Esther May Springett @esthermayspringett - Tumblr Blog

Film stills from ‘Fleshed Out’

2015

Directed by Esther Springett

Gazelle Twin project

My collaboration with Gazelle Twin and the blue hoody began in 2013. Gazelle Twin aka Elizabeth Bernholz is an electronic music composer and artist. Our first film project together, Belly of the Beast, saw the first debut of the blue tracksuit and hood which would become Gazelle Twin’s visual trope until its final appearance in 2015.

In a backlash to the 2011 riots when young people took to the streets across the country to protest the injustice of a silencing system, this blue hooded figure first made its outing in a supermarket, wreaking havoc in The Belly of the Beast, 2014.

Gazelle Twin - Belly Of The Beast (official video) from Gazelle Twin on Vimeo.

Since then, the blue hoody has been on a journey through guttural urban landscapes both familiar and uncanny. Gazelle Twin, equipped with her blue comforter, faced her fascination and fear of the car wash brought on by childhood trauma (GUTS, 2014) and terrorised brutal landscapes, seeking shelter in thresholds between public and private existence (Fleshed Out, 2015).

Gazelle Twin - GUTS (official video) from Gazelle Twin on Vimeo.

Sightings of the blue hoody continue to be reported although Gazelle Twin’s last live performance in November 2015 at London’s Barbican cinema signified the putting to rest; the end of the blue hoody as we now know it.

Films directed by Esther Springett

Screenings to date: Belly of the Best, BFI Southbank, London, 2013 Fleshed Out screened at: Barbican Centre, London, 2015 J.G. Ballard season, Rio Cinema, London, 2016

Next screening: Fleshed Out at Brighton Film Club, Brighton Pop-up, Patterns, 17th May 2016 Release date TBA

The Creaking Chair - Pieceworker

Directed, filmed and edited by Esther May Springett

2016

Bernholz - My History

Video conceived and animated by Bernholz and Esther May Springett

Directed, filmed and edited by Esther May Springett

2014

http://bernholz.bandcamp.com

My original treatment for 'My History'

Bernholz recounts a life of social spaces, empty and void of inhabitants. In the style of a lecture, ‘professor’ Bernholz presents his personal history of these spaces, where he has dwelled. An archive of classrooms, football stadiums, railway station lounges and function rooms become catalogued.

A slideshow moving in monotony until our speaker appears within the world of one photograph. Did you miss it the first time? Bernholz is transported back to these collectively lived spaces becoming the host, guest, master of ceremonies, attendant, clerk and butler; the person who was always there.

Spex magazine review, 09/14 (Berlin, Germany)

[Google translation]

"Jez Bernholz creates images which do not fit as his nocturnal synth pop punk and yet paradoxically acts both as it would have resulted in a single creative cast. Bernholz knows how to give form new function and idea new form: he is not gonna be just musicians and filmmakers, but also a sculptor, including connected artist collective and private gallery in Brighton, also co-founder and operator of anti-ghost moon ray, where his wife and the current workhorse of the labels, Gazelle Twin published. Bernholz existing collection of video clips you could also easily be flicker in a chic gallery of confidence on the monitors: celebrate as repetition mode and the artist as his own sculpture.

The video to My History begins first with an on the scene back and forth buzzing alarm, a symbolic, of course: the tentative sensor of a scanner warns us that we now embark between the worlds, between analog and digital, between present and past, perhaps even between life and death. Two central plane change in the video from when Bernholz tells us his story to miniature metaphors in stop motion, the fierce wave a zaunpfahl called vanitas - candles, sand clocks, tottenmasken et cetera - and on the other a slide show as a visual machine guns fire projected on a green screen. Oodles of photos found zoom past the show one thing: many public spaces with many empty chairs. Hotel lobbies, restaurants, casinos, sports stadiums, auditoriums - all visitors - and soulless places of the volatile pleasure in which Bernholz partially walks around as a lonely outsider. Functionalist architecture is to experience a palimpsest of human, rewritten again and again through physical presence, and memories are simply discarded. 'Should I care if it's not there?' sings of Bernholz apocalyptic in everyday."