The Annunciation is a film in which one of the central motifs of Christian iconography is constructed and re-enacted through moving image. It is based on the narrative in the Gospel of Luke (1:26-38) and on paintings of the Annunciation in which artists have, in various periods, depicted their visions of the gospel’s events.
The Cloud of Unknowing is titled after a fourteenth century mystical treatise on faith, where the cloud is paradoxically a metaphor for both an impediment to, and reconciliation with, the unknown or the divine experience.
Over the years my 1976 film The Girl Chewing Gum has gradually acquired an extra layer of meaning – a work that originally documented the present day looks now, especially to the young, like an archaic record of a long-lost world. Acknowledging this transition, The Man Phoning Mum combines the original film with contemporary footage shot in the same locations, enabling chance encounters between the passers-by of 1976 and their present-day counterparts.
An unfaithful interpretation of John Zorn's early 80's film script, A Treatment For A Film in 15 Scenes. I consider Well Then There Now a "list" film since Zorn's text is really a shot list. An exploration of the singularity of the image, but a playful one.
A transformation of Nam June Paik's text "film scenario" into a movie. Hollywood stars speak Paik: "You can make any Hollywood movie interesting, if you cut the movie several times ..." Michael Caine, Humphrey Bogart, Elizabeth Taylor, John Torturro, Katharine Hepburn and other protagonists of mainstream cinema are assembled to speak a text about deconstructing film watching.
Though shot in 1974 before After Manet, its conception post-dated all the preparatory work for that film. It handles in a single screen way a similar area of problematic relying more evidently on speculation by the audience of the 'out of shot' state of affairs, and on the expected development of the work.
As a child Laura Horelli and her family lived in a row house in Nairobi, Kenya, for a period of four years before moving back to Helsinki. The video The Terrace approaches Horelli’s childhood home.
The film was inspired by a 1976 audio recording of a séance with Charlotte Brontë, of which the film makes ample use. But the séance audio is merely the tip of the affective iceberg as its heroine turns out to have an emotional – not to mention intellectual – life of epic proportions.
Based on a true story, this film is about Hossein: a former drug addict who becomes an activist and sets fire to a cinema in Iran a few months prior to the victory of the 1979 revolution, unwillingly causing the death of nearly 400 people.
Strictly non-narrative, the film stretches the limits of the documentary to create a cinematic atmosphere. It mixes pieces of documentary, fiction, and philosophical comment.