Light Reading: 03-04-2001

Light reading is facilitated by Karen Mirza, Brad Butler and Simon Payne.

Were you to describe the range of subjects associated with William Englishs films, the list might include dwelling, desertion, gastronomy, documentary and filmic abstraction. Of the single and double screen works that English will be showing the particularities of each film undoubtedly rests on the exactitude and eye of an experienced filmmaker.

This Wednesdays programme will include: Untitled (1985), Still (1994), What Did You Eat Today? (2001, w/ Sandra Cross and Hugh de la Cruz), Dining Room (1990), Displaced (2000), and a new untitled twin screen work comprising 100ft rolls including the films Dam and Hah.

Programme

Untitled 1985 7 minutes silent colour 16mm. Originally shot on standard 8mm, double exposed, blown up to 16mm and stretch printed.

Almost unrecognisable imagery; dayglo red stripes move up and down against a background which becomes stronger as the film progresses.

Still 1994 14 minutes colour silent 16mm.

What Did You Eat Today? with Sandra Cross + Hugh de la Cruz. 2001 10 minutes colour silent 16mm.

A question and a portrait. Amos Vogel writing in Film Culture November 1957; - I venture to say that future sociologists will find more information about what it felt like to live in the middle of the twentieth century by looking at these so-called esoteric and precious - sum - experimental films than they would from looking at the prefabricated, cut-and-dried documentaries to which we are so often exposed. In experimental films we have a clear picture of a society in transition, a society faced with crisis, war, alienation of the individual, problems of standardisation and mechanisation. In all these respects, the experimental films, whether the individual artists are aware of it or not, express the tensions and the discomfort felt by their makers in our present-day society

Dining Room 1990 20 minutes 16mm colour separate sound track on tape and CD.

Filmed during the last 6 months of the Dining Room organic vegetarian restaurant in Borough Market London which I ran with my partner Sandra Cross between 1980 and 1990. Fragments and sporadic bursts of single frame clusters which alternate between light and shade created by shadows and movements in a sink, the shape of which echoes the shape of the film frame. The soundtrack was recorded in the restaurant, the microphone next to the sink whilst in the background can be heard the occasional conversation of the plongeurs and customers with Dvorak on the radio interrupted by the concrete? sounds of washing up and rushing water.

Displaced 2000 15 minutes colour silent 16mm.

The more I thought of it later the more it seemed strong as image of alienation, emptiness and just strangeness. Those shots of colour on the surface somehow, of those trailers, the gloss of them just being there, and the tents, the kind of mystery and (un-heavy handed) alienation at the same time, without some spurious "meanings" intercut. They had a time of, a necessary time of, their own to impart their effect(s)... and even putting the shots together into some meaningful relation like the marionettes made a sort of sense later, in terms retroactively of the sense of bewildered distanciation... and scale or lack of it, that kind of expectation throughout and then changing the expectation when experiencing nothing happening... no anecdotal copouts... anyway the whole thing gained rather than lost afterwards which is always a good sign with films i think... ? - Peter Gidal August 2000

Untitled 2002 twin screen 20 minutes 16mm colour sound.

Series of 100 foot rolls of Kodachrome including Dam and Hahwhich also exists as a one minute film shown on BBC2s late show in 1990.

William English has screened at the ICA 1987, Paris and Avignon 1989, International Experimental Film Congress Toronto 1989, London Film Festival 1991 (Experimental Film section), London Filmmakers Co-op, Glasgow New Visions 1995, Fourth Wall on the South Bank 1999.

One person screenings at the Lux in June 2001, Light Cone Paris in November 2001 and Avignon in December 2001. Displaced was screened in Dublin in August 2001 in a programme entitled Until That Time.

a mission statement & call for artists & filmmakers

What is documentary and what is Artist F+V. Where are they now and how do they inform the film form? We are not so much looking to answer these questions as we are to get amongst them. Light reading is a forum for these sort of discussions aimed at filmmakers and discussed through their work. We believe there is much to be gained through the examination of the recording eye and the interpreting eye and in prolonging the historical relationship between documentary and the avant garde.