{"id":1281,"date":"2005-10-30T16:00:09","date_gmt":"2005-10-30T16:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/?p=1281"},"modified":"2018-01-25T14:57:38","modified_gmt":"2018-01-25T14:57:38","slug":"history-as-she-is-harped","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/2005\/10\/30\/history-as-she-is-harped\/","title":{"rendered":"History as She is Harped"},"content":{"rendered":"

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HISTORY AS SHE IS HARPED
\nSunday 30 October 2005, at 4pm<\/b>
\nLondon National Film Theatre NFT3 <\/b><\/p>\n

Leslie Thornton, Let Me Count The Ways: Minus 10, 9, 8, 7, USA, 2004, 20 min
\n<\/b>A meditation on the bombing of Hiroshima, matching found footage with revealing audio interviews with survivors, and informed by the film-maker\u2019s personal connection to the horrific event. It opens with amateur movies of Thornton\u2019s father (a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project) at the Los Alamos Air Base. Later sections concern the effects on vegetation in the devastated region.<\/p>\n

Jayne Parker, Stationary Music, UK, 2005, 15 min
\n<\/b>Poetic record of \u2018Sonata 1\u2019 (1925) by modernist composer Stefan Wolpe \u2013 a Jewish communist who was forced to flee Germany in 1933, ultimately making the transition from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College. An appropriately still and empathetic camera captures this vibrant solo piano performance by his daughter Katerina, who first recounts some of the history of the piece.<\/p>\n

Abigail Child, The Future Is Behind You, USA, 2004, 16 min
\n<\/b>Fictional biography woven around home movie footage shot by an anonymous German family in the 1930s. The relationship of two adolescent sisters, and how it may have been affected by the turbulent times ahead, is the focus of a work that raises questions about the interpretation of personal and public histories.<\/p>\n

Deborah Stratman, Energy Country, USA, 2003, 15 min
\n<\/b>Stratman\u2019s impressionistic essay on the oil industry implicitly refers to ulterior motives behind the invasion of Iraq. The dreamlike tour of petrochemical sites in Southern Texas contrasts with the harsh realities of Christian fundamentalist attitudes to homeland security that are heard on the soundtrack.<\/p>\n

Fr\u00e9deric Moser & Philippe Schwinger, Capitulation Project, Germany-Switzerland, 2003, 21 min
\n<\/b>What at first looks to be historical footage of the Performance Group\u2019s \u2018Commune\u2019 (1971) \u2013 a stark work of environmental theatre about the My Lai massacre \u2013 is in fact a carefully re-staged interpretation featuring German actors. Its apparent authenticity, which reflects the Group\u2019s constant shifting between performance, improvisation and rehearsal, oscillates the viewer\u2019s concentration between the various levels of reality it presents.<\/p>\nPROGRAMME NOTES<\/a>

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LET ME COUNT THE WAYS: MINUS 10, 9, 8, 7
\nLeslie Thornton, USA, 2004, video, b\/w, sound, 20 min
\n<\/b>Let Me Count the Ways<\/i> is an ongoing serial about violent terror and its aftermath. In episodes Minus 10, 9, 8, <\/i>and 7<\/i>, personal reminiscence is mixed with archival and new footage in an exploration of the interior of fear. From footage of the artist\u2019s father on the way to Hiroshima, through reference to 9\/11, the phenomenology of horror and the echo of its rupture are presented with an intensity which moves the viewer from history to the present and beyond. (Leslie Thornton)<\/p>\n

STATIONARY MUSIC
\nJayne Parker, UK, 2005, video, b\/w, sound, 15 min
\n<\/b>Stationary Music<\/i> takes its name from the first movement of Stefan Wolpe\u2019s \u2018Sonata 1\u2019 composed in 1925. The sonata is introduced and performed by his daughter, pianist Katharina Wolpe. Stationary Music: music that doesn’t develop\/music that stands still.
\n(Jayne Parker)<\/p>\n

after the fire what S<\/b>hall we do?
\n\u201cfirsT<\/b>
\nonE<\/b> step;
\naF<\/b>ter
\nthA<\/b>t,
\naN<\/b>other.\u201d<\/p>\n

