Pleasure Dome: The Broken Shape
Jennet Thomas in Person
Saturday, September 18, 20h pm, $8/5 members + students
CineCycle, 129 Spadina Ave. down the lane, Toronto
Jennet Thomas’s work emerged from the anarchistic, experimental culture of London’s underground film and live art club scene in the 1990’s, where she was a co-founder of the Exploding Cinema Collective. It now screens extensively in international film festivals and galleries. Her work began as hybrid spoken word performance and projections for a live audience, it now combines a variety of filmic languages, ranging from soap opera to experimental and underground filmmaking, from sci-fi to musicals. “I like to explore unexpected processes of sense-making. My narratives are often fractured, absurdist–generated via dream-logic and increasingly experimental methodologies, inspired by odd corners of British culture, driven by the urge to tell.”
“Jennet Thomas is a zealous god-devil, who constructs bizarre narrative worlds in which we can recognize the pull of gravity, the attraction of belief or the logic of causality, but these forces are somehow reconfigured to describe a place that is way off the map of normality, perhaps with one foot in the realm of the paranormal. And yet Thomas suggests the near-feasibility of the absurd by expressing messages from alternative dimensions, bizarre social codes and accounts of recent cultural history through everyday means. Sausages, sporting trophies, lengths of string and packages sent through the post are the tools with which normal looking people conduct their peculiar activities in community halls, supermarket car parks, back gardens and nicely kept living rooms. The bizarre, Thomas seems to suggest, is a close relative of the ordinary.”
Programme:
Miranda July:
- Getting Stronger Every Day, 2001, 7 min. “Getting Stronger Every Day includes [two] boys’ tales [that] are like mystical objects placed on the living reality of the man storyteller. In other parts of the movie actual mystical objects hover in peoples lives without a myth or story attached. I like to think about how these dimensions interact simply and can be enacted: real life/story/worldly/spirit/video/flat drawing.” – Miranda July
Jennet Thomas:
- Important Toy, 1997, 8 min. A young girl buys a weird toy from a charity shop. She forms such an intense relationship with it that it develops special ways of communicating and a strange connection to her that seems to defy the laws of physics. As the situation escalates, it seems that repression is the only way forward.
- 4 Ways He Tried to Tell You, 1999, 7 min. This is a video about the thing that won’t go away. It has been trying to contact me by altering bits of my reality for several years now, and this 7 minutes is a clear demonstration of that. My 8-year old nephew got drawn into the whole thing, and that’s why his voice is on this tape. I’m not sure if it’s dead now. We’ll just have to see.
- SHARONY!, 2000, 11 min. This is the story of two young girls who dig up a tiny woman from the back garden. They incubate her in their mouths, in their bed, they lock her in a dolls house wallpapered with pornography to make her grow up faster, feeding her through a tube in the door. When she is life-sized and ready to play they take her to the disco..
- Because of the War, 2005, 14 min. “Because of the War things were changing. Very few toys or games were left and music was almost over. Tap water was tasting female and television only came in nasty spasms.” A surreal and sometimes comic meditation on how war affects the hopes and dreams of ordinary people.
- The Man Who Went Outside, 2008, 10 min. A distinguished looking man is apparently trapped in an ever changing void of colour, locked in a power play with a perversely operated camera. A voice over tells us extraordinary things – how this man is special – the first man to “have a baby.” A playful meditation on the idiocies of making sense.
- Return of the Black Tower, 2008, 15 min. Conceived as a response to John Smith’s 1987 classic short experimental film, The Black Tower. “Barmy, baffling and weirdly funny… an elliptical, satirical examination of contemporary belief, as much as it is about the problem of art as an incommensureate, incommunicable experience.” – JJ Charlesworth
Other in-person Jennet Thomas events:
Master Class: My Recipes, and why I won’t stick to them
Sunday, September 19, 2–5 pm, $30/25 TSV & PD members
@ Trinity Square Video, 401 Richmond St. West, Suite 376
416-593-1332 www.trinitysquarevideo.com
“I will share with you my various and idiosyncratic methods for making work – from developing tight monologues, to improvising structures from a purely visual idea, often using a yeasty dough of storytelling and genre forms to bind them. I will also talk about how the process continues into filming, sound design and editing.”
Jennet Thomas: Lecture and Potluck Dinner
Sunday, September 19, 7 pm, $5 or food item to share
@ Trinity Square Video, 401 Richmond St. West, Suite 376
Co-presented with FAG the Feminist Art Gallery
Focusing on her ambitious new installation piece All Suffering SOON TO END! (2009), Thomas will screen excerpts of the video and expose some of the roots of her creative psyche, exposing us to some of the British TV series viewed in her 1970s youth that influenced her latest project: the disturbing edges of work by Dennis Potter and Lindsay Anderson, as well as frightening children’s programs, sci-fi and dark comedy.
Jennet Thomas: The Broken Shape co-presented with the Available Light Screening Collective (Ottawa)
Friday, September 17, 7:30 pm PWYC
@ Club SAW, 67 Nicholas St., Ottawa
[email protected]
Special thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts’ Visiting Foreign Artists Program for their generous support of Thomas’s visit.