SHOW AND TELL
SHOW AND TELL #18
Deborah For Artist Profile Magazine
Deborah Kelly is a Sydney-based artist. Her projects across media are concerned with lineages of representation, politics and history in public exchange. You will be able to watch her film Lying Women in our The Social Script programme. It’s an animated collage, made of images the artist has cut from discarded art history books. Deborah has collated hundreds of printed paintings of the recurring reclining female nudes that represent high culture and its pinnacle moments in western art. Stop-motion animation suggests other lives for these figures as they move and gather across the screen, one in which they perhaps have more agency over their bodies, desires and representation.
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Well, it’s hard to imagine happiness being perfect in this terrifying historical moment of hatreds inflamed by treacherous leaders. The absorption of making a work while possessed by the idea, though, remains a joy.
2. What lies at the heart of your own desire to make films?
It felt like my artworks wanted to move. The impetus came from them, lying under my bed, rustling.
3. What are the first things you do in developing a film idea in response to a subject?
Try to be present-and-absent enough to attend to the artworks’ own desires.
4. What’s your favourite film and why?
I still totally love Bladerunner, but have you seen artist Angelica Mesiti’s Citizens Band? It’s a four-channel work of great power and tenderness, with the most wonderful music made by its subjects.
5. Choose 1, 2 or 3 of your all-time favourite music tracks!
I am still crazy about the score of my own film Lying Women, composed by Evelyn Ada Morris and engineered by Adam Hulbert. It’s made almost entirely of the sounds of women breathing. It’s on my ipod & I still listen to it every day.
6. From your favourite poem – could you give us a few lines that mean something to you?
Crossing the Water, Sylvia Plath
Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.
Where do the black trees go that drink here?
Their shadows must cover Canada.
A little light is filtering from the water flowers.
Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:
They are round and flat and full of dark advice.
Cold worlds shake from the oar.
The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.
A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;
Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls.
7. If you were to die and come back as a person, animal or a thing, what would it be?
If there’s reincarnation I’ll just be super grateful that there’s more life.
8. What is your greatest extravagance?
Everything
9. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Collective acts against oppression, as art and as politics, are satisfying on every level
10. What is your final word?
I’m not ready to go yet!
SHOW AND TELL #17
Péter Lichter is showing his film Non-Places: Beyond the Infinite in our Coos & Chemicals programme. Péter is a Hungarian experimental filmmaker. He’s been making found footage, abstract films and lyrical documentaries since 2002. He is also one of the editors of the Prizma film magazine and wrote a book on experimental cinema called The Invisible Empire. Péter’s first feature length horror film Frozen May will be released in 2017.
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Walking in the city with my girlfriend, check out unknown bookstores.
2. What lies at the heart of your own desire to make films?
Playing with ideas, and later with images and sounds.
3. What are the first things you do in developing a film idea in response to a subject?
I start to make sketches which show me the opportunities of the idea.
4. What’s your favourite film and why?
Badlands by Terrence Malick. Because it is very difficult to analize it.
5. Choose 1, 2 or 3 of your all-time favourite music tracks!
Monogram by Solar Fields.
6. From your favourite poem – could you give us a few lines that mean something to you?
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
(Yeats)
7. If you were to die and come back as a person, animal or a thing, what would it be?
A cat.
8. What is your greatest extravagance?
Haribo gummy candy.
9. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Bori.
10. What is your final word?
Bori.
SHOW AND TELL #16
William Raban is showing his film Available Light in The Social Script programme. William holds a BA in painting from Saint Martins School of Art and MA in Fine Art from Reading University. He was the manager of London Filmmakers Co-Op Workshop, published bi-monthly Filmmakers Europe” and was a senior lecturer in Film at Saint Martin’s School of Art. He is now a Reader in Film at University of the Arts, London and the member of editorial board “Vertigo” film magazine.
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
To be far out to sea in a sailing boat in a stiff breeze
2. What lies at the heart of your own desire to make films?
It is a necessity – not a matter of choice
3. What are the first things you do in developing a film idea in response to a subject?
First thing is to dream into the idea. Second thing is to go out with a camera and capture images as inspiration and raw material. Scripts are irrelevant.
4. What’s your favourite film and why?
Only one? That is tough so maybe A Clockwork Orange . It is a film that is timeless in so many many ways – the Nadsat language helps but so does the deep content around penal reform – just as relevant now as in the early 1970s.
5. Choose 1, 2 or 3 of your all-time favourite music tracks!
The last movement of Bach’s Matthew Passion , any Bob Dylan pre 1969 and Sisters of Mercy Floodlands
6. From your favourite poem – could you give us a few lines that mean something to you?
Do not let me here of the wisdom of old men
But rather their fear of fear and frenzy,
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire,
Is the wisdom of Humility,
Humility is endless.
