The Sunday film programme at The Regal Cinema in the centre of Redruth is co-curated by LUX and Field Notes.

This is a ticketed event:
£2 per session
£5 for an all day pass (limited!)
FREE if you have a TR15 postcode and book through events@inlandartfestival.org

All tickets are available from the Regal Cinema and shortly there will be an option to buy tickets online.

 

Session 1 – Slow Action – Ben Rivers

13.00 Slow Action – Ben Rivers
40 mins
Slow Action is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film which exists somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography – the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat – to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies.

Slow Action is filmed at different sites across the globe: Lanzarote – a beautiful strange island known for its beach resorts yet one of the driest places on the planet, full of dead volcanoes and strange architecture; Gunkanjima – an island off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, a deserted city built on a rock, once home to thousands of families mining its rich coal reserves; Tuvalu – one of the smallest countries in the world, with tiny strips of land barely above sea level in the middle of the Pacific; and Somerset – an as yet to be discovered island and its various clades.

Slow Action, (2010) has been commissioned by Picture This and Animate Projects. Supported by Bristol City Council, Elephant Trust, Arts Council England, Daiwa Japan Foundation and the British Council.

 

Session 2 Towards The Possible – Shezad Dawood & The Stability of The System –  Sasha Litvinseva & Isabel Mallet

14.00 Towards The Possible – Shezad Dawood
20 mins
Towards the Possible Film is a study in parallel universes – and the sparks that fly when worlds collide. As much of a projection into a far-off future as a flashback to a long-forgotten past, Dawood’s vivid 20-minute tableau combines the resonance of a mythic fable with the hallucinatory haziness of a waking dream. Emerging from the waves, as if transported from another dimension, two blue-skinned astronauts materialise on a red-rocked shoreline (Sidi Ifni in Southern Morocco). Blinking into the light, and feeling their way around the sensory contours of this strange new landscape, they are confronted also by the glare of the local inhabitants, who jump up and down in a red mist of rage at the spectre of these mysterious arrivals. This slow, tense standoff evokes those pivotal moments in colonial history when isolated civilisations first make contact – as well as other alien encounters beloved of science fiction. Less likely to result in a meeting of minds than a clash of cosmologies, the impact (and fallout) of these initial interactions is implied, throughout the film, by a subtle back-and-forth between shifting, distorting optical perspectives. A further layer of complexity is added by an intermittent monologue delivered in the Berber dialect of Tamazight; a language undergoing a revival in modern Morocco, and whose origins are both ancient and unknown (despite its possible roots in a lost Phoenician culture that once stretched as far as the Gulf of Mexico).

14.30 The Stability of The System –  Sasha Litvinseva & Isabel Mallet
17.33 mins
The Stability of the System takes its title from the last sentence of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830), the book that introduced geology as a scientific discipline. Lyell states that although earthquakes and volcanic eruptions seem catastrophic and devastating on a human time scale, they are in fact ‘a conservative principle in the highest degree, and, above all others, essential to the stability of the system’.
The film begins with a mathematical point willing itself into dimensional existence, inventing/discovering space, then time. In Italo Calvino’s short story The Spiral (1965), a mollusc grows a shell as a way to differentiate itself from its surroundings. It hopes that by making form it will make an image, and thus be granted sight. The mollusc’s evolution results in an exoskeleton that begins organic life’s participation in geology: in becoming a fossil it marks geological time. Shot in the volcanic landscape of Lanzarote that collapses geological time, the film’s images are willed into existence by the creative act of the volcanoes.

We imagine Robert Smithson’s untimely death, only a year after writing the eerily prophetic Spiral Jetty (1972), as an earthquake. We imagine the site of Smithson’s death to be here, now, the experience of the landscape itself. The landscape as felt during the making of the film, blinding in its monochrome of endless black lava fields and the scorching white of a cloudless sky. In the end the filmmaker dissolves into the landscape, no longer able to see – the landscape sees for her.  

 

Session 3 The Mother’s Bones – Abigail Reynolds

15.00 – 15.50 Screening and a talk from the artist, Abigail Reynolds
The Mother’s Bones was filmed in Dean Quarry on the tip of the Lizard Peninsula with St Keverne brass band. The band (formed in 1896 from the quarry workforce) is intrinsically linked to the place.

In the film, shots of the band playing in the quarry are placed together with models of the seven crystal systems of mineral packing and microscope images of stone from the quarry. Music composed for the band by their band leader Gareth Churcher creates a sound-scape for a montage of filmic conventions, moving the viewer across vast scales of time and space. Drawing inspiration from the Greek myth of Deucalion and Phyrra and Russell Hoban’s novel Riddley Walker, Reynolds represents the quarry through a mythic lens.

The Mother’s Bones is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. It is produced in partnership with Plymouth Arts Centre and Kestle Barton.

Abigail Reynolds lives in St Just, Cornwall. Reynolds was recently selected for the BMW Art Journey visiting the sites of 16 lost libraries on the Silk Road.

 

Session 4 Remnants of the Future/Plans for The Past – Uriel Orlow

16.00 Remnants of the Future – Uriel Orlow
18 mins
Remnants of the Future is a contemplative sci-fi documentary about Mush, a housing project just outside of the north Armenian town of Gyumri (formely Alexandropol and Leninakan). Mush is named after the once flourishing Armenian town in Eastern Anatolia, which in 1915, during the Armenian genocide, became the site of massacres and deportations. Construction of the ‘new’ Mush began a few months after the major Spitak earthquake in 1988, which destroyed many of Gyumri’s housing blocks and made thousands of people homeless. Promised by M. Gorbachev to be completed within two years, construction of the new Soviet-style suburb eventually came to an abrupt halt as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Russian construction workers were recalled by Moscow. The newly independent Armenian state did not have the means to finish this ambitious housing project and it has since remained in a ghostly state of incompletion and near desertion, inhabited migrating birds and gleaners who eke an existence out of slowly dismantling the Soviet style housing blocks. At the end of the film they are visited by the Phosphorescent Woman, a time traveling character from Mayakovsky’s play The Bathhouse. The film is accompanied by a sound-scape by Mikhail Karikis using the radio waves emitted by dying stars (pulsars), which still reach us after the star has died and which were first mistaken for intelligent life messages from outer space

16.30 Plans for The Past – Uriel Orlow
18 mins
A sequel to ‘Remnants of the Future’, in ‘Plans for the Past’ we travel back to the original Mush in Eastern Anatolia. Unlike the ghost town in Armenia named after it, in this now Turkish city the ghosts themselves have become homeless. ‘Plans for the Past’ explores how Mush is palimpsestically imbued with former life, historical spirits, and topographical particularities; how it is personed.