| 아네트 메사제 Annette Messager (0) | 2008/08/21 |
|---|---|
| Lewis W. Hine (0) | 2008/04/26 |
| Nicky Hamlyn (0) | 2008/03/16 |
| Robert Breer (0) | 2008/03/16 |
| Chinese Artist 1- Yang Fudong (0) | 2008/03/12 |
| British Artist 3- William Raban (0) | 2008/02/26 |
| 아네트 메사제 Annette Messager (0) | 2008/08/21 |
|---|---|
| Lewis W. Hine (0) | 2008/04/26 |
| Nicky Hamlyn (0) | 2008/03/16 |
| Robert Breer (0) | 2008/03/16 |
| Chinese Artist 1- Yang Fudong (0) | 2008/03/12 |
| British Artist 3- William Raban (0) | 2008/02/26 |
Film Art Phenomena:
Works by Nicky Hamlyn
Nicky Hamlyn In Person
Sunday, March 4, 2007 at 7:30 pm — Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Book signing and Q&A to following the screening
Prolific film and video artist Nicky Hamlyn has made over forty films since 1975. He has also written numerous essays and reviews on experimental film and video, including his book Film Art Phenomena published by the British Film Institute/University of California Press in 2003. He is currently a senior lecturer in Video Media Arts and Visual Theory at the University College for the Creative Arts at Maidstone, Kent in the United Kingdom.
“I see my films as arising out of an encounter between a situation or location or subject, and a camera/production strategy. For example, in an early film, Silver Street, I used the same 25mm lens throughout, the same framings, parallel cutting between two spaces—indoor room and outdoor street—that was suggested by that situation. This leads towards the production of a mode of seeing that replaces the anthropocentric point of view of the cinema with the mechanical vision of the camera. I tried to suggest this in a number of ways, for example, by using identical framings for shots of the same objects, rather than varying camera position slightly, which tends to suggest a shifting, and hence human, point of view. I have been inspired partly by Robert Morris’s reading of Jackson Pollock’s paintings as resulting from the interactions of horizontal canvas, paint viscosity, stick, gravity, arm mechanics. Morris’s behavioristic take on Pollock redeems it from an expressionistic reading. It points towards an open-ended way of making art/film, in which, rather than attempting to harness a technology teleologically, allows the
various forces at play in the situation to produce an open-ended outcome whose meaning arises from the light that outcome throws (fortuitously) on questions of matter and perception.” (Nicky Hamlyn) Minutiae (1990); 16mm, color, sound, 1 minute, print from the maker Nicky Hamlyn's portrait of BBC2's The Late Show studio was shot in one continuous sequence with no subsequent editing. Within the limit of a one-minute duration, the film captures an eerie and haunting look at the empty interviewer’s chair and the empty studio. Featuring a coyote howling at the moon as darkness encroaches upon rich hues of reds and blues.
Hole (1992); 16mm, color, silent, 2 min, print from the maker
Hole is a pendant/coda to a longer film, Only at First, completed a year earlier. The subject is an absence, a hole in a fibreboard security fence surrounding a large construction site. The hole was made by a drunk who kicked the fence as he was passing my house one night. Behind the hole can be seen fragments of an older fence that enclosed an area of “allotments” rectangles of land that can be hired by members of the public who wish to grow their own vegetables. The hole appears in every shot and the work is principally an exploration of light, but also of scale: feline and human appearances articulate the space in passing through it. (Nicky Hamlyn)
Not Resting (2000); 16mm, b&w, silent, 4 minutes, print from the maker
A film entirely composed of shots from the filmmaker's bed in a single session.
Pistrino (2003); 16mm, b&w, silent, 9 minutes, print from the maker
Time-lapse sequences shot in Central Italy. Composed of uniform shots, each one frame every minute, which compress a long summer’s day into a half a minute. The movement of the wind and sun through tree branches charm shadows into dancing across white walls and patches of glittering sand as the sand dramatically meshes with the grains of the film.
