Focii

Jeanette Iljon
,
UK
,
1975
,
16mm
,
9'

A woman dances and mimes, her stark white image moves across a red floor, reflected in a fractured wall of mirrors. As she performs, her mirror image gradually assumes an autonomous identity so that what was a central relationship of self to self has become one self to other. Focii not only explores the construction of self, and the dynamics of self and other, but also the interaction between the viewer’s body and the body onscreen, raising questions on the nature of identification in cinema.

Swollen Stigma

Sarah Pucill
,
UK
,
1998
,
16mm
,
21'

A visual, surrealistic narrative of a woman travelling both literally and psychically through an interior space of several rooms. Memories, or fantasies, of another woman fill her imaginary space. Femininity, as a construction, is explored within a lesbian context where an assertion of lesbian symbolic imagery is created.

A Cold Draft

Lis Rhodes
,
UK
,
1988
,
16mm
,
30'

What is most provocative about this film is that it proposes multiple credible points of view even as the woman is being certified insane by the ‘Censors’. We voyage into the skull of a woman and peer out to a monumentally static cold waste wit planetary slow motion. It is a bunker-eye view. (Sandra Lahire)

 

 A Cold Draft is drawn from (a drawing of) the conditions produced by ‘liberal’ economics in the UK in the 1980’s. Truth is reckless, certainty a sham, but such is faith in repetition that line by line certainty is drawn. The account may be fictitious, a representation, but the events are the result of the imposition of private ownership. (Lis Rhodes)