Dark Days represented Wales at the 53rd Venice Biennale.
Commissioned by the Arts Council of Wales.
A FILM BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Dyddiau Du/Dark Days is a reflection of Cale's personal relationship with Wales, the Welsh language and wider issue of communication, and the uniqueness of the bardic tradition of his home nation.
"The images in Dark Days are lucid and exact. In effect, Cale has created a filmed concept album and called it an artwork. It is utterly compelling, deeply felt. Cale has created a magnificent allegory of migration and loss, a poem of memory and distance".
Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
Article | review by Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
Dyddiau Du / Dark Days has since screened at the inaugural MONA FOMA Festival, Hobart; National Museum, Cardiff; National Waterfront Museum, Swansea; National Slate Museum, Llanberis; Theatre der Welt, Essen (live music performance); Het Huis, Middelheim Museum, Antwerp.
Other films made with John Cale include: LOOP>>60Hz: Transmissions from The Drone Orchestra
HYMN TO LONDON BRIDGE
Commissioned by The Mayor's Thames Festival.
Conceived by Nick Franglen.
"I am going to be playing a theremin under London Bridge for 24 hours in a slowly developing collaboration with thousands of pedestrians who will unwittingly cut a hidden beam on the bridge that will momentarily mute the music I'm making".
Article | A man, a theremin and a horde of London Bridge commuters
FILMED AND EDITED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
HYMN TO THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE
Commissioned by the Make Music New York Festival.
Conceived by Nick Franglen.
Cyclists crossing the bridge became the unwitting producers of silence, momentarily muting the music being performed below.
“The photography is a hymn to the bridge in its own right. Highly recommended.”
New York Times
FILMED AND EDITED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
3RD STREET BLACKOUT, a feature directed by Negin Farsad and Jeremy Redleaf, used footage from Hymn to the Manhattan Bridge to create story telling interludes throughout their film.
Artist: Melanie Manchot
The post-industrial city of Marl in Germany carries the scars of the economic depression that followed the fall of the mining industry. City squares are filled with public sculptures and bear witness of the past growth of the town. In Cornered Star, a horse stands alone on the main city square.
Early morning lights progressively illuminate the brutalist concrete architecture. The horse is almost static but in spite of his relative fixity, it remains the only source of life present in this deserted urban environment. The work looks at the archetypal forms of equestrian public sculptures and more broadly questions the use, codes and authority of public space artwork.
Cornered Star formed part of Open Ended Now at MAC VAL, Paris.
FILMED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Other films made with Melanie Manchot include: Stephen | Flotilla | Out of Bounds | The Gift | Twelve | Tracer | Dance (All Night) Paris | Walk (Square) | LEAP
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Commissioned and produced by Film and Video Umbrella, London.
Artist: Ruth Maclennan
Filmed among the desert expanses of Kazakhstan the film introduces three iconic characters: a historian, a prospector and an archaeologist; each of them methodically journeying across this apparently empty but symbolically charged terrain.
Copyright of the artist. Courtesy of Film and Video Umbrella
FILMED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
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Lesions in the Landscape was shortlisted for the 2016 Jarman Award.
Commissioned by the Wellcome Trust.
Artist: Shona Illingworth
Lesions in the Landscape is a powerful multi-screen installation, exploring the impact of amnesia and the erasure of individual and cultural memory. The film reveals the devastating effects of amnesia on one woman and the striking parallels with the sudden evacuation of the inhabitants of St. Kilda in the North Atlantic in 1930. It examines the profound effect and wider implications of memory loss on identity, space and the capacity to imagine the future.
Lesions in the landscape was filmed on Hirta, the main island of the St. Kilda archipelago, and in the seas around the island of Boreray and Stac Lee - the highest sea stack in Britain.
Lesions in the Landscape was first screened at FACT, Liverpool and CGP Gallery, London. It has since toured to Sydney, Australia and Toronto, Canada.
FILMED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Other films made with Shona Illingworth include: 216 Westbound | Balnakiel
Commissioned by The Round House and Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Artist: Ori Gersht
Offering confronts the glamorous and treacherous world of bullfighting, its dazzling spectacle and often-gruesome outcomes.
Originally screened at the Round House, London as part of Ron Arad’s Curtain Call. A circular screen became the viewers own corrida.
FILMED AND EDITED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Other films made with Ori Gersht: History Reflecting | Evaders | The Forest
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Commissioned by Great North Run Culture.
Artist: Melanie Manchot
Tracer features ten North East parkour runners, or traceurs, making their way along the course of the Bupa Great North Run.
"Of all the artists in this show, Baudelaire would surely have preferred the German-born photographer and film-maker Melanie Manchot. Manchot goes straight for the transient and contingent with a three-screen installation that moves through the modern city like a high-speed flaneur. Set in different parts of Newcastle, this epic film follows a group of free runners practising parkour, running through streets, along ledges, across bridges and roofs – tracing the lineaments of the city with their feet.
Manchot has been shortlisted for this year’s Derek Jarman award for art films and it’s no surprise. This study of mankind’s movement through the modern city – as the crow flies, and with absolute freedom – mesmerises."
Laura Cummings, The Guardian
Article | review by Laura Cumming, The Guardian
Go behind the scenes on Melanie Manchot's film Tracer in this short making of film.
FILMED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Other films made with Melanie Manchot include: Stephen | Flotilla | Cornered Star | Out of Bounds | The Gift | Twelve | Dance (All Night) Paris | Walk (Square) | LEAP
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Commissioned by Turner Contemporary, Margate.
Artist: Hamish Fulton
Unlike his contemporary Richard Long, Hamish leaves no formal mark or intervention on the land through which he travels.
"As far as I know, Fulton has never made a film before (too full, too revealing). But now he is showing the people of Margate walking round one of the famous boating pools on the beach. Slow, silent and equidistant, each figure files round the edge: a line, a stitch, a tooth in a comb. The effect is extraordinarily potent."
Article | review by Laura Cumming, The Guardian
Margate Walking formed part of Walking In Relation To Everything at Galerie Tschudi, Switzerland 2020.
FILMED AND EDITED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
Commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery.
Artist: Tom Hunter
"This is a magical film. It weaves the memories of people who grew up in East London and have lived on the estate since it opened into a silvery thread of meaning illuminated by dramatisations of their experiences filmed in the aged, but dignified Woodberry Down buildings and public spaces."
Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
Article | review by Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
FILMED BY BEVIS BOWDEN
