Film Serials
Long form multipart open-ended works that perch unstably between film narratives and found video objects. They can be watched from start to finish as single channel movies, spread throughout a gallery in installation form or absorbed piecemeal as background film-noise. Best watched drifting in and out of a restless slumber.
Scorpion’s Stone
(2018, 346 mins)
Scorpion’s Stone – a film that was never there… Four years in the making, this is Maximilian Le Cain’s most ambitious and challenging work to date. A mysterious underworld is evoked through the aura of obscure abandoned tapes and fictionalized video diaries to reveal the traces of a full-blown B-movie serial.
Sounds and images that might mean everything or nothing hover between life and death, as do the characters that drift through them. Over its six-hour running time, Scorpion’s Stone makes use of multiple rhythms and visual textures to repeatedly evoke and dissolve narrative traces. The result is a unique meditation on the haunting malleability of forgotten sounds and images.
This six-hour-long (anti)epic is a notable milestone in the history of Experimental Film Society. Challenging on every level imaginable, formally and conceptually in particular, it could be labeled as a cinematic equivalent of ancient ruins from a parallel dimension or as a deliberately incoherent anthology of the works found in a time capsule sent from the very same ground hole that’s mentioned above.... Genre-bending and genre-defying, it is armed with a B-movie blade and adorned in an avant-garde attire.
Moon Tiger Movie
(1997-2019, 367 minutes, in four parts)
"Moon Tiger didn’t find much to do on the moon so he descended to earth. The first thing he discovered is that he had nothing in common with earth tigers so he decided to see what people were like. But he generally spent his time watching movies and going for long solitary walks. Words could never convey his impressions of being on earth so in 1997 he began trying to make movies. Now, 22 years later, he has assembled his movie fragments on four dirty VHS tapes in order to see what he has become…"
Moon Tiger Movie is the culmination of Le Cain's first two decades of filmmaking. It shapes the short film work he made in this time into a four-part feature. In accruing a wealth of films, sketches and experiments over the decades, he has been gradually working towards this major project in which they reveal themselves as parts of a richer whole. What emerges is the electronic smudge of an inner life, the nocturnal residue of an existence half-dreamed. Broken and unreconciled, Moon Tiger Movie is a testament to the compelling inconclusiveness of life and the fragility of images.
Assembled of fragments, dramatic experiments, casual observations, and sequences that come close to being a kind of exorcism of bodies that have been compelled to live between the camera and the screen, Moon Tiger Movie is neither one thing or many. It is a climate system of its own, recirculating the turbulence of its own weather. It is oceanic. It is planetary. Despite all of the individuated moments of darkness and solitude, there is something that is ultimately liberatory in the scale of the work’s overall effect.
- Matt Packer, In The Dark from 'Luminous Void: Twenty Years of Experimental Film Society'
