Date: 23 October 2010 | Season: London Film Festival 2010 | Tags: London Film Festival
READING BETWEEN THE LINES
Saturday 23 October 2010, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
Thomas Comerford, The Indian Boundary Line, USA, 2010, 42 min
Comerford’s essay maps a historical demarcation which originally divided Native American land from that which was ceded to white settlers in 1812. Modern life has obscured the traces of this history in the Rogers Park district of Chicago. Juxtaposing past with present, footage shot along this formerly disputed territory is matched with readings from official documents, fiction and quotidian accounts.
John Smith, Flag Mountain, UK, 2010, 8 min
A view across the city of Nicosia, over the Green Line border, to an unusual spectacle on a hillside. Lives continue in its shadow, amongst the contrasting flags, anthems and calls to prayer.
Miranda Pennell, Why Colonel Bunny Was Killed, UK, 2010, 27 min
An exploration of turn of the century colonial life along the Durand Line, the frontier between Afghanistan and British India (now Pakistan). Remarkable period photographs are closely analysed as we listen to reports of exchanges between westerners, natives and mullahs written by missionary doctor TL Pennell.
Also Screening: Monday 25 October 2010, at 2pm, NFT3
PROGRAMME NOTES
READING BETWEEN THE LINES
Saturday 23 October 2010, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
THE INDIAN BOUNDARY LINE
Thomas Comerford, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 42 min
Over the last eight years, Chicago musician and filmmaker Thomas Comerford has been at work on a series of quietly-observed films that contemplate the entwined social, political, and environmental histories of Chicago (Figures in the Landscape, 2002; Land Marked / Marquette, 2005). The Indian Boundary Line follows a road in Chicago, Rogers Avenue, that traces the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis boundary between the United States and ‘Indian Territory’. In doing so, it examines the collision between the vernacular landscape, with its storefronts, short-cut footpaths and picnic tables, and the symbolic one, replete with historical markers, statues, and fences. Through its observations and audio-visual juxtapositions, The Indian Boundary Line meditates on a span of land in Chicago about 12 miles long, but suggests how this land and its history are an index for the shifting inhabitants, relationships, boundaries and ideas of landscape – as well as the consequences – which have accompanied the transformation of the New World.
www.thomascomerford.net
FLAG MOUNTAIN
John Smith, UK, 2010, video, colour, sound, 8 min
In Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus, a display of nationalism is taken to its logical conclusion. Moving between macro and micro perspectives, Flag Mountain sets dramatic spectacle against everyday life as the inhabitants of both sides of the city go about their daily business. (John Smith)
www.johnsmithfilms.com
WHY COLONEL BUNNY WAS KILLED
Miranda Pennell, UK, 2010, video, b/w, sound, 27 min
Triggered by the writings of a medical missionary on the Afghan borderlands, a distant relative of the filmmaker, the film is constructed from still photographs of colonial life on the North West frontier of British India at the turn of the 20th century. Searching for clues to the realities behind images framed during a time of colonial conflict, the film plays sound against image to find contemporary parallels in Western portrayals of a distant place and people. (Miranda Pennell)
www.mirandapennell.com
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