The B F I Programme
April 22nd, 2008 by rui
The BFI joins forces with the Big Chill to present a scintillating programme of cinema and live AV. Having first collaborated last year on Tom Middleton’s ‘Lifetracks’ album, we felt BFI and Big Chill were very much on the same wavelength, and are extremely excited about presenting this Media Mix programme.
This year the BFI celebrates 75 years of championing cinema that inspires, challenges and provokes. Via the programme at BFI Southbank, and our cinema and DVD releases, we help people discover films that reach us emotionally and intellectually. We also care for the world’s largest collection of moving image, the BFI National Archive, an astounding living, breathing mass of film and television and a unique window on the histories of life in the UK and beyond.
Here we present a programme of recent, present and future highlights from BFI Southbank, and a series of stunning live audiovisual performances that use Archive film and electronic music as raw material to conjure spellbinding new ideas and forms.
In keeping with the spirit of Big Chill and the dramatic setting of Eastnor Castle, we’re providing a cinematic sprinkling of poetry, beauty, humour, magic and plenty of music, that should put a smile on the faces and a wiggle in the hips of the Chill massive.
[b]Live
The Light Surgeons: True Fictions[/b]
Headlining the BFI programme, we are proud to present the latest piece from one of the UK’s foremost AV pioneers. Originally commissioned by the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre in New York, ‘True Fictions’, is an exploration of historical truth and myth and the spaces that lie between, through the music and voices of New Yorkers.
A multi channel spectacular, The Light Surgeons construct a rich tapestry of recorded voices, archive film and live manipulated video, all set to a completely original, live score. No strangers to the Big Chill, TLS break new Cinematic ground, establishing a new form of audiovisual journalism that questions our perceptions of fact and fiction. Not to be missed!
Exceeda: Platform X
DJ Magazine referred to AV experimentalist ‘Exceeda’, as “Coldcut’s little brother’, and rightly so, as he is up there with the cream of the UK’s audiovisual talent. Presenting here the UK premiere of a BFI commissioned show, Platform X invites all aboard for an hour long journey through the history of Britains rail network.
Combining footage from the BFI National Archive with motion graphics, original textural material and sample driven AV compositions, passengers travel through a variety of retro cinematic destinations, from stations to tracks, from signalling to the modern computer revolution. All the while Exceeda stokes the engine with heavy bass, bleepy bleeps and crisp beats. Full steam ahead, choo choooo!
For the last few years, DJ, writer and producer Ben Osborne has been organising electronic cultural interventions under the ‘Noise of Art’, moniker up and down the UK and at several festivals on the continent. Ben regularly delves into the Archive to find old films, digitise them and re score them with a growing band of musicians and DJs. In the past we have presented an array of early silent films with original rescores by a range of artists including Booka Shade, Laurent Garnier, Sebastian and Kavinsky, MANDY, DJ Mehdi, I:Cube, Fred Deakin, Nathan Fake, Chris Coco, A Man Called Adam and many others.
For 2008 Noise of Art has been working on a theme of technological advance and social continuity. And for the Big Chill show we’ve unearthed some other worldly footage from the early Soviet space programme, including the launch of the first sputnik, the first ever space walk, and some amusingly gruelling cosmonaut training. All of which looks more “sci fi” than any episode of Star Trek ever did. This visual footage will be mixed live by club visual artistes Overlap and Funkcutter, set to a suitably Spacefunk soundtrack by A Human, Danton Eeprom and Les Hommes Du Train/ Ben Osborne. Add a battery of special effects and surprise performance artists from the Dress Up Collective and we’ll probably go where no man has danced before…
Future Loop Foundation: The Fading Room
Rounding off the BFI programme we are proud to present a special live audiovisual performance of Future Loop Foundation’s beautiful album The Fading Room. Constructed using recordings that laid dormant the attic of a family home for almost a quarter of a century, Mark Barrott has assembled a highly personal and organic album that interweaves samples of speech and sound from yesteryear with a wholly contemporary musical palette, conjuring snapshots of an imagined past. Live visuals, mixed by Myogenic, develop further the intriguing balance between past and present with a collage of resonant, beguiling home movie recordings.
BIG CHILL BUG with Adam Buxton (Adam and Joe).
Simply the world’s premiere music video event. The brilliant Adam Buxton takes time out from his busy schedule appearing in feature films and the Adam and Joe show on 6Music, to present a special selection of the latest stand out promos.
Curated by a team of industry heavyweights and experts, Bug is BFI Southbank’s bi-monthly music video extravaganza that delves deep into every corner of the music industry to shine a spotlight on the most creative and innovative offerings from some of the worlds most talented directors. Now in its seventh edition it has become a regular hot ticket, as well as an essential in the social calendar of movers, shakers and aspiring film makers alike.
