by Lydia Beilby
Film is a medium of time. Each of the eight works in this programme serves to illustrate how the physicality of time visually manifests itself. Every second, 24 frames progress through the projector, and in turn each frame is momentarily illuminated by the lamp’s beam, triggering a spellbinding transition of inanimate to animate as the unspooling images dance across the screen. Scratches and abrasions to the emulsion exhibit themselves as imprints of the embodied experience of the filmstrip, testament to the material’s physical memory. This too becomes another layer of visual language, a presence or aura, charting the navigation through time and place, hands and machinery, that the filmic artefact has undertaken.
Physicality and materiality are centralised in this exploration of the photochemical filmstrip as a tactile and responsive, emotional and corporeal landscape. Collectively, the works in this programme examine the forms that the filmic body might take, positioning photochemical film as both a vital entity, and a way to articulate the electric energy of touch, tactility and forms in motion.
Oksar Fischinger (Radio Dynamics) and Hans Richter (Filmstudie) create a pioneering choreography of shifting gestures, textures and forms that playfully move through the frame and generate a kinetic, multi-sensory experience for the onlooker.
Malena Szlam (Lunar Almanac) and Jodie Mack (Persian Pickles) share kinship through an interest in minute details and repetitions as well as a playful engagement with tactile, artisanal, filmmaking modes. With the camera engaged as an extension of the body, both artists explore the technical outer reaches of their apparatus, through innovative engagement of single frames, long exposures, in-camera editing and hand-processing techniques.
Barbara Hammer (Double Strength) and Andrés Barón (Printed Sunset) examine the powerful ways in which film allows us to imagine new ways of inhabiting our bodies, in reversing the dominant heteronormative gaze, and celebrating the queer body as a sensual and political landscape.
In I you me we us, Margaret Salmon applies an inherently intuitive, feminist-centred approach to image-making, seeking a visual language that maps the nuances of intimacy, kinship and care through gesture, touch and textual interventions. Finally, in Vivir Para Vivir, Laida Lertxundi translates filmically the synaesthetic experience of various intimate corporeal processes, from heartbeat to orgasm. Landscape and image form a symbiotic union, a visual echo of Lertxundi’s emotional and bodily entanglements.
An image is a landscape that freely reveals its many collaborators. Beginning with the light striking the emulsion of the filmstrip, continuing through the image-maker’s physical interaction with cinematic apparatus, the projectionist’s handling of the filmstrip, and finally circling around to you, the viewer, whose visual, emotional and cerebral interaction reanimates the work once more, as the lamp is struck.
