British sound artist and laptop performer Kaffe Matthews is a pioneer in the field of electronic improvisation, she is known for her site-specific sound works and live compositions.

Matthews takes her samples not from pre-existing recordings, but from the "live" environmental sounds of the venue in which she is playing or the surrounding area, she creates her sound by live-sampling. She is an extraordinary architect of real-time site-specific sonic explorations and she is well known for her improvisational works with either electronics alone or combined with acoustic instruments, creating pieces of sheer beauty.

Kaffe Matthews has worked and performed with many artists worldwide. One example is her work with NASA astronauts researching the sonic experience of space travel in Weightless Animals, which was awarded a Bafta in 2004. Currently she is directing a research project exploring sound, architecture, furniture and vibrations of the human body, Music for Bodies. She has designed a musical bed titled 'Sonic Bed'. The installation consists of a bed equipped with built-in loudspeakers; when installation visitors lie down on the bed, an endlessly changing music moves and vibrates up and down and around their body. Under the mattress of Sonic Bed there lies a network of loudspeakers including six very large subwoofers that produce very low frequencies that penetrate the body...

Kaffe Matthews and Music for Bodies:


For more information:
www.kaffematthews.net
http://www.annetteworks.com/

Olivier Smolders, an innovative Belgian experimental filmmaker and writer, best known for his spellbinding short films. Smolders creates a dreamlike state haunted by surrealist visions with his unique capacity to go from concrete, shockingly realistic visuals to surrealistically-interpreted dream images. Technically impeccable, and continuously bathed in magical, phantasmagoric light, his bizzare yet very sensual films can go far into intimacy, past the most pontificated aspects. The imagery of his works deal with disturbing visual parallels involving murder, sexual lust, religious iconography, reptiles and insects...
You can find out more about this magnificent director from this interview below:
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AN INTERVIEW WITH OLIVIER SMOLDERS
by Danny Neylon. Translation by Timothy Turner.

Danny Neylon: When were you first exposed to cinema?

Olivier Smolders: When I was about sixteen years old, my father, a sculptor, took me to see some retrospectives of filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Akira Kurosawa, to name a few.

DN: You were born in Léopoldville, the former Belgian Congo, in 1956 during a time of political upheaval. Some of your films (Nuit Noire, Mort à Vignole) explicitly exhibit an influence from this period. What are your memories of your birthplace or this time that have influenced your films?

OS: I only spent a very small amount of time in the Congo and thus only have a few memories of being there. It is therefore reconstructed memories, from family stories to a “collective Belgian unconsciousness” (Léopold II, Tintin, le Musée de l’Afrique), which have influenced my films. The Africa that I evoke in my films is very phantasmal and imaginary.

DN: You then went on to Belgium to study Roman philology, giving you a strong background in literature rather than film. What made you want to make films and when did you decide to start making your own films?

OS: I went to primary and secondary school in Belgium. Afterwards, I chose to pursue some literature studies at the university level, and I continued my education by studying cinematic direction at INSAS, a cinematic school in Brussels. Since then, I have been teaching French, cinema, and writing classes—all while making my films.

DN: What do you think about the current state of Belgian cinema? Whom are your favorite contemporary Belgian filmmakers?

OS: Belgian cinema is very much alive because it is diversified and unpredictable. As for my favorite contemporary Belgian filmmakers, I appreciate, for example, the films of Eric Pauwels, Thierry Knauff, and Claudio Pazienza.

DN: You started your own production company, Les Films du Scarabée, through which you have released your films. What made you decide to start your own production company?

OS: The desire to be free, independent, and responsible for my choices.

DN: Which of your films would you recommend watching first for those who are new to your works?

OS: I would recommend starting with Adoration and Mort à Vignole.

DN: How did you make the transition from making short films to a full feature like Nuit Noire? Was there anything especially difficult you encountered in the process?

OS: For me, it is exactly the same thing. I don’t grant more importance to a feature length film than a short one. The former is more burdensome to prepare, finance, and distribute, but those things aren’t in that practical order of difficulty. At the heart of things, it is really the same work.

DN: Nuit Noire has won several awards: Special Mention at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, Special Prize of the Jury at the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival, the Photography Award at the Lodz Camerimage Festival, and was the Official Selection at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema de Montreal. In your experience,how have audiences been receiving Nuit Noire? Did you ever anticipate this reaction?

