<\/p>\n
DIVERSIFICATIONS
\n<\/strong>Sunday 26 May 2002, at 3pm
\nLondon Tate Modern<\/p>\nSHAPES
\nAnnabel Nicolson, 1970, colour, silent, 7 min (18fps)
\n<\/strong>\u201cI tried to make a kind of environment in the room where I lived in Kentish Town and to make a film within it. There were pieces of paper and screwed up, transparent gels hanging from the ceiling; it was quite dense in some parts. I wandered through it with a camera and then other parts were filmed on the rooftop at St Martins. I think I was just very much trying to find my way in a whole new area of work. I remember it involved a lot of re-filming, which was the part I liked. The process was very fluid, similar to painting. I got quite interested in the specks of dust and dirt on the film and the re-filming gave me a chance to look at that more closely. Probably the thing that attracted me to film was the light \u2026 the kind of floating quality you can get, images suspended in light. Looking at it now, the kind of paintings I was doing before were floating shapes. It seems to me that the kind of things I was looking for I should be able to do with film. When I make a film, I\u2019m not sure what I\u2019m ever trying to achieve \u2026 it kind of gets clearer to me as I\u2019m doing it.\u201d \u2014Annabel Nicolson, interview with Mark Webber, 2002<\/p>\n\u201cCompassion; care; love; appreciation; attention. Quietude; silence; slowness; gentleness; subtlety; lyricism; beauty. It is terms like these that Annabel Nicolson\u2019s films can be discussed in (exploratory<\/em> would be another), if they are to be discussed at all; and perhaps they are best left to themselves, and to the receptive eye, mind, and soul of the viewer. They are humble, unpretentious, searching, and thoughtful films: they are reverent, after a style, and should be seen with a similar sort of reverence. The ephemeral thing, by this compassionate attention, is given the aspect of timelessness which transcends mere nostalgia: the thing is seen \u2018under the aspect of eternity\u2019.\u201d \u2014David Miller, Paragraphs On Some Films by Annabel Nicolson Seen in March 1973<\/p>\nFOOTSTEPS<\/strong>
\nMarilyn Halford, 1974, b\/w, sound, 6 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cFootsteps <\/em>is in the manner of a game reinacted, the game in making was between the camera and actor, the actor and cameraman, and one hundred feet of film. The film became expanded into positive and negative to change balances within it; black for perspective, then black to shadow the screen and make paradoxes with the idea of acting, and the act <\/em>of seeing the screen. The music sets a mood then turns a space, remembers the positive then silences the flatness of the negative. I am interested in the relationship of theatrical devices in film working at tangents with its abstract visual qualities. The use of a game works the memory, anticipation is set, positive film stands to resemble a three-dimensional sense of time in past\/future. Then negative holds out film itself as the image is one stage further abstracted and a disquiet is set up in the point that the sound track ends, whilst the picture track continues.\u201d \u2014Marilyn Halford, Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film exhibition catalogue, 1977<\/p>\n\u201cWe\u2019d just got one of these Russian film developing tanks, that you can load 100 feet of black and white film into and develop it yourself, which is very appealing because it means you haven\u2019t got all the palaver of going to labs. Footsteps<\/em> is based, obviously, on a game. Now whose early work would I have seen that prompted that? I think the image itself came from Ren\u00e9 Clair. That slightly rough black and white image I like very much \u2013 the idea of it not mattering if it\u2019s got speckly and dusty. It had a certain degree of antiquity built into it which, to me, was quite liberating because it\u2019s hard to keep it all dust free and so forth. Anyway, that\u2019s how I wanted it, I wanted it to look old even before it started, like old footage. Consequently it\u2019s got the Scott Joplin soundtrack, \u201cThe Entertainer\u201d; just because it\u2019s amusing and also to add that aged thing to it. The first time it goes through it\u2019s in negative so you wouldn\u2019t necessarily see what was going on, so you would have a lot of questions and curiosity as to what was happening. And then when all is revealed the right way round, it is just so simple, it\u2019s just such a simple game. I suppose the performance part of it just grew out of that, to extend it really, it was another way of presenting it \u2013 to take part and to play the game with the film image itself.\u201d \u2014Marilyn Halford, interview with Mark Webber, 2001<\/p>\nTALLA<\/strong>