TS Eliot Four Quartets
7. If you were to die and come back as a person, animal or a thing, what would it be?
The sun
8. What is your greatest extravagance?
I don’t think of anything that is necessary is an extravagance
9. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Honesty
10. What is your final word?
Yes
SHOW AND TELL #15
Jon Ratigan is coming to Alchemy to present his film x=0 in our Reasons to Be Anxious, Part 3 programme. This is how he introduced himself: I am an artist and filmmaker based in South Wales, UK. My films are often about the contradictions, anxieties, routines and minutia of everyday life and how these impinge on our delicate souls. I like my films to be raw: images music and text colliding, rubbing up against each other- creating texture, resonating, playfully leaking poetry.
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Being at Alchemy.
2. What lies at the heart of your own desire to make films?
Colliding image and sound is exciting, sometimes you find some poetry.
3. What are the first things you do in developing a film idea in response to a subject? I’m not sure I respond to subjects, for me it’s more a question of finding, uncovering; I should probably respond more.
4. What’s your favourite film and why?
Bunuel/Dali’s Un Chien Andalou, it’s so original and so outrageous for the time it was made, also Tati’s Mon Oncle, I love the scene, the look, the time.
5. Choose 1, 2 or 3 of your all-time favourite music tracks!
Bach’s Cello suites, En Mi Solea by Chicuelo, Heroes by David Bowie.
6. What is your greatest extravagance?
Flying to Alchemy, sorry planet!, my excuse is I live 5 mins from the airport but it won’t happen again.
7. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Art, music, new places/things, ideas, beauty, unfairness.
8. What is your final word?
FIN
SHOW AND TELL #14
Based in Scotland, Lin Li has been using moving image and sound in her creative practice since 2011. Her work covers a wide range of subjects, with recurrent themes such as the ephemeral elements of nature; the idea of peace; and transience. In 2013, she was one of the participants in the Alchemy Film and Moving Image residency in the Scottish Borders. Her works have been shown in the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival and many other events in different parts of the world. She’s coming to Hawick again this year to present her film Appearance in our It’s My (Private) Life programme.
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Is it possible to have ‘perfect’ happiness when the world is so imperfect? There can be moments of happiness in the company of friends and family with whom one can talk about serious subjects with humour.
2. What lies at the heart of your own desire to make films?
Films appeal to me because the combination of sound with moving image opens up many expressive and creative possibilities.
3. What are the first things you do in developing a film idea in response to a subject?
It varies from project to project. Given that my works are largely short and I do the filming and editing on my own, I do not use storyboards and usually try things out directly in Final Cut Pro and Soundtrack Pro. Often I start with the soundtrack first, particularly if the film involves interviews (e.g. Fragments of Peace, see here), or is based on a standalone audio piece which I have made or some text which I have written. While I am working on the sounds, I may do some filming or look through my collection of video clips for footage which is suitable for the idea. Other projects may start with the filming or with images which I already have (e.g.Appearance which is screened at the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival this year), and the soundtrack is developed later in response to the images. I also tend to ‘sleep on’ an idea literally – mulling over it at night when I am half awake.
4. What’s your favourite film and why?
I have many favourites, Tarkovsky’s Mirror being one of them. I find it mesmerizing because of its poetic, dreamlike quality and the fluidity of its time-space.
5. Choose 1, 2 or 3 of your all-time favourite music tracks!
There are too many to choose from. Here are three pieces of music which I find moving and have listened to again recently:
(1) Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 particularly the finale Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis
(2) J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations
(3) James Macmillan’s Cantos Sagrados, particularly the last movement Sun Stone
6. From your favourite poem – could you give us a few lines that mean something to you?
A haiku by Basho:
The sea darkens;
the voices of the wild ducks
are faintly white
7. If you were to die and come back as a person, animal or a thing, what would it be?
I don’t know – this could be the subject for a future film project….
8. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Music and works by other artists
9. What is your final word?
The Chinese term for ‘film’ is ‘ 電影 ‘ (dian ying). The first character means electrical. The second character can have different meanings – shadow, or an image formed by light. I like the connotation of shadow which alludes to something other than itself.
SHOW AND TELL #13
Pernille Spence is an artist based in Scotland who has been creating moving image works, installations and performances since the mid 1990s. She’s created work for the sky, working with a team of skydivers, been lifted into the air by 22 giant weather balloons and devised a series of performances that took place in over 50 locations in the landscape alongside railway lines from Aberdeen to Glasgow. She’s coming to Alchemy to present the installation House Arrest: Domestic Actions 1-11 that she created together with Zoë Irvine (who’s also coming!).
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Good health and time to do the things you really want to do
2. What lies at the heart of your own desire to make films?
Can’t think of anything else I would prefer to do!
