Projects matching: Thomas Riedelsheimer

Synopsis

Light, without which life itself is impossible, is the working medium and obsession of director Thomas Riedelsheimer. Light, seen only in interaction with matter, allows us to explore the origin of the universe. In Tracing Light, science and art interact to illuminate the birth of stars and secrets of the molecular world. Einstein’s work on light changed our understanding of the world forever and revealed it as more complex and magical than was thought. Now, at a radical moment in physics, we bring together leading scientists, and artists who sculpt with light, across Scotland and Germany – from the Max Planck Institute at Erlangen, to Glasgow University’s Extreme Light Group and western reaches of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, in a quest to understand and embody the ineffable. New questions are given voice, visually and sensually, in the language of matter; in the language of film – light.
Official Selection DOK Leipzig 2024 - World premiere
Official Selection CPH:DOX 2025 - International premiere

Synopsis

Award-winning director and cinematographer, Thomas Riedelsheimer (Rivers and Tides, Andy Goldsworthy working with Time) takes us on an journey through a universe of sound with percussionist Evelyn Glennie. They map a world of the senses – images and sounds. Hearing images, seeing sound. With Evelyn, we experience sound as palpable and rhythm as the basis of everything that is. Rhythm is movement, flow, change, renewal - and repetition. Everything oscillates and vibrates - from the bridge of steel and concrete to the energy shells around an atom. We recognise and experience our world through oscillations, through rhythms - even colours oscillate at different frequencies. Everything vibrates, everything 'speaks' - a universe of sound. Renowned percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who lost her hearing aged eight years old, lives in this universe in a way that almost no-one else does. Together with her, this film dives into the world of sound and rhythms - into the world of our origins. At the top of her profession with many works written especially for her, Evelyn now improvises for this film with Fred Frith, master of the avant-garde. The result of their collaboration forms the backbone of the film as Evelyn travels the world, playing with diverse musicians and sending back postcards from her world of sound.

Synopsis

Landscape sculptor Andy Goldsworthy is renowned throughout the world for his work in ice, stone, wood. His own remarkable still photographs are Goldsworthy's way of talking about his often ephemeral works, of fixing them in time. Now with this deeply moving film, shot in four countries, across four seasons, and the first major film he has allowed to be made, the elusive element of time adheres to his sculpture.

Director Thomas Riedelsheimer worked with Andy Goldsworthy for over a year to shoot this film. What Riedelsheimer found was a profound sense of breathless discovery and uncertainty in Goldsworthy's work, in contrast to the stability of conventional sculpture. There is risk in everything that Goldsworthy does. He takes his fragile work - and it can be as fragile in stone as in ice or twigs - right to the edge of its collapse, a very beautiful balance and a very dramatic edge within the film. The film captures the essential unpredictability of working with rivers and with tides, feels into a sense of liquidity in stone, travels with Goldsworthy underneath the skin of the earth and reveals colour and energy flowing through all things.

Riedelsheimer's film, like Goldsworthy's sculpture, grows into something beyond the simple the making of an object. It touches the heart of what Goldsworthy does and who he is, in much the same way that Goldsworthy touches the heart of a place when he works in it and leaves his mark on it. In this film, which is Goldsworthy's work as much as Riedelsheimer's, 'you see something you never saw before; that was always there but you were blind to.'