Maximilian Le Cain

Maximilian Le Cain (born 1978) is an Irish filmmaker, cinephile and film critic living in Cork City, Ireland. His always-personal, formally experimental work has included narrative, documentary, and video art installation, although it mostly wanders restlessly somewhere between those categories. Le Cain has made more than sixty short and medium-length films and videos over the past decade. He's written for many magazines such as Senses of Cinema, Film Ireland and Rouge and in several books, including The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World (Wallflower Press, 2006). He is also the editor of the online magazine devoted to experimental cinema called Experimental Conversations.

(An)Other Irish Cinema is the work of three resolutely independent filmmakers based in Ireland who have built up prolific filmographies over the past decade in complete creative freedom, taking full advantage of the liberty for experimentation that low-and-no budget production offers. Although the visions audiences discover in the films of Donal Foreman, Rouzbeh Rashidi and Maximilian Le Cain are very different, they are linked by the use of exploratory, non-script-based approaches to filmmaking and by a keen awareness of the cinema histories that have explored the medium's possibilities far beyond the accepted rules of the multiplex.

Foreman, Rashidi and Le Cain formed '(An)Other Irish Cinema' as a platform for joint screenings, to showcase their work and, in so doing, to propose the possibility of an/other filmmaking culture in Ireland.

Operation Rewrite is an ongoing multidisciplinary art project by Esperanza Collado and Maximilian Le Cain initiated in January 2011. Its original form consisted of an online experimental video project to which both artists contributed with extremely short pieces following specific formal and conceptual criteria. The duration of each piece was 45 seconds, consisting of approximately 30 seconds of images and 15 seconds of black screen. '45,33' is a collage created from the 33 pieces of video made so far, some of which incorporate Super8 and 16mm film, and structured according to a numerical system. The project has broadened to include performances, installations, films, video, and an artist's book that explore the workings of the cut and interruption as fundamental associative principles of cinematographic montage, and intending to suggest the fault lines between cinema and the inevitably ruptured articulation of language. Taking as a starting point that the text is a machine that activates a flux of thought between two subjects, Operation Rewrite makes wide use of black screen and of "spaces in negative" as machines of affection, expropriation, and displacement of meaning.

Operation Rewrite takes its name from a chapter of William S. Burroughs' novel Nova Express, where the author describes his subversive "cut-up" method, the aim of which is to explode the disaffecting "parasite organism" commonly known as language.

Experimental Conversations is Cork Film Centre's online journal of experimental film, art cinema and video art. Experimental Conversations' website is operated strictly not-for-profit with all operating costs paid for by Cork Film Centre.Maximilian Le Cain is the editor of the online magazine Experimental Conversations.

Experimental Film Society is an independent, not-for-profit film production company specialising in experimental, independent and no/low budget filmmaking. It was founded in 2000 in Tehran, Iran. Its aim is to produce and promote films by its members. Experimental Film Society unites works by a dozen filmmakers scattered across the globe, whose films are distinguished by an uncompromising, no-budget devotion to personal, experimental cinema. Experimental Film Society is responsible for rescuing and preserving many of its members' films, which otherwise might have been lost forever. Maximilian Le Cain is an honorary member.