Nicky Hamlyn

A chronological study of the view from a single window onto the skylight of Passaporta, a bookshop in Brussels. Shot over eighteen months and making extensive use of time-lapse filming. The work is underpinned by Siegfried Kracauer's assertion that we can never exhaust the field of view.

The work is constructed from shots of tidal seawater running over rippled sand and the blister pack for Amlodipine, a blood-pressure reducing drug.

Honoré Nicolas is a study of a garden in Arles, Provence, shot over a one week period from the same camera position, and edited entirely in-camera. The curtain, which conceals a car-port, dances wildly to the Mistral wind.

Directed by Nicky Hamlyn.

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

2005/2012 Nicky Hamlyn short experimental work

"Totem Pole '67" was shot frame by frame using extension tubes between the lens and camera body of a 16mm Bolex. The physical form of the subject comes directly to determine the outcome: it is both subject and camera support, that is, part of the technology of which it is also the subject. It is both sculpture and film.

Shot during a residency at Media City Film Festival and the Art Gallery of Windsor, "AGW 2nd Floor South" is part of a trilogy of works that use three distinct filmic procedures. Shot with a wide angle (10mm) lens at a rate of one frame every twenty seconds "AGW 2nd Floor South" compressed an entire day into two minutes. The work confirms, yet again, both Vertov and Kracauer's conviction that film can reveal aspects of the world otherwise inaccessible to human vision.

A single time-lapse shot of the abandoned Michigan Central Station in Detroit. Recording subtle changes in light as it pierces the hollow skeleton of the building, the film was made at a rate of one frame every ten seconds. Part of a series of 7 films completed by the artist in Windsor-Detroit.

A study in contrast, colour and moiré pattern in a public park in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. The film connects with a series of paintings by visual artist, Angela Allen.

A short shot made in a children’s playground in Windsor, Ontario, is cut into three-frame sections, each of which is looped for ten seconds. Each loop advances by one one frame at a time. The process generates multiple and complex kinetic effects, which vary depending on which part of the screen the spectator fixates upon.

Series of films produced during an artist’s residency at the Art Gallery of Windsor Ontario and Media City Festival. All the sequences were shot in and around the gallery on colour negative and Agfa B&W sound recording film.All the B&W sequences were hand processed and printed using a Bolex camera as a printer.

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

A short shot made from a train traveling from south to north through East Croydon station is cut into three-frame sections, each of which is looped for ten seconds. Each loop advances by one one frame at a time. The looping process generates complex artifacts and kinetic illusions in the image.

An artificial animation of the repetitively cycling GM logo sequence and naturally occurring movements, such as clouds reflected in the tower’s windows. This grid of flat planes breaks the reflections up into rectangular fragments that resemble film in both its appearance and manner of operation.

Tobacco Shed is one of a series of films based on agricultural buildings, mostly concerned with tobacco production, in northwest Umbria.

Double Fence was shot from the balcony of a B&B in Porto Potenza Picena , on the Adriatic coast near Ancona . The work explores the changes that occur with slight shifts in framings of the same scene, and the dramatic alterations in light, colour , space and movement between early morning and late afternoon. The work is the third in a series that records spontaneously occurring moiré patterns and related phenomena. The multifarious birdsong emanates from a nearby animal and bird sanctuary.

2008 Nicky Hamlyn short experimental work

2008 Nicky Hamlyn short experimental work

A study in texture and rhythm, made with the painter Angela Allen.

Pro Agri is one in a series of films of buildings related to tobacco production in Umbria. It was shot over a two hour period from an hour before to an hour after sunset, at a rate of one frame every two seconds.

Static shots with moving shadow of the tripod, including the shooting camera, are shifting through the film about direct association between an object and the machine which transforms it into an image - shadow drawings are completed one day by windows, clouds in a lake and texture of walls.

A sequence of twenty three shots of a room occurs four times, twice in colour, twice in black and white. The two colour sequences follow a strict filming plan, the second, black and white, pair are freer.

A sequence of short films, each based on a dominant colour. Extensive use of time-lapse and frame by frame filming generates scintillating juxtapositions of light phenomena. Filmed in north west Umbria.

Panni is a visually arresting work in its formal structure and visual expression of colors. The subject matter of the film is a row of bed sheets flapping on a clothesline, drying in the wind. The colors punch through the screen as orange sheets flutter against a green backdrop of grass and trees.

Penumbra consists of a series of continuous overlapping dissolves on a grid of white bathroom tiles, which are uniformly framed throughout the film.

