Anna Thew

Quick portraits of filmmakers, artists and writers attending last year’s Temenos 2016 open air screenings of Gregory Markopolous 16mm films in the Pelopponese in July, shot on a handheld clockwork Bolex through a 25mm macro lens Anna Lascari, Nina Zy, Kathryn Siegel, Robert Beavers, Ute Aurand, Maria Palacio Cruz, Mark Webber, children eating, the local bar owner, his beautiful daughter, her young man and others with in camera superimpositions of plane tree leaves and pink blossoms blowing in the wind.

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Fragments from 'Adventures in the House of Memory’, a poem by pyrotechnic drummer and musician Paul Burwell, were performed randomly in locations with different acoustics; by the Thames, under railway bridges, in St Paul's cathedral, over roof tops above the City, in a café, on the Underground, as screams, drills, sirens, footsteps and arias rattle to the drifts of metallic percussion from a recording of Paul drumming solo at the LMC. In a collage of chance polyphony, words from the poem are scratched the length of 35mm struck stock with a potato peeler, layered in loops and arabesques over scraps of Super 8 and 16mm footage from the '80's, '90's, Burwell era with flares, ropes, derelict buildings, knives, fighting, graffiti and peeling walls…

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Reel 1 – the walls of Trastevere in a myriad of transitory stop frame sequences shot on a clockwork Bolex with a 25mm macro lens - peeling stucco, graffiti, torn posters, street signs, from the Terme di Caracalla to the bridge over the Tiber; glimpses of ‘FILM STUDIO 80’ and lingering out takes from ‘Toni with smoke’ and a fight scene filmed in a dark alley outside Rome prison long ago (see Eros Erosion clip Il Racconto di Lisabetta, the murder of Lorenzo played by Philippe Barbut and Toni Dominici) Reel II – L’Isle sur Serein with Rameau - late afternoon, early autumn. Close up of apple blossom and the turning pages of an old French history book reflected through a macro lens in the bevel edge of a mirror with a worm eaten frame and a very dirty window pane, framed with flash frames of gravestones and autumn leaves in the Forêt d’Hervaux; accompanied by Rameau harpsichord music from Steve Farrer’s record collection and the slowed dripping of a tap.

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A film about seeing. A cut up of fragments from personal diary films intercut with WWII archive footage of the fire bombing of Dresden and Hamburg from the air and the ground (...) The ruins of Dresden's Frauenkirche and cranes are silhouetted against the sky. My daughter Ra as a child runs past the apple tree in Gran's garden in winter. Summer fruit ripens on an Umbrian hillside. Darren is sleeping. Dark streets of Perugia. The train to Siracusa the year after Mum died. The train from Dresden Hauptbahnhof to Berlin the year Derek and my mentor and curator Manfred Salzgeber died. Ten years on. With friends with HIV. Music from Simon Fisher Turner.

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A close up observation of trees in Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer, filmed in single stop frame motion on a clockwork Bolex using a 75mm and 25mm macro lens, where alternating pulsations of 24 still frames per second in image time, translate into optical syncopation. Each reel consists of over 3,500 images with mathematically planned sections, improvised cross rhythms, variations in colour, density, tree species and shape, with sequences following the Fibonacci series (Kren’s ‘Golden Section of film’) and countered with staggered 2:3; 4:3 rhythms. Part scored, part random and rough edged echoing the Japanese musical phenomenon. "wind in the trees"…

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Over 200 women smile into a Super 8 camera in Minsk. A portrait film with pop music and the Belarusian language as a soundtrack.

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Super 8 blow up to 16mm, optically slowed and stretch printed on Kodak 7272 - leaves of a plum tree in the the wind hand held full zoom to macro, Summer '99 at Dickins Farm near Sutton. S. Yorkshire, with simple 3:2 repeat phrases from Bartok's Mikrokosmos like a round played on Dad's old piano as roughly and imperfectly as the print - re-filmed off the wall on obsolete DV Cam

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Overnight from Rome Termini to Messina, the train to Siracusa. Celestino is sleeping. From Dresden Hauptbahnhof to Berlin Zoo, "branches cut against the sky like paint strokes". Sounds, rhythms, machine landscape, smell of steel... I am obsessed by trains. On a train I am someone else. I am in another language. I am in the land of escape. Accompanied by that particular sound of steel reflected off sheet marble of thirties Roman buildings with the train approaching Roma Termini + a CD of Scanner, "aranciata, birra, coca... aranciata, birra, coca..." - A.T.

