ARTIST IN FOCUS: Guy Sherwin

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Film Feedback
Screening/Talk by Guy Sherwin

Saturday 25 April 2009, 20:00, Cinema Sphinx
Program produced by Courtisane as part of the Courtisane Festival 2009 (Gent, 23 – 26 April 2009)

A key figure in British avant-garde cinema for already more than four decades, Guy Sherwin pushes the limits of cinema with his films, installation works and performances, in which he explores film’s fundamental properties : light and time. After studying painting at the Chelsea School of Art in the late 1960’s, Sherwin taught printing and processing at the London Film-Makers’ Co-op during the mid-70s, at the heyday of the British Structural Film Movement. He now teaches at Middlesex University and University of Wolverhampton, and collaborates on expanded cinema performances with his partner, Singaporean film and sound artist Lynn Loo. Concerned with seriality and live intervention, his work investigates questions such as the physical relationships between sound and image, the digital re-working of film, the mechanisms of projection, the methods of printing and the live interaction between performer and film.

In the course of his screening / talk at Courtisane, Sherwin will discuss ideas about time-looping and feedback that have influenced his film practice and show a series of films that were abandoned in the making, then resumed after a time lapse. As part of ‘An evening on…landscapes‘ (Friday 24.04), Guy Sherwin will present his live film-performance Paper Landscape for the first time in Belgium.

“There are 2 connected themes:
A. Ideas about time-looping and feedback that have influenced my film practice.
B. Films of mine that were abandoned in the making, then resumed after a time lapse.”

Part A

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Paper Landscape
short clip from les Voutes Paris 2006 for those who missed the performance the previous evening, miniDV.

“Paper Landscape deals with the illusory space within the screen by referring to the material of the screen itself. It makes use of live performance played off against a film record of a past event.”

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Man with Mirror
short clip. miniDV.

The filmmaker’s live interaction with his on-screen image which is projected onto a hand-held mirrored screen.

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Refer to influences: still images from Annabel Nicholson’s Reel Time, William Raban 2’45”, and others such as Alvin Lucier, Steina Vasulka. miniDV

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Tony Conrad, Film Feedback
1974, 16mm, colour, silent ,14′

Film Feedback was produced in ‘real time’ by processing and projecting the film while it was being shot. A negative image is shot from a small rear-projection screen, the film comes out of the camera continuously (in the dark room) and is immediately processed, dried, and projected on the screen.

Part B

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Camden Road Station
1973/2003, for 3x 16mm projectors, colour, silent, 9′

Stationary shots of a station platform repeated across three screens. Trains and people waiting and departing, arriving and leaving.

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Da Capo: Variations on a Train with Anna
1975/2000, 16mm, b/w, opt. sound, 9′

Several interpretations of a prelude by J.S.Bach accompany a repeated shot taken from a train leaving a station.

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Views From Home
1987/2005, super 8 on miniDV colour, sound, 10′
(followed by a clip from live performance at Leeds Evolution 2006 miniDV)

Light and shadow in (Sherwin’s) East London apartment perform a gloriously elegant ballet.

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Cycles #3
1972/77/2003, 2x 16mm projectors, colour, opt. sound, 9′

A twin-projector version of a film made in 1972 without using a camera: holes were punched into a length of clear film and paper dots stuck onto it…