Serpentine Cinema: Ellen Cantor and Noam Gonick
American artist Ellen Cantor screened chapters from her new film Pinochet Porn (2009) an epic soap opera about five children growing up during the Pinochet regime in Chile.
Canadian film director Noam Gonick, notable for films including Tinkertown (1999), presents a performative lecture.
ELLEN CANTOR
Pinochet Porn (a film in progress) – Directed and Presented by Ellen Cantor
“Pinochet Porn is an epic soap opera about five children growing up during the Pinochet regime, and their subsequent development into adulthood. This film is being created directly from an 83-page hand-drawn story/film script Circus lives from hell” – Ellen Cantor, 2009
Pinochet Porn Trailer, 2009 (5 mins, Super 8)
Trailer for Pinochet Porn, a film in progress.
The Dictator & The Maid, 2009 (21 mins, Super 8)
Excerpt from Pinochet Porn (rough footage) a film in progress.
Director of Photography: John Brattin
Art Director: Jay Kinney
Starring: Lia Gangitano, Michel Auder, Patrick Blumer, Ellen Cantor, Jim Fletcher, Francesca Gangitano, Andrew Haynes, Jay Kinney, Harri Kupiainen, Danny McDonald, Spencer Sweeney, John Thomson, Sofia Elisabeth Von Herrlich, and Stephen Ward
Narrated by: Pablo Leon de la Barra
Assistant Editor: Simon Popper
Editing Advisors: Nikos Pantazis, John Cussans, Pablo Leon De La Barra
Ellen Cantor currently lives and works in London and New York. She has exhibited internationally with solo exhibitions and screening including Participant Inc, NY; 1000000mph, London; Sketch, London; Kunsthalle Wien; Transmission, Glasgow; Delfina, London; Feigen, Chicago; Cabinet, London and Postmasters, New York as well as at Edinburgh International Film Festival and Rotterdam’s International Film Festival amongst many others. Cantor is a Cubitt artist.
NOAM GONICK
Selection of Shorts & Excerpts – Directed and Presented by Noam Gonick
1919, 1997 (8 mins, 35mm)
Experimental short revisiting Winnipeg’s long-forgotten General Strike in 1919 from historic, narrative and aesthetic points of view. The industrial conflict in this once thriving ‘frontier town’ polarised bourgeois and socialist opinion.
Tinkertown, 1999 (3 mins, 35mm)
Murderous, carnivalesque experimental short.
Stryker (excerpt), 2004
Darkly humorous and politically charged feature investigating the dispossessed Winnipeg ‘North End’ indigenous gangs.
Hey Happy (excerpt), 2001
Gonick’s first feature, a post-apoplectic rave era parable of the Flood.
Wildflowers of Manitoba (excerpt), 2007
At once a film, performance and installation, Gonick and Jacob created Wildflowers of Manitoba as both a utopian vision of an idealistic world and a model or vision of things to come. Shot ‘off-grid’ in Winnipeg and blurring fact and fiction they draw on historical references from the history of Gay and Lesbian Culture to the hippy and Radical Fairy movements to provide an insight into ‘other potential futures or possibilities’.
Noam Gonick was born in Winnipeg, Canada. He is a filmmaker and artist whose work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Venice Biennale, Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, the Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals and Anthology Film Archives. He is also a member for the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Feature films include Hey Happy (2001) and Stryker (2004) and have been distributed internationally. His recent collaboration with Louis Jacob Wildflowers of Manitoba (2007) has been exhibited internationally at the Montreal Biennial, Toronto & Berlin Film Festivals, the Tribeca Grand, New York and is part of the UBC Morris & Helen Belkin Art Gallery collection, Vancouver. Gonick’s current exhibition at Sketch, London No Safe Words runs until 22 August 2009.
Serpentine Cinema
Serpentine Cinema was a series of monthly screenings and events at The Gate cinema in Notting Hill which gave an opportunity to view rarely seen artists’ films in a cinema context. Presented in association with Sketch.
