Maximilian Le Cain

Maximilian Le Cain

Born: January 1, 1978
in Ireland
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.

Movies for Maximilian Le Cain...

Homo Sapiens Project (201) (2002-2021)
Title: Homo Sapiens Project (201) (2002-2021)
Released: August 1, 2021
Type: Movie
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.
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Personal Growth
Title: Personal Growth
Released: November 9, 2019
Type: Movie
"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.
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Luminous Void: Docudrama
Title: Luminous Void: Docudrama
Released: September 21, 2019
Type: Movie
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.
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Self Decapitation
Title: Self Decapitation
Released: April 25, 2017
Type: Movie
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…
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Animal Kingdom
Title: Animal Kingdom
Released: February 25, 2017
Type: Movie
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.
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TRAILERS
Title: TRAILERS
Released: November 13, 2016
Type: Movie
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.
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Ten Years In The Sun
Title: Ten Years In The Sun
Character: Boris Remy
Released: March 27, 2015
Type: Movie
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.
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Forbidden Symmetries
Title: Forbidden Symmetries
Released: January 1, 2014
Type: Movie
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.
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Homo Sapiens Project (100)
Title: Homo Sapiens Project (100)
Released: December 31, 2013
Type: Movie
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.
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HSP: There Is No Escape from the Terrors Of the Mind
Title: HSP: There Is No Escape from the Terrors Of the Mind
Released: October 5, 2013
Type: Movie
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.”
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Weird Weird Movie Kids Do Not Watch The Movie
Title: Weird Weird Movie Kids Do Not Watch The Movie
Released: January 1, 2013
Type: 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.
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Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days (Take 1)
Title: Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days (Take 1)
Released: June 15, 2012
Type: Movie
“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.
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Abel Ferrara in Lucca
Title: Abel Ferrara in Lucca
Released: February 24, 2012
Type: Movie
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.
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HE
Title: HE
Released: January 1, 2012
Type: Movie
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.
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I Am Not God But I Am Michelangelo Antonioni
Title: I Am Not God But I Am Michelangelo Antonioni
Character: Self
Released: December 31, 1969
Type: Movie
A documentary which explores the life and the career of Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the greatest Italian directors, through archival footage and interviews.