Date: 21 October 2012 | Season: London Film Festival 2012 | Tags: London Film Festival
WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENS
Sunday 21 October 2012, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
Peter Miller, Ten Minutiae, Germany, 2012, 5 min
A series of brief exercises in cinematographic magic.
Shumona Goel & Shai Heredia, I am Micro, India, 2011, 15 min
‘Shot in an abandoned optics factory and centred on the activities of a low budget film crew, I am Micro is an experimental essay about filmmaking, the medium of film, and the spirit of making independent cinema.’ (SG/SH)
Kevin Jerome Everson, Rita Larson’s Boy, USA, 2012, 11 min
In one of a trilogy of works based on personalities from the filmmaker’s parents’ hometown, actors audition for the role of sitcom character Rollo Larson. As they attempt to inhabit the character, subtle variations in delivery bring a hypnotic dimension to disconnected lines and repetitive actions.
Erin Espelie, True-Life Adventure, USA, 2012, 4 min
Espelie trains her camera on the myriad life forms that coexist within a small area around a mountain creek. ‘When nature writes the screenplays, she doesn’t abide by crescendos.’ (EE)
Nick Collins, Dark Garden, UK, 2011, 9 min
Contours of light define the flowers and plants of a winter garden, filmed against the black expanse of the night sky.
Robert Todd, Within, USA, 2012, 9 min
‘A film that sustains a complex condition: keeping the inner world alive as the camera looks ‘out’ upon the world.’ (RT)
David Gatten, By Pain and Rhyme and Arabesques of Foraging, USA, 2012, 8 min
An ‘experiment touching colours’ inspired by 17th Century scientist Robert Boyle, bringing together exquisite images shot over a 13-year period. Its title, from a sonnet by Jorie Graham, encapsulates the process and infers its poetic consequence.
Ben Rivers, The Creation As We Saw It, UK-Vanuatu, 2012, 14 min
Unexpectedly given the opportunity to travel anywhere in the world, Ben Rivers chose Vanuatu in the South Pacific. Amidst the villages and landscapes of this remote archipelago, he sought out the creation myths and folktales of a distant culture.
Erin Espelie will give a talk and screening at The Natural History Museum on Mon 22 Oct 2012, at 2:30pm.
PROGRAMME NOTES
WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENS
Sunday 21 October 2012, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
TEN MINUTIAE
Peter Miller, Germany, 2012, 16mm, b/w, silent, 5 min
Minutiae are ‘little things’. Here are ten. These little things comprise an exhibition exalting the cinema. (Peter Miller)
www.petermiller.info
I AM MICRO
Shumona Goel & Shai Heredia, India, 2011, 35mm, b/w, sound, 15 min
I Am Micro is an experimental film portrait of an anonymous filmmaker struggling to make films against innumerable odds. A stream of consciousness voiceover describes the film artist as a fragile, amorphous being, working in isolation, within a competitive film industry built by businessmen. The film was shot on black and white 16mm at National Instruments Limited, a now defunct factory in Calcutta which once produced cameras. I Am Micro combines lyrical tracking shots of obsolete machinery and dismembered cameras, with behind the scenes footage of an independent film production in Bombay. (Shumona Goel & Shai Heredia)
RITA LARSON’S BOY
Kevin Jerome Everson, USA, 2012, video, b/w, sound, 11 min
Rita Larson’s Boy portrays ten actors auditioning for the role of Rollo Larson in the 1970s TV sitcom Sanford and Son (the American remake of Steptoe and Son). It is one of three films included in the Tombigbee Chronicles Number Two. The series of films is based on famous people and objects from Columbus, Mississippi, hometown of Everson’s parents (the Tombigbee is the river the runs though the city). The actor Nathaniel Taylor, raised in Columbus, portrayed Rollo Larson – Rita Larson’s boy. (Kevin Everson)
TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE
Erin Espelie, USA, 2012, video, colour, sound, 4 min
When nature writes the screenplays, she doesn’t abide by crescendos but makes up each adventure as she goes along. A rivulet of time encased in a sliver of space reveals an abundance of life, an expression of persistence, and a vision of a world expanding beyond the limits of human attempts to contain or conclude. (Erin Espelie)
DARK GARDEN
Nick Collins, UK, 2011, 16mm, b/w, silent, 9 min
Dark Garden is a short film that captures the ghostly images of the artist’s garden in wintertime, a silent world of ghostly apparitions. Skeletal and silvery plants and their supports are conjured out of the black of the screen as a series of filmic epiphanies. (Cinecity)
WITHIN
Robert Todd, USA, 2012, 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min
Within is a film that sustains a complex condition: keeping the inner world alive as the camera looks ‘out’ upon the world. The film, edited mainly in-camera, dives into an interior that drifts increasingly internally, seeking a sort of cave-like milieu that dissolves into abstraction (forms seen in the dark, lacking firm definition, confusing both scales and distances), and then employs real-time complications to bring this internally-directed way of feeling space along with us as it moves into the outside world, or is it an imagined outer world? The film is a further complication of the perspectival explorations present in my film Undergrowth: rather than looking either at a figure or what some imaginary figure might be looking ‘at’, Within lives in a state that seems to resist perspectival definition, hovering somewhere between what is ‘out there’ and an internally defined image space that sees along with it. The film exists in a space that is at once shallow and deep, layered and reflective, barely there and yet very much alive. It is twilight. (Robert Todd)
www.roberttoddfilms.com
BY PAIN AND RHYME AND ARABESQUES OF FORAGING
David Gatten, USA, 2012, video, colour, silent, 8 min
Fourteen years of foraging, repeated attempts at rhyming, painful process of pruning. A love letter of sorts to Robert Boyle, FRS of The Invisible College and the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, in a visual embodiment of an obscure poetic form known as an ‘exploded Petrarchan sonnet.’ Lines by Jorie Graham in ‘Of Forced Sightes and Trusty Ferefulness’, after Sir Thomas Wyatt, informed both the impulse for the journey itself and destination I ultimately sought. (David Gatten)
www.davidgattenfilm.com
THE CREATION AS WE SAW IT
Ben Rivers, UK-Vanuatu, 2012, video, b/w, sound, 14 min
Three mythical stories from the island nation of Vanuatu, South Pacific, concerning the origin of humans, why pigs walk on all fours, and why a volcano sits where it does. (Ben Rivers)
www.benrivers.com
Erin Espelie will present a free screening and talk in the Attenborough Auditorium of the Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre on Monday 22 October 2012, at 2:30pm.
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