Lucy Peters I: Zodiac x Four Chambers

Overlapping visual form with sensory perception, the dominant film programme was punctuated by with live projected visual collage by Kino Club and DJ sets from Amy Krawzcyk and Eve King. Presented as a tribute to the history of experimental form (specifically the essential cinema of Kenneth Anger), the programme drifted seamlessly between the boundaries of the political, the pornographic and the interior experience, all harnessed by a radical underline of female and queer imagination. 

Immediately upon entering the space, there was a sense that the images contained within the carefully sourced archive films had begun to seep out from the liminality of the screen to the edges of the room itself – packed out with audience on seats, on beanbags, and in proximity to the buzz of activity around the various projectors and their operators, with interval visuals that ghosted across the screen, muddled by a constant psychedelic glow across the entire room. There was an anticipation of what would become a sensual binding together of both audience, director and conceptual fervour. 

Each film reflected a practice of authorial voice – not only of female/queer expression but diving further into the dreamscapes of the interior; the sensory domestic purgatory of Sarah Pucill’s Milk and Glass (1993), and the holy martyrdom of Ronald Chase’s Catherdral (1971), realigning locations of opposition such as the church and the home with the avant-garde and prevailing narratives of societal otherness. His Fleece As White As Snow by Samantha Sweeting preceded a revolutionary reclamation of female bodily autonomy that came to culmination in Four Chamber’s hypnotic Fuses. 

In wake of Carolee Schneeman’s pioneering self-made pornographic cinema, Vex Ashley of Four Chambers uses layered images and experimental projected lighting technique to redefine the performance of overt sexuality/desire – confronting the audience with unapologetic self-pleasure, she exhibits the female body as fragmented, reconstructed into rhizomatic sway through truly erotic command. Within the obvious curated references to classical experimental cinema, it was clear to me that this programme was incentivised to re-administer the presence of otherness within the realm of the short experimental form. 

With essay shorts from Jennifer Proctor and collage work from Sandra Goldbacher surrounding punk/feminine image culture of the 80s, it was further apparent that the programme intentionally highlighted the curational voice of otherness too – the prescient creation not only of original perspectives but also of narratives throughout past/current cultures and contemporary image archives. As film curator working within female experimental cinema, I found this exhibition to be so widely aware of its extended paradigms of narrative and power - in the Sobchakian sense of the relational space between audience and form – as ‘The Address of the Eye’, and in challenge to the standing masculine-focused experimental film canon. 

Short form has historically been a mouthpiece for marginalised voices/experiences, and in an emerging digital age, there surfaces an intimate, pointed engagement with the scope of the subjective gaze, one which has the potency to radicalise our allegiance to form – and the authoritative curational voices of Zodiac/Four Chambers are surely at the forefront of this cultural shift.

Lucy Peters is a film programmer and curator from Brighton, researching and exhibiting experimental/female directed cinema. 

Her most recent work 'Female Rebels of the Avant-Garde' was presented at the BFI Southbank and the University of Sussex, alongside curational projects at Genesis Cinema and screenings from her independent exhibition initiative Electric Blue Cinema