Launch of Sequence 3

12th December no.w.here 7PM onwards Free Event

Sequence (no.3) is jam-packed with artist's pages, interviews and essays, by numerous authors, and film and video artists. Bigger and better, this issue is 64 pages, perfect-bound, with a glossy cover and full colour images throughout. Here is a roll call of the contributors and articles: In ‘ABC of Music and Film’, Jayne Parker’s striking images and detailed table equates the images and forms she associates with film and music. Bruce McClure’s provocative statement cuts the role of the ‘artist’ down to size and promotes the live aesthetics of cinema that he seeks to ignite in his projector performance pieces. Peter Kennard’s, iconic and decisive photomontages are a backdrop to his discussion with A. L. Rees, which charts Kennard’s career and covers the aesthetics of montage across film, photography and literature. Nicky Hamlyn’s essay, on the layered photographs of Joséphine Michel, picks up on the radiation of light in her images, from the perspective of a filmmaker. Neil Henderson’s essay ‘Tidal Island’ refers to other noted landscape filmmakers in his thinking through ways of filming a redundant experimental reservoir. His grid of topographical photographs is especially instructive. Politics and film is something of a theme in this issue of Sequence: ‘Forever May’ by Andrew Vallance is an essay of ‘bullet points’, accumulating different critical perspectives on politics and artists’ film. Following this, Nina Power questions the ‘melancholic turn’ in contemporary political cinema; Esther Leslie’s essay on the humour and animation in historical examples of avant-garde film resonates with contemporary examples in other ways; and William Raban offers a personal perspective on the classic division between the ‘two avant-gardes’. Setting a different tone, the pop-gothic of Hilary Koob-Sassen’s artist’s page sees capitalism cast as Frankenstein’s monster. Other artists’ pages are Bradley Eros’s witty, quasi-surrealist, photomontage pieces, and Martina Mullaney’s open letter of request to Documenta. The essay ‘Full Body Film’ by Vicky Smith, which describes the artist-filmmaker as being thrown back on her own resources, highlights, by implication, the significance of no.w.here’s production facilities. It also chimes with aspects in the round-table discussion by the group Hysteriography, who are keen to promote women’s films, which they see as underrepresented in the history of experimental film and video. ‘Re-Reading Chromatic Borders’, by Mareike Bernien and Kerstin Schroedinger, outlines film colour as culturally determined, an analysis that they address in their own video work as well as in their writing. Photographs are recurrent in this issue of Sequence. In William English’s article, candid, observational photographs punctuate memoirs in a form of paratactic montage on a human scale. The intense typewriter poems of Gustave Morin are often witty and joyful. The titles of the two pieces included with this issue resonate with some of the articles on politics and film. They also pick up on a theme from the last issue, which looked at text-based pieces that suggest filmic strategies.