This page lists all new works added to the LUX collection in October 2006. For a full list of all LUX collection holdings, see our online catalogue.
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THE BERWICK STREET COLLECTIVE | NICK COLLINS | REDMOND ENTWISTLE | GERMANO FACETTI & PAOLO GORI | MATT HULSE & JOOST VAN VEEN | ANDREW KÖTTING | JOHN LATHAM | ANNABEL NICOLSON | SARAH PUCILL | GUY SHERWIN
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THE BERWICK STREET COLLECTIVE Nightcleaners Part 1 was a documentary made by members of the Berwick Street Collective (Marc Karlin, Mary Kelly, James Scott and Humphry Trevelyan), about the campaign to unionize the women who cleaned office blocks at night and who were being victimized and underpaid. Intending at the outset to make a campaign film, the Collective was forced to turn to new forms in order to represent the forces at work between the cleaners, the Cleaner’s Action Group and the unions - and the complex nature of the campaign itself. The result was an intensely self-reflexive film, which implicated both the filmmakers and the audience in the processes of precarious, invisible labour. It is increasingly recognised as a key work of the 1970s and as an important precursor, in both subject matter and form, to current political art practice. "A film that places the nightcleaners' campaign within a series of broader political discussions formulated as an `open text' which asks as many questions about its own status as a film as it does about the socio-political issues that are its subject. No engaged person should overlook its challenge" (Tony Rayns, Time Out). "A landmark work of British political cinema and of collective
and feminist film-making" - Annette Kuhn |
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NICK COLLINS Across the Valley was shot, and the sound gathered, between July 2004 and January 2006, in the Cevennes, in the south of France. The film is from a single vantage point, a small area of flatness on the side of a steep valley. I filmed the view of the landscape from this point, through three of the four seasons, as well as elements of the scene closer to the camera. The resulting film draws on, and develops, my existing interests in the time-based representation of simultaneity, and in the temporal and sequencing possibilities inherent to film editing. |
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NICK COLLINS Early Morning, Bathroom Mirror and Cat & Flyscreen were filmed between 2000 and 2004, and printed at the end of 2005. The three films, grouped for screening together, document - and at times develop further - small-scale events within my domestic surroundings; all three are dependent on low-angle winter light and its ability to transfigure surfaces and spaces. |
REDMOND ENTWISTLE 'Redmond Entwistle's three-dimensional work, Paterson - Lodz, crosses between cinema and installation. Incorporating the filmic essay, expanded cinema and new media, a series of soundscapes and recorded interviews are randomly selected by a computer. Alternating with black screens and beautifully fixed shots of glass panels made from ground impressions in Paterson, USA and Lodz, Poland it describes a complex picture of history, identity and migration through two key events: the 1905 revolution in Lodz and involvement of the Jewish populations in both towns and the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike.' Ian White, Whitechapel Gallery |
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GERMANO FACETTI & PAOLO GORI Victoria Etcetera is a unique meditation on London’s Victorian and imperial legacies, made as a collaboration between photographer Gori and graphic designer Facetti. The film combines stills of Victorian friezes and statuary from around London with images from Gustave Doré’s nineteenth century engravings of the city, and a collaged soundtrack of readings ranging from Rudyard Kipling to excerpts from Victorian newspapers and sociological texts. |
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MATT HULSE & JOOST VAN VEEN As if attracted by a black hole, objects come to life in this combination of live action and animation. Combining live action, stop-frame animation and chemical processing techniques, the film explores the working of an arcane power which, like a black hole or immensely powerful electromagnet, exerts a far-reaching and irresistible force upon certain objects and materials. |
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ANDREW KÖTTING 'Four years ago in an act of Dada I decided to make a large inflatable sculpture of my Deadad and take him on a journey to places of significance to either his life or mine. Once there I would inflate him using a generator and small industrial fan. I took him to many places. Then through an amazing turn of events I discovered that my Deadadad’s Deadad (my Grandad), had fathered an illegitimate child when he was stationed up in the Faroe Islands during the Second World War. This illegitimate son had sent letters to all the Köttings in the phone book, (there are only 4), and was searching for his lost family. So I made another inflatable sculpture, which I took up to the Faroe Islands to meet him. My Deadad now had company and we all set off to meet the half brother he never knew he had. Meanwhile my Deadad’s Deadad was en route to meet his illegitimate son and both were about to bear witness to their own history. Strange and unpredictable narratives have taken ‘us’ to locations all over the world including the French Pyrenees, Hollywood, Venice, The Valley in South London (home to the football team they both supported), and ultimately to the Graveyards of Mexico where they met other dead as part of the Day of the Dead celebrations.' AK |
