Three exciting events at Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image this week:

1. Friday 6th May, 11:30-13:00 and 14:30-15:30
Proximity on Film: intimate experiments in closeness and distance

Screening 1: Friday, 6 May 2016 from 11:30 to 13:00
Messages by Guy Sherwin (1981-84) 16mm, black and white, silent, 36 minutes.
Red Shift by Gunvor Nelson (1984) 16mm, black and white, sound, 50 minutes.
This event is free but booking is required: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/proximity-on-film-guy-sherwin-messages-gunvor-nelson-red-shift-tickets-24926472751

Screening 2: Friday, 6 May 2016 from 14:30 to 15:30
Stephen Dwoskin, Shadows from Light. The Photography of Bill Brandt (1983) 16mm (transferred to BluRay), black and white, sound, 59 minutes.
This event is free but booking is required: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/proximity-on-film-stephen-dwoskin-shadows-from-light-the-photography-of-bill-brandt-1983-tickets-24926855897

About the films:
Guy Sherwin, Messages (1981-84):
Made over a period of three years, the filmmaker assembles an open-ended filmic notebook of observations translating into images and silence his young daughter's questions about the physical and social world surrounding her. The film draws on the filmmaker's readings of Jean Piaget's 1929 seminal work The Child's Concept of the World, inviting us to think about cinema's potential and limitations to grasp what is visible through a series of visual associations and plays on perception and language. Print courtesy of LUX artist's moving image

Gunvor Nelson, Red Shift (1984):
Subtitled "All Expectation", Red Shift is described by Nelson as "a film in black and white, about relationships, generations and time". A personal look at three generations of women in her own family, Red Shift is an investigation on the nature of relationships, on what brings people closer to, or makes people further away from each other. To complete this portrait and in order to bring a different temporality to the film, the filmmaker added a voice-over reading of the letters of Calamity Jane to her estranged daughter on the subject of motherhood and sorrow. All this is rendered as an intimate narrative of distances, a variation of scales and surfaces, looking at the world in close-up to better grasp the intricate, shifting and yet immutable nature of relationships. Print courtesy of FilmForm

Stephen Dwoskin, Shadows from Light. The Photography of Bill Brandt (1983):
'Born in 1904, Brandt was a shy and enigmatic man who dominated British photography for decades. His early studies of class-divided Britain were followed by the postwar series of "distorted nudes", shot on beaches and inside rooms. The film is a fitting final portrait of Brandt (it was completed in the year he died), and recomposes his work in cinematic terms. The camera moves through an apartment where the pictures were taken, to reveal photographs scattered. These are panned to show the surrounding space, the angle of vision and a model who reconstructs Brandt's original image. Dwoskin emphasises visual atmosphere through the language of the eye.' Al Rees, Leaflet on Steve Dwoskin for Channel 4 & BFI Education, 1983. Print courtesy of BFI
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2. Friday 6th May 6.30-9.00pm
Screening and discussion: The American Who Electrified Russia
The American Who Electrified Russia, Michael Chanan, 2005, digital, 105 minutes
Followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Michael Chanan, Professor of Film and Video Studies, University of Roehampton
 
“A film about the role of the individual in history, and of history in the individual. Solomon Trone (1872-1969), a cousin of the film-maker’s grandmother, is a figure unrecorded in the history books, whose life was nonetheless intertwined with history, but in paradoxical fashion: as a communist revolutionary and a director General Electric (first in Russia, then the USA). Drawing on archives both public and private, this is also a film about the gap between family memory and public knowledge of history – not the history we think we know, but another history, lived in another way.” Michael Chanan, http://www.americanwhoelectrifiedrussia.co.uk/
 
This event is free but booking is required: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bimi-screening-the-man-who-electrified-russia-with-filmmaker-michael-chanan-tickets-24664806099
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3. Saturday 7th May 11.00am-6.00pm
BIMI in collaboration with the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research (BISR) presents:

Le Chagrin et la Pitié [The Sorrow and the Pity]
Marcel Ophuls, France, 1969, 120 & 128 minutes

Presenter: Michael Temple

Marcel Ophuls is German by birth and Franco-American by adoption. His two-part documentary picks at tangled loyalties some would sooner forget.
   Le Chagrin et la Pitié examines France under occupation. It explores relations between France and other nations (mainly Britain and Germany) and within France itself. As Pierre Mendès-France remarks in the first film (‘The Collapse’), defeat brought not just an impulse to come to terms with the victors and a renewed Anglophobia, but a resurgence of petty internal jealousies against a background of virulent anti-Semitism. The occupation, Vichy, and their aftermath pose questions about loyalty and legitimacy, and about their corruption.
   A preoccupation of the second film (‘The Choice’) is why some collaborated, while others resisted. Denis Rake, the gay SOE war hero, remarks that French workers would give him their last centime, whereas the bourgeoisie was too scared to help. The aristocratic leftist Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie opines that a lot of resistance fighters (including himself) were quixotic failures in society at large. In Ophuls’s account, the war was hardly the finest hour for the respectable. If class becomes important in the film, so does memory, as Ophuls’ interviewees variously remember, forget, interpret and reinterpret their pasts.

For information about the Guilt Group's work, see http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bisr/research/guilt-working-group.

This event is free but booking is required: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bisr-guilt-screening-series-with-michael-temple-tickets-24285741306

Michael Temple, Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, and Essay Film Festival
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