Film Description
A collection of the ongoing work and research of Guy Sherwin, one of the pre-eminent British film artists of the last 40 years in a unique artist’s book and DVD publication.
Guy Sherwin studied painting at Chelsea School of Art in the 1960s before becoming closely associated with the British avant garde film movement centred on The London Film-makers Co-operative in the 1970s. His film works, often including serial forms and live performance, are characterized by an enduring concern with time and light as the fundamentals of cinema.
Optical Sound Films explores in detail one of his particular and recurrent concerns, the synaesthesic relationship between sound and image manifest in the material of film sound. These investigations take Sherwin from physical manipulation of the very material of film through to live performances utilising multiple film projectors, all of which are explicated through drawings, diagrams, video documentation as well the films themselves. This publication provides a unique insight into conceptual and practical concerns for artists’ working with film as well as a detailed exploration of the processes and technology involved in its production and exhibition. It also contains a DVD of Sherwin’s minimalist film works, documentation of a number of his performances and is completed with a new essay by Sebastiane Hegarty exploring synaethesia and sensory metaphor.
DVD contents: Phase Loop (1971), Sound Shapes (1972), Cycles 1 (1972/1977), Newsprint (1972), At the Academy (1974), Soundtrack (1977), Musical Stairs (1977), Railings (1977), Night Train (1979), Interval (1974), Interval #2 (1974/2007), Notes (1979), Notes #2 (1979/2007), Optical Sound (2007), Spirals (1974), Cross Section #2 (1997/2007).
Extracts from documentation of Film Performances: Cycles #3 1972/2003 at La Sala Rossa Montreal; Newsprint #2 1972/2003 at Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, Vowels & Consonants 2005-6 (with Lynn Loo) at Bullion Theatre London, Mobius Loops 2007 at Palais des Beaux Arts Brussels, Sound Cuts 2007 at Site Gallery Sheffield.
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By Graeme Hobbs on 12th June 2008
Have you ever wondered what newsprint sounds like? Maybe you imagine words spoken in journalistic tones, measured, appreciative sardonic or breathless according to the... more >
Have you ever wondered what newsprint sounds like? Maybe you imagine words spoken in journalistic tones, measured, appreciative sardonic or breathless according to their subject? Welll forget it. Newsprint has the sound of crackling bursts of static and grating interference; a scurrying, blaring distorted machine-gun fire of repetitious static. It’s the kind of intereference that prevents thought rather than encourages it. There are hints towards something more poetic too though: now and again a goods train taking a curve and grinding against the rails can be imagined; a train's doleful whistle too, but these are exceptional moments and we are not on a purposeful journey here so much as trapped in an inescapably clamouring present.
These thoughts are occasioned by Newsprint, Guy Sherwin's 1972 film in which he printed newsprint on clear 16mm film and projected the results, the sounds of the letters and halftone images creating the film's own soundtrack. The letters rush and jostle across the screen on a cracked glaze of a background. Also included on the dvd is a twin projector performance of Newsprint from 2003 which extends the resonance of the piece. The cascading, rushing vortex of the words is even more pronounced here, and, filmed from the rear of the cinema, it seems like the words and images, now and again paused in projection for temporary respite, are actually preparing to engulf the watching audience. Maybe they already have.
Another letters-related filmed performance, Vowels & Consonants, from 2005-06, also uses letters to strange and even unnerving purpose. As Es and Os linger and assume abstract shape on the screen, fast-moving amoebic arrangements of b-d-p-q skitter upwards across the screen, as if a vast spawn had suddenly begun to hatch from the deep. The effect of superimposed projection is here ghostly, especially when the amoebic letters spread out into areas that seem to be wider than the screen itself. Their spread looks to be irresistible. It was a moment of shock that tapped directly into a memory of watching Quatermass and the Pit and the intemittent scenes of unknown creatures heading to their doom called up from far off. Sherwin’s piece is perhaps mpore unnerving in that it has the energy and charge of birth, not death.
These are surprising reflections maybe for films from a filmmaker mining a minimalist, if infintely variable, seam of largely monochrome 'optical sound films' – films in which there is a direct correspondence between what we see and what we hear. Sometimes the soundtrack is the aural equivalent of filmed footage, as with Soundtrack (1977), which shows on screen footage of rails filmed from a train. This footage of rails was then printed onto the optical soundtrack area of the filmstrip, with the modulations in tone of sound reflecting the changing configuration of the rails. Light conditions affect the soundtrack noticeably too. As Sherwin says, 'the sun comes out, volume increases. Shadows are quiet.' The neon lights seen on another train journey, this time at night, are also used in Night Train. The journey here sounds like the puttering wings of moths.
The difference in light and dark with regards to sound quality and pitch are even more evident in Musical Stairs (1977), in which Sherwin creates a fugue of sorts from the crossed and slatted patterning of the iron steps leading up to the London Film-Makers Co-operative. The images of the steps were printed on both the film and soundtrack strips of the film. Mixing jackhammer harshness with muted, organ-like discordancy, the sounds accord well with the visual resistance of the steps’ unwelcoming design, which brings to mind tools such as files and graters. (‘Leaves on the stairs add timbre’ says Sherwin.)
If some of the experiements tend to the austere, there is also nevertheless a certain playfulness apparent in a film such as Railings (1977) in which Sherwin said that ‘he used the camera like a stick, clattering along the railings’, with the resulting images also turned into sound. A constant feature of the collection though is the productive use of innovative and experimental technique. Film splitting, sideways projection, staggered printing and mobius film loops (to name but a few) are married with minimal starting points to create pieces that break down boundaries between what is seen and what is heard and entice the mind into speculation of what the rest of the visual world really sounds like. An excellent accompanying 128 page book offers technical details and procedures, including how optical sound works, as well as background information for the films.
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