\nMalcolm Le Grice, 1968, b\/w, silent, 20 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cTalla <\/em>is the most narrative\/subjective film I have yet made. Because all the material was shot by me in a week or so it has location continuity, which becomes very important in the film. The pace of the cutting is still fast and images still work from perception to conception or perhaps in this film \u2013 to \u2018feeling\u2019. However, there is no consistent building up of pace and the fast-cut pieces are held within pauses so that there are often \u2018clusters\u2019 of images diving out of a mainly calm field.\u201d \u2014Malcolm Le Grice, Interfunktionen 4, March 1970<\/p>\n\u201cI think Talla <\/em>is a hard film for most people. It\u2019s a very psychological and mysterious film. It starts out, in one primitive way, from the interplay of the black and the white. I was interested in this white screen on which things appear black. It\u2019s highly orchestrated, in terms of the black and white qualities of the image. There\u2019s something that\u2019s coming out in this work, in the mythological kind of subject \u2013 Chronos Fragmented<\/em> and the Cyclops<\/em> and all of that stuff \u2013 that Talla <\/em>is playing on. The shot material is actually on a very obscure bit of Dartmoor, and Dartmoor Prison and the warders there. So there\u2019s that element of the threatening, mysterious bit of society which is something that you can\u2019t get into, the dark side of the social. It\u2019s also very mythical, in that the gods and ghosts of that landscape are floating around there in the mist. It was completely edited directly on 16mm using a magnifying glass, I didn\u2019t edit it at all through a viewer. I thought of it symphonically, in terms of the lengths and orchestration. There\u2019s an element of propheticness in there\u2026\u201d \u2014Malcolm Le Grice, interview with Mark Webber, 2001<\/p>\nWHITE LITE<\/strong>
\nJeff Keen, 1968, b\/w, silent, 2.5 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cWatch the ghost of Bela Lugosi decay before your very eyes. A sequel to Plan 9 From Outer Space<\/em>.\u201d \u2014Jeff Keen\/Deke Dusinberre, \u201cInterim Jeff Keen Filmography with Arbitrary Annotations\u201d, Afterimage No. 6, 1976<\/p>\n\u201cKeen is indebted to the Surrealist tradition for many of his central concerns: his passion for instability, his sense of le merveilleux<\/em>, his fondness for analogies and puns, his preference for \u2018lowbrow\u2019 art over aestheticism of any kind, his dedication to collage and le hazard objectif<\/em>. But this \u2018continental\u2019 facet of his work \u2013 virtually unique in this country \u2013 co-exists with various typically English characteristics, which betray other roots. The tacky glamour\/True Beauty of his Family Star productions is at least as close to the end of Brighton pier as it is to Hollywood B-movies\u2026 The heroic absurdity and adult infantilism that are the mainsprings of his comedy draw on a long tradition of post-Victorian humour: not the \u2018innocent\u2019 vulgarity of music hall, but the anarchicness of The Goons and the self-lacerating ironies of the 30s clowns, complete with their undertow of melancholia.\u201d \u2014Tony Rayns, \u201cBorn to Kill: Mr. Soft Eliminator\u201d, Afterimage No. 6, 1976<\/p>\nMUYBRIDGE FILM<\/strong>
\nAnne Rees-Mogg, 1975, b\/w, silent, 5 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cI started making films in 1966, and teaching filmmaking in 1967. Before that I had been painting and drawing and exhibiting at the Beaux Arts Gallery and other places. My first film was a painterly study of interference colours and structures of soap bubbles (Nothing is Something)<\/em>. At the same time I made a 16mm home movie of my nephews which was called Relations<\/em>. I realized two things, one that film is not about movement, and that the figurative and narrative possibilities of the second film were what I wanted to explore. Eight years later I made the film I should have made then, a small film called Muybridge Film<\/em> in which I explored all the filmic possibilities of someone turning a cartwheel.\u201d \u2014Anne Rees-Mogg, Arts Council Film-Makers on Tour catalogue, 1980<\/p>\nMOMENT<\/strong>
