Falling Lessons: The Films of Amy Halpern (Open City Documentary Festival, Institute of Contemporary Arts and Close-up Cinema, 26 and 28 April 2024)

A perennial and dynamic presence in American avant-garde circles from New York to Los Angeles, Amy Halpern (1953–2022) remained dedicated to probing cinema’s special capacity to heighten perception and reveal ephemeral states of consciousness. Though her films may appear dream-like, they are designed, as she once put it, to render what it is like to be truly lucid and awake, experiencing reality in its fullness. Informed by a profound awareness of the world around her, Halpern’s rich, associative films invite us to savour the everyday in their devoted study of gesture, light, ritual, movement, and the mesmerising intensity of the gaze. Ranging from avant-garde portraiture to rapturous surveys of animal and substances engaged in constant cycles of change, Halpern’s empathetic, non-anthropocentric cinema also exudes a fierce commitment to anti-racism and a keen distrust of authority, instead invoking solidarity and individual and collective transformation. This dual programme presents a series of short films made over the course of more than three decades, almost all of which are on 16mm, as well as her only feature-length film, the monumental Falling Lessons, which is being presented here for the first time in the UK.

“Falling Lessons: The Films of Amy Halpern” is curated by Sophia Satchell-Baeza and presented in association with Sisters of the Extreme.

Programme 1:
- Access to the View (Amy Halpern, USA, 2000, 2', 16mm, sound)
- Cheshire Cat (Halpern, USA, 2012, 5', 16mm, sound)
- Ginko Yellow (Halpern, USA, 2022, 5', 16mm, silent)
- Hula (Halpern, USA, 2022, 6', 16mm, sound)
- Jane Looking (Halpern, USA, 2020, 2', 16mm, silent)
- #27 (Halpern, USA, 2019, 3', 16mm, silent)
- My Dear Evaporant (Halpern, USA, 2022, 5', 16mm, silent)
- Chabrot (Halpern, USA, 2022, 3', 16mm, sound)
- Three Minute Hells (Halpern, USA, 2012, 14', 16mm, sound)
- Unowned Luxuries #3 (Halpern, USA, 2020, 2', 16mm, silent)
- Elixir (Halpern, USA, 2012, 7', 16mm, silent)
- Cigarette Burn (Halpern, USA, 1978, 7', 16mm, silent)
- Emit a Beam, See a Light (Halpern, USA, 2022, 3', 16mm, sound)
- Vezalay Curtains (Halpern, USA, 2019, 4', digital, sound)

Programme 2:
- Injury on a Theme (Halpern, USA, 2010, 7', 16mm, sound)
- Falling Lessons (Halpern, USA, 1992, 64', 16mm, sound)

With an introduction by Kathryn Siegel.




Sisters of the Extreme (Tyneside Cinema, 23 January 2020)

Avant-garde filmmakers have long explored the potential of cinema to afford a visionary experience, exploring the affinities of film with trance, ritual, dream and memory, testing the play of light on the depths of the subconscious. Curators Kathryn Siegel and Sophia Satchell-Baeza’s programme Sisters of the Extreme brings together a series of films by women from the 1960s to the present day, concentrating on work that shares an occult sensibility and a concern with film’s potential to render heightened mental states, from the meditative to the ecstatic.

From films which harness the darkness of the cinema space as substance, such as Amy Halpern’s Invocation (1982), to magic and colour games in Storm de Hirsch’s rarely-screened trilogy The Color of Ritual, The Color of Thought (1964-1967), the programme moves towards the more personal, at times frightening vision of Betzy Bromberg’s exploration of life and death, love and loss, Az Iz (1983). Selected from the Projections Open Call.

Programme:

- Shaman, A Tapestry for Sorcerers (Storm de Hirsch, USA, 1966, 12', 16mm)
- Az Iz (Betzy Bromberg, USA, 1983, 37', 16mm)
- Peyote Queen (Storm de Hirsch, USA, 1965, 9', 16mm)
- Elixir (Amy Halpern, USA, 2012, 7', 16mm)
- Divinations (Storm de Hirsch, USA, 1964, 5'05, 16mm)
- Invocation (Amy Halpern, USA, 1982, 2', 16mm)





SPECTRAL/OLFACTORY (GHOST, Guest Projects, 21 October 2018)

SPECTRAL/OLFACTORY is a projection-based performance lecture I produced in collaboration with Bardo Light Show and SonicSoul. This was produced for GHOST, a multidisciplinary month-long programme of events and exhibition at Guest Projects, Yinka Shonibare’s London residency space.

Partly inspired by Brian Eno’s lecture on perfume, the lecture explores the role of synaesthesia across a range of artistic and countercultural practices. Interspersed with readings from personal “sense logs,” the performance was animated by liquid colour projections by Bardo Light Show, concrete mandala imagery by tie-dye artist Courtenay Pollock (The Grateful Dead), and an immersive soundscape by sound artist and gong practitioner SonicSoul.



Women of the Counterculture, Regent Street Cinema, 25 April 2018

In collaboration with the Peter Whitehead Archive and Dr. Alissa Clarke, I co-produced an event focused on reevaluating women's contributions to the counterculture. Emphasising the range of women’s voices, practices and perspectives, this event involved a panel discussion, performance work by DMU postgraduate students, and a rare screening of the feature film Dope (Sheldon and Diane Rochlin, 1968) The panel discussion featured: key countercultural figure, English Boy model and Whitehead collaborator, Jenny Spires; singer-songwriter Carol Grimes; Jill Drower, writer and artist in the performance art collective, The Exploding Galaxy, and legendary British folk singer and activist Julie Felix, who performed “Needle of Death” live.

Projecting Psychedelia, Regent Street Cinema, 5 April 2018

I curated a film program at Regent Street Cinema in collaboration with the Peter Whitehead Archive, next door to where the band Pink Floyd first formed. Billed as an evening of surprises with British underground filmmakers Antony Stern and Kevin Whitney, it included Stern’s short experimental film San Francisco (1968), which used the first recording of Pink Floyd’s legendary “Interstellar Overdrive” as its soundtrack. Whitney’s split-screen film Psychedelia includes rare footage of Syd Barrett in 1968 and Red/Green plays with the visual potential of moving coloured light priojections. Whitney’s Psychedelia was accompanied by a live performance from London space-punk band CuT and there was a chance to try the effects of the Lucia No 3 hypnagogic light machine.