To launch the publication Ecstatic Dislocation: Slip-Syncs, Collapse, and Strange Unrealities in the films of Sogo/Gakuryu Ishii, published by Courtisane as part of the Echoes fo Dissent series, author Jennifer Lucy Allan will introduce Ishii's Crazy Family (1984) at the Cinematek on 23 April. 

Jennifer Lucy Allan is a writer, researcher and broadcaster. She has acquired a PhD at CRiSAP (UAL) on the social and cultural history of the foghorn, which became the foundation of her first book, The Foghorn’s Lament (White Rabbit Books, 2021). She is also a presenter of BBC Radio 3's Late Junction, and is a freelance music journalist specialising in underground and experimental music. Previously she was online editor for The Wire, and now freelances for The Wire, The Quietus, The Guardian and others. She co-runs the record labels Arc Light Editions and Good Energy, and is a member of Laura Cannell’s Modern Ritual Collective, and the Cafe OTO Experimental Choir. She has recently published her second book, Clay: A Human History (Pegasus Books, 2024)

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You can talk about Ishii and music and you can talk about Ishii and sound. I want to talk about both. I want to talk about him as a node in a network of musicians and bands, that starts with punk but spider webs out to ensnare post-punk, industrial and ambient music, with a brief free jazz cameo. I also want to talk about the way he uses sound, rhythm and silence.

This is not just about soundtrack. A soundtrack tends towards telling you something about what’s happening. Soundtracks tell you what to feel, whether there is dread, or romance, or sadness in a scene. Not so for Ishii. For Ishii a soundtrack stands alone, is a bed and is a moment, but it doesn’t tell you how to feel. It is, in Ishii's hands, dislocation, silencing, or distortion of the cause-effect connection; between the punch thrown and the punch landing; between moving image and the sound that constructs the conceits of the cinema. "He attempted to find a visual equivalent to punk music," wrote critic Tom Mes. "A way to express the same philosophy and spirit with a camera instead of a guitar.”  — Jennifer Lucy Allan

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In collaboration with Cinematek. Screening introduced in English by Jennifer Lucy Allan, British author, researcher and radio producer. Part of the research project Echoes of Dissent (Stoffel Debuysere, KASK School of Arts), in collaboration with Courtisane.