<\/p>\n
BREAK ON THROUGH
\n<\/strong>Sunday 24 October 2010, at 7pm
\nLondon BFI Southbank NFT3<\/p>\nGHOST ALGEBRA
\nJanie Geiser, USA, 2009, video, colour, sound, 8 min
\n<\/strong>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<\/em> suggests one of the original meanings of the word \u2018algebra\u2019: the science of restoring what is missing, the reunion of broken parts<\/em>. (Janie Geiser)<\/p>\nSTILL RAINING, STILL DREAMING
\nPhil Solomon, USA, 2009, video, colour, sound, 15 min
\n<\/strong>Still Raining, Still Dreaming<\/em> tracks film\u2019s \u2018wind in the trees\u2019, 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\u2019s machinations in a hollow, digital city from the post-apocalypse where the images again don\u2019t 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\u2019re gone from the program altogether once they\u2019ve left the screen. Solomon films only the urban after-effects of a natural world of seasonal and solar changes never seen. It\u2019s his best Grand Theft Auto film yet, as the portrait of a world going on over the graveyard of an abandoned civilization. (Johnny Lavant)<\/p>\nSO SURE OF NOWHERE BUYING TIMES TO COME
\nDavid Gatten, USA, 2010, 16mm, colour, silent, 9 min
\n<\/strong>Excerpts from Sir Thomas Browne\u2019s 1658 text \u2018Hydriotaphia, Urne-Burial or, A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk\u2019 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)<\/p>\nFORMS ARE NOT SELF-SUBSISTENT SUBSTANCES
\nSamantha Rebello, UK, 2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 22 min
\n<\/strong>The film was borne of an interest in \u2018medieval\u2019 perception through images and philosophy, the latter taken in particular from Aristotle\u2019s \u2018Categories\u2019 and \u2018Metaphysics\u2019, 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 Cath\u00e9drale Saint Lazare, Autun \u2013 the stone carvings attributed to Gislebertus, depicting humans at the mercy of beasts and devils \u2013 and colour plates from a reproduction of the Bestiary \u2018M.S. Bodley 764\u2019. The sounds of \u2018medieval\u2019 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 \u2018beasts\u2019; animals filmed in such a way as to attain a sense of distance \/ strangeness akin to the medieval illuminations and carvings. The idea of \u2018substance\u2019 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 \u2018beings\u2019 in their own right, with thecloak of language removed on order to reveal a reality of \u2018things\u2019 ordinarily hidden from view. The tension between \u2018medieval\u2019 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)<\/p>\nFACTS TOLD AT RETAIL (AFTER HENRY JAMES)
\nErin Espelie, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 9 min
\n<\/strong>In his introduction to the 1909 edition of \u2018The Golden Bowl\u2019, Henry James wrote, \u2018My instinct appears repeatedly to have been that to arrive at the facts retailed \u2026 by the given help of some other conscious and confessed agent is essentially to find the whole business.\u2019 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)<\/p>\nCOSMIC ALCHEMY
\nLawrence Jordan, USA, 2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 24 min
\n<\/strong>Cosmic Alchemy<\/em> 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\u2019s work, Cosmic Alchemy<\/em> will leave you desperately wanting more. For the rest, already quite familiar with his brilliance, this film will install a fresh appreciation for Jordan\u2019s justifiable position among experimental cinema\u2019s ascended masters. (Jonathan Marlow)<\/p>\nBack to top<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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":[59],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-1606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-london-film-festival-2010","tag-london-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606","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=1606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}