Matthew Noel-Tod

Movies

The Empty Plan
Cinematography
Shifting between documentary, historical reconstruction and melodrama, The Empty Plan interrogates the relationship between theory and practice in the theatre of Bertolt Brecht.
Trail of the Spider
Director of Photography
Trail of the Spider transposes Western genre motifs and the suppressed racial history of the American west (where one in three cowboys were black or Mexican) onto the transforming landscape of East London. Questioning and re-imagining the Western’s portrayal of the “Vanishing Frontier” , the film extends the metaphor to the material and psychological conditions of a present day city increasingly dominated by volatile financial speculations and private interests.
Nausea
Director
Nausea is a synthesis of text and image that draws inspiration from Impressionism, On Kawara, Barnett Newman and the existential diary of Jean-Paul Sartre from which it adopts its title. The video footage is a journal of observations shot entirely on a mobile phone. Crudely low resolution, it retains a fuzzy warmth and familiarity rather than the cold and impersonal qualities of much digital technology, challenging a ‘certain end-point in cinema, wherein we only ever imagine and receive mediated images.’