Programme Notes

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All works are 2021 unless stated.

 

Maria Anastassiou Dropped Frames (2013) extract

The work is strongly reminiscent of Richard Serra’s 1968 film Hand Catching Lead, except that here the hand drops rather than catches, and the jittery, reiterative process is complicated by the jumpy frame-line, which a-rhythmically appears and disappears in the frame and is an essential and disruptive-constructive part of the work. (Nicky Hamlyn)

 

Luke Aspell Dead Moths

Time/graphic intervals approach animation with the jump of graphic matches, but their regularity regularly becomes irregular. Moths killed over the course of roughly nine months, and the surrounding wall space.

 

Jenny Baines Performing Objects (First Law of Motion)

Shepherd’s Lane, a Sunday morning, some time before you moved to New York.

A performed but unrehearsed demonstration of Newton’s law of inertia.  

A conjurer’s illusion, gunslinger’s stance, slight-of-hand, no hesitation.  

 

Steven Ball Convoys Wharf

A composite view of Convoys Wharf in Deptford, constructed from a number of sequences captured at various focal lengths and angles of view on 29 July 2021 between 11.17 and 11.44am. The camera was positioned on the opposite side of the River Thames, 355 metres due northwest of Convoys Wharf, on the furthest extent of the Thames path, from Maritime Quay, 322 metres from Masthouse Terrace Pier. The weather was sunny, with occasional cloud and wind from the west at 25 kph, the temperature was 22 degrees Celsius.

 

Suky Best I’ve been told the history

This short film is made in response to Al Rees’s chapter ‘Room Films’. I was house-sitting this summer, in the house where my father was born and spent his early life. I’d never been in the house much before, due to family politics, but recently younger cousins have inherited it and now I’m a welcome guest. This room is full of ‘family paintings’. There is a lot of fiction (to my mind) about my father’s glorious and fascinating landed gentry family. Many of my cousins are in thrall to these legends, especially those around the Right Honourable, OBE, tiger-shooting grandfather.

 

Kelvin Brown I didn’t catch the word (To the memory of A. L. Rees)

 

Savinder Bual Wind Extractor 

 

Luke Burton Cross Fields

Super 8mm of a digital TV screen whilst my friend plays Minecraft in 2009. A square sun rises and square sun sets – amateur gauges, amateur games and the thought that this almost-forgotten footage can commemorate and celebrate at once. 

 

Brad Butler and Noorafshan Mirza in collaboration with Anna-Maria Nabirye The Scar

A performance inspired by Hortense Spillers' ‘Shades of Intimacy: Women in the Time of Revolution’.

Extracted from a longer work (The Scar, 2019)

 

Sophie Clements On Letting Things Be (An Exercise) (2020)

 

Nick Collins of and from 

My film is very straightforward – two contrasted forms of looking and recording – and the synopsis is really the title. It was filmed on Super-8 colour neg in Messenia, Greece, in June and edited digitally.

  

Toby Cornish Prenden Field

24 frames of film, filmed through a ladder in a field in Prenden, Brandenburg. 

 

Chris Paul Daniels Election / Coverage (2013)

An experimental, observational, one-minute film where the speed of the artist's vehicle and the video’s frames-per-second converge in a zoetrope-like study of the 2013 presidential campaign in Nairobi Kenya.

 

Karel Doing Revolution

A constellation of camera, projector and screen.

 

Amy Dickson Fields of View Sony Xperia XZ II, 10/08/2021,17:37, Heysham

I showed Al Rees and Nicky Hamlyn the first video I’d made on a mobile phone in 2011 (Window 1) in Al’s office at the RCA. Five minutes into the 7 minute video I wanted to hit pause, embarrassed I was showing two film scholars this lo-fi video of the window in my bedroom. Nicky smiled as the video panned around over some objects and postcards on my wall – this was a massive mistake. Finally it finished, after a life-time pause they said 'keep going'. 

 

William English From India to Chesil Beach 

 

Anna Fernandez De Paco Feather

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Patti Gaal-Holmes into the frameless distance: searching for traces of the past

Returning to the Bratislava/Austria border, the filmmaker searches for traces of the past to uncover evidence of her father's escape into exile. Scouring the landscape and considering the anticipation, tension and fear of being caught/shot/sent back which infused the passage of transition from being an ‘inhabitant’ to becoming an ‘exile’.

 

Éric and Marie Gaspar Re-collection

This is a piece about memory. One minute of soundtracks we remember from major films we discovered with Al. In a surprising way, thinking now of those films, the memory of sounds appears sometimes more vivid and accurate than the memory of the images themselves. We did the sound editing in an automatic and random way with a selection of film extracts, using a Python script. Those sounds are support for a wide spectrum of RVB colours that also scroll randomly. Amateurs of experimental cinema will identify and reconstruct images visually from their own memory. 

