FILM
More Light -
Curated by: Willy Le Maitre
Venue: Innis Town Hall
Date: Thursday May 29, 2008
Time: 8pm
Cost: $8 at the door, or included in the Festival Pass
More Light refers to what are reputed to be Goethe’s last words. For a man who spent over 40 years looking for the key to colour, one can appreciate the poetry of his laconic words. What sort of future did he see in the inventions to come?
Since 1832 the phrase ‘More Light’ has hovered in the air as though illuminated from within. A pact with electricity has turned our night into a colony. I don’t think he was calling for film and video projections per se but perhaps he anticipated how we would learn to travel in a beam.I wanted to show films of what the light was looking at.
Looking for them, I found that it’s the same for us; that projected light looks to a memory of the sun. Our screens provide a constellation prize for cities too bright for their own stars. The compliment to expecting to see is that of wanting to show. In all exposures and rich varieties of colour we still look to the invisible to frame what we can see. While we are flipping the switch did someone ask what was the speed of darkness? As one answers, one becomes light.
- Willy LeMaitre
The Program:
The Light
Brian Doyle
2003
The Light reveals a world that cannot see its way. The invisible populace of this world, present only through the objects of their creation, attempts to illuminate paths through the unknown.
10 min.
U.S.A.
Alice Sees the Light
Ariana Gerstein
2006
Alice laments the loss of her view of the universe, one of her initial reasons for living in the country. The change in her environment is the result of “security lighting” for a large corporate storage facility.
6 min. hdcam
U.S.A.
Circle
Jack Chambers
1967-68
CIRCLE is a nature film divided into three sections. Every morning, at around the same time, for 365 days, Chambers filmed his backyard shot through a hole he had made in the side of his house. In the first section, as ritual, Chambers prepares himself and his filmmaking equipment to shoot a film. The second section, the everyday recording of a single scene, is enlivened by a variety of focus and f-stop changes by which Chambers continually invigorates the composition through to CIRCLE’s paradigmatic final section.
28 min. 16mm
Canada
Light, Darkness, and Colours
1999
Henrik Boëtius, Marie Louise Lauridsen and Marie Louise Lefèvre
WolfgangGoethe was a key figure in the cultural landscape of the XIX century. A gifted poet, essayist and philosopher, he was also a well-known scientist fascinated by the beauty of nature. In 1810, one century after Newton’s works, Goethe published a text entitled Zur Farbenlehre which outlined his Theory of Colours, thereby providing new insights into the study of light, colors and the phenomena that control them. Goethe’s theory acts as a guiding lead throughout Light, Darkness and Colours, a documentary that takes us on a fascinating journey through the universe of colors.Goethe felt, like any artist, that one could not talk about light without touching upon the concept of darkness. In his investigations he focused on the so-called “light - darkness polarity” and made scientific discoveries using innovative methods that mixed art and science together.He spent more than 40 years of his life on the Theory of Colours, which in a sense summarizes the whole of his thinking and especially the link between science and his poetry. Goethe himself realized that his work was so stunningly innovative that it would only be understood generations after his death.In keeping with Goethe’s method, the three directors Henrik Boëtius, Marie Louise Lefèvre and Marie Louise Lauridsen explore the laws of nature and the phenomena associated to human sensory perception. Using strikingly beautiful cinematography, and duplicating Goethe’s and Newton’s experiments on camera, they have crafted an excellent documentary characterized by scientific accuracy and narrative clarity.
60min
Denmark
Gran Prix at the IX Prix Leonardo festival, Parma, 1999
Curator Biography
Willy Le Maitre has been making media art works since 1988. He has been oriented to video as a live form that has served as a pivot point in collaborations between himself, musicians, writers, and visual artists. Currently based in Toronto, he enjoyed a creative dialogue for over 10 years with New York based composer Eric Rosenzveig. Located in different cities their collaborative systems were incubated over the network. An example of his work is The Appearance Machine; an autonomous system that generated media assets and content streams from the reanimation of consumer refuse and distributed its live results to logged galleries. His work has been presented, among other places, at The New Museum, the Kitchen, FIMA in Victoriaville Quebec., ICMC in Banff, Canada, and ISEA. His work has received numerous grants and awards including LIFE 3.0 competition for artificial life artworks in Madrid and The Telefilm Canada prize at the Images Festival of Independent Film, 2000, Toronto.
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