Director
The Alice of fifties animation visits the Wild West of fifties live action, but only through persistence of vision, they never meet in the same frame. The original Alice and the original Wild West were contemporaries too.
Director
A clip from the iconic 1999 science fiction film "The Matrix" becomes a much older silent movie with piano accompaniment, seen again in its own far future or where time no longer counts. The two lovers shift roles and even genders in the obscure cinematic space that contains them.
Director
Clips from two Italian films of the early 1960's meet on a train platform in Rome. Together they move towards, but don’t quite arrive at, another story, as the processing makes animation of what began as live action. To the sound of Wagner and Rossini.
Director
The source clip is taken from a cult science fiction film where the world is literally turned on its head. The audio track is cut along with the moving image and superimposed 5 times reverberating speech and effects tracks.
Director
A man is found drowned in a few inches of water. His only ID is his tattoo.
Director
Breathing out should be easy but it’s difficult with damaged lungs. The hospital uses gadgetry to measure exhalations. Here an underwater camera measures them as bubbles and records the sound of the breather’s disturbances in the water.
Director
1872. Maharajah the elephant and his trainer Lorenzo Lawrence travel on foot from Edinburgh to Belle Vue Zoo in Manchester, a ten day walk that makes them both famous before they arrive. The skeleton of Maharajah is in Manchester Museum.
Director
An eye in close-up moves ever nearer to abstraction.
Director
To the right, a distorting face inside a rectangle tries to avoid being classified as human - but fails! To the left, algorithms including Boolean operators seek to refine a description of image content with varying amounts of confidence.
Director
Light is interrupted by a strip of old 16mm film seen under a low magnification microscope and is reflected from the surface in rainbow colours. Software simulates the film’s chemical erosion.
Director
A Boogie dance performed by William & Maeva was downloaded from the internet and vertical sections taken from each frame arranged into 24 panels to show pattern and movement across each second.
Producer
Short film with original footage taken from the internet, reprocessed into vertical stripes with three frame blocks of positive black & white alternating with high-contrast negative.
Director
Short film with original footage taken from the internet, reprocessed into vertical stripes with three frame blocks of positive black & white alternating with high-contrast negative.
Director
Agile cross-cutting between images shows animals hunting in the snow. The soundtrack is a Roma song celebrating the coming of spring.
Producer
Exploration in split screen of Clara Schumann’s face, on her Romance Op. 11 no.1 Andante.
Director
Exploration in split screen of Clara Schumann’s face, on her Romance Op. 11 no.1 Andante.
Director
This video contrasts the moving and the still image. A sequence was taken from the iconic film L'Avventura made in 1960 by Michelangelo Antonioni with Monica Vitti . The soundtrack is a train trundling at night through the Carpathian mountains towards Bucharest.
Director
A poem about Amy Johnson that looks at how flight disturbs our sense of space, time and what is “modern”. The poem is spoken and then appears on screen, with a jazz soundtrack and digitally processed found images.
Director
The speaker imagines herself on “reality” TV, surreal, but not much more so than "real" reality TV. Fish, rocking horses, the Mona Lisa, Dame Edith Sitwell and the presenter Davina McCall all appear as found footage.
Director
“It’s all about what you do with it afterwards…” one of the voices says. That is make it black and white, wriggle out of the 16:9 frame, and overlap and reverberate the talk and laughter.
Director
The starting point for "Hopeless" is a song of the same title, recorded by the group "Evangelista". The song is about an impossible love for Louise Brooks, impossible because she died in 1984. I liked its energy and humour. I downloaded a section from G.W.Pabst's film Pandora's Box (1929), together with a number of publicity shots of the star, and re-worked them to accompany the song.
Director
The film here is one I made in 1972. The surface is easily marked. I scratch the image off with a needle then sweep away the dust emulsion. I record this using a low magnification microscope USB connected.
Director
An image taken from the internet of the young Ezio Pinza and an old vinyl recording of this great Italian singer are brought together.