Water Water (2003); 16mm, b&w/color, silent, 11 minutes, print from the maker
Water Water revisits the bathroom location of a previous film White Light (1996). It is based around a set of antinomies that operate at various levels, from between frames to between the two halves of the film. The black and white first part is composed of individually filmed frames (animation) which form shots of interlaced contrary motion that nevertheless can be read as sequences of individual frames, and/or in which alternate frames are lit in contrasting ways so as to emulate negative-positive juxtapositions. In the colour second half, dissolves replace cuts, light softens and contrast decreases. Continuity, by way of isomorphic features in the room, replaces the discontinuities of part one. (LUX)
Matrix (1999); 16mm, color, silent, 2 minutes, print from the maker
Matrix is constructed in terms of receding planes. It shows a back garden/yard and the housing beyond it, in which the divide between the private and public sphere, a garden wall topped with wooden trellis, acts as a fulcrum for various spatial elaborations. Matrix is both analytical and synthetic. Analytical in that there is an attempt to explore three-dimensional space through two dimensional planes, but without resorting to Cubist fragmentation, in that the planes are unified around a singular position (not point) of view, synthetic in that every aspect of the space is re-configured through shifts in the angle of that point of view, bringing into alignment previously seen elements from earlier, different alignments. The trellis acts as a framing and aligning device, and its form echoes that of the filmstrip and the manner in which the film is assembled, that is, in a frame-by-frame manner. This film was also an opportunity to question what for me has always seemed a difficult distinction: that between analytic and synthetic as applied to Cubist painting. In order to undertake the spatial analysis attempted in Matrix, it was necessary to bring into being—to synthesize—images through points of view, camera operations and so on. This is what one is doing in making a shot, unless one subscribes to the naïve view that film simply re-presents its pro-filmic objects. (Because all painted images are, in a literal sense, synthetic, it is tempting to assume that camera images can be more properly analytical in that that they are not constructed but are disinterestedly, since mechanically, revealing). The “synthetic” reconfiguring of space, on the other hand, may just as easily be understood as analytical, since the act of trying things out constitutes an exploration of immanent possibilities that yield a further understanding of the space (as pro-filmic of course) under consideration. To this extent it may be as much
analytical as it is synthetic. (Nicky Hamlyn)
Penumbra (2003); 16mm, b&w, silent, 9 minutes, print from the maker
In Penumbra the camera strategy, and shooting scheme, are rigidly determined by the film’s subject, a grid of off-white bathroom tiles. The work is formed as a continuously evolving image. In other words it has neither cuts nor dissolves, both of which affect the transition from one shot to another, but exists as a single fixed shot made with a static camera. Penumbra’s spatio-temporal grid structure parallels the structure of the filmstrip, which is similarly grid-like: spatial in its actual physical form, spatio-temporal in its manner of operation. (Nicky Hamlyn)
Object Studies (2005); 16mm, color, silent, 17 minutes, print from the maker
Object Studies was shot in northeast Umbria, Italy. It was made in the same location as a number of my other recent films. It is organized around a colour scheme based loosely on the hues of the colour temperature scale; brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, white. Time-lapse, interlaced single-frame sequences and overlapping dissolves were deployed to explore densities and translucencies of light and the interactions of different kinds of cast-shadows. The space between the camera and its subject is also explored: Space is flattened, collapsed, expanded and bridged. In each section I tried to establish a relation between camera and subject that responds to the peculiarities of the spatial array in front of the lens, but there is a sense in which, at the same time, I want to challenge formulations like "in front of".(Nicky Hamlyn)
Transit of Venus (2005); 16mm, b&w, silent, 2 minutes, print from the maker
Transit of Venus is composed of two consecutive, partial, time-lapse records of the “Transit of Venus”, when Venus passed across the Sun on June 8th 2004, “Transits of Venus” are rare and currently occur in a pattern that repeats every 243 years, with pairs of transits 8 years apart separated by long gaps of 121.5 years and 105.5 years. Before 2004 the last pair of “Transits of Venus” were in December 1874 and December 1882. The second of the current pair will be on June 6th, 2012. Although the film was shot with a very small aperture, reduced shutter opening and several layers of neutral density filter, resulting in a black sky, the sun nevertheless remains contrastingly dazzling, and Venus, consequently, is obliterated.
These two short sequences are contextualized with data detailing the various technical parameters, which determine the peculiarity of the image. (Nicky Hamlyn)
Total running time of program: 64 minutes
| 아네트 메사제 Annette Messager (0) | 2008/08/21 |
|---|---|
| Lewis W. Hine (0) | 2008/04/26 |
| Nicky Hamlyn (0) | 2008/03/16 |
| Robert Breer (0) | 2008/03/16 |
| Chinese Artist 1- Yang Fudong (0) | 2008/03/12 |
| British Artist 3- William Raban (0) | 2008/02/26 |
A collage film in which Pope Pious XII does a juggling act.
1954, 16mm, color/si, .5m, $20
A frame by frame collision of totally disparate images.