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"Mama, Papa, last night I had an ugly dream which sent shivers down my spine..." Cine terror wrecked my eyes with images that lurk. The thief with his face against the cold wall murmurs in riddles and weeps for peace as Mario spins. Off loading trauma from having been glassed after the first public screening of CLING FILM in Britain, Franko's art assemblages, scars, tattoos, broken glass and blood red crosses in his flat translate into bad bad dreams as life/art footage cross cuts with indelible images of Oedipus Re, Mario spinning, a man with dark wavy hair and stubble crying, WWII stereoscopes of bombed French or German cities; negative/positive flashback images of blindness...

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Halfway between unbiased pornographic cinema and denouncing social cinema, Cling Film travels humorously and recklessly through a catalogue of sexual encounters and mishaps to take to task the media's repressive approach to its coverage of HIV infection and AIDS before the turn of the millennium. An energetic and frontal attack on censorship and its bedfellows: prudishness, guilt and shame.

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Through a rush of abstract and allegorical connections the film touches on transience and desire, and the silence and concealment surrounding sexuality, love, death, AIDS, and the fear of bereavement.

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An elegy on the death of the film-maker's mother. Fragments from dreams, nightmares and memories combine with natural sound and landscape in this short film poem "a myriad of instances in transit" M. Maziere, Independent Media. Through various texts and spoken diaries oblique reference is made to the persistence of the imagination; the dark, wild wood of Dante's Inferno with Paolo and Francescs buffeted on an infernal breeze, whilst an iconoclasic re-depiction of a Renaissance painting of the deposition by Raphael, describes an age in which the reality of death and grief were less hidden.

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A film by Anna Thew

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Broken fragments of narration accompany broken fragments of 'Hilda's' physique. A woman recalls the early aspects of her family's life, centering on her older sister's rejection and subsequent acceptance of her suitor (who, in a lighter moment, wins the girl over by banging his head against the wall).

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My mother's garden in Spring, filmed the Easter after her death. My mother died suddenly in December 83. In the Spring the blossom came through as though nothing had happened. I filmed the Easter morning and evening. 2 reels of Super 8. Like a song. The sound was recorded in the same place one year before the image, that is before her death. It does not tell. It is her garden for the last time.

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"Two 100ft film loops ran the length of the Musicians' Collective space connecting two projectors physically, to two canvases (the screens) suspended like wafers, with superimpositions of mouths in close up and black and white images of words, texts and equations. The film-maker on separate video monitors, raps verbal explanation, poetry, reparative voice over and/or commentary, changing her hat for each change in language. This is an irreverent multi-lingual piece impishly concealing texts of renown (da Vinci, Tzara etc). A Kabuki howl cues brief live action, a shadow of an embrace and strangulation (evidently melodrama in early cinema); a bout of boxing; a mathematical (the ultimate language?) recitation delivered in the film light, from an imaginary cat walk by Ms Thew and Mr Pig, resplendent in evening dresses" M.J.L London Film-makers' Coop cata., 1983

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A parody on the post urban devastation wasteland film with a slant on 'rectangular' thought patterns in which a little girl recites from Marx's Communist Manifesto between two cardboard cut out trees and Alfa, the last man on earth to read and write (improvised by Yehuda Safran), is interviewed on TV (improvised by painter Jock McFadyen); with cameo performances by Alexe Sayle eating a Chelsea bun, David Medalla and Oriel de Quadras in non-sensical conversation and Giles Leaman consming reams of rectangular text.

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An elegy on the death of the film-maker's mother. Fragments from dreams, nightmares and memories combine with natural sound and landscape in this short film poem "a myriad of instances in transit" M. Maziere, Independent Media. Through various texts and spoken diaries oblique reference is made to the persistence of the imagination; the dark, wild wood of Dante's Inferno with Paolo and Francescs buffeted on an infernal breeze, whilst an iconoclasic re-depiction of a Renaissance painting of the deposition by Raphael, describes an age in which the reality of death and grief were less hidden.

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