OS: One always imagines a little the reactions of the public, but we’re never certain of anything. Nuit Noire aroused quite a number of diverse reactions, which is a rather good thing. The strangeness of the film leads to some strange reactions.

DN: What would you say to someone before they were to watch Nuit Noire? Or what would you say to those who might leave the film frustrated and confused?

OS: It seems the spectators are accustomed to often understanding cinema. Films often repeat the same information several times; however, Nuit Noire doesn’t work like that. I would invite the spectators to let themselves be carried by the story, the impressions, the music, and the environments, without seeking to explain everything in an intellectual fashion. This film reads like a poem, not like a mystery novel.

DN: Nuit Noire often inspires comparison to David Lynch's films. In other interviews you have mentioned David Lynch's Eraserhead and Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf as having an influence on you, the latter of which you cite as one of your favorite films. Are there any other films or directors that have greatly influenced your directorial style? What do you particularly find influential about these directors or works?

OS: I love mysterious films that put the spectator in a disturbing situation. This is evidently the case with certain films by David Lynch or Ingmar Bergman, but also of Federico Fellini, Robert Bresson, and Andrei Tarkovsky.

DN: If you were asked to show Nuit Noire with a handful of other films, which films would you choose and why?

OS: I would put Nuit Noire in the company of Luis Buñuel’s An Andalusian Dog and Peter Greenaway’s ZOO because they show, similarly, a line of “dreamlike writing”(unconsciousness seen by the Surrealists) and a “structural” line (Greenaway’s taste for formal variations).

DN: Nuit Noire has been described by many as Kafkaesque. In Adoration, your film based on the story of the Japanese murderer-cannibal Issei Sagawa, the works of Gérard de Nerval and Stephane Mallarmé are read. Your short film La Philosophy dans le boudoir is based on the work of the same name by the Marquis de Sade. You also cite the role of fairytales in Nuit Noire. What authors and literary works have had the largest influence on you and your films, directly or indirectly?

OS: That is a difficult question because I am a very elective reader in my choices. In general, I read with more pleasure poets and essayists than novelists.

DN: How did your collaboration with the Belgian women's choir Anakrouze in Nuit Noire take place? Their voices are particularly haunting and yet the rest of the film is unsettlingly quiet. To what effect do you use or choose not to use music in your films?

OS: I discovered that women’s choir during a concert and I asked them if they would like to work with me on the film. The choice of hymns—the lullabies above all—as well as the rhythm of their arrival in the soundtrack was rather intuitive: it is like a child’s nightmare that returns regularly. There are some hymns from eastern countries, somewhat associated with the scenes with the snow children. I made sure to avoid having an African universe of sound, which would have been redundant within the story told by the film.

DN: Many of the actors in Nuit Noire had little to no previous acting experience, but fit their roles very well. How did you go about finding and choosing your actors? How did you prepare them?

OS: A great part of the filming wasn’t recorded in direct sound since there is little dialogue. I was therefore able to talk during the takes and direct the actors with my voice. It was necessary in directing the tempo if I desired a sort of non-realistic scene that was a little slower, as if the film’s universe were plunged into a kind of torpor. I didn’t talk about the sense of the film or the contents of the scenes; I was content to describe the emotions, attitudes, gestures, and looks.

DN: From struggling with the past and memories in Nuit Noire, murder in Adoration, and the institutionalized children in Seuls, themes of repression and madness recur in your works, although in different forms. What do you find so fascinating about repression and madness?

OS: Those are extreme situations and, as such, they tell us some essential things about what we are and about the mystery of human nature.

DN: Your films often focus on delicate objects that evoke a sense of nostalgia and memory, including, for example, music boxes, photographs, and shells. How are these objects meaningful for you or your film’s characters? They seem to reinforce not only your motifs of loss and memory, but of life and death, and even the “life” that “dead” objects or old films can bring forth.

OS: Beyond nostalgia, these objects interest me by their forms and their strangeness. If they are sometimes signs of the past, death, or regret, they can also be signs of life, sharing, traveling, or bizarreness. It is all in the sense of the baroque “cabinets of curiosity” that I am an enthusiast of.

DN: You have also played with themes of religion in your shorts, where the symbol of the Christian cross is prevalent. The women in several of your films also seem to bear crosses frequently with violent imagery accompanying sexual imagery. What is the relationship between sexuality, violence, and religion in your films?