"I haven't felt as good in a long time as when I stood in the Bonino Gallery looking at Breer's constructions and movies. The amazing thing is that all this goodness and happiness is caught so simply and so effortlessly. It's done through abstract lines, through the play of plastic elements, through movements and rhythms. The happiness has its own rhythm, and Breer seems to have caught and recreated it in his work. We look at Breer's work and we begin to smile - lightly, inside, a happy sort of smile, a happy feeling like when you see anything beautiful and perfect. It's through an amazing control and economy of his materials that he achieves this; through the elimination of all the usual emotional, personal, biographical material; not by giving in to temptations." - Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice
Award: Creative Film Foundation
1956, 16mm, color/so, 1.5m, $20
"Mixing photographs, newspaper clippings, and quickie paintings of an insolent taschisme, he ran them together as fast as racing cars. The eye absorbs them imperturbably, as if they constituted a coherent sequence. It is the succession of different images itself which comes to constitute an illusory form, comparable to that of solids in movement, and which reduces every attempt at analysis to a simple 'impression.'" - Benayoun, Positif
Award: Bergamo Award
1957, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $20
"[A] brilliant and astonishing ballet animated with unprecedented virtuosity!" - Burch, Film Quarterly
Selected for eight months' run with Last Year at Marienbad premiere in NY.
1957, 16mm, b&w/so, 3m, $20
100 basic images switching positions for four thousand frames. A continuous explosion.
1961, 16mm, color/so, 3m, $20
A day in the country with Claes Oldenburg and the Ray Gun Theatre Players ... includes such classic items as the haunted house, a gas station, ice cream stand, miniature golf, airplane noises, balloons. Things happen after each other in this film only because there isn't room for everything at once. After all, time's not supposed to move in one direction any more than it does in another.
1962, 16mm, b&w/so, 13m, $40
"Breer's unpredictable lines flow forth naturally with an assurance and a serenity which are the signs of an astonishing felicity of expression." - A. Labarthe, Cahiers du Cinema
Awards: NY Film Festival; London Film Festival; Tours Film Festival.
1963, 16mm, b&w/so, 5m, $20
Frame by frame collage of everything imaginable. First shown in New York production of K.H. Stockhausen's "Originale." Track from these performances.
Awards: NY and London film festivals; Special Mention, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1965.
1964, 16mm, color/so, 11m, $30
A record, of sorts, of the birth and death of Tinguely's famous auto-destructive sculpture. Filmed on the spot at the New York Modern Art Museum, this film also exploits a wide range of camera and editing techniques to give it a life of its own, independent of and parallel to the subject.
1968, 16mm, b&w/so, 9.5m, $30
"It's so absolutely beautiful, so perfect, so like nothing else. Forms, geometry, lines, movements, light, very basic, very pure, very surprising, very subtle." - Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice
"A dream of Euclid." - Donald Richie
Awards: NY Film Festival; London Film Festival; Tours Film Festival; Oberhausen Film Festival.
1968, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
A concise, one-minute cartoon history of the black American, commissioned by the Public Broadcast Laboratory and shown on NET network.
1968, 16mm, color/so, 1m, $20
1970, 16mm, color/si, 4m, $20
"In GULLS & BUOYS a large number of Breer's ideas are compressed and crystallized into a short statement of great richness. It could function excellently as an introduction to the remarkable range of pleasures available from the films of Robert Breer." - Scott Hammen, Afterimage
1972, 16mm, color/so, 7.5m, $20
"A poetic, rhythmic, riveting achievement (in rotoscope and abstract animation), in which fragments of landscapes, passengers, and train interiors blend into a magical color dream of a voyage. One of the most important works by a master who - like Conner, Brakhage, Broughton - spans several avant-gardes in his ever more perfect explorations." - Amos Vogel, Film Comment
Awards: Oberhausen Film Festival, 1975; Film as Art, American Film/Video Festival.
1974, 16mm, color/so, 8.5m, $25
"RUBBER CEMENT employs a variety of formal techniques and modes - including live-action footage, line drawings, animated geometric figures, color washes and found material in the form of newspaper clippings and sales receipts. The soundtrack follows a similar collagist tendency, offering snatches of dialogue, music and natural sound. The film is divided loosely into sections - some involving representational figures and others presenting purely abstract imagery.
