Mare’s Tail
“…starting in the beginning at the beginning … organic … prima material … impressionable mass confusa … out of which some original naming and ordering processes spring …” —David Larcher
We are very excited to celebrate our 8th anniversary with an extremely rare screening of David Larcher’s The Mare’s Tail, which is on our side of the Atlantic for a very limited time. A key text in the history of the London Filmmakers Co-op, which celebrates 50 years this year, The Mare’s Tail has gone down in that history shrouded in legend—appropriately enough for a film that is about creating one’s own mythology. Larcher and family lived out of his converted moving van while he made the film, testing the limits of both the filmmaking process and the social milieu of the times. All of his films are visually and physically vagabond—he was as quick to embrace new techniques as he was to jump in his van to travel towards new adventures.
In the British setting of structuralist filmmaking, Larcher’s film was the closest one got to the poetics of the American avant-garde (more than one source compares the film with Brakhage’s epic The Art of Vision). Described by Simon Field as, “at once a kind of an autobiography and a film about making that autobiography,” Larcher used the new chemical and materialist possibilities of filmmaking to move between the quotidian and the cosmic, creating a truly unique experiential hybrid, well worth the trip.
Programme:
The Mare’s Tail, David Larcher, UK, 1968, 16mm, 143 min.
@ Gladstone Hotel, Ballroom, 1214 Queen Street West
Tuesday, March 7, 2017 | 8:00 PM screening | $5-10 suggested donation
Thanks to Light Industry, LUX, Daichi Saito, Ekrem Serdar and Squeaky Wheel.
EMS #95 = Tuesday April 11 2017 = TBA