THE DREAM THAT KICKS / FEB 4TH / CINEMATEKET / OSLO
Five artists film performance directly to camera, five films that capture the improvisation, musicality, drama, and occasional seriousness that sparks from the screen.
Guerillére Talks / Vivienne Dick
(IRL, video from Super8, 24 mins, 1978)
Arriving in New York, fresh from Ireland and with no experience of making films, Vivienne Dick shoots eight rolls of Super-8 film to profile eight women – real time and no editing. Appearing are Pat Place, Adele Bertei, Lydia Lunch and other NY punks and scenesters.
Beating The Bridges / William Raban
(UK, 16mm to video, 1998, 11 minutes)
The 30 bridges spanning the river Thames in London provide a diverse range of acoustic space, wonderfully exploited by the explosive percussion of the late drummer and performer Paul Burwell. Raban films him aboard ship, with full drum kit as they sail from West to East.
Money / Harry Hills
(USA, 1985, 15 minutes, 16mm)
A radically composed time capsule,rapid-fire portrait of the innovative “downtown” Lower Manhattan community of poets, musicians, dancers and personalities active in the early-to-mid 1980s. As much a sound work as it is a film, featuring John Zorn, Christian Marclay, Fred Frith, Arto Lindsay, Abigail Child, Charles Bernstein and an extraordinary feast of luminaries.
Drag / Bea Haut
(UK, 2017, 5mins, 16mm)
Performance and film come together to evidence a physical and poetic response to an old sofa abandoned on the street. Transforming the discarded into action, comedy and pleasure. Aspects of the everyday present themselves as potent catalysts, in the end becoming a road test of materials, bylaws and nerve.
Country Grammar (featuring Sue Tomkins) / Luke Fowler
(UK, 2017, 18 minutes, 16mm to video)
Fowler’s film focuses on Tompkins’ performance ‘Country Grammar’ created in 2003. Tompkins’ performance works begin from her texts; fragments of signs, observations, seen and heard, which are then collated, assembled and edited, re-edited and adapted within each performed iteration.
The camera weaves in and around Tompkins’ performance – filming from a multitude of perspectives, employing rhythmic pans, tilts and opaque or reflective screens.
Greg Pope. 