Date: 27 October 2007 | Season: London Film Festival 2007 | Tags: London Film Festival
MYSTERIOUS EMULSION
Saturday 27 October 2007, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
Sandy Ding, Water Spell, USA, 2007, 42 min
A journey from realism to a supersensory realm, slipping under the surface and between molecules at a microscopic scale. Channeling the subconscious, Water Spell is both odyssey and invocation; a ritual of transformation and retinal blast. The film releases the energy locked within its frames through flickering pulsations of light.
Carl E. Brown, Blue Monet, Canada, 2006, 56 min (double screen)
Rarely shown in the UK, Carl Brown is a long-established film artist whose practice is dedicated to the modification of images by chemical means. Blue Monet is an homage to the French Impressionist, and an attempt to bring the Monet experience into the realm of cinema. Through the ebb and flow of intricate imagery, water lilies eternally blossom and fade with otherworldly grace. Brown has used his alchemical techniques to transfer Monet’s sense of colour, light, sky and water onto film. Viewed in spacious double-screen and enhanced by swathes of sound, this film is an immersive experience.
PROGRAMME NOTES
MYSTERIOUS EMULSION
Saturday 27 October 2007, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3
WATER SPELL
Sandy Ding, USA, 2007, 16mm, b/w & colour, sound, 42 min
Sandy Ding’s Water Spell is a bold, abstract journey that takes us into the psychic interior of our very cellular structure … and back. For me, this film is about reincarnation and transformation, on both the spiritual and sub-atomic levels. This is not an easy film, but it is a powerful one. (Nina Menkes)
BLUE MONET
Carl E. Brown, Canada, 2006, 2 x 16mm, colour, sound, 56 min (double screen)
This is an homage to Claude Monet and Eustace R. Brown who both taught me to ‘cultivate my garden’. In my film work over the past twenty years water has always been a touchstone for my emotional state. To look out at the water whether it be lake or sea is to face the two endless zones, that of water and sky and the mysterious edge at which they meet. I find this vision one of the strongest intimations of infinity. Monet is an artist that I have always greatly admired. His use of colour through water and sky to convey his emotional state has had a great influence on me. Whether it was the first rays of light glinting the water’s edge or the magic time just before nightfall, Monet’s sense of colour and colour conveyance has always been perfect. I have used my techniques of alchemical film to translate onto film my impressions of Monet’s sense of colour, water, sky and his most powerful icon the water lily. Using my toning, liquid emulsion, reticulation, dried crystal bleach formations and stacking techniques to just name a few I have translated the Monet experience onto the surface of my film. An illustrational form tells you through its intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a nonillustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into fact. Alchemical work provides both illustration and nonillustration simultaneously … the experiential depth of representation (the photographic source), and a sensuous (abstract) surface of the wild, both seen and unseen … but felt. That is what is art creation; a union between the beauty that is Monet converted through my alchemical nature into a new form for a new generation of viewers. (Carl E. Brown)
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