 

Rob Gawthrop INTERVALS, Skidby Mill

Skidby Mill, a working windmill near Hull, East Yorkshire, filmed on 16mm about twenty-five years ago.  Recorded onto digital video in 2021, using electro-mechanical devices, movement is reconstructed by lengthening and shortening the intervals between frames and sequences of two loops of the rotating sails. The images between the intervals are audibly marked and separated to left and right loud-speakers. The pitch rises as intervals shorten and lowers when increased. The consequential rhythms, synchronised with the image, shift in and out of phase between the speakers.

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Zlatan Hadžifejzović Playball 

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Nicky Hamlyn Ferrel (2019–21) 

This one-minute version of Ferrel is taken from a ten-minute work, although the longer work’s structure is preserved exactly. A shot of a field in the coastal resort of Ferrel, in Portugal, was cut into three frame sections, each of which is looped and runs for 20 seconds before advancing by one frame.

  

Tony Hill Bodies in Motion: Twirl 

A tribute to A.L. Rees using some body mounted camera devices developed for a film about walking and one or two choice words from the man himself.

 

Elizabeth Hobbs Reservoir Film

An animation about swimming in the West Reservoir in Stoke Newington. Painted on 35mm film.

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James Holcombe VHS

VHS is a series of haptic rubbings onto 16mm black leader of VHS tapes from the RE:VOIR series of artists' film releases from the late 90s to the mid 2000s. A transmutation of one supposedly obsolete medium to another.

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Phil Hollins Praxinoscope

Near to the Kingston Museum (which has an exhibition space dedicated to Muybridge) stands the entrance to an underground car park. The entrance is a circular building with flat glass windows nearly all the way round. A praxinoscope has a strip of images around the inner face of its outer ring which when revolved are shown in multiple flat mirrors at its centre as an animation. My video reverses this process as I capture the reflections that are flung outwards from the car park building and captured in camera as I walk around them.

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Riccardo Iacono Gloves (2015)

Garden gloves on a washing line, animated and looped using the Vine app on an iphone. One of an expanding body of videos from my project Lamp Posts (2010–ongoing) following my personal experiences of everyday situations.

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Nils Jean Op 82 VII 

Inspired by Schumann’s ‘Forest Scenes’, the piece explores the canvas space as a visual score. Here, repetition generates patterns and attempts to present a visual response to this piece of Romantic music.

 

Jamie Jenkinson Dip (no slo mo) iPhone 7 Plus w/ leaky waterproof case, 19/07/21

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Deniz Johns Turna Semahi

 

sue k. parading tod und schlaf  (Not included in the online programme.)

When all that is given is one single minute, how does one present a discussion about surface, space, and time, which takes the viewer on a journey from beginning to end in a moving image work? Without the grace to explore the specificities of the original source material to inform complex layers in the structure of the work, the making of parading tod und schlaf relied upon the simplicities of canon music. Haydn’s short canon Tod und Schlaf No. 17 provides the soundtrack to the three-part image sequences, these are staggered in entry into the edit-weave of the work eventually culminating to a point of synchronicity.

  

Adam Kossoff Strip

On a 16mm film strip, Gregory Peck’s communicates his plans to steal a film that contains a secret formula as he starts to strip off. Peck stars in The Chairman (1969), the story of a scientist sent to Chairman Mao's China to steal the formula for a revolutionary agricultural enzyme.

 

Lynn Loo Chikuhi sen 

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Paul Martin Film for Al

Plumstead was Al Rees's station from where he commuted to the RCA.

 

Chris Meigh-Andrews Portland Place (for Al Rees) 

The vanishing point in Portland Place reappears. 

 

Jo Millett Avian Interference

A bird moves, lines interfere – or lines move and a bird interferes. A clip from a 16mm film of a sea bird flying, found in a film archive and transferred to video. Superimposed horizontal animated lines obscure, erase, reveal and intensify, darken or lighten. Intervals of time and memory. Silent.

  

Jayne Parker 59 1/2 seconds for a string player (2000) Version 1

Performed by 'cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, John Cage's score 59 1/2 seconds for a string player (composed in 1953) runs through an array of ways to produce a sound on a ’cello.

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Stephen Partridge Film/Film 

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Simon Payne YES/NO

An affirmation and negation of cinema by way of an admixture of the words ‘YES’ and ‘NO’ in black-on-white or white-on-black which were traced from the screen.

 

Alexandros Pissourios Room Rose 

A miscommunication of MiniDv and a MacBook Pro in the search for painterly surfaces and illuminations

 

Gareth Polmeer Sea / Variation

 

William Raban Confessions (1997)

The film engages in the sheer physical experience of the fall and elastic reprieve of a bungee jump. An essentially static view down onto a familiar Thames side site changes to an accelerating dead straight track into centre frame – the vertiginous rush faired-out to an almost static picture before a rapid spinning backtrack towards the full aerial view but with ever wilder pan dynamics as the viewpoint is twisted and twirled in ascending/descending rhythms of the elastic spiral.