3. What are the first things you do in developing a film idea in response to a subject?
Research and dream
4. What’s your favourite film and why?
Pina by Wim Wenders, it’s one of the few films that I could watch over and over again and never tire of it.
5. From your favourite poem – could you give us a few lines that mean something to you?
I don’t have a favourite but I love the poems written by Raman Mundair
6. If you were to die and come back as a person, animal or a thing, what would it be?
A bird – I envy the way they move through the air
7. What is your greatest extravagance?
Doing something inessential and enjoyable…it is hard to find this space when life is so full of demands, deadlines etc.
8. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Creatively – inspiring art/films
Spiritually – beautiful landscapes
Emotionally – my children
9. What is your final word?
I dare utter a final word for fear of dying and returning as a bird that is shot in hunting season.
SHOW AND TELL #12
Marc David Jacobs is a member of the Alchemy Programme team. This is how he introduced himself to Show and Tell readers: I’m a freelance arts worker with various organisations around Scotland and for the artist Marvin Gaye Chetwynd. In 2016 I released an album called Songs for Thistlists and am doing more writing nowadays. I live in Edinburgh and last month my oven blew up.
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Always listening: to people I love talking about their day; to unfamiliar music in the dark; to things I don’t understand. (Some would add: to the sound of my own voice.)
2. What lies at the heart of your own desire to make films?
I’m not really a filmmaker, but I do other creative things because they’re the only outlet I have for my strongest emotions. If I’m writing or singing or dancing, it’s usually because I’m at my highest or my lowest, or both. At all the darkest moments in my life, writing has often been the thing which kept me sane and alive.
3. What are the first things you do in developing a film idea in response to a subject?
Again, not specifically towards film, but for any creative act the first and only thing for me is just to do it. The more I think about the story or the song or the image, the less likely I am to actually carry it out. My attention span’s too short: I have to sit down then and there and write or sing or whatever. For me, the first draft is almost always the best, and inevitably the closest to whatever it is I’m trying to say. At heart, I’m an imperfectionist. The more instinctive, the less conscious, the better; the more I think about something, the more formulaic it becomes. Maybe it’s better objectively, but it usually ends up being the least interesting to me.
4. What’s your favourite film and why?
For the moment probably Sunday Bloody Sunday, due in large part to Penelope Gilliatt’s staggering screenplay – the only of hers yet produced. But the film I’ve watched more than any other over the past five years is Elli Rintala’s Kiitotie, which is a midlength documentary about Helsinki-Vantaa Airport. It’s beautiful, balletic, cold, human, remote, intimate, poetic, objective and very, very blue: literally all the things I love most in a film, all in the same film.
5. Choose 1, 2 or 3 of your all-time favourite music tracks!
Impossible! But here are three songs that, for three different reasons, have consistently brought me to tears over the past couple of years:
This Woman’s Work by Kate Bush.
Pauper’s Dough by King Creosote.
Beauty Never Lies by Bojana Stamenov.
6. From your favourite poem – could you give us a few lines that mean something to you?
These are (slightly related) passages from two poems which have been favourites at different points:
From Jaroslav Seifert’s All the Beauties of the World:
For our poetry we found utterly new kinds of beauty…
Be silent violins and ring you horns of automobiles,
may people crossing the street suddenly begin to dream;
aeroplanes, sing the song of evening like a nightingale…
From Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Richard II:
In the joinery timbers there is new infestation
And a damp-proof course is urgently needed.
Say a few prayers to the copper wire.
Technicians are placing flowers in the guttering
They are welding the roof to a patch of sky
Whatever you do, do not climb on the roof.
7. If you were to die and come back as a person, animal or a thing, what would it be?
Less socially awkward.
8. What is your greatest extravagance?
I have bought an awfully large amount of Glenn Gould paraphernalia over the past 16 years.
9. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
In all three: collaboration. Sharing and reacting with other people’s thoughts, words, ideas, lives, directly – always new, always unexpected and, to me, always so much more interesting than my own. I’d much rather be asking you these questions than answering them!
10. What is your final word?
Hmm.
MARC DAVID’S FESTIVAL PICKS
I’m a big fan of work that uses humour in innovative ways. These three films from across the Alchemy programme do so whilst also exploring the nature of progress – particularly of the technological variety – in this shiny modern world of ours. Much like the above two poems, now I think of it. Although these may not be quite as complimentary about it all as they are.
