monsell
2017, 16mm, color, opt. sound, 18’
Several dreams, dozens of hotel rooms, an escape. A pine forest. Some women gazing out to sea, seen from behind. Images and sounds create the reverse angle of happiness.

Cactos

a film by Leonor Guerra

2019, Super 8 blown up to 16mm, b&w, opt. sound, 9’
The observation of cactus was for her a recent activity. Her curiosity was aroused by the arid beauty of these plants, filled with tusks crimped into its stems. Shortly after, she discovered that the night is favorable to its flowering, helped by bats, nocturnal butterflies and other lunar animals.

Filmed in a garden in Oaxaca, this garden-film crossed by the fleeting details of vegetal forms, by camera movements and slow motion, composes in fragments a vision that launches a look both close and intimate on the botanical elements.
Septième Fraction (Seventh Fraction)
By Guillaume Mazloum
2015, 16mm, b&w, opt. sound, 45’
“What things were interred and sacrificed amid magic incantations!” — One Way Street by Walter Benjamin.
Fractions is a films series in seven sequences, each with a pattern and a reference to a text of a political nature, to create a space for reflection on the scope and responsibility of these images.

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Los Angeles Filmforum screenings are supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.

Los Angeles Filmforum is the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation. 2019 is our 44th year.

Memberships available, $70 single, $115 dual, or $50 single student

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