 

Karolina Raczynski (with Caroline Wilson) Slide I

Using a microscope and a USB camera, Slide I records the details of a magpie feather and conversation between the collaborators. The feather is part of a larger collection from Victoria Park, East London belonging to anthropologist and park warden Caroline Wilson. This is part of a series and documents various observations and contributors. 

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Emily Richardson Arboreal

Arboreal, meaning living in trees, is part of a longer film I am currently making that captures aspects of the sculptural forms left by dead ancient oaks in a woodland in Suffolk. 

 

Cathy Rogers Radiator

A contact print from a digital photograph of a radiator in my studio, scaled to fit a length of film that is 1 minute when projected at 24fps. High contrast was applied to the digital photograph. A continuation of my films/film objects made by contact prints of floorboard rubbings and photographs of rooms. (Unsplit Standard 8, contact print, sound, 36 ft)

 

Edwin Rostron Dream Sheets

The best sleep of your life.

 

Philip Sanderson18 Trains a Second

This video is part of a very occasional series of Chronocuts which began as a happy accident. In 2007 whilst testing a new web page I found that the movie clips loaded one after the other, in sequential order, with a one frame gap between each. The online version was pretty unreliable so I began making them in QuickTime clipping part of the frame and then layering the clips at intervals.

 

Guy Sherwin lightrail

The film was made on the Docklands Light Railway on my mobile phone.

 

John Smith Time & Motion 

I was making a little video based on a recent experience and realised that it related to Al’s ‘Bodies in Motion’ essay.

 

Vicky Smith Human Thaumatrope

This film responds to Rees’s reflections on frame-centred filmmakers and bodies in motion. Two positions – the front of my face and the back of my head – are presented to the film camera and a single frame is taken. Though both subject and film frame are still (at the moment of filming) in projection an impression of movement is created. Then, like a zoetrope, further stationary positions are plotted as I animate myself in incremental measures. One sense of speed set against another, spun around, to the point of motion sickness. That's how life feels at present. 

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Anna Thew Paul’s Poem (2010) extract 

Scratched the length of 35mm with a potato peeler - fragments from a poem ('Adventures in the House of Memory') by pyrotechnic drummer Paul Burwell performed randomly in different acoustic locations as screams, drills, sirens, footsteps and arias rattle to drifts of metallic percussion from a recording of Paul drumming solo at the LMC

 

Peter Todd Cup and Saucer

 

Nikolaos Tzaferidis (vinsky) Territories  

This one minute videoTerritories is an edited version of a seven minute work. It was filmed in Ierapetra, in Crete, using a Hi-8 video camcorder. The camera, through proximity, light variation and motion, explores the relationship between macro and micro on an old wall space.

 

Andrew Vallance One Axe (The Plumstead Connection)

Late afternoon, Sunday on the Greenway. A field-of-view – Abbey Mills Pumping station, the Docklands high-rise skyline, a train threading its way through the landscape – attracts. Off-screen voices, local wildlife, indicate communal presence. The actual scene – a London microcosm – is now history. But this point-of-view remains, forever this time and place. 

 

Dominic de Vere Cross Train Boogie

Unsplit Standard-8 transferred to digital. A beginning with an end, an end with a middle. 

Fragments and frames from a journey come together.

 

Chris Welsby Water and Fire

Water and Fire is what we have here on the Pacific West Coast at the present. Over 300 massive wildfires burning just in-land from here, and it’s the same all the way down to LA. It’s hot, the light is ominously red with smoke from the interior. The particulars are poisonous if inhaled. There is not much point having an evacuation plan for our island. If it catches fire in a strong wind we have to evacuate 3,000 people in a few hours. All the boats are moored at the south end, most people live at the north end, there are only two small connecting roads. All buildings are wooden. The island is densely forested and fresh water is in very short supply. The surrounding ocean is hypothermia cold. The people are many but the boats are few.

 

Ian Wiblin and Anthea Kennedy Nassau

Sounds and images of a London street ...

 

R. L. Wilson Primitive Camera

Lost in space via the dark skies of a Cumbrian estuary, the author and accomplice look to find details in the lunar surface, through a 1980s spotting scope Following the study they arrive at an inevitable comedy of errors, the value of which only extra-terrestrial life can be certain of.

 

winc films Intervals

This film takes the role of the intervals between shots and frames as its central theme, inspired by the final sequence of Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov, edited by Yelizaveta Svilova. Shot remotely, the film brings together winc films’ members across geographical distances through the glance of the filmmakers themselves, galvanised by the kinetic rhythms of the intervals between shots. Filmed in Boston, Brooklyn, Cambridge, Florence, Hampshire, Horgan Switzerland, Kingston and San Diego during the summer of 2021.

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Stephen Littman Hypnagogic Al

Al always talked about hypnagogic vision and this was reflected in students who emerged from his wisdom. Hypnagogic Al reflects this idea, integrating Stan the Man's vision of the moving image in video. Hypnagogic Al was created using 8mm and Hi 8 source material. It’s amazing what you find in your back catalogue of moving image material.

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