Ecology on Film
Sunday 4 May
5 - 9pm
The Pie Factory, Broad Street, Margate
Free
No booking required
Please come ready to cycle and power the films!
Andrew Kötting – Gallivant (1996)
Andrew Kötting was born in Kent in 1958 and is one of the most influential and celebrated contemporary artists using film today. His work is often compared to that of the late Derek Jarman, and includes experimental shorts and feature length pieces.
A 6,000-mile journey zig-zagging around the coast of Britain, Gallivant is both an experimental travelogue and an intensely personal story. Filmmaker Andrew Kötting begins the journey to bring Gladys, his 85-year old grandmother, and Eden, his 7-year old daughter, together. Gladys’s stamina is limited, and Eden has Joubert’s syndrome: she’s not expected to live to adulthood. Both are fragile, and the journey is an opportunity which may not be repeated.
The film follows their journey chronologically, but the film is far from naturalistic. Kötting uses different film and video stocks, timelapse photography, and macro shots. He also inserts found footage and non-synchronous sound. Sometimes this is ironic: tourists looking through pay-per-view telescopes at a cliff’s edge ‘see’ what-the-butler-saw footage. Sometimes it’s dramatically beautiful: the tide rapidly sweeping out towards Lindisfarne. Unable to see through Gladys’ or Eden’s eyes, we see that the journey itself has many viewers, each with their own eyes. Eden can’t speak, but uses a limited-vocabulary sign language, and the film subtitles her commentary on the journey.
Kötting looks not for an essential quality of British life, but for its symptoms: folk culture and songs. He cajoles two old men at Port Carlisle into singing ‘Do ye ken John Peel?’, one accompanying the other on his mouth organ. At Robin Hood’s Bay, folk musician Martin Carthy gives a more professional rendering of ‘Sailing over the Dogger Bank’. In Goathland, a sword dancer explains the dance’s pagan Viking roots, and in Hastings a man tells how the Jack-in-the-Green festival has exploded in popularity.
Andrew Kötting won the Channel 4 Best New Director prize for Gallivant.
Jean-Gabriel Périot – Nijuman no Borei (200,000 Phantoms) (2007)
Jean-Gabriel Périot is an artist and filmmaker based in Tours, France. His work has been shown extensively around the world, winning numerous awards including the Grand Prix at the Tampere International Film Festival, USA and Best International Short at the Cork International Film Festival, Ireland.
In 1914, the Genbaku Dome in Hiroshima was a beacon of graceful urban life in Japan. On August 6 1945, the atomic bomb called ‘Little Boy’ detonated 500 feet away from the building, killing 78,000 people and leveling the city within a single second. But the dome miraculously survived. Nijuman no Borei (200000 fantomes / 200000 phantoms), charts the 20th century history of the town through 600 photographs of the Genbaku Dome. We witness life fade in and out, the dome still standing today as a silent reminder of the horrors of nuclear war.
Nijuman no Borei (200000 fantomes / 200000 phantoms), a work about Hiroshima, 1914 - 2006, has won Périot international critical acclaim. Amongst others it has picked up the Grand Prix at the Japan Media Art Festival in Tokyo, the Grand Prix at KIVF Kansk, 1st prize and audience prize at Videologia Volgograd, and the Animate award at Encounters Bristol.
Cape Farewell – Art from a Changing Arctic (2007)
Cape Farewell pioneers the cultural response to climate change. Created by artist David Buckland in 2001, Cape Farewell has led five expeditions to the frontline of climate change, the High Arctic. From these expeditions has sprung an extraordinary body of artwork, educational projects and collaborations.
Cape Farewell’s film Art from a Changing Arctic was co-produced with the BBC and first screened in 2006. The audiences that have viewed it worldwide now number over 12 million people, broadcast on the BBC and the Sundance Channel. Directed by David Hinton, the film documents the Cape Farewell expeditions to Spitzbergen (2003-2005) and features narrative and artistic insight from the artists as well as feed in from the science research team. It shows the crew hauling sails, climbing glaciers and watching the Northern Lights whilst participating in global political and environmental debates.
Ultimately they are seen talking about art and making art; all of which speaks of the environment. The film closes by charting the emergence of this work and the early development stages of its exhibition in the UK and internationally.
Anne Brodie – Breathing Berg (2007)
Breathing Berg is one of a series of short films made by artist Anne Brodie as a result of an Arts Council and British Antarctic Survey sponsored residency in Antarctica.
Most of the information coming out of Antarctica is scientific data monitoring the rate and implications of climate change, it is rigorously devoid of subjectivity. Brodie says she felt a freedom as an artist to explore creatively the extraordinary world around her, whilst being aware that the environment needed very little in the way of intervention, it already had its own voice; all it needed was a quiet witness.
Most people watching Breathing Berg for the first time make an assumption that it has been digitally manipulated. We have grown so accustomed to the slick tricks of the advertising industry that we find it hard to believe that something so unworldly can in fact be real. Brodie explains, “my part in making the film was to be a bystander with a film camera and make the decision to overlay the sound of an elephant seal breathing on land. Antarctica is a hard place in which to be a human being and I wanted to reflect this without being too interventionary.”
Laura Daly – Fugue (2007)
Visually reminiscent of a psychiatric ‘ink blot’ test, Fugue depicts a densely fogged and overgrown landscape in a panorama of reflected moving imagery. Exploring fogs ability to both romanticize the landscape and generate a non-specificity of place, central importance is given to visual and sound effects that are traditionally supportive to a filmic narrative. Referencing cinematic and literary uses of fog to indicate psychologically shifting states (such as a split personality), Fugue combines a split screen presentation with a commissioned echoic piano score, underlining both meanings of its namesake - a reflective musical arrangement and a temporarily altered state of being.
Images: Nijuman no Borei (top) © Jean-Gabriel Périot and Gallivant (right) © Andrew Kötting