Super – 8 filmstrips laid down the length of our long, dark hallway. Giggling as we fumble in the shadows. One flash and it’s done. While children sleep, in the tiny, fleeting window of time that we share, alone at last, the mystery and energy in these whispering, tiptoeing moments feed us.
Filter Films
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A video reconstruction of Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting, “Nu descendant un escalier n° 2”, that updates the work’s inter-media and temporal concerns into a contemporary frame, one century later.
Nude Descending
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‘Sound Seam’ is a film which gives voice to the idea that every surface, in particular parts of our anatomy, is potentially inscribed with an unheard sound or echoes of voices from the past. The soundtrack’s musical composition is interlaced with a voice-over which draws on Rainer Maria Rilke’s text ‘Primal Sound’, where he reflects on the possibility of playing the coronal suture of a skull with a gramophone needle. The overlapping voices of the narratives tell a forensic love story of yearning, encryption, inscription, decoding, memory and erasure. The film uses microscopic photography, scanning electron microscopy, and sounds of otoacoustic emissions to uncover haunting aural bonescapes. Music composed and recorded onto wax cylinder and acetate discs by Aleks Kolkowski. The voiceovers too are recorded using old sound technology as a filter – writing and over-writing of wax cylinder to create unexpected scratches, glitches, loops and echoes. ‘Sound Seam’, HD, 2010, 14mins, filmed, edited and written by Aura Satz, soundtrack composed by Aleks Kolkowski. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, during a residency at UCL’s Ear Institute, London.
Sound Seam
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‘Oramics: Atlantis Anew’ is conceived of as an artist’s film in homage to Daphne Oram, the pioneer of British Electronic Music and co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic workshop in 1958. The film features a close-up encounter with her unique invention, the Oramics Machine, housed at the Science Museum in London. Oram used drawn sound principles to compose ‘handwrought’electronic music, and yet the visual nature of her work remains largely unseen and unsung. The film brings this obsolete technological fantasy briefly to back to life, enabling the visualisation of the drawn sound material, re-interpreting and translating it into new filmic sequences. The soundtrack features electronic music composed by Oram, interlaced with her voiceover reading excerpts from a first draft of her book “An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics” (1971)
Oramics: Atlantis Anew
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‘Doorway for Natalie Kalmus’ is a film centred around the use of colour in moving image technology, exploring the disorienting technicolour prismatic effects of the lamp house of a 35mm colour film printer. Through minute shifts across an abstract colour spectrum, punctuated by a mechanical soundtrack, the film evokes kaleidoscopic perceptual after-images (bringing to mind Paul Sharits, Dario Argento and the Wizard of Oz). Natalie Kalmus was the ex-wife of technicolour inventor Herbert Kalmus, and was the colour consultant for hundreds of colour films, including The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, the Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and many more. She would draw up colour scores for each film, according to her theories of “Colour Consciousness”. She also authored a short article entitled “Doorway onto another world”, in which she described her sister’s deathbed experience of seeing deceased family members.
Doorway for Natalie Kalmus
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‘Chromatic Aberration’ is a film which explores the early technologies of colour filmmaking drawn from the archives of George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Featuring vibrant close-ups of eyes from fledgling archival experiments in colour film, Chromatic Aberration turns the cinematic lens in on itself: from the prosthetic recording eye of the camera, to an evocation of the abstract inner screen of one’s eyelids. Satz has drawn inspiration from a scene in Powell and Pressberger’s 1946 film ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, where the transition from the reality of colour to the black and white of the afterworld is conveyed from the viewpoint of David Niven’s eyelid, from inside the body, behind the eyes. Early 1920s colour film footage – mainly tests shots featuring members of George Eastman’s family as well as Hollywood stars of the time – is shot in such a way so as to reveal the inherent chromatic fringing, distortion and misalignment. Using specialist equipment at the BFI National Archive, London, the footage is reworked through the use of extreme close-up and magnification, honing in on the eyes.
Chromatic Aberration
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Synopsis: A musical voyage through photographs from Tokyo, St. Petersburg, Barcelona, Milan and Buenos Aires. The word for power line in Japanese is densen. Music by the Swedish group Tape. French: Inspiré du mot japonais signifiant « ligne à haute tension », le film Densen est un voyage musical à travers des photos prises à Tokyo, St Petersbourg, Barcelone, Milan et Buenos Aires. Spanish: Un viaje musical a través de fotografías de Tokyo, St Petersburgo, Barcelona, Milano y Buenos Aires. La palabra japonesa Densen significa conducto de corriente. Musica del grupo Tape de Suécia. German: Eine musikalische Reise aus Schnappschüssen in Tokyo, St. Petersburg, Barcelona, Mailand und Buenos Aires. Densen bedeutet Leitung auf Japanisch. Die Musik wurde komponiert von der Band Tape.
Densen
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It’s physically demanding and sweaty. Grandma’s hands are gnarled from years of pain and hard work. Hands knead the dough. She works with rolling-pins, brushes and older baking utensils. She deftly places the bread on a peel and sets it in the stone oven. Grandpa takes care of the wood-burning , watches over it, blows life into it, again and again. He moves the bread around on the hot hearth. They work noiselessly. Close to each other. Crackling and pounding, scratching and clouds of flour. It is hot. The fire blazes. The smell of wood. The aroma of freshly baked bread enticing as it teases. Colors of white flour and a brown work-bench. Time stands still. Hands and dough, flour and bread. Equipment; old, worn. A punch, made of capercaillie quills bound together, loudly smacks holes in the bread. Whirls of flour-dust. When the bread is lifted a landscape of white flour remains on the brown work bench. An unidentifiable pattern so like the light layer of flour on a new dough waiting in a trough. A broken stone wall or a desert – who knows? Grandma and grandpa, concentrating, the back of a head, a silhouette. No clear narrative. The bread is baking. They are silent, no idle talk. They work. We observe.
Cum Pane
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A photographer steadies a Polaroid camera and composes a shot of the sky, flanked by tree branches. Later, a woman wakes from a nightmare. Jenny Haniver takes its title from a cryptid totem sold for centuries at the docks of Antwerp: a Jenny Haniver or jeune d’anvers (young girl of Antwerp) is a disfigured ray or skate carcass, carved to resemble an angel, a devil, a dragon. A series of ten filmed portraits are subject to all manner of alteration. By this they compose the hull of a ship wrecked on rocks sung by sirens. To mirror its namesake, the film’s plastic properties have been carved, lacerated, bleached, otherwise stressed, reshaped to transform reality into the fantastic and unknowable.
Jenny Haniver
