Martes 19 de Septiembre de 2017, 21:30h. Zumzeig Cinema.
Carrer de Béjar, 53
08014 Barcelona
Carrer de Béjar, 53
08014 Barcelona
Programa:
Napkins (1975)
Jillian Dressing (1976)
Task (1982)
Sisterhood (1975)
Seacliff (1975)
Body/House (1975)
Motorway (1971)
Barrys Bay 2 (1975)
Children Imogen (1975)
Aberhart’s House (1976)
Port Chalmers Cycle (1972)
Thorndon (1975)
Napkins (1975)
*Formato original: 8mm y 16mm
*Duración total del programa: 70 min.
*Formato original: 8mm y 16mm
*Duración total del programa: 70 min.
Formato de proyección: HD (Actual formato de exhibición. Transferido de las películas
originales por CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand)
originales por CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand)
Agradecimiento especial a CIRCUIT, Peter Todd y Mark Williams.
--
externos" –Joanna Margaret Paul
"Las películas experimentales de Joanna Margaret Paul son cine-poemas: estudios silenciosos
de meditación de los entornos y / o personas dentro de ellos. Martin Rumsby ha descrito el
trabajo cinematográfico de Paul como "retrato doméstico". "Su cámara - a menudo se
mantiene, aunque con una mano de escalofrío, a veces en movimiento: graba imágenes en
movimiento que otros consideran que no son importantes; grietas en un muro de hormigón,
un edificio en ruinas, las manos de una mujer planchando. Las películas son un documento de
la vida cotidiana a través del ojo de una artista." –Kathy Dudding.
Joanna Margaret Paul (1955-2003) fue una artista neozelandesa que fue pionera en la
práctica interdisciplinaria, trabajando prolíficamente a través de los medios de cine, poesía y
pintura. A menudo filmado y editado en cámara, su trabajo cinematográfico narra la
maternidad y la vida doméstica (Task, Napkins), las huellas gastadas del asentamiento
urbano (Port Chalmers Cycle) y la presencia persistente del mundo natural. Otras obras
como Sisterhood retrataron la vida de otras artistas femeninas identificadas con el
movimiento de mujeres de los años 70 en Nueva Zelanda.
Comisariado por Peter Todd, "Through a Different Lens/Film Work by Joanna Margaret
Paul" es la primera colección del trabajo de la imagen en movimiento de Joanna Margaret
Paul para poner el trabajo de Paul a disposición de una audiencia internacional. En el ensayo
que acompaña de Todd, coloca su trabajo en el linaje de los cineastas Margaret Tait y Robert
Bresson, y la pintora Frances Hodgkins.
"Through a Different Lens/Film Work by Joanna Margaret Paul" contiene 13 trabajos
rodados en los años 70 que se han transferido de las películas de 8mm y de 16mm a vídeo HD.
···
Through a Different Lens / Film Work by Joanna Margaret Paul
Peter ToddThrough a Different Lens / Film Work by Joanna Margaret Paul
They just start coming, images, one after the other, a film, with an inner rhythm.
A napkin on a washing line, blowing in the wind. Then two napkins. Then napkins on a line
seen diagonally, then glanced from the house, always the wind, a couple of (dark) pauses then a
pan, napkins floating in the wind, again the napkins on a line, and on. This simple description
belies the wonder of the film. As often with works that are composed, edited in the camera; it
has the specificity of recording the moment of creation as it was for the artist.
There is a play in Napkins (1975) between the window frames, architecture, and the white
squares of washing. The movement of the washing on the line in the wind contrasts with
movement of the rooted bushes and trees. Later, outside the time of the film, will come the
gathering and tidying away, ready for use, and the cycle will continue. We do not see this, but it
is in the image. The firm window frames and architecture, the soft squares of the cloth. A film
pared down, that resonates. A washing line like this will be seen, as a part of family life, in
Aberhart’s House (1976). The play between the edge of the film frame and the image in
Napkins, likewise with the shipping containers in Port Chalmers Cycle (1972).
