{"id":1400,"date":"2007-10-28T21:00:27","date_gmt":"2007-10-28T21:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/?p=1400"},"modified":"2018-05-08T17:32:49","modified_gmt":"2018-05-08T16:32:49","slug":"the-anagogic-chamber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/2007\/10\/28\/the-anagogic-chamber\/","title":{"rendered":"The Anagogic Chamber"},"content":{"rendered":"

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THE ANAGOGIC CHAMBER
\n<\/strong>Sunday 28 October 2007, at 9pm
\nLondon BFI Southbank NFT3<\/strong><\/p>\n

David Gatten, Film for Invisible Ink, Case No: 71: Base-Plus-Fog, USA, 2006, 10 min
\n<\/strong>\u2018Just barely a whisper. The minimum density, the slightest shape. A series of measurements, an equation for living. The edge of what matters, the contours of an idea. A selection of coordinates for finding one\u2019s way back.\u2019 (David Gatten)<\/p>\n

Greg Pope, Shadow Trap, UK-Norway, 2007, 8 min
\n<\/strong>Shards of emulsion produced during an auto-destructive film performance have been layered and structured onto clear 35mm. Extending across the soundtrack area, the synaesthetic image creates an intense volley of sound and light.<\/p>\n

Samantha Rebello, The Object Which Thinks Us: OBJECT 1, UK, 2007, 7 min
\n<\/strong>Utilitarian objects, related to health and hygiene, rendered in unconventional ways. This unsettling film questions the way that we relate to our surroundings by exploring the \u2018radical otherness\u2019 of things.<\/p>\n

Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, fugitive l(i)ght, Canada, 2005, 9 min
\n<\/strong>Adrift on the mists of time, archival images of Lo\u00efe Fuller\u2019s \u2018Serpentine Dance\u2019 shimmer forth and dissolve in folds of abstract colour.<\/p>\n

Emily Wardill, Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck, USA, 2007, 10 min
\n<\/strong>A farce of fractures: part study of allegorical stained glass windows, part fiction of disparate doppelgangers.<\/p>\n

Michael Robinson, Victory over the Sun, USA, 2007, 13 min
\n<\/strong>Viewed through science fiction or scientific innovation, the future is as far away now as it ever was. Sites of past World\u2019s Fairs witness battles between good and evil, the spirit world and the cold hard light of day.<\/p>\n

Jessie Stead & David Gatten, Today!, USA, 2007, 11 min
\n<\/strong>\u2018Touch what you see when you find it or pick it up. Fall off tomorrow\u2019s promise, not injured and again. In the woods there is snow, in the water there is sugar, bodies are made of salt and (yesterday is unaware).\u2019 (Jessie Stead & David Gatten)<\/p>\n

Festival guest David Gatten will lead a practical workshop on the use of text in 16mm filmmaking on Thursday 25 October 2007. <\/em><\/p>\nPROGRAMME NOTES<\/a>

<\/p>\n

THE ANAGOGIC CHAMBER
\n<\/strong>Sunday 28 October 2007, at 9pm
\nLondon BFI Southbank NFT3<\/p>\n

FILM FOR INVISIBLE INK, CASE NO: 71: BASE-PLUS-FOG
\nDavid Gatten, USA, 2006, <\/strong>16mm, colour, sound, <\/strong>10 min
\n<\/strong>David Gatten\u2019s placid, comically lyrical new Film for Invisible Ink, Case No. 71: Base-Plus-Fog<\/em> calls to mind the self-referential highjinks and bone-dry textual wit of Owen Land. But Gatten\u2019s approach is in some ways more classically minimalist than Land\u2019s. Invisible Ink<\/em> is largely composed of a series of sprocket-hole outlines that seem to materialize from the white screen, the \u2018image\u2019 consisting of clear leader and its dust granules until one of the rounded rectangles dips down and floats forward into the frame of reference. They each occupy pretty much the same position and, although they are mostly identical, the ongoing procession gives us time to notice their differences – a smudged lower boundary, say, or an unstable corner. In between, Gatten silently presents texts from a Kodak manual, detailing what I can only assume to be the film-developer hazard that we\u2019re observing \u2013 problems in base-plus-fog density. (Don\u2019t ask me. For all I know, this could refer to an ambiance management conundrum at a discotheque.) Gatten has been working for years now with the particular juncture at which text and image become indistinguishable, but Film for Invisible Ink<\/em> displays an impressive recommitment to the less-is-more aesthetic that lent such subtlety and refinement to his earlier What the Water Said<\/em> series. The new work is as delicate yet muscular as an Agnes Martin canvas or a Fred Sandback string sculpture. (Michael Sicinski, Green Cine Daily)
\nwww.davidgattenfilm.com<\/p>\n

SHADOW TRAP
\nGreg Pope, UK-Norway, 2007, <\/strong>35mm, colour, sound, <\/strong>8 min
\n<\/strong>Shadow Trap<\/em> was conceived as a companion piece to the live film performance Light Trap<\/em>. In Light Trap<\/em> action is taken to remove all emulsion from completely developed black film loops; Shadow Trap<\/em> operates in reverse \u2013 a film created by the application of film emulsion \u2018dust\u2019 to a clear base. In a way Shadow Trap<\/em> is a documentary \u2013 a record of previously executed actions \u2013 an exhibition of the evidence. I also regard it as a found footage film, where material from one film is re-presented and re-examined in another. In this case the re-presented material has been subjected to extreme abrasion and reduced to dust. I was also excited by the notion of fragmenting the base unit of film language to a level below that of the classical single frame, where frames are \u2018atomised\u2019 and we start to examine the building blocks of film. The image-as-sound \/ sound-as-image crossover also mirrors the audio element in Light Trap<\/em> (where a live scratch soundtrack is created). Using the inherent sound technology of 35mm projectors I can play back surround sound audio (sound which is created by the image), over which I have very limited control. (Greg Pope)<\/p>\n

