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I shot Silk Ties for the most part in New York’s Garment District from the vantage point of a work truck. Sometimes I filmed while parked. Other times, I filmed while driving slowly in thick traffic, which enabled me to create the dolly-like motions that contribute to a rhythm and sensibility. Most of the film was edited in the camera. The subject matter—the vibrant street life of a working neighborhood—is endless. The film could go on and on forever or until the last sweatshop is turned into a luxury condominium. - Jim Jennings
Last year, I went to visit locations for a project I helped shoot in 2001. Chantal Akerman’s From the Other Side was filmed along the U.S./Mexico border. Crossings is a short response to my experience of the shoot and its subject. A wall exists along parts of the border facing those who live on either side. The film gives multiple views of the wall and visually confronts the idea it represents. Crossings is a short installment of a larger project, shot in Cuba, France, the United States and Israel that investigates insularity in both geographical and cultural terms.
Views From Home was filmed in the flat in which I lived on Clarence Road, east London. I had rooms at the front and back of the house and I recorded sunlight passing through them in the course of the day, as well as across the buildings seen from the windows. Sometimes I would set the time-lapse camera running and go off to work, leaving it to record the sunlight in the empty rooms.
Another room in the flat was used for rehearsal by the saxophone player Alan Wilkinson. The soundtrack comes from recordings I made while walking from room to room as he was playing. This is mixed in with a variety of musics from the street, reflecting the multi-ethnicity of the location – Greek music, reggae, country & western. - Guy Sherwin
Day through night Block is a portrait of a 1960’s London tower block, it’s interior and exterior spaces explored and revealed, patterns of activity building a rhythm and viewing experience not dissimilar from the daily observations of the security guard sat watching the flickering screens with their fixed viewpoints and missing pieces of action.
Block was made over a period of 10 month period in a tower block in south east London from 2004 –05. The film is a portrait of the place that came out of much time spent there.
The security guards office and the bank of CCTV monitors with their random editing patterns and missing pieces of action were used as a starting point in terms of the camera techniques and editing structures employed in the film. All seeing, but seeing nothing at the same time. Working with static camera the fixed shots are repeated and edited together in sequence in a similar way to the CCTV camera recordings that flick from one camera view to another, often disrupting the (visual) ‘narrative’.
The contrast between the exterior and interior of the building, the impersonal common spaces and the personal spaces of the interior of people’s flats gives shape to the portrait.
The soundtrack was built up from recordings made on location at the time of shooting and sounds gathered from various sources and was composed and mixed by Jonah Fox. - Emily Richardson
The way in which Las Vegas knocks off other cities makes it an even better target. In one photograph, the complex of skyscrapers representing New York presents the city in miniature, thrusting up from a flat, hazy desert landscape that rolls out to the mountains. In a close-up of Vegas-as-Egypt, a spectacular black glass pyramid fronted by a white Sphinx stands hard by a slick pair of anonymous buildings that would fit in any American downtown. Mr. Barbieri also catches a graveyard for old neon signs that lends a certain poignancy to this hard-bitten casino-rama.
Las Vegas, viewed by sunny day and glitzy night as the chopper throbs above it, staccato engine sounds mixing with a lively score of slot machines clunking, people talking and a snappy piano performance. A truck doing doughnuts in the dust, the American flag in neon, the Bellagio's dancing water fountains and much more pass in a dazzling display of the kitsch that is an American classic. - Grace Glueck
1903 hand/horse drawn street carts on New York's Lower East Side. Tiny movements evolve in place, caught between 2-D and 3-D. -
Ken Jacobs
A transitory outpouring of invective and intercession in the Berlin underground. – Mark McElhatten
“Why should my heart be discouraged, why should the shadows come
Why should my heart be lonely, and long for heaven and home?”
In the 1930’s jubilee gospel singing underwent a metamorphosis when Roy Crain joined up with R.H. Harris and developed a new style of vocal arrangement with The Soul Stirrers. (Later members included Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls) The Soul Stirrers introduced a more complex kind of vocal presentation employing the innovations of falsetto and swing lead tradeoffs with guitar accompaniment and complex background singing with reiterated words or delayed echoing responses. Bruce Conner began working on By and By a documentary about The Soul Stirrers several decades ago shooting their reunion concert with four cameras and accumulating interview material. Conner was poised to finish the piece in the mid – 80’s but the project was abandoned for a variety of financial and personal reasons. From the ashes of this project arises a new collage film miniature completed this year.
In the past Conner created masterful pairings of sound and image with the music of Dylan, Ray Charles, Devo, Byrne and Eno, Respighi, Sibelius, Riley, Gleeson and others. His Eye Is on the Sparrow takes its name from a classic gospel song written by Civilla D. Martin and Charles H. Gabriel in 1906 often associated with Ethel Waters , Mahalia Jackson and most recently Lauryn Hill.
The Soul Stirrers cut their version in Chicago on October 10, 1946 and it is this recording that is heard on the track. Carefree and complex the song moves in tandem with a set of found images that seem utterly transparent yet are evocative of other mysteries just out of reach. - Mark McElhatten
Three years of the Kopaszi dam under a demolition order. The sunlight spindle camera, the scratches and flashes of the expired raw material and the cut in the camera breathe together with nature and the people living there. The film’s sound material is an orchestra’s rehearsal in which a brass band is trying to play the Egmont overture.
This film was made for an exam at the end of year four of the Prague-based FAMU, in the workshop of Vera Chytilová and Karel Vachek, with the co-operation of the Czech experimental filmmaker Martin Blazicek. - Gulya Nemes
Drive Thru is a landscape of incomplete signs. The piece takes its
inspiration from the traces of destruction left by Hurricane Ivan in Miami.
Despite an intense rush to rebuild, these neon bulbs remained apart
and largely untouched just beyond or above the city's active construction
sites. Stripped to their barest lighting elements and a few broken
parts, they illuminate on a basic level. - Gretchen Skogerson
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