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STATEMENTS
Exhibition Curator Emma Ota: Julia Dogra-Brazell
Elaine Smollin: Vision Scored for Voice: Films by Julia Dogra-Brazell Curated by Helen de Witt
Producer Kentaro Chiba: Beyond Language
Chronicle of a Sound: The Films of Julia Dogra-Brazell
and
Up in the Air and Down on the Earth: A programme inspired by the films of Julia Dogra-Brazell Curated by Helen de Witt
At once personal and detached, intimate but distancing, Julia Dogra-Brazell’s work casts a spell all of its own. Often only a minute or a few minutes long, its brevity leaves us gasping and grasping for more- to see more beautiful and complex images and hear the intricately layered sound. But the moment is so fleeting, we are also grasping to hold onto its meaning, its significance for us. It’s as if we are chasing an elusive rare butterfly that briefly landed on our arm but has now flown away on the breeze before we can truly appreciate not only its fleeting beauty, but also its generosity in granting us such a precious moment.
In order to extend our brief stay in Julia’s magical yet material world, here are a number of British films from the last five decades that take delight in a similar perspicacity of ideas expressed in lightness and delicacy, and yet are no less profound for that.
Helen de Witt
Head of Cinemas of British Film Institute/ Festivals Producer of the London Film Festival and the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
Chronicle of a Sound: The Films of Julia Dogra-Brazell
1：From A to B 2014
Super8 /b&w/colour/sound/ 1min 3 secs
Language: English
2：In Childhood 2014
iPhone/b&w/sound/2mins 3secs
The first of a two-part meditation on Arthur Rimbaud’s elusive poem, Guerre (War)
３：Before I Left 2010
Super8/b&w/colour/sound/5mins 15secs
Language: English
And there it was, trapped in the space between fleeting images... JD-B
One of a number of films in which words and phrases are randomly chosen from specific texts and later re-arranged to form a voiceover to each piece.
4:Plot 2001-6
Super 8/colour/b&w/sound/4mins 45 secs
Language:s English/French
Using the languages of Dogra-Brazell’s childhood (French) and adulthood (English) as she travelled back and forth to Switzerland where her mother lay seriously ill, the camera was used as a diary recording little snatches of daily life, moments insignificant in themselves and certainly inadequate to the task of telling the stories of those years or what came before. As such, Plot takes the form of a ‘film fragment’ that eschews any straightforward narrative intention, causation or chronological structure. It relies instead on the material texture of the work to promote ‘the possibility of the emergence of memory through a visual and auditory sensation of speed and change’ (Susan Trangmar, ‘Frame Of Mind’, Next Level Ed 2 Vol 4, 2005)
Urschrift 2014
Super8, Hi8, Agfa Scala 200 and iPhone/b&w/colour/sound /1min 50 secs
An unapologetic conjunction of visual and auditory cliche´s, Urschrift is a wry take on the forties American police procedural.
6: Girl in a Taxicab 2007
Super8/b&w/sound/3mins 12secs
Language: English
One of a number of films in which words and phrases are randomly chosen from specific texts and later rearranged to form a voiceover to each piece. For Girl in a Taxicab, Dogra-Brazell deliberately chose a text she had read over twenty years ago and was almost certain to have forgotten. She could not be sure whether the structure she built from parts (a tapestry of overlapping sentences) retained any of the book’s original causality. When the visuals start to fade halfway through the film, the visual and verbal screens come together in a screen of trauma. The story, like any story, becomes symptomatic of a kind of forgetting. In contrast, the ambient sound for this film was recorded in New York a month after 9/11.
7:Theatre Games (from the series No One) 2016
Super8/colour/sound 1 min 50 secs
The first in a series of enigmatic portraits of friends, raising issues of love, truth, life and documentation.
8:Chronicle of a Sound 2015
iPhone/b&w/sound/7mins 20secs
Language: Rumansch (Rumansch Grischun and Vallader dialects)
A conflict, suspended between the afilmic and profilmic, involving a man, a woman, a language and the passing of time.
9:The Rules Of The Game 2015
Super8/iPhone/b&w/colour/sound/3mins 32 secs
Language: English
A meditation on time, perception and the moving image fashioned from two seemingly disconnected narrative sources. Half enunciated words and phrases from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper － a cautionary tale on the perils and extravagances of seeing and being seen － qualify extracts from the filmmaker’s own correspondence on film and photography that forms the auditory foreground to this film. Delightfully, Gilman’s short story was published at the start of photography’s ascendancy and just three years before the arrival of the first moving image made for projection.
10:Protection Leader 2013
Super 8/b&w/silent/1min 7secs
Up in the Air and Down on the Earth: A programme inspired by the films of Julia Dogra-Brazell Curated by Helen de Witt
Curated by Helen de Witt
1.Aerial
Margaret Tait, UK, 1974, 4 mins
The film evokes the vastness of the air above us as well as the TV transmitter that brings the world in all its creativity and complicated confusion into our home. It, perhaps, also conjures up Shakespeare’s sprite of the same name from The Tempest. He (or she, Ariel was historically played by a women) is an elemental being of the higher order, identified with the upward-tending elements of Air and Fire, and with the higher nature of humanity. Aerial, the film, is too about freedom, but not in isolation, rather the freedom that provides the space to explore connectedness.
2.CHAMELEON
Tanya Syed, UK, 1990 4 mins
From within a constricted environment, a women seeks to escape her psychic and physical constraints. To become free; to become herself. The filmmaker creates her emergence through rhythmic intercutting of film as she moves forward to enter what we think of as the real world. But what really is real?
3.Deviant Beauty
Tina Keane, UK, 1996, 10 mins
A mysterious and androgynous woman travels though a shadowy, carnivalesque world. Unrecognisable from the everyday, it dismantles old certainties and mocks authority, undermining traditional hierarchies of meaning. It is a place of non-fixed sexualities and erotic desires, but also one of death and decay. Tantalising in its temptation to the pleasures of other worlds, it warns that the surface allure of the image can only lead to oblivion.
4.Stages of Mourning / Sarah Pucill, UK, 2003, 19 mins
A personal playing out of the process of grieving. The filmmaker performs to camera a ritual to help her come to terms with the death of her partner, the filmmaker Sandra Lahire. She uses her own body and photographs of her partner to explore the tearing apart of a deep and close relationship in a process that helps to heal herself and to share with the audience. The film explores the relationship of the filmed movement of the body that appears resonant and real to the picture of one no longer here, but nonetheless captured for all time in the photographic image creating a blending or the two.
5.A Woman Returns from a Journey / Ruth Novaczek, UK, 2016, 10 mins
“It’s dangerous to get what you want, she said, it sets you up for tragedy.” The film follows a detective of the emotions who is trying to uncover the secret past of a lost and mysterious woman. Using clips from the great auteurs- Hitchcock, Godard, Antonioni, Pasolini, Ackerman, and images of eternal screen goddesses- Bergman, Crawford, Stanwyck, Viti, mixed with iconic American scenes, we follow the detective as she probes beneath the surface of our world that is so familiar on the surface but so unfathomable when you delve beneath.
