We here at Because love a bit of artists' film and video (thanks, in no small part, to our wonderfully innovative sister company, tank.tv). So, to see one of the Big Four English film and video companies putting together the UK's first Biennial of Moving Images sends us into a little bit of a tizzy.

LUX have been a major part of the English moving image sector since their formation from the old London Filmmakers' Co-op. Always ambitious, they have partnered this year with the ICA to create this inaugural film and video festival. Comprising of talks, seminars, workshops, screenings, performancea and an art school, this long weekend is filled with the great and the good of moving image artists, writers and curators. They announced their opening last night with the film & DJ night, Little Stabs at Happiness: Here are two institutions who love to Make Art Fun.

To look forward to this weekend we have names including Rosa Barba, Light Industry, Michelle Cotton, Elena Filipovic, Martha Kirszenbaum, Ben Rivers, Mark Webber, and no less than three (count 'em) writers-in-residence, live writing under the auspicious aegis of Isla Leaver-Yap.  A biennial is an incredibly difficult thing to sustain, but on the evidence of this outing not only do we have a great shot of seeing the two Grand Dame organisations together again in two years' time but also fitter, stronger and bigger.

LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images is at the ICA until Sunday 27 May

The LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images opens today, until Sunday (your Culture section will be reviewing it tomorrow), and promises a full weekend of film screenings, performances, talks, symposia - hell, they've even set up a temporary art school. Tonight, to launch the event, and in great celebratory style, the ICA throws a party like it's 1997 and invite film curator Mark Webber back to host Little Stabs at Happiness.

Webber, an established curator of film and video, ran Little Stabs at Happiness as a club night at the ICA between 1997 and 2000. The film and music night is reinvented this evening. From 2000, there will be screened a series of experimental films. At 2130, the feature presentation: Roberto Rossellini's The Machine that Kills Bad People, from 1952, in which a photographer uses a magic camera to avenge corruption and greed. From 2300, the original Little Stabs at Happiness DJs return, along with special guest DJs. The volume rises and the lights stay low, there's music and dancing to real songs. With beats. Both LUX and the ICA are good, fun organisations; they are filled with and are friends with good, fun people. Even better: Good, fun and smart people. This inaugural biennial, the first of its kind in the UK, promises a well-thought, wide-ranging programme, and we hope is preparing itself for longevity. Reports tomorrow, for now, enjoy the night…

LUX/ICA Biennial Launch Event: Little Stabs at Happiness is at the ICA tonight, from 2000.

London of the 1950s, as described in outline yesterday, was a place for beatniks and writers.  An erstwhile 1920s, where the spirit of Scott and Zelda gave one last hurrah before the sunny optimism of the 1960s burst through.  London of the 1950s was still black and white.  Mostly it rained.  At least this is what the legend would have us believe.  Room 31 at the National Portrait Gallery has been turned over to one of these characters, the inimitable and never-forgotten Daniel Farson, in the exhibition Famous in the Fifties: Photographs by Daniel Farson.

Farson never really had a single job, and he could only be described in the poymathic manner of his work.  A broadcaster, Farson was widely renowned for being a television personality in the days when it was rare to have a television in your house.  Further, he served as a writer and raconteur; the great wit of Soho.  It's his career as a photographer that is surveyed here, one that began as a staff photographer for the Picture Post.

The man was bohemian, in a time when the word (as we know it today) was unheard of.  His portraits propelled this sense of a dizzyingly independent freewheeling artistic life.  Drinking grain whisky in Soho pubs, then breakfasts in greasy spoons, with Lucien Freud, Brendan Behan, John Deakin, and other artists known just as much for their extra-curricular exploits as they were for their writing and painting.  Farson catches this all through his lens.  A talented photographer, as much as a talented broadcaster and writer, Farson and his work were the unlikely zeitgeist of 1950s London: that spirit of the age that both embodies and sets the boundaries for a movement, a time or a place.

Famous in the Fifties: Photographs by Daniel Farson is at the National Portrait Gallery until 16 September.