With works edited in camera, there is what film maker Helga Fanderl calls ‘capturing’. She
writes, ‘In a way my films recreate the moments I have experienced and lived through. To film
in a certain situation, in a certain place, in a certain time-space does not mean to simply collect
material but to react immediately, ‘capturing’ what challenges and touches me and to transform
it into film while there is an interchange between us.’ Helga, as Joanna did, works with 8mm
film (film on 3 min reels), with no sound, a focus on the visual. Often Helga responds to
movement in the picture frame. For Joanna Margaret Paul it is the image, square on, which
seems the starting point; within the chosen place she wants to look at, ‘stalking images’, a
phrase which she shares with film maker and poet Margaret Tait who spoke of ‘stalking the
image’.
Things laid out to be seen, to be displayed, square on. There is a feeling of how places and
objects can become a portrait of a place, a person, as seen in Joanna’s drawing Self
Portrait/Still Life from 1999, picking up a dialogue with Frances Hodgkins painting Self-
Portrait: Still Life (1935) in Auckland City Art Gallery, just as other work of Hodgkins; like her
Wings Over Water (1930) in the Tate London echoes the interest in interior and exterior
around a window with objects displayed before it, also with that square on look. At the same
time in Joanna’s film work there is an interest in what could be described as a poetic
of the urban and the manufactured. Something she shares with artist Prunella Clough and
again Margaret Tait. The sharp distinction between images, sometimes filmed almost
immediately after the other, sometimes with a longer wait, or at a tangent, is explored in film
maker Luke Fowler’s series of two frame works in Two-Frame Films 2006-2012. In Thorndon
in 1975 Joanna films herself reflected in a window, just as Margaret Tait incorporates herself
reflected in a mirror in Tailpiece (while uniquely individual artists and of different generations,
at opposite points of the globe, Tait and Paul were at this point almost working at the same
time with the years 1975 and 1976 being Paul’ most productive time in terms of films completed
and it being one of the periods of completion for Tait with Place of Work and Tailpiece
completed in 1976). Like Tait, Paul explores the local and the films are often a record of family,
friends, community, personally important landscapes, as well as works in themselves. Images
often on the cusp of abstraction flow with those more closely figurative. There is also a
collecting of images, like references for future thoughts, future work.
Napkins and Port Chalmers Cycle both go through a kind of introduction, an interlude, then a
conclusion or return to the introduction, but with the experience now passed to the viewer.
Echoing the description of Napkins earlier Port Chalmers Cycle also starts in the domestic
environment of houses and gardens, but then descends into the town. Where Napkins has a
pan, Port Chalmers Cycle has a dolly shot on a pavement along a slight bend.
Motifs return in her films or what she has filmed. They become motifs through accumulation. A
way that is perhaps both a becoming familiar with, getting ones bearings, and just being.
Resultant works a kind of gift to others for whom these are also local. But then for others it will
be that her images captured through her intuition, her filming, will have a meaning they
recognise.
Windows, views over roofs, coast, farmland, industrial areas. Sarah Treadwell writes for Joanna
“‘waste’ space offered positive qualities to a city driven by commercial imperatives.” And then
there are the diagonal lines, of trees, fences, posts, washing lines, rusting and bending metal,
concrete, which seem to mark but also break or give a focus. Perhaps giving a shift within the
film of the kind she talked of moving between different media. As with the ‘sequences’ of
Barry’s Bay 2 (1975) and Body/House (1975).
In her drawings of people, often in just a few dark lines on white paper she captures how a neck
runs onto a shoulder into an arm; the outline of a torso. They feel like, and probably were, done
in a short time. Things captured and explored. Lines that create the bodies forming them in the
whiteness of the paper. Almost abstract. So very felt in Body/House which brings together
these two named elements one after the other.
