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ALTERED STATES Ben Russell, Trypps #7 (Badlands), USA, 2010, 10 min Mary Helena Clark, While You Were Sleeping, USA, 2010, 9 min Neil Beloufa, Sans Titre, France, 2010, 15 min Emily Wardill, The Pips, UK, 2011, 4 min Deborah Stratman, \u2026 These Blazeing Starrs!. USA, 2011, 14 min Michael Robinson, These Hammers Don\u2019t Hurt Us, USA, 2010, 13 min Also Screening: Thursday 27 October 2011, at 3:45pm, NFT3<\/em><\/p>\nPROGRAMME NOTES<\/a> ALTERED STATES ALTERED STATES<\/strong><\/p>\n TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS) WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING SANS TITRE THE PIPS \u2026 THESE BLAZEING STARRS! THESE HAMMERS DON\u2019T HURT US
\nSaturday 22 October 2011, at 2pm
\nLondon BFI Southbank NFT3<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>The mirror crack\u2019d: As a young woman, high on LSD, looks toward the camera, the doors of perception swing open for both viewer and subject.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>\u2018This is your life. It rides like a dream.\u2019 (MHC)<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>In a reconstruction of a villa occupied by terrorists during the Algerian War, onlookers speculate on the activities that took place.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>A gymnast performs, and everything begins to fall away \u2026<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Watch the skies! Throughout history, comets have heralded events of grave significance and change; today it is thought that they can reveal facts about the formation of the universe.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>\u2018Tired of underworld and overworld alike, Isis escorts her favourite son on their final curtain call down the Nile, leaving a neon wake of shattered tombs and sparkling sarcophagi.\u2019 (MR)<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Saturday 22 October 2011, at 2pm
\nLondon BFI Southbank NFT3<\/p>\n
\nBen Russell, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 10 min
\n<\/strong>Trypps #7 (Badlands)<\/em> charts, through an intimate long-take, a young woman\u2019s LSD trip in the Badlands National Park before descending into a psychedelic, formal abstraction of the expansive desert landscape. Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell\u2019s unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence. (Michael Green)
\nwww.dimeshow.com<\/a><\/p>\n
\nMary Helena Clark, USA, video, colour, sound, 2010, 9 min
\n<\/strong>\u2018This is your life. It rides like a dream.\u2019 (Mary Helena Clark)<\/p>\n
\nNeil Beloufa, France, 2010, video, colour, sound, 15 min
\n<\/strong>A cardboard decor and photographs reconstitute a luxury Californian-type villa in Algeria. Its inhabitants, neighbours and other protagonists imagine themselves there to explain why and how the latter was occupied by terrorists in order to hide whilst, paradoxically, it is entirely in glass. They even polished it clean so as to leave no traces. This improbable and irresolvable anecdote encourages the characters to invent images of an event given media coverage without the images nor the story and thus missing the main point. (Neil Beloufa)<\/p>\n
\nEmily Wardill, UK, 2011, video, b\/w, silent, 4 min
\n<\/strong>Emily Wardill\u2019s films encourage imagination as an unpredictable tool to surpass rational thought. The Pips <\/em>explores movement and the materiality of it, the instigation of one and the duration of the other. Shot in black and white on 16mm, then transferred to a digital projection, The Pips <\/em>focuses on British gymnastics champion, Francesca Jones. The film begins with a straight depiction of Jones\u2019 routine; the patterns created by her ribbon baton trace her movements in the air. It is a reflection of her actions, imitating her and existing because of her. Near the end of the film, the gymnast\u2019s body becomes stretched, elongated and distorted ultimately breaking into a series of mutant parts. Her face remains unfathomed and she gives no acknowledgement to her own decay. As Jones becomes still, her actions take on their own identity; their materiality deconstructed by Wardill\u2019s emphasis on the physical replication of movement. The body and its motions become contained in the object, revealing an inherent plasticity in the gymnast\u2019s performance. (Ian White)<\/p>\n
\nDeborah Stratman, USA, 2011, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 14 min
\n<\/strong>Since comets have been recorded, they\u2019ve augured catastrophe, messiahs, upheaval and end times. A short film about these meteoric ice-cored fireballs and their historic ties to divination that combines imagery of 15th-18th century European broadsides with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory footage. \u2026 These Blazeing Starrs!<\/em> juxtaposes a modern empirical desire to probe and measure against older methods, when we translated the sky to predict human folly. These days, comets are understood as time capsules harbouring elemental information about the formation of our solar system. We smash rockets into them to read spectral signatures. In a sense, they remain oracles \u2013 it\u2019s just the manner of divining which has changed. (Deborah Stratman)
\nwww.pythagorasfilm.com<\/a><\/p>\n
\nMichael Robinson, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 13 min
\n<\/strong>Looking to a future beyond death, Michael Robinson\u2019s These Hammers Don\u2019t Hurt Us<\/em>, one of the filmmaker\u2019s most sophisticated found footage concoctions yet, combines Michael Jackson\u2019s Remember the Time<\/em> music video with footage of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra <\/em>and roughly a dozen other sources, creating for the late pop star a solemn passage into a bedazzled Egyptian afterlife tenderly ushered by his real-life confidante. (Genevieve Yue, Reverse Shot)
\nwww.poisonberries.net<\/a><\/p>\n