TAKE 291: 28-07-2005

MYRIAM THYES - MUTABLE WORLDS (Flash animation, 4 minutes)

Six different projections of equal area world maps, orientated centred towards the south pole and the Pacific Ocean, morph into each other. The unusual views of the world. the abstract graphical artwork and the strange continental drifts question and irritate - in a playful and meditative way - our habits of perception and our belief in detached information.

MARK NORFOLK - RAGE (16mm, 6 minutes)

An avant-garde non-narrative expression of anger at the unprovoked death of black student

Stephen Lawrence

MARTA ANGELOZZI - THE SHADOW COLLECTION (THE SPINNING CAGE, THE WHISKY GLASS AND THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL) (MiniDV, 7 minutes in total)

The Shadow Collection traces a creative journey working with shadow forms, both in live performance and digital media. Some videos are told directly for the camera, or recorded live performances. Other videos are collaborations with artists and the shadow as an element in their work. The results are striking and deeply poetic films that explore various levels of perception; the symbolic becomes abstract and what was narrative becomes an aesthetic motion.

COLIN CROCKATT - INTO THE DRINK (MiniDV, 6 minutes)

Man Overboard.

A curiously involuntary suspension of disbelief whereby the viewer is aware of the banal reality of the images whilst simultaneously believing in the cinematic fantasy that the music has invested them with.

DAVID THEOBALD - TALES FROM PURGATORY (MiniDV animation, 3 minutes)

A butterfly leaves the garden to seek its fortune - an open-ended allegorical tale, with crawling subtitles.

CLAIRE FOWLER - THE DEVIL AND THE FLY (16mm, 8 minutes)

Inspired by an Icelandic folktale, The Devil and The Fly charters a brief but claustrophobic power-struggle between the same person.

A female figure moves back and forth within a confined space, changing identity with the donning of a garment. A girl eats porridge. A butterfly is consumed. A pair of bellows become an instrument of torture. The sound of an Icelandic glacier, Vatnajokull, pervades the atmosphere.

RAFAEL - EL HIJO ET EL LIBRO (MiniDV, 10 minutes)

A red and black movie about a son and a Korean book.

JOE STEVENS - PUMP (MiniDV, 1 minute)

At just under a minute long, this comedic short engages with the audience by using metaphorical juxtapositions and a simple narrative to try and encourage thinking about the nature of masculinity, the proliferation of voyeurism and the notion of objects and/or shapes being representative of alternative forms and suggestions.

NICK JORDAN - FURY (MiniDV, 5 minutes)

"A short film about insects and the stillness of the cinema at 24 frames per second. Fly is a popular fly-paper brand. I usually try and construct my work out of chance situations or found material. I thought the fly-paper, and its unique name, would act as a good motif, or trigger, for the film. My video work is a kind of fictional, or fabricated, cinema - which arises out of happenstance or real situations. Various elements and referents are brought together in the frame to 'construct a cinematic language or model."

PHILIP NEWCOMBE - BLUDGEON (MiniDV, 1 minutes)

A direct response to the filmmaker being beaten up and ending up in hospital. A nod to Norman McLaren and Martin Kippenberger's Dialogue with the Youth' in its absurd hilarity and banal aggression. A short burst of comic violence, then the blackouts.

OLIVER PIETSCH - TUNED (MiniDV, 14 minutes)

A compilation of actors plaving drugged people in movies.

CHRISTINA LOVEY - CAMBER

The point of recognition - when does something become recognisable? Shot from a static viewpoint, the work uses the documentary gaze and the documentary tradition but the work has become almost painterly in its realisation. The work was shot in a single take over 30 minutes. on a beautiful end of summer Sunday where everybody, it seemed, took the opportunity to enjoy the last bit of the summer. Initially, the image is unclear but gradually, al is revealed

BROTHERS QUAY - THE PHANTOM MUSEUM (UK, 2003, 12 mins, video)

Sir Henry Welcome (1853-1936) amassed one of the world's largest museum collections, capturing human culture and history through medical eves. The Phantom Museum uses animation to imaginatively 'document' this extraordinary assemblage and simultaneously reveal an extremely beautiful yet odd inner cosmos of things.