"It seems fitting that one of the central 'characters' in RUBBER CEMENT is a bottle of film editing glue which collects and trails behind it a chain of colorful fragments. For through the collagist potential of frame-by-frame construction and the adhesive possibilities of the editing process, Breer has created a highly eclectic and brilliant cinematic work." - Lucy Fischer, UFSC Newsletter
1976, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
"Breer is a consummate master of cinematic space. Like Hans Richter, he constantly provokes a sense of depth through changing the scale of his shapes. We see the space as constantly shrinking and expanding ... the metamorphosis of things and space is located in the spectator who actively participates in creating the meaning of the image. Breer celebrates the freedom endemic in animation by giving the spectator a creative role in the process of metamorphosis." - Noel Carroll, The Soho Weekly News
"[77 is] a film notable for its sparely effective use of color and sound." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
Exhibition: Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1979
1977, 16mm, color/so, 7m, $20
"[A] French gendarme weaves a hapless path through the film's strobe attacks, disparate drawing styles, and variable scale .... Framed by underwater and travel imagery, the central section's faucets and aerosols, collapsing tents and outsized croquet games, breakfast foods and sexual violence, all suggest domestic frustration." - J. Hoberman,The Village Voice
Exhibition: NY Film Festival, 1979; Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1979.
1978, 16mm, color/so, 9.5m, $30
"� Breerworld is homey but tumultuous, filled with sudden shifts in scale or color, flash frame jolts, and a steady back beat of good-natured apocalypse. ... [H]e towers over a field where gimmicks are common currency and cuteness is as virulent as malaria in the tropics .... T.Z. offers a typically witty barrage of domestic imagery and eclectic technique." - J. Hoberman, American Film
"Within the film's brief length, numerous dramas take place, puzzling and enthralling us with their restless, enigmatic denouements." - B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Reader "An elegant home movie, its subject is Breer's new apartment which faces the Tappan Zee (T.Z.) bridge. It is permeated, as are all his films, with subtle humor, eroticism and a sense of imminent chaos and catastrophe." - Amy Taubin, Artforum Exhibition: NY Film Festival, 1981; Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1981.
1979, 16mm, color/so, 8.5m, $25
"... displays sinuous cutting between live action and animated images, rapid-fire associations and transformations, freedom in collaging the everyday with the imaginary in sound and image, and a diabolical moment of synthesis at the climax when the rat trap is sprung. ... Breer is easily the greatest animator currently practicing." - Amy Taubin, The Soho Weekly News
"... a typically bravura and delightful display of simple objective forms flashing, rotating, and dissolving into abstraction ...." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
Exhibition: NY Film Festival, 1982; Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1983.
1981, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $20
A mix of rephotographed live action and animation using hand-cut traveling mattes.
"The strongest film by Robert Breer in several seasons." - J. Hoberman,The Village Voice
1982, 16mm, color/so, 5.5m, $20
"BANG reveals Breer at his most accomplished and most playful. It is also his most autobiographical film - the youngster paddling a boat is Breer as a boy and the pencil cartoon sequences were drawn by Breer when he was around ten years old.
"Robert Breer is the godfather of animation art. In BANG he sustains ten dense minutes of collagistic mayhem that's as potent as anything he's ever done. Television images of a boy paddling a boat and an arena crowd cheering, plus film shots of bright pink and red flowers and a toy phone, are intercut with frenetic drawings in Breer's trademark heavy crayon, principally of baseball games. Breer inserts a photo of himself with a question mark scrawled over his head, accompanied by the words 'Don't be smart.' But he can't help it - he is." - Katherine Dieckmann, The Village Voice
"Robert Breer's style is akin to musical composition. His films begin by presenting various elements - a dog, a house, a telephone - upon which he will later expand. The films seem to be variations on the themes of certain objects or words or gestures, variations that grow and build, becoming ever more complex." - Janet Maslin, The New York Times
1986, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $40
This animated fable is centered around a backyard pond shown intermittently in live-action scenes. A small child appears and disappears in a ballet of crows, rabbits, monkey wrenches, and goldfish. When the police arrive there are pot-shots at backyard varmits, but the frog on the swing seems to survive it all.
As usual in Breer films, the soundtrack is often conspicuously out of sync with the picture. Or is it vice versa when a crow goes "moo?"
1989, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
VHS Sale: $300
1997, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $30
16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
2000, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
-Canyon Cinema catalogue-
| 아네트 메사제 Annette Messager (0) | 2008/08/21 |
|---|---|
| Lewis W. Hine (0) | 2008/04/26 |
| Nicky Hamlyn (0) | 2008/03/16 |
| Robert Breer (0) | 2008/03/16 |
| Chinese Artist 1- Yang Fudong (0) | 2008/03/12 |
| British Artist 3- William Raban (0) | 2008/02/26 |
| 아네트 메사제 Annette Messager (0) | 2008/08/21 |
|---|---|
| Lewis W. Hine (0) | 2008/04/26 |
| Nicky Hamlyn (0) | 2008/03/16 |
| Robert Breer (0) | 2008/03/16 |
| Chinese Artist 1- Yang Fudong (0) | 2008/03/12 |
| British Artist 3- William Raban (0) | 2008/02/26 |
