"'Phi Phenomenon 2' is a 100ft restaging of Morgan Fisher’s 1968 film 'Phi Phenomenon'. Shot on out-of-date stock, and featuring a clock fortuitously found on ebay, the film is the result of multiple experiments with hand processing in a rewind tank. Fisher's film adresses the fact that, as with the phi phenomenon, we see movement in film where no actual movement is presented to the eye... To grapple with movement here is to grapple with both speed and transparency, and in this remake the transparency of the apparatus is foregone so that the slow speed of the minute-hand must compete with the fast and furious activity of the animated artefacts rattling through the projector to film's own beat." Patrick Tarrant
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Experimenta Strand
Shot over four weeks in November 2014 on the campus of Aichi University of the Arts, Nagoya, Japan, designed by Junzo Yoshimura and opened in 1966. The film explores the remarkable architecture of this 'campus world' through the camera and through a collaborative project with students.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere
Relationships between energy systems, localised and national, and the weather with its own structures and rhythms are closely observed.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere
"An enlivened 16mm mediation on lush green sprouting plants and vegetation, signaling life, change and development within an urban environment otherwise preoccupied by stasis." William Fowler, LFF
"An old ceramic jar from my parent’s house. Images of places its presence brings. A study of object and place." Peter Todd
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere
While investigating her late parents’ involvement with the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (BP), the filmmaker comes across the letters of a petroleum geologist in Iran in the 1930s who was later to embark on a search for the origins of civilisation. 'The Host' sets out on its own exploration, to decipher signs from the fragmented images buried in the BP (British Petroleum) Archive. This journey through the past interweaves a number of stories drawn from both personal memory and the records of an imperial history, which builds a picture of a 20th-century colonial encounter. 'The Host' is a personal essay film about the stories we tell about ourselves and others, the facts and fictions we live by, and their consequences. (LFF brochure)
BFI London Film Festival 2015 - World premiere
A special combined presentation of three of James Richards’ recent works (2006-2014) that recycle and adapt a diverse range of material to produce a spectral meditation on the human figure as a space of sensual integration, inspired by the work of the late filmmaker Derek Jarman.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Experiementa Strand
Artist Tacita Dean, and actor Stephen Dillane presented a live theatrical happening performed over four nights at the 2014 Sydney Biennial, with two 16mm cameras rolling on each occasion. Dillane changed elements of his appearance each night and, snatching pages from Dean who was seated in the front row, recited Shakespeare, popular texts and personal stories, whilst also announcing adjustments in the camera set-ups and the changing of reels. Dean has returned to this tense scenario and cut into the material according to the systemic logic that emerged over the course of the serialised performance, inscribing changes in time and space, illustrating or actualising a form of deep choreography- LFF
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Experiementa Strand
Through a series of oral testimonies and carefully composed portraits, Alone Together, the Social Life of Benches explores how individuals and groups spend time in two distinctive public London locations.
Made by Esther Johnson as part of an Arts & Humanities Research Council project, this poetic documentary illuminates the thoughts and memories of frequent users of General Gordon Square, Woolwich, and St Helier Open Space, Sutton.
Revolving around the micro-space of the humble bench, the film incorporates contributions from a diverse range of visitors. These testimonies highlight themes such as the psychological feeling of being in a space, the rhythm and flow of visitors to a place, the importance of design for everyday street furniture and access to communal outdoor space.
The film acts like a stranger who joins you to ‘watch the world go by’, and to break the ice by starting a conversation with their fellow bench user.
From their first conversation the film set out to highlight reaction to unspecified places, as jump off points to something, offering a culture of play in " Ballardian" environments where past planning has lost relevance. Places that induce reaction to the architecture of existence.
A young boy releases a cloud into a church and it builds to a storm. Elwood’s Ark is a poem that challenges notions of religion and redemption. It traces the journey of the water we drink, back 13.8 billion years through time and space to the beginning of the Universe.
Spoken in the words of a child, the film warns of a coming apocalypse. It is an apocalypse of our own making - an apocalypse in which divine intervention will not play a part, and only we ourselves may prevent.
Exploring the intangibility of how one experiences and records the present through bodily sensations, referencing Marcel Proust’s notion of ‘Involuntary Memory’.
The residual, the soil and stains aren’t mere reconstruction of the past but an attempt to return to ritualise fragments of the absent. The desire to remember, embeds the past involuntarily within the present.