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JOHN LATHAM An animated documentation of the production of Film Star, another work by Latham which took its title from its appearance in this film. Film Star is a canvas incorporating books whose pages have been painted in twelve colours. Because the books can be opened at different pages, the work can exist in different states; during production, Latham would stop filming at various points, turn the pages of the books, and start filming again. In the film, the books appear suddenly to open, close and change colour. |
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JOHN LATHAM A stop-frame animation made with cut-out blobs of coloured paper juxtaposed. The soundtrack is a collage of radio fragments. |
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JOHN LATHAM "Speak is his second attack on the cinema. Not since Len Lye's films in the thirties has England produced such a brilliant example of animated abstraction. Speak burns its way directly into the brain. It is one of the few films about which it can truly be said, 'it will live in your mind.'" - Ray Durgnat. |
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JOHN LATHAM For Skoob Tower Ceremony: National Encyclopedias (1966), Latham had constructed towers from volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica and then burnt them. This film attempts, instead, a precis of the entire encyclopedia, with one frame of film for each page: the history of human knowledge becomes an illegible, strobing stream of images. |
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JOHN LATHAM A journey from outer space to the centre of the world, in which consciousness itself is revealed as a form sedimented history. With distant views of the approaching Earth punctuated by black and silence, light years are compressed into a cosmic imaginary. Made with funding from the National Coal Board. |
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ANNABEL NICOLSON Film created in contact printer with material which had gone through a process of deterioration in a projection event. 'The original image was from something I'd shot myself, std 8mm material that I'd shot in a village in Italy. The material had gone through a process of deterioration. I'd used it in performing and taken it through a slide projector, I had an old Russian slide projector, very cheap, that didn't have a fan, so it was completely silent, which was why I liked it. I took the lens out of this projector so it created a gap where I could pull the film strip through and because the lens was out of the projector it meant the image could be focused on different surfaces. Instead of the image falling onto a screen as normally it would do I could direct it around the room with the lens in my hand. It made the focusing quite critical. The image could go in and out of focus quite easily.' 'I was using this material, trying to focus on individual images, rather
than having a sequence and duration. I suppose I was treating it like
a series of still images, because it was going through a slide projector,
not a movie projector. In the process of this it got very torn and scratched
and it was that material I eventually put in the contact printer and
made into a 16mm film Frames.' |
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ANNABEL NICOLSON A last look at the London Filmmakers' Co-op when it was housed in an old Victorian dairy. 'in the dark room, single imagess [sic] succeed eachothers [sic] in a continous [sic] motion towards the dairy, where she and the other english filmmakers stayed in an area of demolishing. she penetrates with the camera in rapid flicks, hesitates at single things, and glides on in a staccato flow. that is how she works, annabel nicolson, goes into a room and gives sigth [sic] of everything.' Quote from Helge Krarup (Denmark) 1976 |
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SARAH PUCILL I’m not aware of you taking my skin’, says the artist’s mother to the camera as it zooms in on her eye as close as the lens will allow. Taking My Skin tracks a dialogue between the artist and her mother. Their exchange ranges from narrating the filming process ‘in the moment’ to relations in an earlier time – ‘how long do you think it takes for a child to become separate?’ Throughout the journey film spaces continuously dissolve and collapse only to separate again. Sometimes the artist is behind the camera, sometimes the mother, sometimes both simultaneously behind and in front, or neither. Both perform, film, and alternately instruct, position and direct the other. Formally and thematically, the film is an exploration of closeness, of synching, and the threat this poses to the self. |
GUY SHERWIN '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 with a variety of music from the street, reflecting the multi-ethnicity of the location - Greek music, reggae, country & western' GS |
