DISTANCE AND DISPLACEMENT
Saturday 28 October 2006, at 4pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

LET THERE BE WHISTLEBLOWERS
Ken Jacobs, USA, 2005, video, b/w, sound, 18 min
A train passes through a tunnel and hurtles on to a station. Time and space is toyed with, things enter an impossible state of on-going movement while going nowhere. The actual tunnel experience sets off a metaphysical one. Composed to the first part of ‘Drumming’ by Steve Reich. (Ken Jacobs)

UNIFINISHED PASSAGES
Brett Kashmere, Canada, 2005, video, b/w, sound, 17 min
This five-part film cycle emphasizes instants, rather than developing situations. Designed using indeterminate loop forms, and organized around themes of dislocation, transition, settlement, modernity and transportation, Unfinished Passages traces my great-grandfather’s journey from London, England to Golden Plains, Saskatchewan at the turn of the 20th century. Using the shadow play of light and darkness as a metaphor for human memory, Unfinished Passages reframes his forced immigration , orphan experience through the developing lens of the cinema. In bringing to light this aspect of my family history I draw upon the language of early cinema, beginning with the straightforward visual simplicity of Lumière demonstration pieces such as Boat Leaving the Harbour (1896) and The Arrival of a Train at the Station (1895), and Birt Acre’s Rough Sea at Dover (1895). The second part, inspired by Georges Méliès, follows the pattern of a dream and, as in a dream its real meaning is displaced and dispersed through associative connections. Part three forms a transitional pivot, seizing on the romanticized image of a moving train as an emblem for cinematic and technological progress. In part four the film proceeds to a more constructive, layered assembly based on the theory and practice of Dziga Vertov. Part five draws on the individual self-expression and open-ended conclusion of Francois Truffaut’s 400 Blows (1959). The reconstruction of my great-grandfather’s passage from Europe to Canada is, at the same time, expressed as a coterminous movement through film history. (Brett Kashmere)
www.brettkashmere.com

THIS IS MY LAND
Ben Rivers, UK, 2006, 16mm, b/w, sound, 14 min
A portrait of Jake Williams, who has lived in the middle of Clashindarroch Forest, Aberdeenshire, for over twenty years. Jake always has a hundred jobs on at any one time, fragmenting them into a system that he says eventually gets them all done some day; an expert mandolin player; a committed permaculturist who never throws anything away in the conventional sense, and has compost heaps going back many, many years. He has a different sense of time to most people in the 21st Century, which is explicitly expressed in his idea for creating hedges by putting up bird feeders. It struck me straight away that there were parallels between our ways of working – I have tried to be as self-reliant as possible and apart from the idea of filmmaking as an industry – Jake’s life and garden are much the same – he can sustain himself from what he grows and so needs little from others. To Jake this isn’t about nostalgia for some treasured pre-electric past, but more, a very real future. (Ben Rivers)

THE OTHER SIDE
Bill Brown, USA, 2006, 16mm, colour, sound, 43 min
Rooted in the true sense of ‘independent’ in voice and image, The Other Side is a personal essay documentary imbued with magical landscapes and searing observations softly spoken during the director’s cinematic trek along the United States-Mexican border. Throughout the 2,000-mile journey, Texas-based filmmaker Bill Brown considers the border as an historical and political geography of aspiration, insecurity, and transition. He talks to undocumented immigrants who have risked their lives to cross the border and to border activists whose politics have put them at odds with the guardians of homeland security. A native Texan who has made several documentary shorts, Brown is a sublime, poetic master of wide-open, in-between spaces, of desert and deserted vistas. The Other Side is a rare chance to discover one of America’s leading new cinematic voices. (Film Society of Lincoln Center)
To describe myself as documentary filmmaker is to own up to a troubled profession, what with its unfortunate aspiring to Truth and Objectivity. I’ve tried to cope with this by personalizing my films, insinuating my own voice and disavowing any pose of authority or conclusiveness. More than that, I’m interested in moving the documentary toward something like a metaphysics of fact, where fact materializes for a moment, only to dissolve into daydreams and melancholy and goose bumps.
I find myself drawn again and again to the same spaces: those wide open in-between spaces; landscapes of abandoned things; border zones and landscapes of transition, whether on the far edges of Las Vegas suburban sprawl, or along the fence line of abandoned missile silos in North Dakota. I’m drawn to the drama of transits and transitions played out on landscapes like these. I find myself drawn to the uncanny, too: UFOs and crop circles and ghost stories. The uncanny short-circuits the conclusiveness of our daily lives, which is something I like about it. I’m not sure if the uncanny has some special access to truth, but the uncanny and the true both are spooky. Both haunt us, hovering close by but just out of reach. (Bill Brown)

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