La Cellule d'Intervention Metamkine and Plains
Saturday July 14, 2007
Kenneth Myers Centre, The University of Auckland, 74 Shortland Street, Auckland
Thanks to Dean Roberts, Angeline Chirnside, James mcCarthy and Greg Wood for their help
Images and documentation by Jennifer French
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Performing at Alt.music in collaboration with the Telecom 39th Auckland International Film Festival, La Cellule d'Intervention Metamkine from Grenoble, France is a live expanded-cinema group made up of musicians and filmmakers.
Metamkine produces and directs a new film with each thrilling and spontaneous performance. These highly articulate improvisations push the boundaries of film and soundtrack into the realm of live performance.

Projectionists Christophe Auger and Xavier Quérel perform live on multiple 16mm projectors; they apply chemicals to their films on stage, play with film speed and filters, and scratch directly onto celluloid to stunning effect. Jérôme Noetinger performs live musique concréte in a similar analogue fashion. Utilising reel-to-reel tape recorders and vintage synthesizers, the trio engage in an entirely real-time invention. They create a unity of sound and image, immersing the audience in a rich display of unusual diffusion and refraction techniques and compelling sound-collage.

Metamkine remain deeply purist in their approach to the immediacy and tactility of analogue film and sound techniques. For 20 years the Metamkine project has expanded on the tradition of experimental cinema and celluloid reverie. They could be described as successors to the early experimental cinema lineage of Walter Ruttmann, Isodore Isou, Guy Debord, Stan Brakhage, Len Lye et al, through to Fluxus Film and Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable happenings.

Metamkine’s methodology of live improvisation is shared by Plains, an Auckland live audio ‘supergroup’ of sorts, comprising Tim Coster, Rosy Parlane, Paul Winstanley, Clinton Watkins, Richard Francis, and, until recently, Mark Sadgrove, whose coming together in the live context has produced artefacts such as the Underground 3” CD on Coster’s CLaudia label, the controlled quiet and textural dynamics of which is about as far from maximalist as six performers are likely to get. Plains’ performance for Alt.music will be supplemented by a video by Michael Morley, whose sensibilites as artist and musician have long been integral to New Zealand audio culture through his work with the Dead C, and solo, as Gate.  
Morley has been making video works since 1990. Non-narrative and experimental, these are often meditations on a subject, removed from real-time constraints and suspended within a timeframe of its own making. Reason was conceived as a response to the video game aesthetic, the romantic painted landscape where possibilities for disaster are commonplace and frequently catastrophic. North Otago is emblematic of New Zealand art history; as landscape it is one of the characters within Reason.

[Metamkine’s] work ethic is a far cry from the trendy multi-art events that are currently mushrooming in the capitals of Europe … The performances were an inspiring and frequently chaotic mix of acoustic, electronic and electroacoustic elements, an aural and visual celebration that even included some live sampling - of the group itself - by Noetinger, demonstrating that analogue and digital techniques can be complementary. As Noetinger puts it: "We have to move beyond this opposition between analogue and digital. The important thing is the music, not where it's coming from."

Rahma Khazam, The Wire 157, March 1997.

“I believe firstly that the cinema is too rich. It is obese. It has reached its limits, its maximum. With the first movement of widening which it will outline, the cinema will burst! Under the blow of a congestion, this greased pig will tear into a thousand pieces. I announce the destruction of the cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of disjunction, of rupture, of this corpulent and bloated organization which calls itself film.”

Letterist filmmaker Isodore Isou, 1950
http://metamkine.free.fr

Plains and Michael Morley video Metamkine