Maximilian Le Cain

Profile

Maximilian Le Cain (born 1978) has made more than ninety short, medium and feature length experimental films and videos over the past decade. He is affiliated with Experimental Film Society. He is currently working in creative partnership with sound/performance artist Vicky Langan. He collaborates with artist Esperanza Collado in the multi-disciplinary art project Operation Rewrite and with composer Karen Power on the sound / film / performance project Gorging Limpet. He is a contributor to the Cinema Cyanide noise project. He is also a film critic. He founded and edited Cork Film Centre’s online experimental film magazine Experimental Conversations. He regularly programmed experimental film for the Cork-based experimental music/film event Black Sun and has presented avant-garde film events in collaboration with, amongst others, Cork Film Centre and Cork Film Festival, involving filmmakers such as Peter Tscherkassky, Vivienne Dick, Pip Chodorov, James Fotopoulos, Abigail Child and Christoph Girardet. As a film critic, his writings have appeared in a broad range of international film journals, including La Furia Umana and Senses of Cinema, and in several books, including The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World (Wallflower Press, 2006). He is based in Cork City, Ireland. Born : 1st-Jan-1978

Movie Credits

I Am Not God But I Am Michelangelo Antonioni

A documentary which explores the life and the career of Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the greatest Italian directors, through archival footage and interviews.
Released : Unknown

Luminous Void: Docudrama

A documentary like no other. Starting with the bizarre practices and fantasies of a group of filmmakers working under the label Experimental Film Society, it spins off into a manifesto of light and sound. This dazzling journey through a view of cinema as cosmic ritual and erotic delirium is also an idiosyncratic celebration of the medium itself. Rouzbeh Rashidi’s ornate visual style unleashes a parade of visionary scenes that redefine movie magic as a fevered hallucination.
Released : 21st-Sep-2019

Self Decapitation

Self Decapitation is a Janus-headed self-portrait by Rouzbeh Rashidi and Maximilian Le Cain in which death and desire each take possession of this film in two parts. The ambiguities of inhabiting a human body are conjured by way of film technology in its faults, faulty memories and false promises. There is no escape from its haunting – except perhaps to haunt it in turn…
Released : 25th-Apr-2017

Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days (Take 1)

“Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days”, is a four hour feature film by Maximilian Le Cain and Rouzbeh Rashidi. Structured in two sections or ‘takes’ of two hours each, this dream-like, experimental project offers two complementary explorations of cinematic form that skirt around possible narratives, ducking through a series of fluctuating audio-visual categories and intensities.
Released : 15th-Jun-2012

Homo Sapiens Project (201) (2002-2021)

Homo Sapiens Project (201) was completed in 2021 as part of re-envisioning and restructuring Rashidi's filmography. This nineteen-hour experimental feature is constituted from many feature films produced between 2002 to 2014. These experimental features were made as a type of test or trial experiment. Rashidi assembled the films from footage accumulated over the years, archival footage, found footage and rushes donated by his close collaborators.
Released : 1st-Aug-2021

Forbidden Symmetries

Three witnesses to the invasion. Three accounts. Are they observing the same thing? Were there any warning signs? And, after all they’ve seen and heard, are they even competent to offer a reliable report? The purpose of this film is to demonstrate that an eﬀort to construct functions known not to exist may on occasion produce interesting frauds.
Released : 1st-Jan-2014

Ten Years In The Sun

An assortment of obscure private obsessions, conspiracies and perversions flicker on the verge of incoherence against the context of vast cosmic disaster in Rouzbeh Rashidi’s boldest film to date. This sensory onslaught combines a homage to the subversive humour of Luis Buñuel and Joao Cesar Monteiro with the visionary scope of a demented science fiction epic.
Released : 27th-Mar-2015

Weird Weird Movie Kids Do Not Watch The Movie

Weird Weird Movie Kids Do Not Watch The Movie is the second collaborative feature film between Rouzbeh Rashidi and Maximilian Le Cain. This hypnotic, visually and sonically immersive exploration of a haunted space unfolds in two parts. In the first, a woman (Eadaoin O’Donoghue) dissolves her identity into the ghostly resonances she finds in the rooms and corridors of a sprawling, atmospheric seaside basement property. In the second, a man (Rashidi), existing in a parallel dimension of the same space, pursues a bizarre and perverse amorous obsession.
Released : 1st-Jan-2013

TRAILERS

TRAILERS unites the most personal and experimental aspects of underground filmmaking with a scope that is as cosmically vast as a science fiction epic. Rashidi’s ongoing exploration into the nature of cinema sees a group of characters adrift in space, each locked into their own sexual rituals while a cataclysm of universal proportions unfolds. Humanity has become a mysterious burlesque show for alien eyes: the gaze of the film camera. This visionary spectacle uses multiple formats and visual textures in weaving an erotic anti-narrative suspended in its own space and time.
Released : 13th-Nov-2016

HE

HE, the third work in the ongoing collaboration between Rouzbeh Rashidi and actor James Devereaux, is a troubling and mysterious portrait of a suicidal man. Rashidi juxtaposes the lead character’s apparently revealing monologues with scenes and images that layer the film with ambiguity. Its deliberate, hypnotic pace and boldly experimental structure result in an unusual and challenging view of its unsettling subject.
Released : 1st-Jan-2012

HSP: There Is No Escape from the Terrors Of the Mind

There is no escape… From one side of the globe to the other, there is no escaping the faces, the visions, the ever-watchful camera. There is no escaping the mask, there is no escaping the resonating echoes of images and sounds that cross each other over time. There is no escaping the cinema. There is no escaping the terrors of the mind. “A mysterious loner, perhaps a poet, journeys through a series of uncanny surrealistic landscapes with an unclear purpose. His adventure is divided into three sections. The main theme of this experiment is to compare the eerier qualities of different landscapes and interpose the characters within them, elaborating the project’s ongoing preoccupation with extracting sinister moods from ordinary settings. In a way, these can be seen as experimental horror films in which an atmosphere of dread is evoked and sustained without the expected narrative trappings.”
Released : 5th-Oct-2013

Homo Sapiens Project (100)

HSP 100 is a portrait of experimental filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain. As Le Cain discusses his life, work and relationship with cinema, Rashidi envelops him in a hallucinatory audio-visual ambiance that ultimately results in a poetic dialogue with the ideas and feelings he expresses.
Released : 31st-Dec-2013

Animal Kingdom

Earth. Wind. Fire. Water. Sacrifice. In Animal Kingdom a ritual carves a dimension that melds character, object, landscape and the very tactile makeup of the film itself into one mutating, symphonic mass of spell casting, storytelling, living and dying. An explosive account of cinema as witchcraft.
Released : 25th-Feb-2017

Abel Ferrara in Lucca

A simple, modest and faithful record of some moments at the Lucca Film Festival in October 2010, with songs and speeches by Abel Ferrara: trace of the co-presence of two of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, dissident and true sons of Cesare Zavattini’s revolutionary spirit.
Released : 24th-Feb-2012

Personal Growth

"Personal Growth" is a Super-8 film work, an enigmatic, fragmented piece that could have been filmed at any point in the past sixty years. It conveys the haunting charge of a privately made home movie of great significance to its creators but unsettlingly mysterious to viewers. Its grainy, black and white texture vividly renders the elemental coastal seascapes where it was filmed. Langan & Le Cain appear as a couple who inhabit this wild terrain as if it were a domestic arena.
Released : 9th-Nov-2019

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