Category: Video

Faction Films’ Picturing Derry (1985)

An extract from Faction Films’ Picturing Derry, featuring artist Willie Doherty discussing his photographic work about surveillance in Derry. Directed by David Fox and Sylvia Stevens; produced by David Glyn, camera, Maxim Ford, and editor Esther Ronay.

A Faction Films production for the Arts Council in association with Channel 4.

50mins, 1985

 

To buy the full film, please visit Faction Films

A FLICKERING TRUTH – Story behind the lost Afghan Film Archive

Director Pietra Brettkelly (The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins) follows a group of dedicated Afghan cinephiles who are literally excavating their country’s cinematic past, as they seek to retrieve over 8,000 hours of film footage that they risked their lives to conceal during the Taliban era.

New Zealand, Afghanistan, 91′ Language: English and Dari – s/t English.

Director’s Statement – Pietra Brettkelly
As a filmmaker, coming from one of the youngest lands in the world, New Zealand, I am intrigued by Afghanistan with its old land and its deep history. I had been to Afghanistan in 2006 and was keen to go back, for the right story at the right time. During the years of conflict I had wondered about Afghanistan’s own film industry, those like myself. I had heard of the Archive but that not even Afghan’s knew of the films stored inside, and that I would never get access. Attempts were made to dissuade me to try. I had been mentoring two filmmakers in Kabul for some time and asked Gulistan to accompany me. On the day I visited the Archive, sandwiched between the American Embassy and the NATO compound, Hilary Clinton was in town. American forces helicopters hovered overhead and my credentials were checked numerous times as I walked the hot dusty road to the Archive. But a new Archive director, Ibrahim Arify had started just three days previously after years in exile. He welcomed me, and gave me exclusive access to a unique moment in time. I don’t believe in coincidence or luck, but in this instance that I arrived at a critical time when the story was evolving, and was given access to capture that story.

via La Biennale di Venezia 2015

Chantal Akerman – Family Business (1984) CH4 #WomanWithAMovieCamera

Chantal Akerman was commissioned by Visions to make this short film for £20,000. It was first shown on 21 November 1984, on Channel 4. Akerman herself plays the role of a director visiting Hollywood to find financing from an uncle she hardly knows. Very little goes to plan… Also stars Aurore Clement and Colleen Camp.

Thanks to Large Door

Yvonne Rainer Journeys From Berlin/1971 (1980) #WomanWithAMovieCamera

Agnès Varda on Coming to California

Agnès Varda stopped by the Criterion offices to talk about the films she made in California in the sixties and eighties. They are all collected in the new Eclipse series Agnès Varda in California, available now!

The legendary French filmmaker Agnès Varda, whose remarkable career began in the 1950s and has continued into the twenty-first century, produced some of her most provocative works in the United States. After temporarily relocating to California in the late sixties with her husband, Jacques Demy, Varda, inspired by the politics, youth culture, and sunshine of the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas, created three works that use documentary and fiction in various ways. She returned a decade later, and made two other fascinating portraits of outsiderness. Her five revealing, entertaining California films, encompassing shorts and features, are collected in this set, which demonstrates that Varda was as deft an artist in unfamiliar terrain as she was on her own turf.

William Gibson on La Jetée

From: ‘Thrilling and prophetic’: why film-maker Chris Marker’s radical images influenced so many artists – theguardian.com

William Gibson, novelist

I first saw La Jetée in a film history course at the University of British Columbia, in the early 1970s. I imagine that I would have read about it earlier, in passing, in works about science fiction cinema, but I doubt I had much sense of what it might be. And indeed, nothing I had read or seen had prepared me for it. Or perhaps everything had, which is essentially the same thing.

I can’t remember another single work of art ever having had that immediate and powerful an impact, which of course makes the experience quite impossible to describe. As I experienced it, I think, it drove me, as RD Laing had it, out of my wretched mind. I left the lecture hall where it had been screened in an altered state, profoundly alone. I do know that I knew immediately that my sense of what science fiction could be had been permanently altered.

