Mutable screens: the expanded films of Guy Sherwin, Lis Rhodes, Steve Farrer and Nicky Hamlyn
Hamlyn, Nicky (2011) Mutable screens: the expanded films of Guy Sherwin, Lis Rhodes, Steve Farrer and Nicky Hamlyn. In: Expanded cinema: art, performance, film. Tate Publishing, London, pp. 212-220. ISBN 9781854379740
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This project complements my own practice as a filmmaker: it develops and consolidates my ongoing research on how some artists’ experimental film and video practices investigate questions around representation, perception, understanding, materials and technologies in the 'moving image'. I focus on the ways such work can interrogate and reconfigure standardised procedures in film and video making, in order to question prevailing assumptions regarding the photographic image and how it purports to represent what it does.
The essay analyses a selection of experimental film works in which the projection screen is treated as active, as opposed to being a static device designed to reflect images back to an audience. Works discussed include Lis Rhodes' two-projector film Light Music (1975), Steve Farrer’s The Machine (1978-88), a horizontally orientated 35mm filmstrip projected onto a 360˚ circular screen, and Guy Sherwin’s Paper Landscape (1975), a performance work whose transparent plastic screen is painted white during the film's projection onto it. These works, almost uniquely, reconfigure the projection screen and its role in projected images; yet they have not been discussed together before in this respect.
My primary research is rooted in the detailed, formal analysis of individual works, and also involves watching them in a public situation (as opposed to on a DVD) so that their intended impact can be assessed.
The article aims to redress the current lack of critical-analytical writing in the area of artists' film and video, where too often writing is either blandly affirmative or acquiescent in the work it discusses. My work speaks to a community of readers: filmmakers, students, critics and spectators. The project received funding from the British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection at Central St. Martins School of Art, and Tate Publishing.
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