Projects matching: Michael Nyman

Synopsis

“My shows are about Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll. It’s for the excitement and the goosebumps. I want heart attacks. I want ambulances.” (Alexander McQueen)
‘Lee’ Alexander McQueen’s rags-to-riches story is a modern-day fairy tale laced with the gothic. An unremarkable working-class boy from East London, he harnessed his demons and went on to become a global one man fashion brand and one of the most iconic artists of the century. How did this punk rebel overturn the silver-spoon world of Paris haute couture, ushering in the heady, revolutionary era of ‘Cool Britannia’? And why, at the height of acclaim and power, did he shockingly put an end to it all?
Mirroring the savage beauty, boldness and vivacity of his design, this film is an intimate revelation of McQueen’s own world, both tortured and inspired, which celebrates a radical and mesmerising genius of profound influence.
Official Selection Tribeca Film Festival 2018 - Spotlight Documentary - World premiere

Synopsis

April 24th 1915: Under cover of the darkness of war whilst the British are preparing landings at Gallipoli, mass arrests of Armenians are taking place across Constantinople. Poet Taniel Varoujan's home is broken, his poetry scattered, name checked and ticked on ordered list – never to be seen again.

Synopsis

A song cycle with texts written by World War I poets all of whom, apart from the English painter-poet David Bomberg, lost their lives during the war... This innovative song cycle combines chansons vieilles from European poets, archival visual excerpts, and fragments of World World I-era musical motifs, in which Michael Nyman evokes everything erased from our memory: the unknown soldiers - those who have never been found or have lost their lives.

Synopsis

On Landguard Point is a film about home created by Suffolk raised Robert Pacitti - founder of the award winning SPILL Festival of Performance and maker and curator of performance art for over 20 years - with original music by Michael Nyman.

Set entirely in the East of England and built through poetry, performance and slips of story. Woven together these forms accumulate ideas around what home means. The film is about trade: what it means to produce and export, or import from elsewhere. It is also then a film about migration, identity and defence. These themes underpin every element of the film and offer up multiple layers of resonance and meaning.

The film is carried by two other voices. The first, our narrator, initially sets the scene before falling into his own poetic visions and daydream. The second is a family of scrolling red LED text boxes, stood in the sea and beginning: HERE IS A MAP…

On Landguard Point features work by internationally acclaimed artists such as Julia Bardsley, Rajni Shah, Kira O’Reilly, Harminder Judge and Mark Peter Wright.

Synopsis

NYman with a Movie Camera is a 64 minute feature film conceived and directed by Michael Nyman. The film presents a shot-by-shot reconstruction of Dziga Vertov's iconic film 'Man with a Movie Camera', replacing the original sequences with footage from Michael Nyman's own film archives shot over the last two decades.
 
Deeply rooted in Vertov's original ideas concerned with 'the Perception of Truth', the documentation of 'life as it is' and that of 'life caught unawares', Nyman's film attempts to capture the essence of 'what is there', and reflects on what he calls the Persistence of glance, a multi-sensorial experience of time as it occurs, of life as it happens and as recorded by the human memory. The film is a modern-day take on experimental documentary film making through the bias of cinematographic collage. It proposes to renew a discourse with the ideological and aesthetic precepts once defended by Vertov in his pursuit of the ultimate 'cleaning up' of film language from the 'corrupting influence' of Drama.

Synopsis

The film is part of 'CINE OPERA', a series over 50 videoworks and cinematographic records shot in various part of the world by Michael Nyman during the last fifteen years. In Moscow 11:19.31, the camera observes, somewhat objectively, from the view point of Michael Nyman, the interviewee and celebrity, the proceeding of an interview in a Moscow radio station. His answers, always triggered by some sort of hesitation, are replaced by his own music: 'La Debarcadère' from 'La Traversee de Paris' (1989).

Synopsis

A writer returns, disillusioned, to London and Paris. He begins on a story: a sleeper cell of young, glamorous urban terrorists. Gabriella, glamorous trophy wife of a young king-in-exile, holed up in an opulent London riverside penthouse, falls under the spell of a modern-day Che Guevara and, Patty Hearst-style, enlists in The Cause. She is sent to Paris under the 'front' of a drama student aiming at film. She takes her studies exceptionally seriously: encounters Bernard Stiegler, the leading philosopher on the subject of cinema and the human condition, and other luminaries. And she meets fellow-"student" activists, half-sister and -brother Julia and Sam, skilled actors who seem more interested in petty crime and scams. Their father is a political prisoner held in London; is he the master-mind? Has he been grooming them since childhood?

Our writer adopts the persona of a sleuth as he follows these anti-heroes. Books are passed, stolen: do they bear coded messages? Why is Gabriella obsessed with capturing her interviews on an outdated Nagra tape-recorder? What is their connection with the incipient terrorism on the city streets?

So our writer/sleuth uncovers events; but is he documenting actuality, or inventing a fiction?

Synopsis

David Bond lives in one of the most intrusive surveillance states in the world. He decides to find out how much private companies and the government know about him by putting himself under surveillance and attempting to disappear – a decision that changes his life forever.

Leaving his pregnant wife and young child behind, he is tracked across the database state on a chilling journey that forces him to contemplate the meaning of privacy - and the loss of it.

Synopsis

The Trip is an improvised tour of the North of England that reunites comedy favourites Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. In the style of 'Curb your Enthusiasm', the story is fictional but based around their real personas.

When Steve is commissioned by a Sunday newspaper to review half a dozen restaurants, he decides to mix work with pleasure and plans a trip around the North of England with his food-loving American girlfriend. But when his girlfriend leaves him and returns to the States, Steve is faced with a week of meals for one. Reluctantly, he calls Rob, the only person he can think of who will be available. Rob, never one to turn down a free lunch, agrees and together they set off for a culinary adventure.

Over the course of six meals at six different restaurants in and around the Lake District, Lancashire and The Yorkshire Dales, the unlikely couple find themselves debating the big questions in life over a series of culinary delights.

This six-part comedy series is directed by Michael Winterbottom, and builds on the success of previous collaborations with Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan, 'A Cock and Bull Story' and '24 Hour Party People'.

Synopsis

Charon, the demon sailor over the river Styx, sets off on a journey to recover his mortality. He renounces his role as ferryman for the dead and sails away in search for the archetypical home, the mythical place of his childhood where he can finally abandon his boat and die.

Synopsis

Ordinary Magic consists of a series of interviews with six Londoners in their 70s and 80s, each of them offering intimate observations on their lifelong quest for meaning and knowledge.

Synopsis

9 Songs takes place in London in the autumn of 2003. Lisa is an American, studying in London for a year. Matt, a glaciologist, meets her at a rock concert at the Brixton Academy and falls in love with her. The film follows their domestic and physical relationship and includes music from the concerts they go to together: Black Rebel Morotcycle Club, The Von Bondies, Elbow, Primal Scream, The Dandy Warhols, Super Furry Animals, Franz Ferdinand, Michael Nyman.

In between the music and the bands we see Matt and Lisa making love. The film follows their love affair until Christmas, when Lisa leaves London and returns to America.