William Raban

Following the eruption of the Lakakigar volcano, Iceland in 1783, a sulphurous haze shrouded vaste swathes of the northern hemisphere, causing widespread crop failures, consequent famine and disease across Europe, parts of America, North Africa, and India. It is estimated to have killed millions of people. Using first-hand accounts from Iceland and from across Europe, Raban’s film connects this event with the current global political and ecological crisis. It continues recent film investigations into the use of the long single take and revisits Raban’s preoccupations with landscape film from the early 1970s.

With the threat of nuclear conflict between North Korea and America comes the realization that the blast effects of a nuclear strike would be outweighed by the potentially irreparable damage to the Earth’s atmosphere. In 1783 the Laki volcanic eruption, and the resulting haze that covered vast swathes of the northern hemisphere, caused widespread crop failures and consequent starvation across Europe, parts of America, North Africa, and India. Raban’s new film connects this ecological theme with the current political crisis in Europe and America

Made two months in advance of the referendum to decide whether the UK should remain within or leave the European Union, speculates on the outcome of the vote. This is a satirical fairytale – a political provocation that invites the audience to guess the outcome of the referendum to decide London’s fate

A witty take on the contingencies of the conditions in which to best read Marx. Filmed over 6 days, the time-lapse technique compresses a classic text (Karl Marx's 'Das Kapital') into a 9 minute experience, raising questions as to how film might transcend verbal language. The picture is offset by David Cunningham’s score which is composed solely from the two words of the book’s title.

72-82 tells the story of the first ten years of Acme Studios and their ground breaking work providing artists' housing and studios in London. It also features some of the pioneering exhibitions at the Acme Gallery that was based in Covent Garden from 1976-81. The film comprises visual archive materials brought to life by the voices of the artists involved.

The paradox of the present as a time that cannot be reflected upon until it has already become past, seems consistent with the idea of thinking about the passage of time as the movement within a wave, where the individual particles of water remain static despite an illusion of movement upon the surface. Might not the succession of events in daily life pertain to a similar form of illusory movement? Time and the Wave engages with this paradox by focusing on key London events filmed in 2012 and 2013: the opening of Westfield Shopping Centre at Stratford, the Saint Paul's Occupy movement, the Queen's Jubilee Thames pageant and the funeral of Margaret Thatcher to expose the condition of this country in the time of crisis of late capitalism.

A documentary/art film inspired by the Charles Dickens essay "Night Walks."

Shot from the 21st floor of the iconic Balfron Tower, the film takes in the city of London below. Filmed mostly in time-lapse with the camera tracking across this aerial field of view, the intention is to create a cinematic map that exposes the neural networks of the post-modern metropolis; producing a film that reveals the workings of London’s nervous system.

A land and sea-scape film drawn from rich sources of imagery: the constantly changing mood of the sea to the distinctly different shorelines of Kent and the Pas de Calais – twenty-one miles of water that define both the “island race” and English hostility towards a wider integration within Europe.

A rapid time-lapse journey from the London Houses of Parliament to the English Channel near the port of Dover is offset by David Cunningham’s musical score composed from fragments of Margaret Thatcher’s Belgrano speech.

Documentary about architectural structures in the UK.

Documentary about architectural structures in the UK.

This film documents the transformation of a derelict fire station into studio and living spaces for artists. The opening of the restored building is celebrated in performances and installations by its new occupants. In common with Raban’s films that reflect upon different aspects of the changing face of London’s East End, this tightly structured film-poem confronts the present with the past: the building’s war-time role is recalled in archival images, and by women who served in it as Auxiliary Fire Service officers.

"ISLAND RACE contrasts everyday events with actions of right wing extremists, counter anti-racist demonstrations, the funeral of a gangland leader, and the jingoistic street parties celebrating Victory in Europe Day. Using only picture and sound, with no added commentary, Raban gives viewers the space to draw their own conclusions about the film’s portrayal of English national identity in the late 1990s." - Anthology Film Archives

"ISLAND RACE contrasts everyday events with actions of right wing extremists, counter anti-racist demonstrations, the funeral of a gangland leader, and the jingoistic street parties celebrating Victory in Europe Day. Using only picture and sound, with no added commentary, Raban gives viewers the space to draw their own conclusions about the film’s portrayal of English national identity in the late 1990s." - Anthology Film Archives

Documentary about the surroundings of a skyscraper in London.

Documentary about the surroundings of a skyscraper in London.

William Raban's Sundial (1992), shot in the same location as his film Island Race, combines strongly formal procedures with an equally emphatic political message, which is conveyed through careful juxtaposition of objects in the field of view.

This movie is an experimental documentary following the flow of the Thames out of London to the sea. It has a narration from John Hurt that takes the form of reading old manuscripts, books and news articles, and also a posthumous narration from poet TS Eliot reading from his own work, The Dry Salvages from the Four Quartets. Engravings, paintings, and archival film are juxtaposed against the contemporary footage, including Pieter Breughel the Elder's "The Triumph of Death" (c.1562) from the Prado Museum.

Directed by William Raban.

