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.
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.
A bewitching celebration of menstruation which uses a variety of animation techniques from pixilation to scratch on film. An antidote to the vacuous sanitised view of menstruation promoted by advertising. A dream life of angels. What wings really mean. The wise wound and its belly music. Desire is vulvic and creativity claims the calendar of bodies.
Documentary profile of English artist, Paul Nash.
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.
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.
Le Grice no longer simply uses the printer as a reflexive mechanism, but utilises the possibilities of colour-shift and permutation of imagery as the film progresses from simplicity to complexity… With the film’s culmination in representational, photographic imagery, one would anticipate a culminating “richness” of image; yet the insistent evidence of splice bars and the loop and repetition of the short piece of found footage and the conflicting superimposition of filtered loops all reiterate the work which is necessary to decipher that cinematic image. - Deke Dusinberre
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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
Stephen Dwoskin brings together members of the Ballet Negres dance company, founded in London in 1946.
About Performance Art and its historical origins including its links with folk customs. The film includes extracts from the work of many different performance artists from England and abroad collected from 1979 to 1983, amongst them: Tibor Hajas (Hungary), Rasa Todosijevic (Yugoslavia), Iain Robertson (Scotland), Zbigniew Warpechowski (Poland), Milan Knizak (Czechoslovakia), Natalia LL (Poland), Ewa Partum (Poland), Jan Mlcoch (Czechoslovakia), Sonia Knox (Northern Ireland), Jerzy Beres (Poland) and Stuart Brisley (England). The film also records the Haxey Hood and Padstow Hobbyhorse folk dances from Lincolnshire and Cornwall respectively.
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.
Portrait of the composer, Peter Maxwell Davies, set in the context of the islands of Orkney. George Mackay Brown is featured reading his own verse and there are quotations from the works of Edwin Muir, Robert Rendell and the ancient Orkneyinga Saga. Extracts from the composer's works include pieces from Ave Maria Stella, O Magnum Mysterium and the final scene from his opera The Martyrdom of Saint Magnus.
Toulouse-Lautrec's sketchbooks are turned into an animated short.
Ted Hughes's 1993 novel The Iron Woman is the springboard for this multi-media project by Mikhail Karikis. The video section of the installation features seven-year-olds from Mayflower Primary School in East London discussing the novel's environmental themes.