1. I’m going to put my cards on the table and say that I think Karolina Breguła and Ela Orleans’ The Tower (Wieża) makes a strong case for being the first truly great Scottish opera – not to mention the most tuneful anywhere since Nixon in China. The film itself is Polish, but composer Orleans has been Glasgow-based for the past six years; she also lived there in the late ’90s, becoming a member of collage-pop group Hassle Hound. Breguła’s story and libretto present an Ionescoesque absurdist narrative about a tenants’ association whose members decide that the best way to improve their lot is through a massive new building scheme in which everything will be made of sugar (but definitely not sweetener). Things only get stranger from there, and the resulting allegory touches on everything from aspirationalism and gentrification to pretty much any recent economic boom-and-bust. And all of it is set to some brilliantly catchy electronic tunes, the subject matter of which includes modernist architecture, noisy neighbours, and, of course, what to do when faced with the prospect of eating your own construction materials.
2. Glasgow also happens to the be the base for Desktop Drama maker Myles Painter. I’ve got a lot of love for his film, both for its methods and its motives. Built entirely out of the bits and bobs sourced and acquired in the attempt to make a previous film, it presents the creative process entirely through the accumulation of ancillaries, all of which are eventually discarded. The film flits back and forth from shots of gently purring hard drives to piles of jauntily-coloured post-its to an entire cutting-room floor’s worth of abandoned video clips. Is technology helping this creative process, or barring its way? And are used teabags and empty crisp packets just as important to producing a piece of art as visual research and physical space? As you ponder these points, you’re treated to a soundtrack which is difficult to describe – and, anyway, it’d spoil the fun if I tried. Suffice to say that if you don’t know what a browser window sounds like when you close it, you soon will do.
3. Jeremy Moss’ Death / Destruction / Some Other Terrible Fate reminds me of a news story that was doing the rounds on my 23rd birthday. Police in Germany were called to an apartment block to investigate reports of a loud crash; on arriving, they found electronic debris strewn across the pavement outside. It transpired that a resident in his fifties had grown so frustrated by his computer that he’d finally just thrown it out the window. The police let him off without a fine. Their rationale: ‘Who hasn’t felt like doing that?’ Moss’ film plays out like the tribute that man deserves: a set of truly transcendent moments of catharsis for anyone who has ever faced an uncooperative printer, the random deletion of hours of work and, of course, the spinning wheel of doom. Which is to say, all of us.
Death / Destruction / Some Other Terrible Fate trailer
SHOW AND TELL #11
Dana Berman Duff works in small format film and video. She’s coming to Alchemy to present four of her Catalogue 16mm films in our It’s My (Private) Life and The Social Script programmes. Catalogue is a series of 16mm films and videos that consider the time it takes to look at desirable objects; in this case, the objects for sale in a mainstream furniture catalogue. It presents desaturated photographs of staged rooms shot and printed to resemble sets for film-noir era movies and this mediation of reality functions to increase the objects’ desirability.
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Being free of the need for perfection
2. What lies at the heart of your own desire to make films?
To really see
3. What are the first things you do in developing a film idea in response to a subject?
Take a bath
4. What’s your favourite film and why?
a) Most watched favorite: Agnes Varda’s Cleo de 5 a 7. Shows it’s possible to be subversive and sentimental at the same time.
b) Most life-changing film: James Benning’s 11 x 14. Courageous attempt to see in time.
5. Choose 1, 2 or 3 of your all-time favourite music tracks!
Arvo Pärt Fur Alina (I love playing it myself on the piano); The Byrds Eight Miles High
6. From your favourite poem – could you give us a few lines that mean something to you?
…
when center and edges are crushed together, the extremities crushed together on which the world was founded
when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our loneliness within the tribes
when the refugee child and the exile’s child re-open the blasted and forbidden city
when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in multitude
in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will solitude mean?
—Adrienne Rich
7. If you were to die and come back as a person, animal or a thing, what would it be?
Film grain being projected
8. What is your greatest extravagance?
Making movies
9. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Watching movies
10. What is your final word?
Movies
SHOW AND TELL #10
Filmmaker Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt has developed a body of work investigating trance and liminality. He’s coming to Alchemy to present his film Ruins Rider in our Installations programme .
What lies at the heart of your own desire to make films?
Ruins Rider is an atlas of power-zones. A magical current is charged through the act of filming, flowing through my whole body and mind, piercing through the image. This life force guided my shooting, deeply fusing the mythical portals and the volcanos of my consciousness. This approach is sustained by a meticulous and deep dedication to the transmutation process of the hypnotic ruins, the image’s revelatory nature and within my own cognitive’s elemental structure. The pulsating and magnetic ruins embody the numinous fire and limitless light. High voltage telluric blast.
SHOW AND TELL #9
Nick Jordan is a visual artist based in Manchester, UK. Working predominantly with short film, the artist’s practice also includes drawing, painting, objects, publications and collaboration. He will show his film Thought Broadcasting (watch trailer here) in our Installations programme .
