Luke Fowler

...in this new film, the performativity of his subject - Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari is self-evident. Composer Brunhild Ferrari, born 1937 in Frankfurt a.M., Germany moved to Paris in 1959 where she would meet and marry the composer Luc Ferrari. Brunhild Meyer, who produced a number of works of radio art in the 70’s and 80’s for SWF, slowly began to emerge as a composer in the last decade (adopting her husband's surname only after his death). Luc Ferrari, was a pioneer of ‘Musique concrete’ and a founding member of Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) with Pierre Schaeffer in Paris. Fowler’s film provides peripheral glimpses into their collaborative life and work but resists a traditional biographic narrative.

Drawing on a wealth of unseen archival material and unpublished notebooks, the film weaves a complex and personal portrait of Margaret’s life, from the perspective of a fellow artist sensitive to the potential Margaret envisaged for film as a poetic medium.

Luke Fowler’s work has long asked how we come to know someone in their absence. He has explored this question by creating posthumous portraits of individuals through precise compositions of the things they have left behind: recorded images and sounds, papers and notes, artwork, the spaces through which they moved, and the testimonies of friends who remain among the living. Patrick evokes the life of its eponymous music producer [Patrick Cowley] by all these means, taking in the postindustrial charms of San Francisco’s now-gentrified South of Market district, once famous for its dance clubs and leather bars, as if searching for Cowley’s still-lingering energy.

Luke Fowler’s work has long asked how we come to know someone in their absence. He has explored this question by creating posthumous portraits of individuals through precise compositions of the things they have left behind: recorded images and sounds, papers and notes, artwork, the spaces through which they moved, and the testimonies of friends who remain among the living. Patrick evokes the life of its eponymous music producer [Patrick Cowley] by all these means, taking in the postindustrial charms of San Francisco’s now-gentrified South of Market district, once famous for its dance clubs and leather bars, as if searching for Cowley’s still-lingering energy.

Luke Fowler’s work has long asked how we come to know someone in their absence. He has explored this question by creating posthumous portraits of individuals through precise compositions of the things they have left behind: recorded images and sounds, papers and notes, artwork, the spaces through which they moved, and the testimonies of friends who remain among the living. Patrick evokes the life of its eponymous music producer [Patrick Cowley] by all these means, taking in the postindustrial charms of San Francisco’s now-gentrified South of Market district, once famous for its dance clubs and leather bars, as if searching for Cowley’s still-lingering energy.

Luke Fowler’s work has long asked how we come to know someone in their absence. He has explored this question by creating posthumous portraits of individuals through precise compositions of the things they have left behind: recorded images and sounds, papers and notes, artwork, the spaces through which they moved, and the testimonies of friends who remain among the living. Patrick evokes the life of its eponymous music producer [Patrick Cowley] by all these means, taking in the postindustrial charms of San Francisco’s now-gentrified South of Market district, once famous for its dance clubs and leather bars, as if searching for Cowley’s still-lingering energy.

Luke Fowler constructed this tribute to Scottish filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait on the occasion of her centenary. Setting off to Tait’s native Orkney, Fowler creates a record of her life and work through images of her past dwellings, filming locations and notebooks. The soundtrack consists of location recordings made in Orkney and an archival tape recording of Tait reciting her poem “Houses,” in which she reflects on the meaning of home.

Shot on 16mm and featuring a soundtrack by Toshiya Tsunoda, Luke Fowler's film pays tribute to the French master’s impressionistic approach to light and nature (notably his Mont Sainte-Victoire series) through his own resplendant glimpses of landscapes and people in Southern France.

My mother is a Sociologist – she came to Glasgow from the south of England in the 60’s to work within the Politics Department of Glasgow University- after a few years the Sociologists broke away and formed their own department, where she taught until she retired. Although the university advocated and furnished her with her own personal computer – she still used index cards to make notes on the books and articles that she read. Now that she no longer has an office her house is filled with shoeboxes and filing cabinets containing these cards. My mother was absent on the day that I shot this film; the interview and sounds were recorded at a later date.

