Remarks: New Films In The Making

“We have a series of new projects opening across the autumn. Each and every one is a new commission, and each is incredibly different. We are closely involved in all of them (as is usually the case), although in slightly different ways. We are making a new film with Paul Rooney; it’s shooting on location this summer and continues a relationship with Paul begun when Film and Video Umbrella commissioned him to make a short single-take piece for our ‘Single Shot’ project in 2006.

I’ve always been intrigued by the relationship between visual art and literature (it was a key theme of the Waterlog exhibition we commissioned in 2007, which looked at the lingering influence of WG Sebald, not just on contemporary writing but in shaping a sense of place particular to that part of the East of England where Sebald lived and worked). Paul’s film began as a loose adaptation of one of Malcolm Lowry’s short stories, but over the course of its development it has changed considerably. It still has the Lowry story as its inspiration, but has grown into a completely autonomous piece.

The piece we are developing with Duncan Campbell, on the other hand, had a different genesis. We were approached by Chisenhale and Tramway, already in discussion with Duncan at that time about an exhibition of new work. Since we joined forces, we’ve been able to give our collective backing to a much bigger project, which we hope will give Campbell the opportunity to make a significant new piece of work involving a re-construction of a scene from the DeLorean factory in Belfast in the 1980s. These two films, like the video installation by Suki Chan, ‘Sleep Walk, Sleep Talk’, an impressionistic study of contemporary London that we are also launching this autumn, are indicative, I think, of the breadth and vitality of film and video practice in the UK. For all the artists we work with, these commissions afford the opportunity to work with a larger production set-up than they have been used to. And though outwardly different from another recent work of ours, ‘Balnakeil’ by Shona Illingworth, these commissions are vivid evocations of a particular place at a particular pivotal moment.”Film and Video Umbrella, full programme on www.fvu.co.uk