Hilarious and inspiring all at the same time.
[b]Film:
Heima[/b]
Premiered at BFI Southbank in November 2007, Heima was a film of such beauty that we felt Big Chillers should be given the chance to see it on a big screen and through a big soundsystem.
Following more than a year of touring the phenomenon that was ‘Takk”, their fourth album, Sigur Ros returned to Iceland, firmly established as one of the most influential bands on the planet. In an instinctive attempt reconnect themselves with the beautiful homeland that inspires their music, the band immediately embarked on a two week tour of live performances in a series of unlikely milieu – a village hall, on the top of a remote mountain, even inside an abandoned herring tank. ‘Heima’, Icelandic for ‘home’, or ‘homeland’, is the stunning record of that extraordinary two weeks and a cinematic portrait of both Sigur Ros and the landscape of Iceland.
Courtesy of Sigur Ros and EMI. With thanks to Big Dipper Productions
The Flight of the Red Balloon (Le voyage du ballon rouge)
This tender homage by Taiwanese master director Hou Hsiao – Hsien, captured the imagination and hearts of audiences across the world earlier this year.
Set in Paris and inspired by Lamorisse’s classic short The Red Balloon (also playing at the Big Chill), Hou’s delicate and lyrical film offers a window onto the chaotic everyday life of puppeteer Suzanne, played by an enigmatic Juliette Binoche. Faced with a heavy workload, shifty tenants occupying the upstairs of her apartment, and an absentee husband, Suzanne hires a Chinese film student to look after her seven year old son.
A loose narrative structure that swings between Suzanne’s travails and her son’s walks through a stunningly photographed Paris, unfolds to deliver both a compassionate insight into the pressures faced by single parents, and a subtle study of different forms of storytelling.
Geoff Andrew calls it “a beautiful cinematic love letter to the French capital”.
Courtesy of Park Circus
Albert Lamorisse Double Bill
Elegiac, enchanting and life affirming, Lamorisse’s timeless cinematic allegories have enjoyed a resurgence of interest this year. Both films tenderly explore themes of companionship, identity and triumph over adversity, and possess a magic that is resonant for young and old alike. Remarkably, despite being shorts, both films won the coveted Palme d’Or prize at the Cannes film festival and The Red Balloon won an Oscar for best screenplay.
The White Main (Crin-Blanc, 1953)
In the rugged countryside of the Camargue in southern France, bands of wild horses roam free. This rural counterpoint to the urban, ‘ The Red Balloon’, explores the bond between a boy and the proud horse who trusts him but will never be tamed.
The Red Balloon (Le Ballon Rouge, 1956)
This almost wordless poetic fantasy tells of a young boy’s friendship with a red balloon that seems to have a mischievous mind of its own. Their adventures through the streets of Paris are shot in breathtaking colour, and provide a poetic visual treat for young and old.
Dracula
Dracula is Hammer’s most celebrated film starring Christopher Lee in his first ever outing as the vampire Count. The film’s international success established Lee as the new superstar of British horror and Hammer as the horror studio par excellence.
This was the first version of Bram Stoker’s novel to be filmed in colour, lending greater emphasis than ever before to the physical aspects of horror. Jack Asher’s lush cinematography makes the most of Dracula’s bloodshot eyes and fangs dripping with blood. Yet Lee’s Dracula, though horrifying, is less of a stylised monster than in previous portrayals. Suave, debonair and an accomplished seducer, he is effectively a nineteenth-century James Bond – with an even deadlier touch.
Re-released in a new restoration from the BFI National Archive, Terence Fisher’s horror classic offers a richly satisfying big screen experience – from the first appearance of the black-cloaked Count at the top of a flight of stairs, to the film’s breathtakingly choreographed finale.
Manufactured Landscapes
Acclaimed by Al Gore as ‘beautiful, insightful and thought-provoking’, Jennifer Baichwal’s award-winning documentary centres on renowned artist Edward Burtynsky, whose large-scale photographs portray the devastating impact of industrial expansion on the environment. Baichwal observes the artist at work amid some of the most surreal landscapes of the 21st century: China’s mountains of computer waste; the Yangtze River where whole towns are disappearing in the flooding caused by the Three Gorges Dam; the shipbreaking yards of Bangladesh; Shanghai, with its increasingly crowded skyline and millions of new inhabitants. Eschewing polemics, Burtynsky aims simply to bring these landscapes into our consciousness, to provoke reflection on some highly inconvenient truths. Yet Baichwal’s film also exposes a tension between ethics and aesthetics: aren’t these images of apocalyptic splendour just a little too seductive? One thing’s for sure: it’s a terrible beauty that’s born.