THE OBJECT WHICH THINKS US: OBJECT 1
\nSamantha Rebello, UK, 2007, <\/strong>16mm, colour, sound, <\/strong>7 min
\n<\/strong>The Object Which Thinks Us: OBJECT 1<\/em> is a film about human beings in the 21st Century, though paradoxically it is a film in which the human image plays no more than a fleeting part. Objects: utilitarian articles which play a major role in our everyday existence (though to which we pay little attention) are at the core of a film which uses them as a mirror in which we are able to view ourselves. People are nowhere to be seen though human presence is felt everywhere in the things<\/em> which fill the screen. Humans are modified and directed by those objects they deem to be in control of. Our gestures and movements are constantly guided by things<\/em> which do more than aid us in our day to day activities. The film seems intent on opening our eyes to the hidden qualities of manufactured goods and articles, exposing them to be enigmatic and imposing operators
\nin our existence, and human beings are shown at the periphery of an object world. \u2018Through the objects, other human beings are haunting us.\u2019 (Samantha Rebello)<\/p>\n

FUGITIVE L(I)GHT
\nIzabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Canada, 2005, <\/strong>16mm, colour, sound, <\/strong>9 min
\n<\/strong>This film explores the morph-like quality of the Serpentine Dance and its intricate play on the visible and the invisible, which extends to the larger context and legacy its originator, the American born Lo\u00efe Fuller. fugitive l(i)ght<\/em> is composed of elaborately reworked found footage, originally captured by Thomas Edison and the Lumi\u00e8re brothers, of various renditions and imitations of Fuller\u2019s Serpentine performances. These found films are woven into intricately reworked sequences using several computer programs and following poetic interpretations of several artists who experienced Fuller\u2019s performances in person: texts of Mallarme, lithographs of Toulouse-Lautrec, sketches of Whistler, and futuristic manifesto on dance by Marinetti. The music for this film was composed by Toronto based composer Colin Clark who reworked various LP recordings of Wagner\u2019s Die Walk\u00fcre, the music that often accompanied Fuller\u2019s Serpentine performances. fugitive l(i)ght<\/em> emphasizes rhythmic structures over and above representation, by drawing the viewer\u2019s gaze into a maze of multiple folds of continuously unfolding colour patterns. fugitive l(i)ght<\/em> aims to evoke a charge of energy that might have been experienced by the audience of the 1890s in the presence of Fuller\u2019s light performances, and therefore permitting her to meet us again, one century later by making herself and her performance (in)visible to us through its palpitating playful rhythm expressed as a field of energy that resonates within the spectator. (Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof)<\/p>\n

SICK SERENA AND DREGS AND WRECK AND WRECK
\nEmily Wardill, UK, 2007, <\/strong>16mm, colour, sound, <\/strong>10 min
\n<\/strong>Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck <\/em>revels in a subset of fiction \u2013 allegory, with its roots in Medieval poetry \u2013 that ricochets retrospectively into Emily Wardill\u2019s other films, into us watching them, into a methodology or a thought process being made manifest in which we are complicit. Allegory is an illusion of the highest order, fiction crystallised into a specific or mysterious instructional purpose. It tells two entirely co-dependent stories absolutely simultaneously, one which we are actually reading, the other the lesson to be derived from it. Through coherent, albeit often surreal narrative, we are taught something about how to behave, told our own story. These (invariably moral) coda only make sense if the narrative we are reading or watching remains in tact. Allegories are told like fairytales or made into pictures that have a similar symbolic order. Religious images are not strictly allegorical, but they are instructional and in the close-ups of Sick Serena<\/em>\u2019s stained glass the figures crunched between thick lead with animals and angels, reframed here as decapitated, broken, they are reinterpreted as mysteriously, dramatically symbolic. What is more they come to life. To \u2018life\u2019. They come to whose life? (Ian White)<\/p>\n

VICTORY OVER THE SUN
\nMichael Robinson, USA, 2007, <\/strong>16mm, colour, sound, <\/strong>13 min
\n<\/strong>Dominant sites of past World\u2019s Fairs breed an eruptive struggle between spirit and matter, ego and industry, futurism and failure. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory; nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain. (Michael Robinson)
\nwww.poisonberries.net<\/a><\/p>\n

TODAY!
\nJessie Stead & David Gatten, USA, 2007, <\/strong>16mm, colour, sound-on-cd, <\/strong>11 min
\n<\/strong>Touch what you see when you find it or pick it up.
\nFall off tomorrow\u2019s promise, not injured and again.
\nIn the woods there is snow, in the water there is sugar,
\nbodies are made of salt and (yesterday is unaware).
\n(Jesse Stead & David Gatten)
\nwww.jessiestead.com<\/a>
\nwww.davidgattenfilm.com<\/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":[25],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-1400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-london-film-festival-2007","tag-london-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400","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=1400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}