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
My idea is to find happiness in imperfections, as that’s how things seem to be.
2. What lies at the heart of your own desire to make films?
To make moving pictures that move people in some shape, manner or form.
3. What are the first things you do in developing a film idea in response to a subject?
Read a good book not directly related to the subject. Most recently it was Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter.
4. What’s your favourite film and why?
At this present moment it would be Endless Poetry by Jodorowsky (2017). Poetry without end.
5. Choose 1, 2 or 3 of your all-time favourite music tracks!
I wish I was a mole in the ground, as performed by Bascom Lamar Lunsford– ‘the Minstrel of the Appalachians’.
6. From your favourite poem – could you give us a few lines that mean something to you?
This is a haiku by Michael McClure:
WHAT SOFT
brown eyes
the dog has
as
she
shits
on the deer’s
hoof
print
7. If you were to die and come back as a person, animal or a thing, what would it be?
Ideally Christina Hendricks. Maybe a mole in the ground. But probably a cross-headed wing-nut.
8. What is your greatest extravagance?
Answering these questions when I should be stirring the gravy and mashing the spuds.
9. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Encountering the unexpected. Finding the unfamiliar. Observing the absurd.
10. What is your final word?
Forage
SHOW AND TELL #8
Andrew Kötting is a filmmaker, writer and artist. Andrew’s first feature film, Gallivant (1996) was a road movie about his three-month journey along the coast of Britain, with his mother Gladys and his daughter Eden who suffers from the very rare Joubert’s syndrome. Andrew is going to lead the Film Walk to Hermitage Castle on Monday, March 6 and show an installation Edith Loops created with Anonymous Bosch in Heritage Hub in Hawick. Andrew’s film The Sun Came Dripping A Bucket Full of Gold is included in the Video Strolls programme curated by Owen Davey.
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Swimming in a cold sea
2. What lies at the heart of your own desire to make films?
Ego
3. What are the first things you do in developing a film idea in response to a subject?
Research and digging into the idea like an archaeologist
4. What’s your favourite film and why?
Gallivant – because my daughter and grandmother are in it
5. Choose 1, 2 or 3 of your all-time favourite music tracks!
Natty Rebel/ Soul Rebel by I Roy
Into My Arms by Nick Cave
Please Release Me by Engelbert Humperdink
6. From your favourite poem – could you give us a few lines that mean something to you?
All the lines mean something to me – you choose – especially when coming out of the mouth of either Freddie Jones or Alan Moore
I am by John Clare
I am – yet what i am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet i am, and live – like vapours tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that i loved the best
Are strange nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my creator, god,
And sleep as i in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where i lie
The grass below – above the vaulted sky.
7. If you were to die and come back as a person, animal or a thing, what would it be?
Wind
8. What is your greatest extravagance?
Clocks
9. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Curiosity and the search for meaning
10. What is your final word?
There is no god (and this world is full of stupid men)
SHOW AND TELL #7
Seán Martin is a filmmaker and writer based in Edinburgh. He’ll present his film A Priest from a Different Land in Nature Spirits programme.Why does the priest come? To baptize? Or to bury? Seán’s film uses a text by Robert Walser to meditate on perception, endurance, and being in the world.
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Walking on a beach, breathing in the wind and light, being with it, not wanting anything more.
2. What lies at the heart of your own desire to make films?
To witness or reveal mystery. As Robert Bresson said, Show what, without you, might never had been seen. I also like Tarkovsky’s dictum, It’s not a question of details, but of what is hidden.
3. What are the first things you do in developing a film idea in response to a subject?
Cogitate. Make notes (sometimes). Go for a walk.
4. What’s your favourite film and why?
Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice showed me the world as I had never seen it before, dreaming and waking intertwined, equal importance given to both. Also his use of space, light and colour were revelatory. And sound too: those shepherdess calls…
5. Choose 1, 2 or 3 of your all-time favourite music tracks!
I’m not sure I could whittle it down to tracks. My desert island discs would probably be Bruckner’s 8th Symphony, performed by the Munich Philharmonic, conducted by Sergui Celibidache; The Who’s Live at Leeds; and Keith Jarrett’s Lausanne Concert (the last 15 minutes in particular).
6. From your favourite poem – could you give us a few lines that mean something to you?
I once saw Ted Hughes read Hawk Roosting. It wasn’t a poem for those moments, so much as a shamanic invocation, a magical rite. It brought home to me the power (and importance) of the spoken word, of living presence.
7. If you were to die and come back as a person, animal or a thing, what would it be?
A dog. (Wag more, bark less.) Or come back as me, and do it all again.
8. What is your greatest extravagance?
Pizza with blue cheese.
9. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Pizza with blue cheese.
10. What is your final word.
Pay attention.