If the word Enceinte (meaning the “main defensive enclosure of a fortification”) is synonymous with “the body of the place”– what does it means to live within a body that is outside of time and without purpose? could these places be considered Hetrotopias? Or are they – as WG Sebald describes – alien structures denuded from human history? The first collaboration between filmmaker Luke Fowler and acclaimed sound recordist Chris Watson. Enceindre is a study in film and sound of two 16th century fortified cities: Berwick in the North-East of England and Pamplona in the Navarre region of the North of Spain. The film considers the wider psychological and social resonances of what it means to live within a town defined by its historical complex of defensive walls and bastions. By adopting an “infra-sensitive” approach to place; Enceindre draws on overlooked acoustic perspectives and lucid camerawork to propose a new framework in which to consider these anachronistic structures.

Fowler’s film focuses on Tompkins’ performance ‘Country Grammar’ created in 2003, one of her earliest pieces performed within a gallery context.

Electro-Pythagorus is an intimate and subjective portrait of the late Martin Bartlett, the Canadian electronic music pioneer who studied with Pauline Oliveros, David Tudor, John Cage, and Pandit Pran Nath. His contribution as an interdisciplinary composer, educator, and founding member of Western Front, though undoubtedly extensive, is in danger of being erased from cultural memory since his death from AIDS in 1993. Navigating an array of archival materials including letters, correspondences, notebooks, personal photos, and a huge body of unreleased music and field recordings held at the archives of Simon Fraser University, Electro-Pythagoras is a journey through the evolution of Bartlett’s musical time and space, softly guided by Luke Fowler’s insightful camera and montage—creating an experimental portrait that defies one-dimensionality.

Electro-Pythagorus is an intimate and subjective portrait of the late Martin Bartlett, the Canadian electronic music pioneer who studied with Pauline Oliveros, David Tudor, John Cage, and Pandit Pran Nath. His contribution as an interdisciplinary composer, educator, and founding member of Western Front, though undoubtedly extensive, is in danger of being erased from cultural memory since his death from AIDS in 1993. Navigating an array of archival materials including letters, correspondences, notebooks, personal photos, and a huge body of unreleased music and field recordings held at the archives of Simon Fraser University, Electro-Pythagoras is a journey through the evolution of Bartlett’s musical time and space, softly guided by Luke Fowler’s insightful camera and montage—creating an experimental portrait that defies one-dimensionality.

Electro-Pythagorus is an intimate and subjective portrait of the late Martin Bartlett, the Canadian electronic music pioneer who studied with Pauline Oliveros, David Tudor, John Cage, and Pandit Pran Nath. His contribution as an interdisciplinary composer, educator, and founding member of Western Front, though undoubtedly extensive, is in danger of being erased from cultural memory since his death from AIDS in 1993. Navigating an array of archival materials including letters, correspondences, notebooks, personal photos, and a huge body of unreleased music and field recordings held at the archives of Simon Fraser University, Electro-Pythagoras is a journey through the evolution of Bartlett’s musical time and space, softly guided by Luke Fowler’s insightful camera and montage—creating an experimental portrait that defies one-dimensionality.

Fowler’s portrait of New York School composer Christian Wolff continues his investigation into the legacies of 20th-century avant-garde music. Short, handheld shots taken at Wolff’s New Hampshire farm are assembled in diagonal relation to a soundtrack that features snippets of conversation with Wolff and passages from his compositions.

Impressionist journey through the archive of the Leeds Pavilion, which in the 1980s started out as a feminist photo studio. Former members, male and female, give their vision of the studio’s artistic and activist past, the reasons for which are as current as ever.

The quietly insistent and critical DEPOSITIONS attempts to restore some dignity to images of the communities of the Scottish highlands taken from patronizing BBC documentaries and news features from the 70’s and 80’s. DEPOSITIONS repurposes footage from the archives of the BBC and sound from the School of Scottish Studies, it is a film about differences and dichotomies: science and superstition, near and far, community and the individual.

Collage film about R.D. Laing, who spearheaded the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s, weaves archival material with his own filmic observations. For Laing normality meant adjusting ourselves to the mystification of an alienating world.

Collage film about R.D. Laing, who spearheaded the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s, weaves archival material with his own filmic observations. For Laing normality meant adjusting ourselves to the mystification of an alienating world.

Turner Prize-winner Luke Fowler's film focuses on the life and work of the socialist historian EP Thompson and his involvement with the Workers Education Association. Presented in a documentary style format, combining archive and contemporary footage, the film questions our notions about how history is constructed.

In part 3, Fowler furthers his on-going dialogue with the sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda (Yokohama, Japan). Toshiya Tsunoda develops an on-going philosophical line of enquiry regarding the art of field recording, as a conceptual act, and that of the relationship between the “field”, the recordist and the audience. During these investigations, he came to think about the meaning of choosing an object to focus on; drawing the conclusion that “perhaps it is similar to a hunter who becomes more interested in shooting the bow than the prey itself”.

