Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman's experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.
Leave behind the ugly modern multiplex and step back into the glamorous world of the 1930s picture palace, in this charming documentary about Art Deco cinema architecture. Influenced by Le Corbusier, Oscar Deutsch created an iconic cinema brand and house style for his Odeon cinema chain. Designed by modernist architects Harry Weedon and Cecil Clavering, the distinctive buildings were anything but drab, with their sensual curves, glass, chrome and plush soft furnishings.
“London artist John Smith uses light-hearted humour to explore theoretical concerns - Gargantuan, for instance, is both pleasantly silly and acutely conscious of how imagery depends entirely on its framing. A voice-over intones the words ‘huge’ and ‘strapping’ as a lizard almost fills the screen, then ‘medium’ as the camera zooms out, then ‘tiny’, and finally ‘minute’, a pun on the film’s running time.” Fred Camper, Chicago Reader 2001
From the idea that glass, even when cooled, is a liquid that changes in appearance over time, an offscreen narrator launches a recollection of the bygone days of manual glassmaking and an observation of the impact of the mass-produced glass on the changing appearance of England over time.
Stephen Dwoskin brings together members of the Ballet Negres dance company, founded in London in 1946.
Vertical Features Remake is a film by Peter Greenaway. It portrays the work of a fictional Institute of Reclamation and Restoration as they attempt to assemble raw footage taken by ornithologist Tulse Luper into a short film, in accordance with his notes and structuralist film theory. The footage consists mostly of vertical landscape features, such as trees and posts, shot in the English landscape.
Early 90s London gets a vibrant dose of African culture in this mini odyssey fusing dance, music and fashion.
Beautiful but often violent images are interwoven to create an experimental documentary about the hazardous existence of the Serpent River community living in the shadow of uranium mines in Ontario Canada.
Oscar Wilde’s famous and eloquent defence of love – made while he was being cross-examined at the trial that led to his incarceration and death – is strikingly illustrated, word by word, with Mapplethorpe-like imagery.
Le Grice no longer simply uses the printer as a reflexive mechanism, but utilises the possibilities of colour-shift and permutation of imagery as the film progresses from simplicity to complexity… With the film’s culmination in representational, photographic imagery, one would anticipate a culminating “richness” of image; yet the insistent evidence of splice bars and the loop and repetition of the short piece of found footage and the conflicting superimposition of filtered loops all reiterate the work which is necessary to decipher that cinematic image. - Deke Dusinberre
A documentary about the life and works of Margaret Tait.
Plutonium Blonde is a beautifully textured collage of sound and images and a fractured narrative about woman’s self-definition and control. Taking the figure of Thelma, a woman working with the plutonium monitors at the core of a reactor, Lahire questions both the process at the core of the plutonium terminal and that one that constructs female identity. Plutonium Blonde is part of a trilogy of films on radiation (the other two are Uranium Hex and Serpent River) that Lahire made in the 1980s.
The Arts Council commissioned this film to coincide with their major retrospective of Giacometti's work at the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) in the summer of 1965. A similar exhibition was held concurrently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, sealing the artist's reputation as a modern master.
In this film an interior landscape is scrutinised, and an apparent rational calm is revealed as suffocating. Milk and Glass is an evocative journey from surface to interior – a black-coated mirror, the hollow of a bowl, a cavernous throat; a brush demarcates a line of lip on a flat surface, a mouth doubles up with the bowl and is virtually spoon-fed till it chokes.
A kaleidoscopic celebration of the 1980 Notting Hill Carnival. Arts Council of Great Britain.
An engaging and enlightening documentary about Jeff Keen shown on Channel 4 in 1983. Features Keen performing in front of his film projections as well as talking about and showing his work in different media.
Toulouse-Lautrec's sketchbooks are turned into an animated short.
Documentary on advertising. Investigates the way work has disappeared from advertising images, and traces the phenomenon through archive advertising films from 1897 to 1960. Places advertising in the context of historical events and everyday life, archive material being juxtaposed with contemporary images.
Documentary profile of English artist, Paul Nash.
Biographical short about the American Pop Artist by James Scott