\nStephen Dwoskin, 1968, colour, sound, 12 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cMoment<\/em> presents a continuous, fixed gaze by the camera at a girl\u2019s face. The fixity, although paralleling the spectator\u2019s position, nevertheless marks itself off as \u2018different\u2019 from our view because it refuses the complex system of movements, cuts, \u2018invisible\u2019 transitions, etc. which classic cinema developed to capture our \u2018subjectivity\u2019 and absorb it into the filmic text. In this way, the distinction between the looks of the camera at the profilmic event and of the viewer at the image is emphasized. Moreover, the sadistic components inherent in the pleasurable exercise of the \u2018controlling\u2019 gaze (a basic fact without which no cinema could exist) are returned to the viewer, as it is he\/she who must construct the \u2018scenario\u2019 by combining a reading of the image (slight movements of the woman, colour changes in her face, facial expressions, etc.) with an imagined (but suggested) series of happenings off-screen. The result is a narrative: the progressive excitement of a woman who masturbates.\u201d \u2014Paul Willemen, Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film catalogue, 1977<\/p>\n\u201cIn one long take, a girl whose face we see in close-up throughout, smokes and excites herself, her eyes resting at moments on the camera as if in a supplication which is also an utterly resigned accusation of film-maker and spectator alike. Not for their curiosity, which may after all be far from devoid or reverence for the human mystery, but for a willful self-withholding which is the standard human relationship. Here are three solitudes, and the film\u2019s climax occurs after the girl\u2019s, in her uneasy satiety, a convulsion returning her, and us, to an accentuation of the nothing from which she fled.\u201d \u2014Ray Durgnat, Sexual Alienation in the Cinema, 1972<\/p>\n
WINDMILL II<\/strong>
\nChris Welsby, 1973, colour, sound, 10 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cA reflexiveness using the camera shutter as a technical referent can be seen in Welsby\u2019s Windmill II<\/em>. The camera is placed in a park. The basic system involves a windmill directly in front of the camera, so that as the blades pass by the lens they act as a second shutter, as a paradigm for the first shutter. The blades are covered in melanex, a mirrored fabric. The varying speeds of the blades present the spectator with varying perceptual data which require different approaches to the image. When moving slowly, they act as a repoussoir<\/em>, heightening the sense of deep space. At a moderate speed, they act as an extra shutter which fragments \u2018normal\u2019 motion, emphasizing movement within the deeper plane and critiquing the notion of \u2018normality\u2019 in cinematic motion. When moving quite fast, the blades act as abstract images superimposed on the landscape image and flattening the two planes into one. And when the blades are stopped (or almost so) a completely new space is created \u2013 not only does the new (reflected) deep space contain objects in foreground and background to affirm its depth, but these objects are seen in anamorphosis (due to the irregular surface of the melanex) which effectively re-flattens them; the variations in the mirror surface create distortions which violate (or at least call attention to) the normal function of the lens of the camera.\u201d \u2014Deke Dusinberre, \u201cSt. George in the Forest: The English Avant-Garde\u201d, Afterimage No. 6, 1976<\/p>\n\u201cFormalism has grown up in parallel with the development of an advanced technology. The medium of landscape film brings to organic life the language of formalism. It is a language shared by both film-makers and painters. In painting, particularly American painting of the 1950s, formalistic thinking became manifest in the dictum \u2018truth to materials\u2019, placing the emphasis on paint and canvas as the subject of the work. In film, particularly the independent work done in England, it manifests itself by emphasizing the filmic process as the subject of the work. The synthesis between these formalistic concerns of independent film and the organic quality of landscape imagery is inevitably the central issue of contemporary landscape film. It is this attempt to integrate the forms of technology with the forms found in nature which gives the art of landscape its relevance in the twentieth century.\u201d \u2014Chris Welsby, Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film exhibition catalogue, 1977<\/p>\n
THE GIRL CHEWING GUM<\/strong>
