Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman's experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.
In this film an interior landscape is scrutinised, and an apparent rational calm is revealed as suffocating. Milk and Glass is an evocative journey from surface to interior – a black-coated mirror, the hollow of a bowl, a cavernous throat; a brush demarcates a line of lip on a flat surface, a mouth doubles up with the bowl and is virtually spoon-fed till it chokes.
Oscar Wilde’s famous and eloquent defence of love – made while he was being cross-examined at the trial that led to his incarceration and death – is strikingly illustrated, word by word, with Mapplethorpe-like imagery.
Vertical Features Remake is a film by Peter Greenaway. It portrays the work of a fictional Institute of Reclamation and Restoration as they attempt to assemble raw footage taken by ornithologist Tulse Luper into a short film, in accordance with his notes and structuralist film theory. The footage consists mostly of vertical landscape features, such as trees and posts, shot in the English landscape.
From the idea that glass, even when cooled, is a liquid that changes in appearance over time, an offscreen narrator launches a recollection of the bygone days of manual glassmaking and an observation of the impact of the mass-produced glass on the changing appearance of England over time.
Gilbert & George are renowned for presenting themselves as ‘living sculptures,’ fusing their art and identity with the external world. Their exploration of the bleak urban surrounds of 1980’s London, powerfully evoke the desires and tensions of its disillusioned youth alongside their own eccentricities. Poetic narration combines with vivid imagery that moves between the startlingly beautiful, the humorous, and the absurd. Church spires and city streets, youth and drunks, dancing and tea-drinking all take on an affecting symbolism when viewed from the unique perspective of Gilbert & George.
Beautiful but often violent images are interwoven to create an experimental documentary about the hazardous existence of the Serpent River community living in the shadow of uranium mines in Ontario Canada.
Two cameras mounted on tripods with wind vane attachments were positioned about 50 feet apart along an axis of 45 degrees to the direction of the wind. Both cameras were free to pan through 360 degrees in the horizontal plane. There are three continuous 100 foot takes for each screen. The movements of the two cameras, which were filming simultaneously, were controlled by the wind strength and direction.
Documentary on advertising. Investigates the way work has disappeared from advertising images, and traces the phenomenon through archive advertising films from 1897 to 1960. Places advertising in the context of historical events and everyday life, archive material being juxtaposed with contemporary images.
A memory-using location film of a stay with a uranium mining community. Using a kaleidoscopic array of experimental techniques, this film explores uranium mining in Canada and its destructive effects on both the environment and the women working in the mines. A plethora of images ranging from the women at work to spine-chilling representations of cancerous bodies are accompanied by unnerving industrial sounds and straightforward information from some of the women.
Experimental essay in film history, associating very early archive material (circa 1909) and studio shot footage in an attempt to provide insights into the way in which "film language" developed during the silent era, with emphasis on the process by which spectators came to be increasingly "contained" with the space time of narrative.
“London artist John Smith uses light-hearted humour to explore theoretical concerns - Gargantuan, for instance, is both pleasantly silly and acutely conscious of how imagery depends entirely on its framing. A voice-over intones the words ‘huge’ and ‘strapping’ as a lizard almost fills the screen, then ‘medium’ as the camera zooms out, then ‘tiny’, and finally ‘minute’, a pun on the film’s running time.” Fred Camper, Chicago Reader 2001
Plutonium Blonde is a beautifully textured collage of sound and images and a fractured narrative about woman’s self-definition and control. Taking the figure of Thelma, a woman working with the plutonium monitors at the core of a reactor, Lahire questions both the process at the core of the plutonium terminal and that one that constructs female identity. Plutonium Blonde is part of a trilogy of films on radiation (the other two are Uranium Hex and Serpent River) that Lahire made in the 1980s.
The Arts Council commissioned this film to coincide with their major retrospective of Giacometti's work at the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) in the summer of 1965. A similar exhibition was held concurrently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, sealing the artist's reputation as a modern master.
A kaleidoscopic celebration of the 1980 Notting Hill Carnival. Arts Council of Great Britain.
Documentary profile of English artist, Paul Nash.
Introduces the world of painter René Magritte through an assemblage of the painter's images. Includes statements by Magritte about his intentions and anecdotes from his friends Mesens and Scutenaire.
Peter Blackman, founder of Steel 'n' Skin, talks about this pan-African group, which takes African culture to British schools. The film follows the group during a ten day workshop in Liverpool.
Stephen Dwoskin brings together members of the Ballet Negres dance company, founded in London in 1946.
A portrait of Salford-born poet, storyteller and comic, John Cooper-Clarke. His poems, a satirical blend of humour and social comment, are delivered at a fast pace, often with musical backing. His style, and that of his contemporary Linton Kwesi Johnson, have influenced a generation of younger poets involved in a revival of popular poetry in Britain.