OS: It is notably the fruit of a Catholic education, but not solely. Some blurred links connect sexuality, violence, and rites in the majority of human cultures. Let us say that Catholicism was particularly imaginative in drawing pleasure from that “phantasmal territory.”

DN: With themes of repression, madness, violence, sexuality, and memory, Nuit Noire and its imagery lends itself easily to the impression that we are journeying into the “night” that is the unconscious. Were you influenced at all by psychoanalytical works when conceiving the film?

OS: Not really. It is more the “psychoanalysis of the schemes” like that of Alfred Hitchcock or the Surrealists! Artists normally only obtain general concepts from psychoanalysis and work from there.

DN: You are also a writer with several publications. Could you tell us about them? Do you have any works in progress?

OS: I am working on a little book that will be the catalog of an exposition, Cabinet of Curiosities, starting with my films and books, but it will be associated with other artists: sculptors, painters, photographers. This will take place in Charleroi in November of 2010.

DN: What films are you working on or have planned next? What ambitions do you have for yourself in film?

OS: I have a project in preparation but it is too early to talk about it. My only ambition in the matter of cinema will be and remain: to be able to continue to direct the films that I have chosen to make, when the right conditions are brought together, in all liberty…
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Many thanks to Danny Neylon and Timothy Turner for this gem!

BLACK NIGHT (NUIT NOIRE) trailer here

The above video is a transfiguration performance by a French contemporary multimedia artist Olivier de Sagazan and this work is entitled Return to Close. The artist molds and remolds a variety of inhuman visages upon his own face in this rather eerie ten minute short film.It may seem that one person’s art is another person’s nightmare.

Unfortunately I couldn't find any useful information about this amazing artist, there is no web content available in English, but you can check out more of his spectacular art on his site where you can find clips from his live installations, stills, sculptures: http://nefdesfous.free.fr/




Thank you, Dox!

Eadward Muybridge, a pioneer of stop-motion photography and early filmmaking, an inventive photographer and a technical wizard, known mainly for his early use of multiple cameras to capture motion. Muybridge was the first to show action photographs in one of the primitive motion-picture machines and he was the most significant contributor to the early study of human and animal locomotion.


The zoopraxiscope was developed by him, which projected a series of images in successive phases of movement obtained through the use of multiple cameras. In his most famous motion studies, a row of cameras snapped a dozen or more photographs of a passing horse; the public was astonished to see proof that a trotting horse can simultaneously have all four hooves off the ground.


Muybridge's work was specifically created for the purpose of stopping action. It was analytical; he strove to freeze motion, to hold still for our contemplation the most rapid muscular movements of man and beast.In doing so he was unwittingly creating the basis for moving pictures. All that was necessary to recreate the motion he had analyzed was to put the individual photographs in rapid succession before the eyes of an audience. His experiments in photographing rapid action are landmarks in the history of photography and early version of the motion picture.




Music by Philip Glass from the dedicated album "Photografer" to Eadweard Muybridge.

Philippe Halsman, a remarkable foremost black and white portrait photographer started his career in the field of photography in pre-war Paris , and he is one of the first contributing members of Magnum Photos.

The French press referred to Philippe Halsman as the best portrait photographer in Paris. When the Nazis approached Paris, Halsman’s family had to leave the country. His friend, Albert Einstein, helped Philippe, obtain visa, including him on the list of the most significant European artists, writers and scientists. He worked as a fashion and portrait photographer for magazines, books etc. and met Salvador Dali in 1941. As it turned out, both of them were closely bound by similar artistic strivings and exceptional thirst for experimentation. The sessions with Dali resulted in a lifetime of friendship and collaboration.


Dali Skull(1951)
Halsman’s portraits might be characterized as a personification of the hopes and ideals of his epoch. The master has managed to focus his camera on each face deeply, and with great respect, in order to reveal the spirit of his subjects.
Apart from his stunning portraits, Halsman developed a philosophy of jump photography, which he called “Jumpology”.Early in the 50’s, Halsman began to ask his subjects to jump for his camera. These unique, witty and energetic images have become an important part of his photographic legacy.
Philippe Halsman is quite possibly the only photographer to have made a career out of taking portraits of people jumping. But he claimed the act of leaping revealed his subjects’ true selves.

Dali Atomicus (1948)

Popcorn Nude (1949)


Jack-of all-trades (Jean Cocteau, 1948)



Alfred Hitchcock (1963)