Thursday 9 September, 2010

Advance bookings for this screening have closed although tickets will be available to purchase from the Information Desk tonight. Please arrive early to avoid dissapointment. 

Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network’s (FLAMIN) Productions Fund award winner Charlotte Ginsborg reflects on her process, showcases her research and the work that has influenced her, prior to showing her completed film in January- March 2011.

The evening will focus on three distinct influences on Ginsborg's practice: music, film image, and narrative. It will feature work by two of the collaborators Ginsborg has been working with to develop her new film, Gabriel Gbadamosi and Gabriel Prokofiev, as well as a screening of Slow Glass by John Smith, which Ginsborg saw first when she was nineteen and inspired her to make films. All three works are framed by, and for the atist are a reflection of what it is to experience the vibrancy and onslaught of London .

The Elysian Quartet play Gabriel Prokofiev’s String Quartet No.2
The Elysian Quartet is one of the UK ’s most innovative young ensembles and the only British string quartet of its generation focused exclusively on 20th Century, contemporary and experimental music. Gabriel Prokofiev’s String Quartet No: 2 was written for them and has generated much interest for its dance music influenced origins.

John Smith, Slow Glass, 1988-91, 16mm, 40mins
A nostalgic glazier shows off his knowledge and expounds his theories.  Taking glassmaking processes and history as its central theme, Slow Glass explores ideas about memory, perception and change.

The film begins with a shout in the street and a smashed pane, and ends with a bricked-up window. Between these literal images of opening and closing, Slow Glass spins immaculately shot puns and paradoxes that play on reflection and speculation – words that refer both to acts of seeing and of mind. Glass is the key, as a narrator’s running commentary sketches the glassmaker’s art, splicing a history lesson with a quasi-autobiography.  The authority of word, voice and picture is questioned through the film’s gradual revelation of its own (highly pleasurable) artifice.  The cutting of glass is matched to the editing of film, and the camera’s lens to the surface which it captures.  Through the pub-talk and the downing of glasses, other themes emerge; among them is the constancy of change, as the face of London alters and the past becomes present (conveyed in jump-cuts showing streets and shops changing over time and season, and in a gently ironized evocation of a 50’s childhood).  The flowing Thames echoes the theme of flux, but also underscores the renewed attacks on East London life in the age of the property war – another kind of speculation.  Slow Glass suggests that the living past has been turned into capitalized ‘Heritage’, that the British Documentarists’ noble craftsman only survives as a museum piece, and that reality in film is itself a fiction.  In this film, the fiction is a crafted illusion that always has a human face.
A.L. Rees, London Film-Makers’ Co-op catalogue 1993.

Gabriel Gbadamosi is a poet, playwright, critic and dramaturg, as well as working on research projects in European, African and British playwriting and performance. He will be reading the first two chapters from, ‘Vauxhall’, the novel he is currently writing, which is based around his experiences of growing up in South London .

Vauxhall is a glimpse into the lives of London 's poor and immigrant communities in the 1960s from the perspective of a child who is African and Irish and learning how to be English from playing on the bombsites. Gabriel Gbadamosi

In association with Film London.

The Film Programme is curated by Ian White.


Concessions and members are kindly asked to show proof or ID when collecting tickets on the night.


Film still from Melior Street, Charlotte Ginsborg, 2010

Don't miss the latest Film