BFI London Film Festival: Experimenta Shorts - A Strange Suspension

BFI London Film Festival: 238 films. From 71 countries. 16 cinemas. 12 days. One Festival.

Three artists’ films that appropriate disparate found material into new affective orders, suspending their original contexts and difference to find intimacy and personal subjectivity across a range of different technologies, times, mediums and ideas.

(Notes by Benjamin Cook)

Radio at Night/ Raking Light/The Mist y Suite (dir. James Richards. UK/Germany 2006-2014, 20 mins.)

A special combined presentation of three of James Richards’ recent works that recycle and adapt a diverse range of material to produce a spectral meditation on the human figure as a space of sensual integration inspired by the work of the late filmmaker Derek Jarman.

Notes on Blue (dir. Moyra Davey, USA 2015, 28mins)

A lyrical and personal film essay that explores blindness, colour, identity and ‘confessional’ writing. It interweaves various biographies, including Derek Jarman, PJ Harvey, Anne Sexton, Chris Kraus and Sylvia Plath.

Stoneymollan Trail (dir. Charlotte Prodger, UK 2015, 54mins)

Using the metaphor of the Stoneymollan Trail, a hiking trail out of Glasgow, the film explores Charlotte Prodger’s personal collection of video material shot over the past fifteen years. The result is a mediation on memory, subjectivity and desire.

Total running time: 102 mins