Underskog

Suicidal lemmings, enchantments, fragmentations, dream symbols and erotic materiality … this programme attempts to capture key moments in the explosion of artist’s film in America from the post war years onwards. Classic.Subversive.Cinema.

Meshes Of The Afternoon Maya Deren (14 min/16mm / 1948/ US)
One of the most influential works in American experimental cinema. A"trance film," in which a protagonist appears in a dreamlike state. The central figure is attuned to her unconscious mind and caught in a web of dream events that spill over into reality. Symbolic objects, such as a key and a knife, recur throughout the film.
“This film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual…. it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience.”m.d.

Notebook Marie Menken (11 min/16mm / 1962 / US)
This film’s great beauty lies in its simplicity and variety – it is as if we were seeing her whole body of filmic work condensed in this scrapbook, which consists of nine film-fragments, shot between the late forties and the early sixties. “They are too tiny or too explicit for a remark, but one or two are my dearest children.“… m.m.

My Name Is Oona Gunvor Nelson (10 min / 16mm/1969/US)
A haunting, intensely lyrical evocation of a young girl’s inner and outer worlds. Looped sound, elliptical cutting, slow motion, and superimpositions construct a dream world in which Nelson’s daughter plays. Throughout the entire film, the girl, compulsively and as if in awe, repeats her name, until it becomes a magic incantation of self-realization.

Fuses Carolee Schneemann (22 min/16mm / 1967 / US)
Schneemann’s self-shot erotic film remains a controversial classic. A notorious masterpiece, first filmed and then constructed – with cutting, superimposition, layering, painting and scratching into and onto the film surface.
“I wanted to put into the materiality of film the energies of the body, so that the film itself dissolves and recombines and is transparent and dense— as one feels during lovemaking”…c.s.

C’mon Babe (Danke schoen) Sharon Sandusky (12 min/ 16mm/1988/US)
In which lemmings run, fight, jump and swim while 1950s US teenage star Wayne Newton sings. This classic of found footage film exposes Walt Disney’s collective lemming suicide myth.