NEW SHORTS: Celluloid Traces
14:00 Sun 11 Jan 2015
We celebrate all things filmic and older formats in this programme of experimental work. Films that draw on the retro look of super-8 and 16mm screen alongside re-appropriated images. Includes work by David Leister, Stuart Pound, Jessica Sarah Rinland, Helen Nias, Rosalind Fowler, Esther Johnson, Tim Plester and Julian Hand.
(87 min)
ICA
SW1Y 5AH
Access
Please find all access information here, or drop a line to Helen MacKenzie at access@shortfilms.org.uk for more information or special requests.
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100 FOOT STEPS
David Leister & Christel Chaudet 3 mins (UK, 2014)
Set to the recollected sound track from the film ‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, 100 Foot Steps is an uneasy walk in a wood. Birdsong and gentle music create a sense of familiarity as the woman takes her steps, leading us to an abrupt end.The juxtaposition of image and sound creates an artificial layer of intertwined narratives without any resolutions. -
2,334 PHOTOGRAPHS FROM CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA
Liam Nugent 5 mins (UK, 2014)
Sharp images, unimaginable landscapes, and spectacular photography are showcased vividly through this expertly edited short film exploring Central and South America. Adventure through desolate Mayan ruins and clear Honduran seas, white Bolivian salt flats and dark Peruvian monasteries. All captured on one stills camera, this film beautifully illustrates our world through 2,334 photographs. -
ADELINE FOR LEAVES
Jessica Sarah Rinland 14 mins (, 2014)
Interrogating memory, horticultural,and philosophical elements through her endeavors, 11-‐year-‐old botanical prodigy Adeline’s mission is to propagate the mythical blue-‐flowering Echinopsis Subdenudata. -
CHALK TRACE
Esther Johnson 3 mins (, 2014)
As a child in the 1950s, Ron Cockroft drew a chalk line from his school in Oldham to his home in Chadderton. CHALK TRACE commemorates and reanimates his graffiti journey through a now much-changed network of streets. -
ET IN MOTORCADIA EGO!
Tim Plester 7 mins (, 2014)
Channelling the dharma-burn of Allen Ginsberg and The Beat Generation, ET IN MOTORCADIA EGO! is a spontaneous fever-dream inspired by the near-mythical iconography surrounding the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. A collaboration between award-winning filmmaker Tim Plester and Lamb & Sea, this audiovisual memento mori features a coruscating central performance by Kieran Bew. -
FROM TOMORROW
Julian Hand 7 mins (, 2014)
The electric hyperborean nova looms within a hollow polar negative sky Alone it pulses above a cityscape both industrial and brutalist in form. The irradiated solar vista lies devoid of life or populous. A phasing holographic female visits from a transmission point in the distant future. Her transmitted image phasing between distorted green traverses the barren cityscape. On she wanders surveying the desolate world in search of a gateway to the beyond. -
LÉTHÉ
Harald Hutter 12 mins (, 2014)
Léthé follows a man with no apparent destination until a chance encounter with a strange young girl sets in a motion a series of events that will challenge his perception of reality. An invitation to go astray; an invitation to forget one’s self and embark with our vagrant protagonist as he searches to forget his past. -
ORWO
Stuart Pound 2 mins (, 2014)
ORWO is an excellent yet inexpensive 16mm film stock made in Eastern Germany and used by many experimental filmmakers in the past. The film you see here is one Imade in 1972. The surface is easily marked. I scratch off the photographic image with a needle then sweep away the emulsion dust. I record this using a microscope with a USB connection, also inexpensive. -
QUIP-SOUL: GOD’S PORNOGRAPHY
Eleni Norey 9 mins (, 2014)
A mixed-media based film brought about through the use of only a digital photocopy-scanner-printer as a camera. The film, which prioritizes, teases and recycles the very physicality of the organic, material image through techniques such as improvised collage and “action painting with light” seeks to explore the relationship between human and machine and the implications this has for the language of memory as of the digital age. -
SUCHSTUFF
Benjamin Fox 3 mins (, 2014)
From the First and Final Report of the Psychophantasmagorical Society, fleeting glimpses of dream states reenacted for the silvery screen. Suchstuff presents miscellaneous accounts from the unconscious mind, shot in a tactile fashion to a hypnoptic soundscape, and entirely open to interpretation. -
TAMESA
Rosalind Fowler 10 mins (, 2014)
The filmmaker searches for traces of the Thames’ distant past by processing 16mm film on the foreshore using water collected from the river. Images of water patterns and foreshore detritus appear alongside close-ups of pre-historic objects discovered nearby. Watermarks and particles of ancient silt cling to the resultant film’s surface, their abstract formations a portal to the river’s unseen forces. -
THE ISLAND AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Joanne Ball 4 mins (, 2014)
A horror ode, inspired by dark history. Experimental documentary ‘The Island at the End of the World’ looks at how history and personal narrative interact, how memory is shaped and the effect of environment and place on emotions and behaviours in my seaside hometown. Shot entirely on mobile using present technology to recreate a past aesthetic." -
VIDEOLETTER TO HARVEY MILK
Helen Nias 4 mins (, 2014)
This is a moving image interpretation of a letter written to Harvey Milk, America's first openly gay politician elected to public office. Milk displayed positive values: openness, love, a desire for freedom and fairness. Therefore participants were asked to submit imagery of what makes life good to them, and these appear in place of words of the letter. -
WORK
Jon Ratigan 4 mins (, 2014)
A masked, unemployed man reflects on his hopeless failure to find work and seems only to find solace in fragmented memories which struggle to assert themselves. In Work, seemingly innocuous objects and sounds- matches, pomegranates, a joke plate wobbler, flamenco dancers conspire with nervous, faltering energy to build a cine-poem around the themes of emasculation, anxiety and memory.