\nJohn Smith, 1976, b\/w, sound, 12 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cI am writing this with a black \u2018Tempo\u2019 fiber-tip pen. A few months ago, I bought fifteen of these pens for sixty pence. Unfortunately, because they are so common, other people pick them up thinking they are theirs, so I don\u2019t have many left now. I bought the pens from a market in Kingsland Road in Hackney, about a hundred yards from where the film was shot. The film draws attention to the cinematic codes and illusions it incorporates by denying their existence, treating representation as absolute reality.\u201d \u2014John Smith, \u201cDirectory of Independent British Cinema\u201d, Independent Cinema No. 1, 1978<\/p>\n\u201cIn relinquishing the more subtle use of voice-over in television documentary, the film draws attention to the control and directional function of that practice: imposing, judging, creating an imaginary scene from a visual trace. This \u2018Big Brother\u2019 is not only looking at you but ordering you about as the viewer\u2019s identification shifts from the people in the street to the camera eye overlooking the scene. The resultant voyeurism takes on an uncanny aspect as the blandness of the scene (shot in black and white on a grey day in Hackney) contrasts with the near \u2018magical\u2019 control identified with the voice. The most surprising effect is the ease with which representation and description turn into phantasm through the determining power of language.\u201d \u2014Michael Maziere, \u201cJohn Smith\u2019s Films: Reading the Visible\u201d, Undercut 10\/11, 1984<\/p>\n
PERSISTING<\/strong>
\nIan Kerr, 1975, colour, sound, 10 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cThee gap in between, perception and awareness of perception of moment is Persisting<\/em>. To put it in context, it works like this, like these. Acceleration of senses in TV culture makes for rash decisions. Momentary vision. Speed kills. Speed lies. Very fast glimpses of one image mean you learn more in a time period, in a sense speed slows down our attention. Very fast glimpses of different images mean we absorb subliminally a little of many things. Speed is speeding up our attention. So time is material. Can be manipulated. Can exist an one or more speeds simultaneously. Subject. Where is camera, is camera present. Are we aware of camera, who is being looked at, what is happening, are we learning. Is it good to expect to learn. Is there actually such a thing as a valid subject. Does it matter. To be aware is to exist on levels simultaneously trusting none as finite.\u201d \u2014Genesis P. Orridge, \u201cThree Absent Guesses\u201d, Edinburgh Film Festival programme notes, 1978<\/p>\n\u201cpersist<\/strong> vb<\/em>. (intr.) 1.<\/strong> (often foll. by in<\/em>) to continue steadfastly or obstinately despite opposition or difficulty. 2.<\/strong> to continue to exist or occur without interuption: the rain persisted throughout the night<\/em>. bridge<\/strong> n<\/em>. 1.<\/strong> A structure that spans and provides a passage over a road, railway, river, or some other obstacle. 2<\/strong>. Something that resembles this in shape or function: his letters provided a bridge across the centuries<\/em>. subtitle<\/strong> n.<\/em> 1. <\/strong>an additional subordinate title given to a literary or other work. 2.<\/strong> (often pl.) <\/em>Also called: caption<\/strong>. Films<\/em>. a.<\/strong> a written translation superimposed on a film that has foreign dialogue. b.<\/strong> explanatory text on a silent film. ~vb<\/em>. 3.<\/strong> (tr.; usually passive)<\/em> to provide a subtitle for. –subtitular<\/strong> adj. <\/em>soundtrack <\/strong>n.<\/em> 1. <\/strong>the recorded sound accompaniment to a film. Compare commentary<\/strong> (sense 2). 2. <\/strong>A narrow strip along the side of a spool of film, which carries the sound accompaniment \u2026 Wave Upon Wave of Wheatfield.\u201d \u2014Ian Kerr, 2002<\/p>\nBack to top<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
DIVERSIFICATIONS Sunday 26 May 2002, at 3pm London Tate Modern From personal montage through to exploration of the cinematic process, the work was sensuous and playful. As a creative group, the Co-op covered vital aesthetic ground and resisted categorisation. This programme does not pursue a single theme or concept, rather it demonstrates the broad range […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[118],"class_list":["post-3540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shoot-shoot-shoot","tag-shoot-shoot-shoot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3540","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=3540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}