Cinema Parenthèse #1: James Edmonds

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Cinema Parenthèse #1 presents James Edmonds (UK/DE) in person at Greylight Projects

James Edmonds is an artist / filmmaker from the UK living in Berlin. His practice centres on a personal poetics in which the nature of recording, particularly when approached from the materiality of a medium, offers a tangible yet ultimately paradoxical surface for what is intangible and fleeting - our personal experience, inner worlds, thoughts and reflections.

His work manifests in analogue films, painted gestures and long-form soundworks, occasionally combined along with found objects or materials to create immersive environments.

He has presented screenings and exhibitions at various venues, project spaces, galleries and cinema events, including Âge d’Or Festival Brussels, Process Festival Latvia, Fronteira Festival Brasil, 3 137 Athens, Macao Milan, Ausland Berlin, and Another Vacant Space Berlin. Since 2015 he also curates the film series Light Movement in Berlin.

Greylight Projects
Bar and doors open: 19:30
Program start: 20:30 (no entry after program has started)
Limited seats: be on time
Entrance: 6€ (cash only)


 

Programme:
Introduction by James Edmonds

- After Hours (2005, super-8 to file, color, sound, 7’18)
Shooting on 8mm film and making field recordings on cassette tape, recorded patterns of light and sound become a low quality, dreamlike plane of stillness, silence and uncertainty, exploring the passing of time through the study of vacant institutional spaces. The transitory spaces of these mundane but haunting buildings become an obsolete reality of forgotten ideals, the filmstrip itself a receiver of these resonances.
“..an office building is almost like a moving film: the lights from the windows shine in the night as if they were film perforations sliding...Space is not just something we simply inhabit. A deserted building is like a film: it has a history that is revealed by the play of light and shadow on the various elements that compose this space." (Toni D'Angela)

- Fleeting Landscape (2006-2007/2016, super 8 to file, color, silent, 3'41)
An imaginary filmic landscape that uses fragments of the real world seen in flight, as the camera moves almost continuously and rapidly through various passages of transit. Certain structures recur as significant landmarks of this fiction - the repeating patterns of towers and masts seem to fade into one another like an unknown omnipresence. Sometimes shown as a tripple projection in a specific space.

- Fragments/Structures (2007/2009, super 8, color, silent, 4'00)
Brief vignettes of selected urban scenery are presented with intervals of blank space offering colourful impressionistic glimpses into small details of a costal town. The materials and detritus, people and architecture -fragments from everyday life, are collected through the ritualistic patterns of single-frame shooting, forming structures directly on the filmstrip as they are discovered, just as pebbles are collected on a walk across a beach.

- Inside/Outside (2008/2015, super 8, color, sound, 7’00)
A fictional architecture of interiors and exteriors made through intuitive observations with the lens. The juxtaposition of the two spaces act as both metaphor and experiential resonance for the inner and outer worlds of the self, as well as being a quietly autobiographical documentation of a life between two places.
"A constellation of internal and external forms, in a continuous return, moving from closed to open form, from one film to another." (Toni D'Angela)

- Movements And Stillness (2014/2015, super 8, color, silent, 10’00)
Quiet observations, variations of light, from strong amber glows to diffused greys, intermittently entering the windows of an internal world. A film about coming home, archetypal images where the eternal meets the temporal. Calm reflection interspersed with travel and the endless search for significant forms, personal chapters of collage and remnants.
"A poem about inhabited spaces, a dialectics without synthesis between the internal and the external...The immeasurable intimacy of the house, the intimacy of the open space, the flesh of the bodies, the vapors, the stain glasses that evoke the work of Joseph Albers, the chiaroscuro produced by the shutters, the windows from which the trees outside appear "the ramifications of Being" - all of this united by the very fast and kaleidoscopic montage. Movement and Stillness is an "aleph" in which the seasons alternate (the snow and the flowers), and with them the day and the night, the lights and the shadows, figuration and abstraction." (Toni D'Angela)

- We All Live In The Blue Images Forever (2007-2018, super 8, color, sound, 6'00)
A collage of half forgotten sub-truths of found and rediscovered footage and scraps which are continuously added to over time, complete with hand painted and scratched sections. Momentary flashes and collisions awaken us us to an abstract memoristic language. The inability to deal with the idea of past / a reflection on the painted image and filmic reproduction. Named after a line in William Burroughs’ The Soft Machine. Sometimes shown with a second super8 reel overlayed.

(break)

- Overland (2016, super 8, color/b&w, sound, 22’00)
A fragment of memory is briefly evoked. The memory of a boat journey, of traveling as a child. mThe child is born into the universe in a flurry of images which constantly shift between modes of chromatic reality. The substances of the earth and it's elements circulate and accumulate in material fluctuation. The flora and fauna give way to the human. The glimpses of lives as portrait - the concrete, the societal, the ritual of the everyday - a short series of episodic documents. This moment again gives rise to other realities. Signs, symbols, silence and stillness animated through the uncertainty of image. In intervals of darkness, light is shed as flashes of remembrance, traces of something long ago. A series of follies appear as history.

- Seasons/Patterns (2018, super 8, color/b&w, silent, 14'00)
A diary film sort of affair, dealing with the flesh of time, strands of the present moment strung together as single reels of super8, one for each season, exposed between 2016 and 2017. Leitmotifs, physical and ephemeral, providing some unity within each season, as a reflection on its atmosphere and passing presence.

- A Return (2018, 16mm, color, sound, 5'00)
To return again. To re-align is the object of these visits perhaps. Geography of origin becoming catalyst for an inner re-alignment with the secret, private, unspoken work of one’s being. A series of rapid contrasts, a synthesis of elemental and everyday experience. “..and again the familiar: grey suede sheep on crumbly green meadows.” (Nabokov, private letter, 1937)

Total running time 79min approx

Thanks to GreyLight Projects!

Venue: 

Greylight Projects Brussels - Brussels, Belgium

Dates: 

Tuesday, April 3, 2018 - 19:30

Category: 

Dates: 

Tuesday, April 3, 2018 - 19:30
  • Rue Brialmont 11
    1210   Brussels
    Belgium
    50° 51' 13.0356" N, 4° 22' 2.46" E