directors lounge monthly screenings
johnny welch
arcane rhythms
Thursday, 25 October 2018
21:00
Z-Bar
Bergstraße 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte
Johnny Welch, filmmaker and photographer from Sydney, Australia lives in Berlin for more than 3 years and is an active member of Labor Berlin. Since coming to Berlin, his work has become more strongly connected with the aesthetic of analog film, with the possibilities of optical printing. Even if edited and projected digitally, analog compositing seems to allow him to create a richer image of high density and depth.
Based on black and white techniques (mostly), the films seem to explore sheer blackness, instead of a black and white aesthetic. Strongly connected with punk music, dark wave and electronic noise, the filmmaker achieves a stunning quality of deep black color with his films. Experimental techniques of emulsion lifts and cracks, combined with black ink, sometimes with an additional tint of red or toning with blue, are combined with dark images of male and female characters. The driving rhythm of the sound track enhances the impression of blackness. Another connection is Aleister Crowley, a controversial figure, and a British occultist from the beginning of the 20th century who inspired a number of important artists and filmmakers like Kenneth Anger and even Fernando Pessoa. Welch's film Aurum (super8 / digital) from 2018 is a contribution to Crowley's Liber 777, a book related to occult or cabalistic games with numbers. For Johnny Welch, the occupation and meditation with occult theory may be a search for liberating ideas, or it may even be used as a release from the haunting personal messages once ago sent by peers. (Discharge Working I and II, 2017/18).
For the viewer, the work has an attracting, maybe haunting quality, tinted with a stunning black color. The black sun (in Aurum) for example is an amazing symbol without the need of occult references, and it is a beautiful image interwoven with blackness of painted film material that may stay in the mind of the viewer as a striking image on its own account.
The artist will be present and available for Q&A after the screening. Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr
Artist Link:
https://www.johnnywelchfilm.com/
Links:
Z-Bar - http://www.z-bar.de/
Directors Lounge - http://directorslounge.net
Playlist:
Discharge Working II (16mm, 5Min, 2018)
I. Darkness: Flesh hate breeding half slaves. Division. Hell adores infinite fools.
A. Blood: Dissolve fear beyond Eyes. Harmony. New Priest kills the Old.
O. Sun: Drinking Fire of Fire. Undulations. Burning in Splendrous Desire.
Discharge Working I (Super 8, 5Min, 2017)
In the celluloid mind a memory is cut.
Obsession loops as the machine remembers the body.
In Mental Exorcise words are emptied.
Repeated to forget, permitted to decay.
Mind Loop: Ghost Trail (Super 8, 5Min, 2015)
This unreleased film experiment was made during the post production of 'Sonic Intangible' (2016). The film material; pulsating in fitful loops, is from an abandoned mental asylum. The soundtrack is field recordings from a haunted boiler room in Paris, captured during the production of the film.
Sonic Intangible (Super 8, 16Min, 2016)
Three voices from the European electronic music scene explore the unseen shadow
side of the sonic realm. Each part is accompanied by a dreamlike vignette shot
in the cities they occupy.
Featuring: Max Leonard Hitchings, Zoé Zanias & Andy Bolus
Music: Amnertia, Keluar, Evil Moisture
Aurum (Super8, 31Min, 2018)
Exploiting Aleister Crowley's Liber 777 as structuring device;
each image in the film combines to form a sigil.
The performers evoke Chthonian rhythms to magnify intent.
The music drives a hypnotic path through suspension of the mind
into the realm of the senses.
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