SHOW AND TELL #6
Kamila Kuc, Ph.D. is a writer, experimental filmmaker and curator. Her work reflects her interest in how film, as a technology of memory, can be seen as an innovative creator of memories themselves. Her films explore complex relationships between personal and collective memories, especially those which subvert the social and political identity constructions. Kamila is now in Morocco (and she’s sent us a lovely picture of hereself taken there!), but she’s coming to Alchemy this year to present her film Batum in Self Registration programme.
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Travelling. Collaborating with people. Making.
2. What lies at the heart of your own desire to make films?
A wish to experiment with telling stories that challenge binary views of the world and human nature.
3. What are the first things you do in developing a film idea in response to a subject?
Go away. Work on sound, engage the people I want to collaborate with.
4. What’s your favourite film and why?
There are many but I have always been amused by the complexity of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. There is also Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, where, like in Chinatown, nothing about life is straightforward, our choices are circumstantial and there is a mystery to life that we have no control over.
5. Choose 1, 2 or 3 of your all-time favourite music tracks!
Where is my Mind? by Pixies.
Ines Ines by Mohamed Rouicha
Girl in Amber by Nick Cave
6. From your favourite poem – could you give us a few lines that mean something to you?
When I pronounce the word Future
the first syllable already belongs to the past
When I pronounce the word Silence
I destroy it
When I pronounce the word Nothing
I make something no nonbeing can hold.
Three Oddest Lines, Wislawa Szymborska
7. If you were to die and come back as a person, animal or a thing, what would it be?
Definitely a cat.
8. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
Visiting places that I have never been to before, especially if I don’t speak the native language. Currently it’s Morocco. Learning Arabic has opened a door to another way of thinking.
My film recommendation:
I admire much of Mike Hoolboom’s work and I look forward to seeing Incident Reports.
SHOW AND TELL #5
David Sillars is an actor and writer. He is the lead actor and co-writer of Seat in Shadow directed by Henry Coombes. David will come to Alchemy and participate in a Q&A after the screening.
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
The state beyond both happiness and sadness is the perfect state. But in the now, kindness makes for perfect happiness.
2. What lies at the heart of your own desire to make films?
To witness and reflect on what it is to be in the world. It is such a brief appearance.
3. What are the first things you do in developing a film idea in response to a subject?
Let the unconscious take over and intuition speaks.
4. What’s your favourite film and why?
Oh that’s too hard! From where I am sitting I can see two boxed sets of Almodovar, Ron Frike’s Samsara, Kenneth Angers’ Magic Lantern Cycle, Wim Wenders’ Pina, Fellini’s Satyricon , Jean Luc-Godard’s Breathless , Pasolini’s Arabian Nights and Derek Jarman’s Carravagio . And it’s going to be…Caravaggio. Caravaggio brought the spiritual and the sensual together in a revolutionary way in his painting, what St Derek does is similar. Beauty is fragile and wired with tension.
5. Choose 1, 2 or 3 of your all-time favourite music tracks!
I was a jazz DJ on radio for twelve years and I still think Miles and Coltrane doing Green Dolphin Street is sublime. Like Cannonball Adderly said You don’t decide your Hip, it just happens that way.. Of course Leonard Cohen, Anohni does a version of If It Be Your Will that I keep going back too. This isn’t fair! I want something from Blackstar and Gene and The Smiths and Cream and Bronco and Mahler and Handel and…okay, Joni Mitchell, A Case of You. She is a Goddess of Song.
6. From your favourite poem – could you give us a few lines that mean something to you?
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.
Louis MacNeice The Sunlight on the Garden (c1936)
7. If you were to die and come back as a person, animal or a thing, what would it be?
I’ve done that so many times. Every time I come back I’m me. It just keeps happening. Next time I’d like to be the sun and shine on everyone.
8. What is your greatest extravagance?
Wasting time.
9. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
These seas of endless change.
10. What is your final word?
Ah. The entirely of the Buddha’s teaching is contained therein.
SHOW AND TELL #4
Karel Doing is an artist and filmmaker working across analogue and digital formats, inquiring the medium and its perception. His work includes experimental films, expanded cinema, installations and documentaries. He’s coming to Alchemy to show his Wilderness Series in Rhythms Crackle programme. By using plants, mud and salt in conjunction with alternative photochemistry, images are ‘grown’ on motion picture film. The ‘aliveness’ of the images is underlined by Andrea Szigetvári’s evocative sound-design.
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
There is no such thing as perfection but happiness can be found everywhere.
2. What lies at the heart of your own desire to make films?
Film is modern magic
3. What are the first things you do in developing a film idea in response to a subject?
Improvise
4. What’s your favourite film and why?
A film that I have not seen yet, I like to be surprised
5. Choose 1, 2 or 3 of your all-time favourite music tracks!
1. Breaking waves on the beach
2. The sound of a rainforest
3. Felino by Electrocutango
6. From your favourite poem – could you give us a few lines that mean something to you?
Rakete bee bee.
