ALTERED STATES
Saturday 22 October 2011, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

ALTERED STATES

TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS)
Ben Russell, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 10 min
Trypps #7 (Badlands) charts, through an intimate long-take, a young woman’s LSD trip in the Badlands National Park before descending into a psychedelic, formal abstraction of the expansive desert landscape. Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell’s unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence. (Michael Green)
www.dimeshow.com

WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING
Mary Helena Clark, USA, video, colour, sound, 2010, 9 min
‘This is your life. It rides like a dream.’ (Mary Helena Clark)

SANS TITRE
Neil Beloufa, France, 2010, video, colour, sound, 15 min
A cardboard decor and photographs reconstitute a luxury Californian-type villa in Algeria. Its inhabitants, neighbours and other protagonists imagine themselves there to explain why and how the latter was occupied by terrorists in order to hide whilst, paradoxically, it is entirely in glass. They even polished it clean so as to leave no traces. This improbable and irresolvable anecdote encourages the characters to invent images of an event given media coverage without the images nor the story and thus missing the main point. (Neil Beloufa)

THE PIPS
Emily Wardill, UK, 2011, video, b/w, silent, 4 min
Emily Wardill’s films encourage imagination as an unpredictable tool to surpass rational thought. The Pips explores movement and the materiality of it, the instigation of one and the duration of the other. Shot in black and white on 16mm, then transferred to a digital projection, The Pips focuses on British gymnastics champion, Francesca Jones. The film begins with a straight depiction of Jones’ routine; the patterns created by her ribbon baton trace her movements in the air. It is a reflection of her actions, imitating her and existing because of her. Near the end of the film, the gymnast’s body becomes stretched, elongated and distorted ultimately breaking into a series of mutant parts. Her face remains unfathomed and she gives no acknowledgement to her own decay. As Jones becomes still, her actions take on their own identity; their materiality deconstructed by Wardill’s emphasis on the physical replication of movement. The body and its motions become contained in the object, revealing an inherent plasticity in the gymnast’s performance. (Ian White)

… THESE BLAZEING STARRS!
Deborah Stratman, USA, 2011, 16mm, b/w, sound, 14 min
Since comets have been recorded, they’ve augured catastrophe, messiahs, upheaval and end times. A short film about these meteoric ice-cored fireballs and their historic ties to divination that combines imagery of 15th-18th century European broadsides with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory footage. … These Blazeing Starrs! juxtaposes a modern empirical desire to probe and measure against older methods, when we translated the sky to predict human folly. These days, comets are understood as time capsules harbouring elemental information about the formation of our solar system. We smash rockets into them to read spectral signatures. In a sense, they remain oracles – it’s just the manner of divining which has changed. (Deborah Stratman)
www.pythagorasfilm.com

THESE HAMMERS DON’T HURT US
Michael Robinson, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 13 min
Looking to a future beyond death, Michael Robinson’s These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us, one of the filmmaker’s most sophisticated found footage concoctions yet, combines Michael Jackson’s Remember the Time music video with footage of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra and roughly a dozen other sources, creating for the late pop star a solemn passage into a bedazzled Egyptian afterlife tenderly ushered by his real-life confidante. (Genevieve Yue, Reverse Shot)
www.poisonberries.net

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