Part of what I find remarkable about this memory today was the temporally hermetic nature of the experience. I saw it, yet was effectively unable to see it again. It would be over a decade before I would happen to see it again, on television, its screening a rare event. Seeing a short foreign film, then, could be the equivalent of seeing a UFO, the experience surviving only as memory. The world of cultural artefacts was only atemporal in theory then, not yet literally and instantly atemporal. Carrying the memory of that screening’s intensity for a decade after has become a touchstone for me. What would have happened had I been able to rewind? Had been able to rent or otherwise access a copy? It was as though I had witnessed a Mystery, and I could only remember that when something finally moved – and I realised that I had been breathlessly watching a sequence of still images – I very nearly screamed.

William Gibson

Via http://chrismarker.org/

‘World Cinema and the Essay Film’ Conference: Keynote by Prof Timothy Corrigan

Organised by the University of Reading’s Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures (CFAC), the ‘World Cinema and the Essay Film’ conference (30 April – 2 May 2015) featured Prof Timothy Corrigan’s (University of Pennsylvania) keynote address on ‘Essayism and Contemporary Film Narrative’, in which he describes how the mode of essayist becomes more and more frequently a disruptive force in narrative films such as Tree of Life (Malick 2011) or The Mill and the Cross (Majewski 2011).

Timothy Corrigan is a Professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame, and completed graduate work at the University of Leeds, Emory University, and the University of Paris III. Books include The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (Routledge), A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (Routledge), New German Film: The Displaced Image (Indiana UP), Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader (Routledge), The Film Experience (Bedford/St. Martin’s), Critical Visions: Readings in Classic and Contemporary Film Theory (Bedford/St. Martin’s, both co-authored with Patricia White), American Cinema of the 2000s (Rutgers UP), and The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford UP), winner of the 2012 Katherine Singer Kovács Award for the outstanding book in film and media studies.

Prof Corrigan’s keynote speech abstract ‘Essayism in Contemporary Film Narrative‘

The essay, the essayistic, and essayism represent three related modes that, at their core, test and explore subjectivity as it encounters a public life and subsequently generates and monitors the possibilities of thought and thinking. The first is a semi-generic product, the second an intervention, and the third a kind of knowledge. The relation of each to other practices, such as narrative, is largely a question of ratios: as assimilative, as inflective, or as disruptive. My title obviously draws on the third mode, and aims to describe and argue a way in which the heritage and distinctions of the essay take a different form than those described more essentially by the essay film. Here, essayism becomes more and more frequently a disruptive force and presence within the presiding shape of a film narrative, a disruption that questions, at its heart, the limits and possibilities of film narrative itself. Specifically and too schematically, essayism questions the interiority of film narrative 1) through the disintegration of narrative agency as a singular and coherent figure, 2) through the exploration of the margins of temporality and history (as a realism) in a movement into unsheltered and “improbable” places, and 3) through the questioning of the knowledges that have conventionally sustained narrative. My two examples will be Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life and Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross, both released in 2011, both engaged with and questioning–not coincidently I think–a dominant Judeo-Christian narrative as the foundation of knowledge, and both operating on the edges of conventional narrative form.

Timothy Corrigan University of Pennsylvania

Date: 30 April – 2 May 2015
Venue: Minghella Building, Whiteknights Campus, University of Reading
Conference convenor: Dr Igor Krstic

http://www.blogs.reading.ac.uk/cfac/

Ann Guedes and Steve Sprung on Cinema Action

Cinema Action members Ann Guedes and Steve Sprung discuss their work with BFI curators William Fowler and Ros Cranston. Guedes and Sprung talk about their productions, made with access to sites like Glasgow’s shipyards, and filmed during and in support of various protests across the country in the late 60s.

Ann Guedes – “I hope, especially with these films, that they are not a lament, they are actually still a call to action”.

Man with a Movie Camera (2014 Restoration trailer) In UK cinemas 31 July 2015 | BFI Release

One the most influential films in cinema history, Dziga Vertov’s exhilarating ode to Bolshevik Russia returns to cinemas across the UK from 31 July 2015.

‘I am the camera eye, I am the mechanical eye. I am the machine which shows you the world as only I can see it’
– Dziga Vertov

“Man with a Movie Camera” met with bewilderment on its release but is now recognised as one of the most radical films of Soviet cinema, and a major influence on Godard, Marker and others.
It’s a great city-symphony: the ‘Kino-Eye’ turns the camera into the protagonist, providing an impressionistic, lyrical portrait of a day in the life of Moscow’s masses at work and at play. But Vertov also investigates film itself, wittily transforming the world caught by his lens with a dazzling array of experimental camera and editing techniques. The constant invention remains astonishing to this day.