‘When my work is all laid out together the jigsaw puzzle of my life will show itself, I think... It’s
oblique, but it’s all there’ Jill Trevelyan quotes. Joanna wrote poems and painted and drew, as
well as making her films, probably more so. The dialogue between these medium and
disciplines, she saw as positive ones; ‘constantly changing ones lens’ was important.
Sometimes Joanna’s camera seems to ‘flow’ over a place or within a time and her thoughts, at
others to echo, or line up, mirroring or just looking, others picking out patterns in places.
Sometimes the place seems to set the images, timing and movements and with others this
seems to come from within, intuition. ‘All my films poems paintings play more or less between
inner and outer events’ she wrote. She writes of Bresson ‘who integrates narrative and visual
poetry’. The framing in the films of Bresson is particularly specific, formal, pared down. Geoff
Andrew writing of Bresson, which could apply to Joanna, ‘..the camera avoids pictorial beauty
to create an abstract timeless world....while the narrative is deprived of climaxes...’. Task (1982)
seems like a sequence from a Bresson film, particularly in the first framing used. A number of
her films end with a Fin, an acknowledgment of art house cinema perhaps. In her in camera
editing, its intuitive montage, and inner rhythm there is perhaps acknowledgment of Eisenstein
who she also references.
Mel Gooding writes, ‘It may be that in certain respects it seems quite unlike any other images
you have seen, by Prunella Clough or anyone else, but that it is nevertheless in some definable
way quite like some thing or other that you have seen.’ As with Clough’s paintings, it seems with
Joanna’s films that there are moments when you feel I have seen this or experienced this, and
then it moves on and they are hers. But afterwards, you do see things with an experience, that
includes hers. We have all seen washing on a line in the wind and been a little mesmerised by it
and the patterns it makes, Joanna made Napkins. We have all looked at a derelict building, at a
friend lying in the sun, Joanna made Body/House. We have all visited friends, Joanna made
Aberhart’s House. We have all explored a local neighbourhood, Joanna made Port Chalmers
Cycle and Thorndon. The time Joanna had for her art was what she had after looking after the
children, running a household. Moments grabbed for poetry, drawing and painting, films. So
everything that got done was important. Time was precious.
Her drawings seem like photographic negative images for her films. The spaces of the white
paper, with the moments of drawing, picking things out. While the films have their saturated
filmic quality and flashes and shafts of light, and colour. Perhaps also working with film helped
her focus on her poems and paintings and drawings, not having the white ground of the
drawings, the films often have a dark of interior shadows, garden shadows, though which light
comes in through windows, or in which light highlights specific patterns or objects.
‘All my films poems paintings play more or less between inner and outer events. (Port Chalmers
on the one hand, to Napkins -) The attempt to work in several fields invokes criticism un-
spoken and spoken. One may dissipate energy. But by constantly changing one’s lens, one
sharpens awareness of the given medium; medium becomes subject ’ she writes for the
Cantrills. It is as if film making, painting and drawing, writing poetry all are lens based, about
looking.
By its very nature, film was unseen, only realised, when projected. This has changed since the
arrival of digital technology, as the moving image is everywhere, and many people in the ‘rich
world’ have devices on which moving images can be accessed instantly, constantly, and
repeatedly. So our relationship with film, the moving image, has changed and is changing; is
more various. In the 1970s when the films were made, to see the films would have meant
setting up a projector, putting up a screen or projecting on a wall, waiting for night or putting
up a blackout. Often a communal experience, with friends, fellow artists, who can be both of
course. And the projectors enveloping mechanical whirring, different, from the silence of the
digital now (as I have experienced those of her films I have seen so far, likewise drawings only
in reproduction). For Joanna, there would have been the delay in seeing material filmed as it
went off to the lab, and returned as a film print, ready to be projected, and seen, realised. They
just start coming, images, one after the other, a film, with an inner rhythm.
