startrunning 29 march 09

I said way back that I was going to review this and so finally I am. It was a mix of mainly sound pieces on film and a live performance from Chris Gladwin.

For me the standout films were probably Ron Tran's The Peckers, Jean-Gabriel Periot's Dies Irae, Peter Rose's Secondary Currents, Jan Hakon Erichsen's Close To Home, and Emily Wilczek's Walk (In Progress). But almost all the others are highly recommended.

The Peckers featured electric guitars, a keyboard, drums and microphones set up in the street and apparently covered in crumbs to encourage Pigeons to come and 'play' the instruments. 

Dies Irae is available online at the link provided. It's a brilliant feat of editing but satisfying beyond the immediate flash - except that I'm not sure the ending is really justified by anything else in the film. It's a shame because until the last seconds there's not really a bum note. 

Secondary Currents is apparently quite an old piece which plays speech - or at least vocalisations - against text on screen. My friend Helen thought it made its point very early on but I felt there was a lot of variations on the theme being found all the way through. That said at nearly 15 minutes it is bloody long.

Close To Home was both funny and the kind of thing you could imagine yourself making even while being faced by the incontrovertible evidence that someone else had done it first and probably better than you could.

Walk (In Progress) fascinated me most because it is both very transparent and very opaque. While a group of people walk in the countryside the filmmaker hands control of the camera to others to film them. The film stock is degraded (apparently out-of-date) and the sound apparently recorded separately on DV but synchronous with the image. There are black passages where the camera is not filming. The mix of semi-autonomous sound, blackness and damaged images constantly hint at broader themes, at lives and stories not told. Essentially by having the information provided so reduced the viewer has to work harder to come to an understanding of the film. Or accept that meaning is forever suspended.

Only one of the films left me totally cold so I think it's fairest not to mention it and move instead to Chris Gladwin. It was similar in some ways to the show I saw him do last year at Islington Mill for his graduation (I think). This time he had sweet potatoes wired for sound and with light sensitive switches, and some amplified polystyrene on glass for a finale. There were some fantastic harsh and loud sounds generated. Try this link for a flavour of the kind of thing he does and then go explore the rest of his site and his MySpace. If you get a chance to see him then do so.