Director
A further fragment taken from an well known Science Fiction film is changed into a semi-abstract experience in which the world is literally turned on its side. There is a slight time delay between each image panel making unexpected abstract arrangements from the original material. The audio track is cut along with the moving image to give a tense reverberating sound.
Director
F. W. Murnau’s menace is double, and triple, trouble.
Director
Self-hate in the recent snow.
Director
A ghost actor haunts his screen life, and is haunted by it, to the clicking of a projector. What you see is scraps of film under a microscope, with its sprocket holes, oily colour, and accumulated fluff and dust.
Director
The sound of clapping hands and voices of two African girls orchestrate the thickness of vertical black lines. Colour fringes appear over the white spaces between the lines, making it also work as an installation piece.
Director
A fragment taken from an well known Science Fiction film is prematurely aged to a time when there was no film sound other than piano accompaniment.
Director
Scenes appropriated from Antonioni’s famous film L’Avventura show Monica Vitti as the central subject. The constant alternating positive and negative image appears to vary with the percussive sound of Gamelan music.
Director
A famous Schwarzenegger chase sequence is literally turned on its side, four times over with a slight time delay between each panel. The audio track is cut along with the moving image to give a reverberating sound. The colour of the original is mostly changed to high contrast black and white negative so that the work has a manga-like appearance. Colour returns at moments of high drama.
Director
A countdown to zero replacing numbers with symbols.
Director
The mysterious love poem by Wilhelm Müller from Schubert's Winterreise provides the audio amplitude samples used to draw the waveform. Awarded Best Experimental Film Prize at the Ismailia International Documentary & Short Film Festival in Egypt in 2010.
Director
Files are copied then deleted from one of the 3.5" floppy disks that have almost disappeared into our past. The soundtrack is the unmistakeable chunter and the image is a graphic representation of it.
Director
Joyful self-hate in the distant snow.
Director
A look at colour separation, using the face of Botticellis Venus. Colour planes are separated and then merged to re-create the original image.
Director
A photograph of deer in Richmond Park, London.
Director
Smile is both a noun and a verb. The noun is represented as a zoom out from what seems at first to be an abstract surface but becomes a tooth, a smile and then a smiling face. Smile the verb is an invitation to the viewer to return the smile on the screen. Made for the videoDictionary , initiated by TheVideoArtFoundation.
Director
Sequences of frames, sampled from a Big Brother broadcast on Channel 4 television, are repeated three times each in rhythmic succession. Nothing is slowed down or speeded up, but movement becomes unreal and fractured, parts of spoken words tumble out into a new stream of image and sound, and “reality television” begins to look like Pop Art.
Director
“SF“, not as in Science Fiction - but Svenska Filmindustri who were instrumental in making “The Seventh Seal”, a film by Ingmar Bergman. When I first saw this film, a game of chess played by the personification of death seemed strangely odd to me, not so now some 50 years later.
Director
The only companions of an artist stranded on Mars are what can be drawn with its red dust. The image is processed from found footage and the soundtrack from the spoken poem. Best with headphones.
Director
In this video, political debate becomes a mere residue of speech, amplified then reverberated as metaphor for the unforeseen repercussions of war. The idea comes from Heinrich Böll’s "Dr. Murke and his collection of silences"* where the psychoanalyst edits tape interviews with patients by joining gaps in conversation to make a sequence of silences. * Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen.
Director
The framing of the image, clouds in a blue sky, changes with the loudness of sound composed from the spoken poem. Best with headphones.
Director
Channel 4 News, 7 p.m , 20 January 2006. The footage is sliced into alternating time lines, and sound and images from news stories converge, overlap and become part of an interview and performance by artists Gilbert & George
Director
In the aftermath of a decision impossible to reverse, political debate is submerged in an ambient world of photoshoot, marimba and birdsong.
Director
A video interpretation of the sixties pop classic. The size of the image responds to the loudness of each note.
