Arts on Film Archive at Tate Modern
Tuesday 2 October – Tuesday 16 October 2007
Tate Modern
Starr Auditorium
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
This programme of screenings showcases the University of Westminster’s newly established online Arts on Film Archive www.artsonfilm.org.uk Supported by the AHRC and based at CREAM (Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster), the archive currently contains more than 465 documentary films drawn from Arts Council England’s Film Collection. The archive is a unique record of British and international post-war art, and of documentary filmmaking in the UK. Many titles in the archive contain rare material about individual artists; others offer definitive coverage of their subject. The screenings are followed by on-stage conversations with artists and filmmakers, led by John Wyver, author of the newly released publication Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain (Wallflower Press).
With support from CREAM at University of Westminster, and the Arts and Humanities
Research Council.
Tuesday 2 October 2007, 18.30
Richard Hamilton
James Scott, UK 1969, 25 mins
Made in collaboration with the artist Richard Hamilton, this documentary remains vivid and surprising nearly forty years on. Fragments of Hamilton’s works are integrated with newsreel images, movie trailers and other footage from the period. The artist offers an audio-only commentary, but this too is layered and disrupted. From this disorienting and often funny patchwork emerges a perceptual analysis that avoids conventional explanation, yet reveals key ideas that shaped Hamilton’s art.
The Great Ice Cream Robbery
James Scott, UK 1971, 35 mins
This rarely seen film, projected on two screens, was made in the summer of 1970 while Claes Oldenburg was in London setting up his retrospective at the Tate Gallery. It was the last film in a quartet of collaborations with artists that included David Hockney, RB Kitaj, and Richard Hamilton.
Wednesday 3 October 2007, 18.30
Bill Brandt: Shadows from Light
Steve Dwoskin, UK 1983, 59 mins
‘A cinematographic journey through the photographic atmospheres of Bill Brandt’ by renowned experimental filmmaker Steve Dwoskin. Many of the photographer’s most famous images are presented, along with Brandt himself, who died in December 1983. Much of the film is a succession of glistening, high contrast monochrome frames, echoing Brandts style and blurring the boundary between the photographs and the film’s photography. There are quotations too, about photography, from Man Ray, Susan Sontag, Edward Steichen, plus a child reading fragments from Alice Through the Looking Glass. Shadows from Light, like Lewis Carroll, is mysterious and haunting, innocent yet rewardingly complex.
Tuesday 16 October 2007, 18.30
Music and Performance Films
Throughout the 1990s, the Arts Council collaborated with BBC Television on a number of successful series of imaginative short films bringing together creative filmmakers with dancers, choreographers, musicians and performance artists. Included in the programme are Blight made by John Smith with composer Jocelyne Pook, Jayne Parker’s The World Turned Upside Down, David Hinton and Rosemary Lee’s work of documentary choreography, Snow, as well as John Tchalenko’s delightful tribute to step-dancer Sam Sherry.
For tickets book on www.tate.org.uk or call 020 7887 8888.