“The film is in three parts, each one exploring the fragmentary experience of perception by resorting to various forms of temporal and spatial dislocation. ‘Concrete Fall’ and ‘Fergus Walking’ are both filmed from a moving viewpoint, and the camera motion is ‘converted’ through simple editing and printing procedures to register subtle depths in space, the layering between foreground and infinity. In ‘Packeted Passages’ I filmed with two synchronized cameras and fused the two views in the printing stage into one disintegrated screen space.” – William Raban

Directed by William Raban.

"This experiment determines what happens when a negative is superimposed upon its own positive image. The center of the picture forms the optical soundtrack on both left and right screens so that what you see finds its aural equivalent in sound." - Anthology Film Archives

Le déjeuner sur l’herbe is simultaneously perceived from four different camera positions in a work which engages with the pro-filmic in order to question documentation, illusion and the film viewing process.

"Like all the works I have done which refer directly to another artist, After Lumière… is not directly 'about' the Lumière original. It is the starting point for an investigation. In this case it is an investigation into consequentiality, or at least the significance of sequentiality in the construction of meaning and concept. As such, the film encroaches on 'narrative' cinema, but in a way which treats narrativization as problematic, not transparent." - Malcolm Le Grice

Footsteps is in the manner of a game re-enacted, the game in making was between the camera and actor,the actor and cameraman, and one hundred feet of film. The film became expanded into positive and negative to change balances within it; black for perspective, then black to shadow the screen and make paradoxes with the idea of acting, and the act of seeing the screen. The music sets a mood then turns a space, remembers the positive then silences the flatness of the negative.

Footsteps is in the manner of a game re-enacted, the game in making was between the camera and actor,the actor and cameraman, and one hundred feet of film. The film became expanded into positive and negative to change balances within it; black for perspective, then black to shadow the screen and make paradoxes with the idea of acting, and the act of seeing the screen. The music sets a mood then turns a space, remembers the positive then silences the flatness of the negative.

“The film image is a row of boarded-up town houses pending demolition. Two cameras film in alternation this derelict facade from two changing viewpoints. They pan in opposing crossways movements and develop a picture view that appears to extend beyond the edges of the screen. The durations and sequencing of one shot in relation to another are not pre-scripted; the shooting patterns take the form of a space-time game where a new movement or action on one camera provokes a corresponding reaction from the second camera.” –William Raban

Shot in a remote part of Dartmoor, Breath is structured around a precise score. Three people are each given a camera loaded with 100ft of Kodachrome film and instructed to walk away from a tape recorder that has been placed within the landscape. The camera operators’ breath and whistling become a measure for the duration of the shots as they film their journey.

“This film is the starting point of a continuous investigation into ways of presenting cubist space in terms of the flat surface of the film screen. The film image is the view through a window, the window-frame providing a constant spatial reference point, as the view beyond is modified by a series of major and minor variations in camera viewpoint. The film is presented un-edited just as it was filmed in the camera. The patterns of camera movement are not the product of a pre-given shooting script, but rather they evolved actually at the time of filming.” – William Raban

Three screen piece. "I was looking for a pure image, an image which was intrinsic to the medium of film. This film is not an abstract film; the subject is the projector gate, the plane where the film frame is arrested in the projected light beam, and the frame whose edges contain and divide the projected illusion from the blacked-out present of the movie theatre. W.R."

Raban layers recordings of successive film performances in which he stands before a projection, states the date and time, and says "A camera is filming the audience watching yesterday's audience watching the blank screen. Sounds of the projection and the audience's responses are being recorded."

"For this short film event, the film is removed from the film feed reel, and is unwound, to span the space between the projector and screen. The projector starts, and the film snakes back through the audience, as it is consumed by the projector. The screen image is a film footage counter which measures the 'throw' of the cinema. (WR)"

A camera recorded one frame every minute (day and night) for two separate three-week periods in autumn and spring. The film is shown on two adjacent screens, each having a soundtrack that was recorded on a sampling basis. The left hand screen was shot at the autumn equinox and the right-hand screen at the spring equinox. The structure of the film is based on the rotation and tilting of the earth as we pass from summer to winter and back. The centre of the film coincides with the equinox and is the point at which day and night are the same length on both the left and the right screen.

Originally, this was a four-minute time-lapse film that was shot continuously over a twenty-four-hour period. The camera was positioned on a busy pathway in Regent's Park, and recorded three frames a minute. The shutter was held open for the twenty-second duration between exposures, so that on projection, individual frames merge together making the patterned flows of human movement clearly perceptible. The time-lapse original was then expanded by various processes of re-filming to reveal the frame-by-frame structure of the original. – William Raban

Whilst working on previous time-lapse films, I found that colour film tended to record the actual colour of the light source rather than local colour when long time exposures were used. Using this phenomenon, Colours of this Time records all the imperceptible shifts of colour temperature in summer daylight, from first light until sunset.

"The film alternates from recording in time-lapse (one frame every ten seconds) to running through the camera at 24 f.p.s. (regular speed). The film was made in a continuous heavy rainstorm, and the front element of the Angenieux lens accumulated drops of rain on its surface until the view became obscured. The bursts of film at normal speed occur just after the lens had been wiped dry to reveal the trees, marsh grass, and watersedge in clear sharp focus beyond" William Raban