The film is composed from thirty-second long time-lapse sequences, filmed in Northwest Umbria. Condensing days into seconds, Hamlyn makes use of lap dissolves and time-lapse photography to compress the temporal duration of the Italian landscape. The film invokes some pre-cinematic technologies mainly in the shadow plays where light and shadow manifest as the movement of trees, clouds, and other objects cast by the sun project and dance onto white walls and other surfaces, emulating and interacting with the film’s grain

1999 Nicky Hamlyn experimental short film

Not Resting was shot from a single position, the filmmaker’s bed, in a single session. The film is structured around a number of formal ideas such as shot duration, movements between light and dark, static camera and static subject, and muted colors.

Set in a particular location, a stretch of ‘white’ – unmetalled – road in Umbria. Structured around ordered and disordered features of the landscape.

The film is composed of receding planes in a landscape: a back garden and the houses beyond. The wooden lattice fence, visible in the image, marks the border between enclosed and open, private and public space, and forms both a fulcrum for the work and a formal grid by which the shots are framed and organised.

White Light consists of extreme close-up shots of chrome bath taps and their reflections, including the camera lens, which becomes its own subject, as it closes in on its reflection. This material is mixed with rotoscope animation, created on various surfaces including cel and hand-made paper, where scratched lines are lit from an acute angle to create an image from light and shadow.

A study of the TV as the bearer of images and as a scuptural-environmental object. The footage is extracted from an episode of the TV soap Brookside.

In Hole, the subject matter is a man made hole near a construction site. Employing static camera shots and conventional compositions, the film is an exploration of light, but also of scale as the filmmaker contrasts the human and feline appearances that pass through the hole

Minutiae was made for the BBC 2 programme The Late Show, and was filmed in the same studio. The aim was to make an event-specific work that would contrast with the way the studio appeared on TV.

This film revisits the same location – a room in my house – as an earlier work, Ghost Stories (1983), and is in fact prefaced with a sequence from that film. “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. Architectural, poetic and personal conceptions of space are counterposed and various techniques – multiple dissolves, superimpositions and extreme close-ups – are employed to this end. In revisiting, redescribing and reconstructing the room in the above terms my aim is to elaborate Bachelard’s apothegm: – N.H.

That Has Been is the last in a series of longer works made in the first half of the 1980s. The film was shot in two adjacent rooms. Outside views are seen in reflection via an aluminum photographic lamp, while some of the imagery is generated from photographs taken in the same spaces. The occasional voice over explores the relationship between places and dreams and that between memories and the physical events that can trigger them.

Ghost stories opens with a sequence of polemical shots: a mysterious shadow, an ambiguous advertisement which has deeper ambiguities unknown even to itself, and a lengthy quotation from Roland Barthes on the nature of autobiography. These opening shots outline the context in which I hope the bulk of the film will be seen: as a critique on so-called visual literacy, which is frequently based on a complacent mis-reading of images, and also as a rejection of film-biography, whose efficacy depends on such visual complacency. The body of the film consists of fragmentary views of the interior of a house, in which desultory activity occasionally takes place, sometimes in front of the camera, sometimes not. A ghost story is told, firewood is sorted.

The film takes place entirely in one room and is based on a series of six repetitive shots. These shots establish a schema, a set of expectations which are then undermined. The film favours image rather than sound, in contrast to most narrative film, and the sound, where it occurs, serves only to confound or displace any meaning that is established. There are people, activities, a location and a hint of story. The film, however, cannot be mentally reassembled into anything like what it hints at in its depiction of bits of mundane domestic activity. On the contrary, it intends to confound any such attempt at a coherent reconstruction, preferring instead to leave the viewer with a lingering sense of doubt. – N.H.

Misrecognitions and simulacra. An anti-montage film: a series of discrete shots that nevertheless gel at one or two points to produce simple meanings. Hovering on the line between abstraction and representation, the film hopes to problematize them both. According to Peter Gidal, “the abstract quality (never total, for the objects are always recognizable as objects) helps Hamlyn to negotiate sexual imagery as it occurs in the film by rendering those images relatively abstract and on a par with other objects depicted. The effect is to drain the image [of the naked body] of its conventional sexual meanings and associations (with pornography, for instance) and instead neutralize it almost.”

Details, fragments, transformations and shadows of a confined space.

Avant-garde appeal on behalf of and made by the adventurous leftist London cinema, The Other Cinema, using the facilities provided by the BBC community programme unit.

'Within a personal framework I have juxtaposed adverts and pornography with some domestic events to try and elucidate and undercut the way sex and the response to it occurs in cinema and advertising.' - N.H.

Silver Street was shot in a single day from my student house in Reading, Berkshire, where I studied Fine Art. Shots were made indoors and outdoors every hour. I adopted a shooting system using consistent framings, interspersed with variations. The film contrasts the interior personal space with the noisy street outside. - Nicky Hamlyn