#fields and frames

[experimenta2013]

The Realist (preview)

by Scott Stark

preview created for the Toronto International Film Festival, taking place in September 2013.

[experimenta2013]

Stephen Sutcliffe Transformations (detail) 2005

Art Now Lightbox: Stephen Sutcliffe

Stephen Sutcliffe’s two films take poems as their starting points. Transformations is based on the Thomas Hardy poem of the same title. Hardy draws attention to the cycles of death and rebirth that are ever present in the countryside. He describes a man his grandfather knew and his wife, and a ‘fair girl’, who, in a process of organic renewal, have been transformed into trees and flowers:

…they are not underground But as nerves and veins abound In the growths of upper air…

Come to the Edge uses a recording of the poet Christopher Logue reciting a poem originally written in 1968:

Come to the edge. We might fall. Come to the edge. It’s too high! COME TO THE EDGE! And they came, and we pushed, And they flew.

The poem is combined with video footage shot in a 6th form common room. In the footage a good-humoured scene is suddenly transformed into something altogether more sinister as the group of schoolboys enact a ritual humiliation upon a seemingly older, mustachioed boy. ---from Tate.org.uk

[experimenta2013]

Sebastian Buerkner at Tramway, Glasgow

FRIEZE April 2009 His work recalls a line from the classic film noir Out of the Past (1947), uttered by the duped hero: ‘I could see the picture in the frame, but not the frame around the picture.’ However, his use of disconcerting white flashes, employed ‘to throw the viewer off balance and out of the image’, also intensifies the fleeting and illusory qualities of each picture. Perhaps Buerkner’s installation could be seen as reflecting the ‘ever-more fractured subjectivity’ that theorist Anne Friedberg describes as a consequence of Internet and digital technologies.

His notion is that the work supports a situation in which the viewer is both maker and spectator, conscious and unconscious: ‘You can look in and look out from these two worlds’. More interesting than this, though, is the confrontation that occurs when the viewer looks out of this virtual environment through the two windows that have been cut in the white fabric. The specificity of the venue is more than a foil for Buerkner’s installation – it anchors his work to a site of real engagement.

Sarah Lowndes in Frieze

[experimenta2013]

The Hollow Ones: Michael Sicinski on SCOTT STARK'S THE REALIST

When watching Scott Stark’s wonderful new film The Realist, my mind unexpectedly shot back to a 1977 work by Peter Kubelka. Although it’s strange to think of a minor Kubelka film, especially in a career characterized by such parsimony of expression, not that much has been written about Pause!, partly because it is so notably different from the heavily edited, “high articulation” films on which Kubelka built his reputation. Pause!, by contrast, consists of uninterrupted camera rolls of Kubelka’s fellow Austrian avant-gardist Arnulf Rainer, as he contorts his face and body, struggling to maintain his balance. As one watches Pause!, it becomes apparent that the limitations of Rainer’s body are setting the parameters of Kubelka’s shots. In fact, although we cannot be exactly certain of this, it appears that Rainer is taking a breath at the start of each shot, and that Kubelka’s shot lasts until Rainer collapses under the necessity of resuming respiration. Continue Reading on MUBI Notebook

[experimenta2013]

FIELDS AND FRAMES

Three experiments in cinematic space. OUTWORK Dir Stephen Sutcliffe. UK 2013. 24min A filmic collage inspired by micro-sociologist Erving Goffman’s book Frame Analysis, which explores how conclusions drawn from interactions shift dramatically due to changes in their framing contexts. THE REALIST Dir Scott Stark. USA 2013. 40min A highly abstracted melodrama storyboarded with flickering still photographs, peopled with department store mannequins and located in the visually heightened universe of clothing displays, fashion islands and storefront windows. THE CHIMERA OF M Dir Sebastian Buerkner. UK 2013. 24min Entering the unfamiliar virtual space of a 3D, stereoscopic digital animation, viewers find themselves behind the eyes of an unseen and distinctly unreliable protagonist. Running time c89 min FRI 18 15:45 NFT3 book tickets

[experimenta2013]

THE REALIST by Scott Stark

THE REALIST Dir. Scott Stark

USA 2013. 40min A highly abstracted melodrama storyboarded with flickering still photographs, peopled with department store mannequins and located in the visually heightened universe of clothing displays, fashion islands and storefront windows.

[experimenta2013]

 CONTEXT: Scott Stark References, inspirations and other material relating to The Realist

A joyful apposition to The Realist from Fernand Leger.

[experimenta2013]

The Chimera of M

Director Sebastian Buerkner UK 2013 24 mins

Entering the unfamiliar virtual space of a 3D, stereoscopic digital animation, viewers find themselves behind the eyes of an unseen and distinctly unreliable protagonist.

Part of the Fields and Frames programme

BFI Southbank, NFT3 Oct 18, 2013 3:45 PM