PAST IMPERFECT
Saturday 27 October 2007, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

HYSTERIA
Christina Battle, Canada, 2006, 35mm, colour, sound, 4 min
Like nostalgia (april 2001 to present), this film is made up entirely of drawings. They show a house from the past century, the cartoonish figure of a man, a woman’s uplifted face praying, and then another. They are lent movement through the act of hand processing, a hail of scratches and blemishes course through the picture, reminding us that we are watching a loop of emulsion unspool. The image turns briefly and occasionally from positive to negative, the likely result of ‘flashing’ the film in the development process, quickly exposing it to light ‘prematurely’. This technique emphasizes the dual nature of the chemical image. Typically negatives are printed to create a positive for viewing. By showing us both at the same time, the artist remarks upon the usually hidden ‘dual’ nature of the picture – and it is hardly a coincidence that these technical namings (negative versus positive) carry distinct moral implications. A Puritan woman points at another in a gesture of accusation while a crowd looks on, an arm points at a woman praying in front of a tribunal. Near the two-minute mark the cartoonish figure of a man returns, this time emulsion lifted, flickering and shaking in an agitated dance. Dark figures in distress slide through the frame, there is a hanging, and then the emulsion lift frenzy is over. The silhouette of a hanged woman stands clear, a reminder of witch hunts past and present, the easy seduction of surfaces, and the migrations of names to these surfaces. Kike, polack, fairy, nigger, witch. (Mike Hoolboom)

DANGEROUS SUPPLEMENT
Soon-Mi Yoo, USA-Korea, 2006, video, colour, sound, 14 min
Most of the archival footage in Dangerous Supplement comes from US military footage under the titles Supplement to ‘This is Korea’, Korea Gun Camera and Native Life, shot during the Korean War. Dangerous Supplement originated from these questions: Is it possible to see the landscape of the past even though it was first seen by the other’s murderous gaze? Did the mountains and waters manage to escape it? Is there a space in-between? Dangerous Supplement is an incomplete index for memory, a substitute for a vision that is yet to exist. (Soon-Mi Yoo)

CATALOGUE OF BIRDS: BOOK 3
Jayne Parker, UK, 2006, video, b/w, sound, 16 min
Catalogue of Birds: Book 3, ‘The tawny owl and the woodlark’, is an interpretation of Olivier Messiaen’s music for piano, played by Katherina Wolpe. The imagery and music evoke the habitat and song of these nocturnal birds. Filmed in black and white, symbolic of the cycle of life and death, the owl is a harbinger of transformation, mediating between two worlds – the seen and unseen, the physical and spiritual. From the terror of night, the forest opens to grassland and we hear in the music, the transcendent song of the lark. (Jayne Parker)

HIS EYE ON THE SPARROW
Bruce Conner, USA, 2006, video, colour, sound, 4 min
Why should my heart be discouraged, why should the shadows come?
Why should my heart be lonely and long for heaven and home?
In the 1930s jubilee gospel singing underwent a metamorphosis when Roy Crain joined up with R.H. Harris and developed a new style of vocal arrangement with The Soul Stirrers. (Later members included Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls) The Soul Stirrers introduced a more complex kind of vocal presentation employing the innovations of falsetto and swing lead tradeoffs with guitar accompaniment and complex background singing with reiterated words or delayed echoing responses. Bruce Conner began working on By and By, a documentary about The Soul Stirrers several decades ago, shooting their reunion concert with four cameras and accumulating interview material. Conner was poised to finish the piece in the mid-1980s but the project was abandoned for a variety of financial and personal reasons. From the ashes of this project arises a new collage film miniature … thimble sized epiphany of conflicted history. In the past Conner created masterful pairings of sound and image with the music of Dylan, Ray Charles, Devo, Byrne and Eno, Respighi, Sibelius, Riley, Gleeson and others. His Eye on the Sparrow takes its name from a classic gospel song written by Lettuce Guest. The Soul Stirrers cut their version in Chicago on October 10, 1946, and it is this recording that is heard on the track. Carefree and complex the song moves in tandem with a set of found images that seem utterly transparent yet are evocative of other mysteries just out of reach. (Mark McElhatten)

MARGUERITE DURAS / ALAIN RESNAIS (0.65, 0.85, 1.0 FPS)
David Dempewolf, USA, 2007, video, b/w, sound, 19 min
Hiroshima mon amour (1959) is utilized as the central narrative that has been dissected into thematically ordered motifs. Marguerite Duras / Alain Resnais (0.65, 0.85, 1.0 fps) is set within the documentary opening of the film. The cinematic flow of the original has been drained and strung together in a series of still sequences. These sequences are determined by the frames per second export rates of 0.65, 0.85, and 1.0. The differences between frame rates in the video mean to invoke an awareness of the accumulation of synchronous and agonistic narratives over time, where the original historical event is a breech of interpretive models, and the temporal present is an unfixed state of intertextual stratifications. Each frame is marked with a number to track variations of the exported stills. The stills that correspond to the spoken dialogue are synchronous with the audio, and the stills that are without dialogue are shown for a single second. By isolating the enunciation of the script, Duras’ text as opposed to Resnais’ editing – becomes the temporal ordering format for the video. (David Dempewolf)

HELENÉS (APPARITION OF FREEDOM)
Christoph Draeger, Switzerland, 2005, video, colour, sound, 18 min
The Cold War was based on fear and deterrence. In both the East and the West, propaganda films were made to prepare people for the worst: a nuclear attack. Nowadays when we watch these films from the 1950s and 1960s, we are often struck by the naive clumsiness of the representation, usually culminating in the advice to take shelter under the stairs. However, some of these films were rather more realistic, as can be seen from the Hungarian 16mm film Helenés (‘Apparition’ in Hungarian) which Christoph Draeger used as an unaltered basis for his piece. Draeger found this film among a stack of 16mm rolls in a defunct disaster training camp of the Hungarian army in 1997. The editing, soundtrack and monotonous voiceover all bring to mind Alain Resnais’ masterpiece, the documentary Nuit et brouillard (1955). This was also impressionistic and remarkably silent, but incredibly threatening as a sad observation on the human condition. Unfortunately it applies to our times as well, possibly it is even a statement of all times. Draeger subtitled the voiceover of this film by using most of George Bush’s famous (or infamous) inauguration speech, in which, in anticipation of his military campaigns, he inflicted serious inflationary damage upon the concept of ‘freedom’ by repeating it no less than 41 times. (Netherlands Media Art Institute)

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