BIFF Offscreen: Cineménage à trois w/ Eros

Cineménage à trois w/ Eros is on view October 8 through October 15 @ Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.

Selections include –

eau de cinema {the avant ad} <> Bradley Eros

2014, (edited with Tim Geraghty), 16mm-to-digital, 2 minutes, color | sound

Soundtrack: Eros mix from Olivier Messiaen.

eau de cinema {the perfume ad}

A hint at the secret formula for the preparation of a film perfume: the scent of silver, dust & light, as seen through the laboratory of olfactory elements: the ingredients, a mixture of liquid colour chemicals and concentrated anima, plus droplets, dyes & stains, from opiated octopi, larvae of lava, mercury styrene, and a pinch of kínema lepìdoptera, or butterfly goo, in a bottle of uncontainable essence & the ephemeral. ~ Eros

eau de cinema {& the philosophy behind it}

eau de cinema is an attempt to contain the uncontainable, to bottle the essence of poetic thought & accident, as a perfume of the creative act. It is also memory driven by an irrepressible mourning, the way scent is linked to both loss and longing. Like cinema, it is both material and immaterial, an apparatus and the experience of light and time. It is disappearance and the obsolete, of both technology and culture, but also hybrids and beautiful mutations coming alive. ~ Eros

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Eros c'est Lamour <> Bradley Eros with Tim Geraghty

2008, 8min, DVD/digital, color, sound

Soundtrack: Yma Sumac & Einstürzende Neubauten

I have cultivated my hysteria with jouissance and terror.~ Baudelaire

Dorothy's l'amour fou evoked in evanescent fragments, unexpectedly encountered. The missing link between Rose Hobart and Maria Montez via Rrose Selavy's bride stripped bare by the song of the sarong. Star*ing Ms. Lamour from The Hurricane, & the queen of exotica as soundtrack. ~ Eros

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Aurora Borealis <> Bradley Eros

2002, 10:40 minutes, 16mm-to-digital, screening video version, sound

Soundtrack: "The Garden of Love's Sleep" by Olivier Messiaen

Aurora Borealis is part of OCULA, a trilogy of subterranean science films, each fabricated from exploratory and observational footage. This imagery, whether microscopic, telescopic, laboratory, or nature, is re-configured into a dream language of re-enchantment and mystery.

Aurora Borealis, the middle work of the trilogy, treats the laboratory as a theater of metamorphosis, a magic show for staging transformations, with technicians as prestidigitators, performing conjuring and vanishing acts on elemental materials of solid-liquid-gas, using prisms, crystals, dyes to invoke the phantasmagoric and the sublime.

Confusions of scale, where the microscopic is analogous to the astronomic, and vice versa, provoke the latent force of displacement and imaginative disorientation in these seemingly hallucinatory parallel universes. Nebula or protozoa? Galaxy or cell? These sci-fi landscapes compel a fantastic voyage to distant, perhaps, infinitesimally inner, spaces.

Created primarily from found footage acquired from a Texas school library, Aurora Borealis is an homage to two lyric surrealists of the cinematic collage, Joseph Cornell and Jean Painlevé. To Cornell in his irrepressible wonder at the marvelous made manifest in the mundane, where common objects reclaim their mystery through subtle juxtapositions and revelatory tangents. And for Painlevé in his own subaquatic science of marine biology turned wonderland and his poetic junctions of the subversive and the submerged.

From the collection of detritus to the construction of oneiric and obsessive templates, I composed this film through a process of subtraction of the original expository devices, and the insertion of unexpected diversions and creatures - the caterpillar's slothful opacity, the jellyfish's phantom transparency and the sudden terror of the octopus'; whiplash emergence - excavating nocturnal associations and triggering the uncanny perception of hidden worlds within worlds.

A re-enchantment of the basic elements, through the hypnotic build of Olivier Messiaen's symphonic fragment; "The Garden of Love's Sleep" - appropriate to this amorous dream of flora and fauna - with its eerie electronic Odes Martinet quiver, creates a utopian gothic, where the invisible spectrum masks a fierce and powerful universe of decay and regeneration, hidden in the dark matter, but finally eclipsed and unveiled via the instruments and apparatus seemingly more alchemical than clinical. ~ Eros

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eau de cinema {the avant ad} + Eros c'est Lamour + Aurora Borealis will be projected on the silos at BIFF's BIG FUN party after sunset as well.

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Bradley Eros is a mediamystic maverick, who prefers the night & the perfume of eau de cinema. Eros is an artist working in myriad media: experimental film & video, collage, photography, poetry, performance, sound, text, installation, expanded & contracted cinema. Also a curator, designer, researcher, composer & investigator. Concepts include: Mediamystics, ephemeral cinema, Erotic Psyche, Optipus, Vampÿrates, Mushroom Archive, Ocula, eau de cinema, subterranean science, cinema povera, poetic accidents, fragmentstein, musique plastique, Narcolepsy Cinema, metaBody, The Owl of Minerva, Artaud-Butoh, Velvet Hermetic System, Oysters of the Id, Imageless Film & Black Hole Cinema.

He is a catalyst actively involved in myriad aspects of the diverse New York experimental film demi-mode for 40+ years, & has initiated, exhibited and curated at a multitude of spaces & venues, collectives and galleries, storefronts, clubs and micro-cinemas: The Kitchen, Exit Art, Artists Space, Millennium Film Workshop, Anthology Film Archives, ABC No Rio, PS1, Roulette, The Film-makers’ Coop, Microscope Gallery, Synesthesia, Galapagos / Ocularis, NY Underground Film Festival, Migrating Forms, Issue Project Room, The Collective for Living Cinema, Light Industry, Shift, Participant Inc., Spectacle, St. Marks Church / Poetry Project, Sunview Luncheonette, Chaos Computer, Secret Project Robot, Lincoln Center, EI: Experimental Intermedia, Le Petit Versailles, MONO NO AWARE, MOMI, The Whitney Museum, & MoMA,+ Arsenal (Berlin), Light Cone (Paris), Nowhere (London), & Image Forum (Tokyo), and most especially, RBMC: the Roberta Beck Mercurial Cinema, @ Collective Unconscious, for many years, among a multitude of others.

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Film stills + descriptive text courtesy of Eros.

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