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In Focus: Betzy Bromberg
The festival co-presented “In Focus: Betzy Bromberg” with Tate Modern, in collaboration with LUX who distribute Bromberg’s films and the support of a Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Grant from the Art Fund. Spanning five decades of filmmaking by the American avant-garde filmmaker, the programme was curated by Charlotte Procter (LUX), with Valentine Umanksy and Carly Whitefield (Tate Film). Betzy Bromberg was present for all of the screenings in the programme, at both Tate Modern and Close-Up Cinema.
A retrospective of the American avant-garde filmmaker Betzy Bromberg has been a long time coming and this did not disappoint. I particularly enjoyed the rare opportunity to slip into her long-form, later abstract work like A Darkness Swallowed (2005) and Voluptuous Sleep (2011) and having the darkened space of the cinema to contemplate the strange sounds and forms before me.
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(Sophia Satchell-Baeza, ALT/KINO)
Tsuchimoto Noriaki: Film is a Work of
Living Beings
Organised by Open City Documentary Festival, the retrospective programme “Tsuchimoto Noriaki: Film is a work of living beings” took place throughout September in various venues across London (ICA, Birkbeck Cinema and Close-Up Cinema), with a series of central screenings coinciding with the festival dates. The retrospective included several of Tsuchimoto’s early films from the 1960s, which chronicle an increasingly modern Japan and changing Asia, and the main trilogy of films made between 1971 and 1975 with the patients of Minamata disease, as well as several other films on the subject. It also included some of his early PR films, and the important works he made about student activism and struggles or about the threat brought to small communities by the forces of “progress” and the uses of nuclear power. Curated by Ricardo Matos Cabo, the screenings were also accompanied by a study-day at Birkbeck, University of London, with speakers including Ishizaka Kenji, Julian Ross, Marcos Pablo Centeno, Irene González, Aaron Gerow, Christine Marran, Jelena Stojkovic and Ricardo Matos Cabo.
The London screenings were followed by the first-ever US retrospective of Tsuchimoto Noriaki’s work, organised by Max Carpenter for the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.