Director
Monsieur and Madame Charles Pigeon at home in Montparnasse. The image is a motion path across a still photograph and the soundtrack is a Sardinian choir singing in Latin.
Director
Milton's Paradise Lost as remembered from the filmmaker's schooldays.
Director
The poem Kissing in hats is a villanelle, a verse form where the regular repetition of two key lines gives added urgency to what is being said.The effect is intensified here by double tracking of the speaker's voice, as a moving path scans a drawing of World War Two lovers kissing in hats before the men must board their train. This is a new version with the text of the poem on screen.
Director
An erotic postcard from Paris is processed into the moving image of a young woman posing beside her mirror. She becomes the "Chloris" addressed in the soundtrack, a French song of similar date. The song appears on screen as a wave-form that intensifies the link between image and sound, and makes visible our own "period" and its technologies.
Director
Writing Behaviour is a poem set to images and sounds. The image foreground is made up of the lines, words and letters of the poem, floating and twisting in the light, as the incarcerated writer writes his escape.
Director
Satara is a study of a moving figure in black and white, returning at the end to a real world of colour. Like Plaza Continuum the video is music driven, with images shaped to the hurdy-gurdy music of Rémy Couvez.
Director
Thirty years ago making experimental films, I used a technique which breaks footage into blocks of one second, divides each block into four, re-orders the segments and then re-assembles the footage. As with slowed down frames, the viewer sees how the impression of a moving image is created. But the sense of both movement and stillness, time and no-time, is even stronger. In this video I have reproduced this digitally. The original footage was shot in Cabot Plaza, Canary Wharf, and is a study in colour, texture and pattern, driven by the hurdy-gurdy music of Rémy Couvez.
Director
A poem about an illegal immigrant is used to explore the presentation of text on screen.
Director
Kaleidoscopics brings together pornographic stills from the internet and bubbles at the edge of running water, putting both through the same digital processes. Eyes, faces and limbs surface and sink again in sequences of coloured tessellations, lead by a music soundtrack that overlays breathy sound with formal patterning.
Director
An experiment in personal history. The footage was shot in the London docklands, and its trains and bridges prompt a meditation on nationality, identity and language, spoken in German with English subtitles. The speaker's first words, in German, are " I don't speak German".
Director
The spoken text of Père Lachaise is a poem about scattering ashes, illicitly, in the famous Paris cemetery. On the screen, the central image is the face of the dead woman, photographed in ATS uniform in black and white. The face is almost always partly obscured by flames. But there is humour in the text, and the brilliant colours of the flames, and the fairground music, suggest life and energy.
Director
The two clips chosen are the theft of a necklace from a department store and a look at the erotic possibilities of ice cubes, but the burden of narrative passes to the music, a performance by Maria João & Grupo Cal Viva, which, like the visual images, repeats the same ideas with variation after variation, but builds to its own unnerving climax. The clips are re-worked into cinemascope format as a double screen that shows sometimes mirrored images and sometimes contrasting ones. Occasionally, they overflow onto the full screen.
Director
Grandmother is a Crab borrows from an earlier digital video, made fifteen years ago, that itself used footage captured from a travel advertisement on television. Black and white, and mirror effects, take the image out of time, giving it both vividness and distance. The music is played in reverse. And the voice-over and under-titles are a poem that re-enters the magic world of a child on a beach.
Director
London is cut up and manipulated in this highly structured, emotionally compelling piece about the UK's capital city and its capacity to alienate and atomise people. Images printed using custom-made equipment at the London Filmmakers' Co-op stagger forward and back in precise rhythms and establish both a spatial and emotional map of the various night-time locations seen here.
Director
A succession of images, overlaying, repeating, banging together around the figure of the filmmaker who crosses his work like a conductor over his orchestra. He brillantly conducts a concerto for a pasted life in a divine future!
Director
A stroboscopic film in which several different time streams flicker by in parallel. The 16mm film was partly shot and processed at the London Filmmakers Co-op.
