Simon Payne – Experimental Cinema Systems

Simon Payne has been making abstract cinema for over twenty years. His videos are predominantly orientated around bold graphic forms and highly structured sequences that produce unexpected colour combinations and conflicting planes. Sometimes there are contingent elements in his work, which correspond with incidental indications of the artist’s hand. The systems that underpin his videos involve the entirety of the screen and every edge. Their effects spill out of the screen, to illuminate the cinema in remarkable ways.

Payne’s work has shown in numerous festivals and venues including: Anthology Film Archives, New York; the Ann Arbor, Edinburgh, London and Rotterdam film festivals; Media City Festival, Windsor, Ontario; European Media Arts Festival, Osnabrück; the Serpentine and Whitechapel Galleries in London; Tate Britain and Tate Modern and the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. He has also written widely on experimental cinema. He co-edited the book Kurt Kren: Structural Films (2016) with Nicky Hamlyn and A.L. Rees, and recently edited a posthumous book by Rees, entitled Fields of View. He is an Associate Professor of Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and lives and works in London.

The programme will include:

Edges: Waves (2018) 6’, video, b/w, sound

May (1998) 1’45”, video, colour, sound

Monitor (2002) 4’, video, colour, silent

New Ratio (2007) 1’40”, colour, sound

Iris Out (2008) 10’, video, colour, sound

Cut Out (2013) 3’33”, video, colour, sound

YES NO (2021) 1’, video, b/w, silent

NOT AND OR (2014) 18’, video, b/w and colour, silent

Edges: Ladders (2018) 4’, video, b/w, sound

Cinema Parenthèse is a platform in Brussels, Belgium that invites alternative filmmakers and screens films in their original format. The screenings are based on a dialectical montage, the collision between single films and different film programmes, an ongoing series about investigating different film strategies in political and aesthetic manners.

Cinema Parenthèse is interested in filmmakers and individual films that want to go beyond - based on different practices - ethnographic and anthropological studies, field and archival work. Films that can be understood as an experimentation with the discovery and unveiling of places and people, acting as a melting pot for various social, political and cultural specificities and cross-cultural experiences. Camera positioning, architecture of the image, the pro-filmic (everything in front of and registered by the camera), the non-diegetic, the soundtrack, politico-cultural diversity and the challenges in representation are central concerns in the films we shall screen. Films which refers to a rethinking of both aesthetics and cultural representation, and show its ability to see film as cultural representation – as opposed to seeing through film. The resistance to the salvage paradigm lies not in abandoning its allegorical structure but by opening the mind’s eye to different histories, and seeks ways of revising the production of otherness in the representation. To deal with history and to overcome the binary oppositions in us and them and self and the others is also of vital interest within our project.

Cinema Parenthèse is also interested in film as structure or structure as film. Films that use different methods (optical printing, refilming, color separation, loops, superimposition) to manipulate and transform short film sequences or single frames in a structural and time-based manner. Cinema Parenthèse focuses on structural materiality, film as film and film as materiality. Films that - with different methods - bring out how deconstruction of the original material results in unexpected constellations and visual rebuilding for a 'new' film structure.