Zikete bee bee
Rinnzekete bee bee
Rakete bee bee
Zikete bee bee ennze
7. If you were to die and come back as a person, animal or a thing, what would it be?
a unicorn
8. What is your greatest extravagance?
making films
9. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
to feel connected
10. What is your final word?
Alchemy!
SHOW AND TELL #3
Harriet Warman is Producer and Programmer at Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival. She is also a film writer.
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Long walk on a warm day followed by freshly cut grass, gin & tonic, birdsong, reading.
2. What lies at the heart of your own desire to make films?
My films remain in the concept stage. I desire to move them from this stage to actually existing as moving images and sounds.
3. What are the first things you do in developing a film idea in response to a subject?
We’ll see!
4. What’s your favourite film and why?
Too hard to answer. There are many answers. One of them is Jeanne Dielman, one of them is Harvey, one of them is Stalker.
5. Choose 1, 2 or 3 of your all-time favourite music tracks!
Knocks Me Off My Feet by Stevie Wonder, You’re All I Need to Get By by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell and 85 by VASQUEZ.
6. From your favourite poem – could you give us a few lines that mean something to you?
I don’t have a favourite poem but I always liked They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad, they do not mean to, but they do.
7. If you were to die and come back as a person, animal or a thing, what would it be?
Any cat
8. What is your greatest extravagance?
Knitwear.
9. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
The anticipation of change, or growth.
10. What is your final word?
Meow.
SHOW AND TELL #2
Gaëlle Rouard
1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Oysters and champagne.
2. What lies at the heart of your own desire to make films?
To reach total hypnosis.
3. What are the first things you do in developing a film idea in response to a subject?
I put work on the table. I’m wondering.
4. What’s your favourite film and why?
Jalsaghar from Satyajit Ray. I think it’s the most beautiful drama ever made.
5. Choose 1, 2 or 3 of your all-time favourite music tracks!
Jalsaghar from Satyajit Ray
The first minutes of The thing from Ennio Morricone (the only Carpenter movie without a Carpenter soundtrack!)
Seppuku from Masaki Kobayashi
Ugetsu monogatari from Kenji Mizoguchi
L’ange from Patrick Bokanowski
Tarva Yeghanaknère, Vremena goda (les saisons) from Artavazd Pelechian and Antonio Vivaldi!
6. From your favourite poem – could you give us a few lines that mean something to you?
Ars Gratia Artis
7. If you were to die and come back as a person, animal or a thing, what would it be?
An oyster ?
8. What is your greatest extravagance?
Staying alive
9. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
10. What is your final word?
SHOW AND TELL #1
Michael Pattison is a member of the Alchemy Programme team. He’s a film critic from Gateshead who has written for Sight & Sound, MUBI and Reverse Shot, and a programming consultant for several international film festivals. In September 2016, he began a practice-based PhD at Newcastle University, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which encompasses filmmaking and creative writing in response to urban space.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
The butterflies before a first kiss – and their disappearance after.
What lies at the heart of your own desire to make films?
The interconnectedness of things: mapping one reality against another.
What are the first things you do in developing a film idea in response to a subject?
Procrastinate.
What’s your favourite film and why?
In the specific context of experimental films, James Benning’s Deseret (1995): an arrangement of landscapes dictated by the rhythms of journalistic prose. A history of a single geographical territory as told through the shifting styles and interests of the New York Times.
Choose 1, 2 or 3 of your all-time favourite music tracks.
Timeless by Goldie
Imhotep by Noah23
Zerthis Was a Shivering Human Image by Eluvium
From your favourite poem – could you give us a few lines that mean something to you?
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.
If you were to die and come back as a person, animal or a thing, what would it be?
Lichen on a road sign in Oxford.
What is your greatest extravagance?
I spend more than anybody ought to on trainers.
What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
I like it when someone’s communism isn’t obvious and then all of a sudden it is.
What is your final word?
Word.
MICHAEL’S SEVEN FESTIVAL FAVES:
1. Ruins Rider
Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt (2016, Canada) UK Premiere
Daily installation, 10am – 6pm: Ballroom, Crown Buildings, 20-22 High Street
A series of Montenegrin ruins is investigated with a physically roaming camera across 49 minutes of screen-time… A simple enough premise, but the imagery here is optically transformed by a constant, negativised flicker, which repurposes each landscape into an incomplete, unstable force. Its energies are best experienced as a relentless sensory bombardment: in the dark. Come for a jolt, stay for the gradual emotional wallop.
