Show and Tell 2018: Michael Pattison
Michael Pattison
Filmmaker, Programmer, Staff, Critic
1. What’s your idea of perfect happiness?:
An air charged with mutual affection between close pals.
2. What drives you to make films?:
A desire to be in and amongst it.
3. Where in the world would you most like to be right now?:
Tokyo
4. When inspiration is waning, and you feel creatively sapped, what do you do to stay motivated?:
I walk, or I read/watch something already familiar to me.
5. What films are the most inspiring or influential to you at the moment, and why?:
I’ve just watched all of Christian Petzold’s theatrical features, and love how they evoke an extremely vivid, very specific sense of Germany as an urban-rural physical space: the lighting (that unspectacular, crystal-solid daytime greyness) enriched by an ever-present sonic ambience (birdsong, roaring traffic, activity on wide boulevards lined with trees reverberating through and against cultivated greenery).
Your top 3 favourite music tracks?:
“Glaciers IV” – Blue Sky Black Death ft. JMSN
“Survival of the Fittest” – Mobb Deep
“Snake Eyes” – Trouble
7. What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever done?:
Jumped with both feet.
8. What’s your greatest extravagance?:
Footwear.
9. What turns you on – creatively, spiritually or emotionally?:
Anticipating then maximising pleasure in a finite window of time; becoming conscious of shared investments.
A final word?
Invest.
P.S. Do you have any favourites or highlights from this year’s Alchemy programme that you’d love to give a shoutout to here?
If you can’t see everything, see these…
Ben Pointeker’s Impassenger, a mysterious, vivid and expertly assembled short that creates a haunting and thrilling ambience through atmospheric images. The film’s mid-movement cuts between non-continuous action are extremely suggestive of some kind of interrelation between images and spaces. It repeats itself but is never repetitive; it teases at a story while never being a narrative film. Wonderful.
Aurèle Ferrier’s Transitions, a totally compelling study of interstitial spaces between untouched desert and a cultivated cityscape that takes much of its meaning from the incision-like cuts – startling ruptures – in a Steadicam roam: jumps in time, space, abridged energies. The city lives, fizzes, becomes: first because of us, then despite us, then without us.
Emily Charlton’s Land Shifting, one outcome of Alchemy’s two-month residency programme last year. Charlton captures disparate natural environments with different image-textures, renewing their distinct energies and interrelations with a textbook care for rhythm and duration.
