{"id":1328,"date":"2006-10-28T16:00:21","date_gmt":"2006-10-28T15:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/?p=1328"},"modified":"2018-01-25T14:55:59","modified_gmt":"2018-01-25T14:55:59","slug":"distance-and-displacement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/2006\/10\/28\/distance-and-displacement\/","title":{"rendered":"Distance and Displacement"},"content":{"rendered":"

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DISTANCE AND DISPLACEMENT
\nSaturday 28 October 2006, at 4pm
\nLondon National Film Theatre NFT3<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ken Jacobs, Let There Be Whistleblowers, USA, 2005, 18 min
\n<\/strong>Advancing the techniques of his \u2018Nervous System\u2019 performances (seen here in 2000), Jacobs now treats archival film footage with electronic means, shifting his exploration of visual space into the digital domain. All aboard the mystery train for a journey from actuality to abstraction. Steve Reich\u2019s \u2018Drumming\u2019 provides added momentum.<\/p>\n

Brett Kashmere, Unfinished Passages, Canada, 2005, 17 min
\n<\/strong>Archival images and a contraflow of texts trace the migration of the artists\u2019 grandfather from London to Saskatchewan. \u2018Using the shadow play of light and darkness as a metaphor for human memory Unfinished Passages<\/em> reframes his forced immigration\/orphan experience through the developing lens of the cinema.\u2019<\/p>\n

Ben Rivers, This is My Land, UK, 2006, 8 min
\n<\/strong>A portrait of Jake Williams, who lives a hermetic lifestyle in a remote house in the woods of Aberdeenshire. Folk film for the new millennium.<\/p>\n

Bill Brown, The Other Side, USA, 2006, 43 min
\n<\/strong>In this rich and revealing essay film, Brown shares his experiences of travelling from Texas to California, recounting a history of the landscape, its inhabitants and those that pass through. The border between Mexico and the USA is crossed by thousands of undocumented persons each year, and hundreds do not survive the journey through the desert to the other side. Incorporating a personal voiceover and interviews with migrant activists, this visually striking film examines the border as a site of aspiration and insecurity.<\/p>\nPROGRAMME NOTES<\/a>

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DISTANCE AND DISPLACEMENT
\n<\/strong>Saturday 28 October 2006, at 4pm
\n<\/strong>London National Film Theatre NFT3<\/p>\n

LET THERE BE WHISTLEBLOWERS
\nKen Jacobs, USA, 2005, video, b\/w, sound, 18 min
\n<\/strong>A train passes through a tunnel and hurtles on to a station. Time and space is toyed with, things enter an impossible state of on-going movement while going nowhere. The actual tunnel experience sets off a metaphysical one. Composed to the first part of \u2018Drumming\u2019 by Steve Reich. (Ken Jacobs)<\/p>\n

UNIFINISHED PASSAGES
\nBrett Kashmere, Canada, 2005, video, b\/w, sound, 17 min
\n<\/strong>This five-part film cycle emphasizes instants, rather than developing situations. Designed using indeterminate loop forms, and organized around themes of dislocation, transition, settlement, modernity and transportation, Unfinished Passages <\/em>traces my great-grandfather\u2019s journey from London, England to Golden Plains, Saskatchewan at the turn of the 20th century. Using the shadow play of light and darkness as a metaphor for human memory, Unfinished Passages <\/em>reframes his forced immigration , orphan experience through the developing lens of the cinema. In bringing to light this aspect of my family history I draw upon the language of early cinema, beginning with the straightforward visual simplicity of Lumi\u00e8re demonstration pieces such as Boat Leaving the Harbour<\/em> (1896) and The Arrival of a Train at the Station<\/em> (1895), and Birt Acre\u2019s Rough Sea at Dover<\/em> (1895). The second part, inspired by Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s, follows the pattern of a dream and, as in a dream its real meaning is displaced and dispersed through associative connections. Part three forms a transitional pivot, seizing on the romanticized image of a moving train as an emblem for cinematic and technological progress. In part four the film proceeds to a more constructive, layered assembly based on the theory and practice of Dziga Vertov. Part five draws on the individual self-expression and open-ended conclusion of Francois Truffaut\u2019s 400 Blows <\/em>(1959). The reconstruction of my great-grandfather\u2019s passage from Europe to Canada is, at the same time, expressed as a coterminous movement through film history. (Brett Kashmere)
\nwww.brettkashmere.com<\/a><\/p>\n

THIS IS MY LAND
\nBen Rivers, UK, 2006, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 14 min
\n<\/strong>A portrait of Jake Williams, who has lived in the middle of Clashindarroch Forest, Aberdeenshire, for over twenty years. Jake always has a hundred jobs on at any one time, fragmenting them into a system that he says eventually gets them all done some day; an expert mandolin player; a committed permaculturist who never throws anything away in the conventional sense, and has compost heaps going back many, many years. He has a different sense of time to most people in the 21st Century, which is explicitly expressed in his idea for creating hedges by putting up bird feeders. It struck me straight away that there were parallels between our ways of working \u2013 I have tried to be as self-reliant as possible and apart from the idea of filmmaking as an industry \u2013 Jake\u2019s life and garden are much the same – he can sustain himself from what he grows and so needs little from others. To Jake this isn\u2019t about nostalgia for some treasured pre-electric past, but more, a very real future. (Ben Rivers)<\/p>\n

THE OTHER SIDE
\nBill Brown, USA, 2006, 16mm, colour, sound, 43 min
\n<\/strong>Rooted in the true sense of \u2018independent\u2019 in voice and image, The Other Side<\/em> is a personal essay documentary imbued with magical landscapes and searing observations softly spoken during the director\u2019s cinematic trek along the United States-Mexican border. Throughout the 2,000-mile journey, Texas-based filmmaker Bill Brown considers the border as an historical and political geography of aspiration, insecurity, and transition. He talks to undocumented immigrants who have risked their lives to cross the border and to border activists whose politics have put them at odds with the guardians of homeland security. A native Texan who has made several documentary shorts, Brown is a sublime, poetic master of wide-open, in-between spaces, of desert and deserted vistas. The Other Side<\/em> is a rare chance to discover one of America\u2019s leading new cinematic voices. (Film Society of Lincoln Center)
\nTo describe myself as documentary filmmaker is to own up to a troubled profession, what with its unfortunate aspiring to Truth and Objectivity. I\u2019ve tried to cope with this by personalizing my films, insinuating my own voice and disavowing any pose of authority or conclusiveness. More than that, I\u2019m interested in moving the documentary toward something like a metaphysics of fact, where fact materializes for a moment, only to dissolve into daydreams and melancholy and goose bumps.
\nI find myself drawn again and again to the same spaces: those wide open in-between spaces; landscapes of abandoned things; border zones and landscapes of transition, whether on the far edges of Las Vegas suburban sprawl, or along the fence line of abandoned missile silos in North Dakota. I\u2019m drawn to the drama of transits and transitions played out on landscapes like these. I find myself drawn to the uncanny, too: UFOs and crop circles and ghost stories. The uncanny short-circuits the conclusiveness of our daily lives, which is something I like about it. I\u2019m not sure if the uncanny has some special access to truth, but the uncanny and the true both are spooky. Both haunt us, hovering close by but just out of reach. (Bill Brown)<\/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":[52],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-1328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-london-film-festival-2006","tag-london-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1328","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=1328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1328\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}