In part 2, Fowler initiates a new collaboration with Parisian-based composer Eric La Casa. Eric La Casa often consults maps, not in order to locate the habitat of specific species or significant sights but more prosaically to calculate proximity to traffic noise. The aeleatory nature of the routes taken often suggests a drift with the character of an “open investigation” and a broad appreciation for all sound. “The whole of my work consists in finding a centre, a listening point in relation to everything which is taking place. The microphones, then, amplify everything that this listening area transmits, that is to say, all the living substances in motion, from the interior of the body to the geophonic exterior”.

How to create a meaningful dialogue between looking and listening? Luke Fowlers film cycle A Grammar for Listening (parts 1-3) attempts to address this question through the possibilities afforded by 16mm film and digital sound recording devices. In part 1, Fowler furthers his on-going dialogues with the sound artist Lee Patterson (Manchester, England).

As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. Entitled, Anna, Helen, David and Lester, they are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow. Composer: Lee Patterson

As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. Entitled, Anna, Helen, David and Lester, they are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow. Composer: Lee Patterson

As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. Entitled, Anna, Helen, David and Lester, they are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow. Composer: Lee Patterson

As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. Entitled, Anna, Helen, David and Lester, they are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow. Composer: Lee Patterson

George was an attempt to reconsider the basic components of my approach to filmmaking and boil them down to their bare essentials. The act of looking is implicit in my past documentary work but in this study it becomes the focus. The starting point for the film was the area that I was born and still reside in; the west end of Glasgow and its conjunction with the location where the film was first installed; a flat in Garnethill. The walk between these locations, and also central to the film is, through the St. George’s X area. The film deals with the relationship between sounds and images, acoustic phenomena and architectural details.

Bogman Palmjaguar is a portrait of a man who became distrustful of people and withdrew into nature. Bogman is passionate about the threatened habitat of Scotland's Flow Country. But Bogman's early life and subsequent diagnosis as "paranoid schizophrenic" conditions his relationships with other people. Describing himself as "the hidden cat" and "wild outlaw of paradise", Bogman is taking legal action to remove the label "paranoid schizophrenic". His is both a search for justice and an attempt to find reason in the course his life has taken over the past three decades. Lee Patterson's evocative field recordings accompany the images.

‘ Paddington Collaboration ’ was shot on 16mm film one morning in and around a flat in Paddington , London. Inspired by a history of formal film experiments the artists imposed a structure with each controlling roughly half of the content. Fowler drew from classic ‘room films’ to document a journey from the interior of the upstairs flat to the front door of the building. McLauchlan then explored the surrounding area, following this exploration with shots of Fowler in front of the places he had previously captured. Fowler asked McLauchlan to draw over the first half of the film, instead she wrote about the events of that morning, a text that then forms the sound track. The narrative reveals the physical and temporal structures that guide this collaboration , together with those that shape expectations of what it means to contribute to this type of film.

This film was made during NVA's Half-Life production which took place in Argyll in 2006.

'Pilgrimage from Scattered Points' is a film about the English composer Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) and The Scratch Orchestra (1968-73). Cornelius Cardew formed the orchestra with Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton in 1968 and published their draft constitution in "The Musical Times" in June 1969. The constitution set out the framework, which would dominate the orchestra's musical work for the first half of its existence. It proposed a fluid community where students, office workers, amateur musicians and some professional composers would gather together for performance, music making and edification.

A film about the life & time of ex The Homosexuals bass player Xentos Jones Luke Fowler's The Way Out: A Portrait of Xentos Jones, made in collaboration with Kosten Koper, is a tribute to underground punk musician and film-maker Xentos Jones and his band The Homosexuals. Fowler collages together diverse material related to Jones including interviews, music and even found fragments from Jones' own experimental films to create a haphazard and intriguing portrayal of this maverick character.

What You See Is Where You're At is a disturbing collage of found and archived recordings constructs a profile of renegade psychotherapist R. D. Laings anti-psychiatry movement. In 1965, a community of 20 people-anti-psychiatry leaders, including Laing himself, and their former patients-move in together. Over the next five years, they collectively explore the definitions of madness. The film re-appraises the culture of oppressive psychiatry and multinational pharmaceutical companies.