The EFS Collection | Irish Artist's Film Index

The EFS Collection

Experimental Film Society

This page connects you to EFS, our associate organisation which holds a copy of a number of Irish artists' moving image works that are detailed in the MExIndex.

EFS moving image collections statement

Experimental Film Society (EFS) is an Irish company dedicated to the production, screening and archiving of experimental cinema. It curates screenings of experimental film, mainly by filmmakers and artists associated with it, both nationally and internationally. Its archive holds over fifty feature films and 500 shorts.

EFS was hailed by aemi as “the most active, prolific and intrepid group of experimental filmmakers working in Ireland today.” It concentrates on nurturing film projects which reflect a distinctive cinematic vision developed over its two decades of activity. EFS produces films that are distinguished by an uncompromising devotion to personal, experimental cinema. These films adopt an exploratory, often lyrical approach to filmmaking and foreground mood, atmosphere, visual rhythms, and the sensory interplay of sound and image. EFS grew out of the former Experimental Film Society collective which was formed and managed by the company’s founder and director, filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi.

EFS moving image distribution and loans policy

All EFS feature films are available to rent for screening. EFS policy in presenting short films is to do so as full EFS short film programmes curated by, or in consultation with, EFS.

Cinema or gallery exhibition of individual EFS shorts in other contexts can be negotiated directly with the relevant artist or artists. All EFS filmmakers can be contacted through EFS.

External Links

Homo Sapiens Project (161-170)

Through the works of the Experimental Film Society, of which Rashidi is a key member, cinema remains in a state of productive instability. Here, cinema can function as a sketchbook - a way of exploring some of the possible lives of an idea. This is what we encounter in Rashidi’s visceral and abrasive Homo Sapiens Project (161-170) in which he takes apart and reassembles a 35mm trailer for Brain De Palma’s little-loved The Black Dahlia (2006). read more >

Brine Twice Daily

Brine Twice Daily is a film that came from the sea, from the depths, and it never truly escapes its salt-encrusted origins. A bizarre romance that is at once an absurd comedy, a horror/adventure B-movie, a cryptic home video and a fading seaside postcard stuffed into a bottle and cast adrift on the ocean, Brine Twice Daily marks a new departure in the Langan/Le Cain film-making partnership. read more >

Arkady Feed

Arkady Feed explores the forlorn yet strangely resilient and always evocative post-industrial terrain of Cork's docklands using sounds found in the area by Paul Hegarty and images picked up there by Maximilian Le Cain. read more >

Controle No 6

Constructed over many weeks, Jann surreptitiously performed for the cinema's security cameras, in empty car parks, box office booths and lifts, only later going back to comb through these tapes in an attempt to retrieve the material in which he appears. With movie star looks and an affection for body comedy, Jann could be situated as the Harold Lloyd of the Experimental Film Society of which he forms part (as unlikely as that sounds). read more >

Clandestine

Layering both space and time, Clandestine superimposes imagery and creates entrancing patterns of repetition and startling interruption. Voyaging from one land to another, from found footage to mysteriously evocative scenes shot by the artist, to the pure abstraction of hand-scratched film, it traces a haunting inner logic of memory and discovery. read more >

Saint Francis Didn't Run Numbers

Saint Francis Didn’t Run Numbers is "a eulogy to personal interpretations of cinema with a fetishistic fascination with the imperfections of ageing celluloid" (Experimental Film Club). By re-filming footage from a 35mm film print of a well-known classic of American cinema, the imagery is adapted and reframed, magnified and fragmented, to present a very different kind of film by focussing solely on one single supporting character and abstract, empty spaces. The pre-existing feature film is an incredibly masculine experience touching upon themes of violence and machismo, while Saint Francis Didn’t Run Numbers makes a female supporting character - one that... read more >

Sister Mary or Mary the Junkie

Sister Mary or Mary the Junkie is an experimental 'found footage' short film. By re-filming imagery from a 35mm theatrical print of a narrative feature, the frame is adapted and reframed, to present a very different kind of film by focussing solely on one single supporting character. read more >

Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep

Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep is a cinematic poem composed from footage Michael Higgins shot on the road across Alberta and BC, Canada. Photographed on Super 8mm and using hand-processed film techniques to create an unworldly zone between sleep and wakefulness, it looks at three characters and the film’s material that connects them. Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep that invites the viewer to sleep with the film’s protagonists, to drift across into the dream world of the film’s material and lose touch with their current surroundings. read more >

At One Fell Swoop

At One Fell Swoop deals with a stone carver and his metamorphic wander through rural Ireland. In passing he slips through the film’s frames into a re-imagining of his surroundings in which he finds himself trapped in a flickering, shifting world of shadows on an intense cataclastic rock path towards a dead end. Photographed anamorphically on expired 16mm black and white film with a 50-year-old hand-cranked camera and entirely hand-processed, At One Fell Swoop resembles a phantom-like film lodged amid multiple strata of time and space. This work is also located in the Experimental Film Society collection, and is featured... read more >