Performance to Camera

Five artists film performance directly to camera, five films that capture the improvisation, musicality, drama, and occasional seriousness that sparks from the screen.

Guerillére Talks
Regi: Vivienne Dick
Irland 1978
video from Super8, 24min

Arriving in New York, fresh from Ireland and with no experience of making films, Vivienne Dick shoots eight rolls of Super-8 film to profile eight women – real time and no editing. Appearing are Pat Place, Adele Bertei, Lydia Lunch and other NY punks and scenesters.

Beating The Bridges
Regi: William Raban
Storbritannia 1998
16mm to video, 11min

The 30 bridges spanning the river Thames in London provide a diverse range of acoustic space, wonderfully exploited by the explosive percussion of the late drummer and performer Paul Burwell. Raban films him aboard ship, with full drum kit as they sail from West to East.

Money
Regi: Harry Hills
USA 1985
16mm, 15min

A radically composed time capsule,rapid-fire portrait of the innovative “downtown” Lower Manhattan community of poets, musicians, dancers and personalities active in the early-to-mid 1980s. As much a sound work as it is a film, featuring John Zorn, Christian Marclay, Fred Frith, Arto Lindsay, Abigail Child, Charles Bernstein and an extraordinary feast of luminaries.

Drag
Regi: Bea Haut
Storbritannia 2017
16mm, 5min

Performance and film come together to evidence a physical and poetic response to an old sofa abandoned on the street. Transforming the discarded into action, comedy and pleasure. Aspects of the everyday present themselves as potent catalysts, in the end becoming a road test of materials, bylaws and nerve.

Country Grammar (featuring Sue Tomkins)
Regi: Luke Fowler
Storbritannia 2017
16mm to video, 18min

Fowler’s film focuses on Tompkins’ performance «Country Grammar» created in 2003. Tompkins’ performance works begin from her texts; fragments of signs, observations, seen and heard, which are then collated, assembled and edited, re-edited and adapted within each performed iteration.

The camera weaves in and around Tompkins’ performance – filming from a multitude of perspectives, employing rhythmic pans, tilts and opaque or reflective screens.