                                                                                   W<\/b>e\u2019re
\nalO<\/b>ne
\nthe music is difficuL<\/b>t
\nto P<\/b>lay.
\nwE<\/b> must work at it.<\/p>\n

In Memoriam S. W.,<\/i> acrostic by John Cage<\/p>\n

THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU
\nAbigail Child, USA, 2004, video, b\/w, sound, 16 min
\n<\/b>Music by John Zorn, arranged and played by Sylvie Courvoisier and Mark Feldman. The Future is Behind You<\/i> creates a fictional story composed from an anonymous family archive from 1930s Europe, reconstructed to emphasize gender acculturation in two sisters who play, race, fight, kiss and grow up together under a shadow of oncoming history. I am looking, as always in found material, for the story below the story. Here there are at least three levels: 1) the home movie in which a family from 1930s Germany near the Swiss border poses for the camera, preternaturally happy. Unusually, the mother is main cinematographer; 2) the historical moment which remains as text trace, undermining the image and serving as covert motive for the action; 3) the development of gender identities \u2013 the innocent freedom of the elder transformed into socially bruised \u2018bride\u2019, the irrepressibility of the younger moving from tomboy to awkward, diffident adult. At once biography and fiction, history and psychology, The Future is Behind You<\/i> excavates gestures to explore the speculative seduction of narrative; it seeks a bridge between private and public histories. (Abigail Child)
\nwww.abigailchild.com<\/a><\/p>\n

ENERGY COUNTRY
\nDeborah Stratman, USA, 2003, video, colour, sound, 15 min
\n<\/b>The frenzied detritus of trading floors, smart weaponry and the religious right are woven through the petrochemical landscapes of Southeast Texas. This short video harangue questions land use policy as it serves the oil industry, patriotism as it absolves foreign aggression, and fundamentalism as it calcifies thinking. (Deborah Stratman)
\nwww.pythagorasfilm.com<\/a><\/p>\n

CAPITULATION PROJECT
\nFr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Moser & Philippe Schwinger, Germany-Switzerland, 2003, video, b\/w, sound, 21 min
\n<\/b>The New York-based Performance Group staged their piece \u2018Commune\u2019 for the first time in February 1971. The play included a short scene referring to the My Lai massacre. If members of the audience refused to participate actively in what was happening on stage during this scene, the actors interrupted their performance \u2013 sometimes for as long as three hours, depending on the audience\u2019s reaction. The group experimented with several variations of the scene. Starting with photographs of the performance and the notes of Richard Schechner, the theorist of environmental theatre, we came up with a new version of the My Lai sequence. We worked with the statements of soldiers involved in the massacre, criminal investigation reports, and contemporary articles in the press. In the process, we developed a scenario that enabled us to translate the historical documents into a form suitable for the stage. We aimed at representing an event of war without using any of the film industry\u2019s spectacular devices. What means do we have, as individual citizens, to come to terms with an act of terror? We followed the trail of the Performance Group. Their attempt to create a platform for self-criticism within the context of a theatre performance motivated our dramatic intentions. For this we reconstructed the stage set of \u2018Commune\u2019: a wave, evoking a landscape and also functioning as an agora, and scaffolding around the stage with seating for the audience. In 1971 the performers were inspired by rituals: they danced and they sang. We did not attempt to re-create this authenticity in our production. Although we do evoke the symbolic level of their representation, we chose to develop our play with the actors on two different levels. Each of the performers takes on a function, for example, as a reporter, but they can also intervene at any time in their own name. Thus, there is a constant back and forth between the actors and the characters they are representing. This method of dramatic framing enabled us to establish an analogy with film. There is no live performance in Capitulation Project<\/i>. The scene was filmed in about 30 sequences during two night shoots, with extras as a \u2018fake\u2019 audience. The distance from the performance that is created through the process of filming is comparable to our detachment from current political events. We intentionally moved back a few steps in time. We evoked the massacre by means of a contemporaneous artistic form in order to demonstrate that the grasp of an event of war is coupled with its transmission. (Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Moser and Philippe Schwinger)<\/p>\n

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Alina Rudnitskaya\u2019s humanistic approach to documentary filmmaking often brings out the humour in her chosen subjects. As an introduction to her work, this programme depicts three diverse groups of contemporary Russian women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-1281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-london-film-festival-2005","tag-london-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}