2. Mnemosyne
Louise S. Milne (2017, Scotland) World Premiere
Rhythms Crackle programme, Sunday 5 March, 11.30am: Main Auditorium, Heart of Hawick (Tower Mill)
An elusive and allusive tapestry of otherwise disparate images (an empty country lane, a staircase, tiled textures), whose loose structure seems to be informed by an invigorating sonic layering of the alphabet, which gives the whole thing a tone that is both childlike and eerie. Strange, and excellent.
3. Spazio-Tempo: Prelude
Roberto D’Alessandro (2016, Italy) UK Premiere
Nature Spirits programme, Sunday 5 March, 4pm: Main Auditorium, Heart of Hawick (Tower Mill)
An impressively conceived landscape film in which the subject (a rural setting) and the form (digitally textured imagery) are in perfect sync with one another. This five-minute short fully utilises the cinematic medium, a means of recording space across time, to reconfigure landscape. I love the way the skies begin to collapse into the earth, the way the image constantly renews itself after deteriorating, with a kind of glitch-heavy impressionism: glitchpressionism?
4. Swarm Circulation
Yeonu Ju (2017, South Korea) World Premiere
Mediating the Machine programme, Daily (various times) in Screening Room, Heart of Hawick (Tower Mill)
There’s an excellent and invigorating progression in the images here, combined with a strong thematic through-line to do with ‘e-waste’, which proves deeply stimulating across a twelve-minute runtime. Yeonu Ju’s editorial rhythms are very persistent and compelling: her constant juxtapositions force meanings and parallels but, through the sheer energy of the thing, her work is also elusive and ambiguous. And the music is lovely, too.
5. 38 River Road
Josh Weissbach (2016, USA & Switzerland) Scottish Premiere
It’s My (Private) Life programme, Saturday 4 March, 10am: Main Auditorium, Heart of Hawick (Tower Mill)
This is just the kind of suggestive film that sends me on an excited search for some real-life confirmation of a dreadful family secret. It’s dynamically structured, around a series of passive-aggressive phone calls that seem to completely contradict the cosy environs depicted on-screen, and the analogue texture of the footage builds on a cinematic tradition of eerie, disembodied home movies; whose quaint character seems to also have a built-in ghostliness, even a schizophrenia, which the threatening tone of the voice messages only emphasises. A kind of anti-thriller built from unspoken threats.
6. Catalogue Vols. 2, 3, 4 and 6
Dana Berman Duff (2015-17, USA & Germany) World/European Premiere
Vol. 6 screens in It’s My (Private) Life programme, Saturday 4 March, 10am: Main Auditorium, Heart of Hawick (Tower Mill)
Vols. 2, 3, 4 screen in The Social Script programme, Daily (various times) in Screening Room, Heart of Hawick (Tower Mill)
Four standalone shorts that also take meaning from one another in an ongoing series themed around furniture. Don’t let the subject put you off, however: it’s a testament to Dana Berman Duff’s strengths as a filmmaker that she’s able to glean a disquieting sense of noir-ish dread from something as mundane as the pages of a commercial catalogue. At its best, the Catalogue series intervenes upon the itemised nature of the choice we have in our domestic lives, by indexing pages from a catalogue, dissolving between them so that any dramatic difference in the images and textures is subdued. I love the subtle emphasis, in Vol. 2, upon found distortions: the crease of a magazine, which obliterates any sense of pictorial harmony when an onscreen image spans more than one catalogue page, invoking an eerie disconnect when accompanied by an urban soundtrack. In Vol. 4, Duff effectively approximates the in-out, on-off experience of a flashbulb, cannily frustrating our attempt to linger on these images and their textures, not revealing itself, or hinting at its origins, until a late but subtle ‘reveal’. Vol. 6 – screening at Alchemy as a World Premiere – might be the best entry in the series so far. We hear: “Inch by inch, I’m disappearing in this house.” Quite: a few initials, marking furniture and other consumerist items, suggest a clinical index of a crime scene rather than a commercial catalogue. Playful, original, haunting: I love it.
7. Home
Pieter Geenan (2017, Belgium) World Premiere
Screens in: It’s My (Private) Life programme, Saturday 4 March, 10am: Main Auditorium, Heart of Hawick (Tower Mill)
Another World Premiere for Alchemy. I love the film’s unwavering pace, the zoom-out and then the single pan, from the minute details of a painting (both its texture and the extreme pixellation of the filmmaker’s own camera) to the interior and layout of a room inside the Belgian Club in Delhi, Canada. But the camera is also moving physically through a spatial z-axis here, so that when we finally come ‘full circle’ it can be somewhat startling to see how far we’ve strayed from the opening painting. The painting has become something less significant, only one feature of many. A bit like the effect of returning home as a sea-changed traveller.
