BREAK ON THROUGH
Sunday 24 October 2010, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT3

GHOST ALGEBRA
Janie Geiser, USA, 2009, video, colour, sound, 8 min
Under erratic skies, a solitary figure navigates a landscape of constructed nature and broken bones. She peers through a decaying aperture, waiting and watching: the fragility of the body is exposed for what it is: ephemeral, liquid, a battlefield of nervous dreams. Using found and natural objects, rephotographed video, medical illustrations, and other collage elements, Ghost Algebra suggests one of the original meanings of the word ‘algebra’: the science of restoring what is missing, the reunion of broken parts. (Janie Geiser)

STILL RAINING, STILL DREAMING
Phil Solomon, USA, 2009, video, colour, sound, 15 min
Still Raining, Still Dreaming tracks film’s ‘wind in the trees’, those ostensibly open-air spontaneities of flickering shadows and leaves that a whole tradition of avant-garde artists (including Solomon) has tried to return to, and shows them as a Silicon Valley programmer’s machinations in a hollow, digital city from the post-apocalypse where the images again don’t always register fast enough for the camera. Buildings bend and catch up as mirages. Leaves fall and children skate by, and any video-game player wonders, as usual, whether they’re gone from the program altogether once they’ve left the screen. Solomon films only the urban after-effects of a natural world of seasonal and solar changes never seen. It’s his best Grand Theft Auto film yet, as the portrait of a world going on over the graveyard of an abandoned civilization. (Johnny Lavant)

SO SURE OF NOWHERE BUYING TIMES TO COME
David Gatten, USA, 2010, 16mm, colour, silent, 9 min
Excerpts from Sir Thomas Browne’s 1658 text ‘Hydriotaphia, Urne-Burial or, A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk’ are superimposed with the stone faces of grave markers and burial urns. This image-text bookends a series of objects framed in the ancient glass window panes of a tiny shop, in a tiny snow covered town, on a mountain top in Colorado: a pocket watch, a postal scale, a small mirror, a stop watch, some stamps, a knife, some bandages, an hourglass. Time is short. Time is running out. The time left is all the time we have. (David Gatten)

FORMS ARE NOT SELF-SUBSISTENT SUBSTANCES
Samantha Rebello, UK, 2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 22 min
The film was borne of an interest in ‘medieval’ perception through images and philosophy, the latter taken in particular from Aristotle’s ‘Categories’ and ‘Metaphysics’, which were highly influential within medieval scholarship. It uses certain passages and concepts from these works (also the origin of the title) on the themes of substance and being. It includes medieval imagery from the Cathédrale Saint Lazare, Autun – the stone carvings attributed to Gislebertus, depicting humans at the mercy of beasts and devils – and colour plates from a reproduction of the Bestiary ‘M.S. Bodley 764’. The sounds of ‘medieval’ bells, recorded in Autun and at the Basilique Saint Denis are also important. There is an interest in themes of animality and flesh through the imagined medieval sensibility. The proximity to their own bodies heightened, paradoxically, by their aspirations toward purity of spirit through the denigration of the flesh. This imagery is juxtaposed against live ‘beasts’; animals filmed in such a way as to attain a sense of distance / strangeness akin to the medieval illuminations and carvings. The idea of ‘substance’ is thrown into relief through playing with the possible ways of understanding the term through the words of Aristotle, or the tactile / haptic apprehension of the screen imagery, filmed mainly in close up. Stone, flesh, milk and blood are filmed as ‘beings’ in their own right, with thecloak of language removed on order to reveal a reality of ‘things’ ordinarily hidden from view. The tension between ‘medieval’ perception and our own is explored. Due to their remove from us, the words of Aristotle or the Bestiary imagery ignite another way of perceiving within the film. Ordinary things become out of the ordinary, on the way towards the essential. (Samantha Rebello)

FACTS TOLD AT RETAIL (AFTER HENRY JAMES)
Erin Espelie, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 9 min
In his introduction to the 1909 edition of ‘The Golden Bowl’, Henry James wrote, ‘My instinct appears repeatedly to have been that to arrive at the facts retailed … by the given help of some other conscious and confessed agent is essentially to find the whole business.’ In this film, James acts as the confessed agent, and the glass through which every image is reflected or filtered takes on a kind of consciousness. (Erin Espelie)

COSMIC ALCHEMY
Lawrence Jordan, USA, 2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 24 min
Cosmic Alchemy is thematically and visually consistent with his earlier films and yet, set to an evocative score by John Davis, Jordan has crossed into an unfamiliar and richly rewarding territory of metaphoric complexity. For the handful of folks unfamiliar with Lawrence Jordan’s work, Cosmic Alchemy will leave you desperately wanting more. For the rest, already quite familiar with his brilliance, this film will install a fresh appreciation for Jordan’s justifiable position among experimental cinema’s ascended masters. (Jonathan Marlow)

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