CINEMA PARENTHÈSE #27 and iMAL presents GRIDS AND OTHER CONSTRAINTS: 16MM FILMS BY NICKY HAMLYN

NICKY HAMLYN is a British filmmaker, artist and published author working in Structural film. He has been making films for three decades. His work explores the basic elements of the filmic experience: the relationship between film space and the film frame, between time, flicker and movement, and between light and the material image.

He has contributed to 'Film Quarterly' and has published 'Film Art Phenomena' and 'Kurt Kren: Structuralist Films' with Simon Payne and A.L. Rees. He was workshop organizer for the London Film-Makers' Co-op in the late 1970s

PROGRAM

INTRODUCTION
by Nicky Hamlyn himself

PENUMBRA
2003, 16mm, b&w, silent, 9'00

QUARTET
2007, 16mm, colour/b&w, silent, 8’,00

FOUR TORONTO FILMS
2007, 16mm, colour/b&w, silent, 18’00

TOBACCO SHED
2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 10’00

4 x 3 x 2
2018, live performance with two 16mm projectors, b&w, sound, 10'00

Q&A
with Nicky Hamlyn

These four films all work with the idea of finding the work’s form in the topography of the subject: In PENUMBRA the square ceramic tiles on a bathroom wall determine the framing and shot sequencing. In FOUR TORONTO FILMS the camera records the pavement slabs, which resemble a filmstrip, of a street in Toronto, followed by three looser sections. TOBACCO SHED follows a similar logic informed by the serial construction of a tobacco curing factory in Umbria. In QUARTET the same room is filmed in four different ways according to strict and free systems.

4 x 3 x 2
A work generated by the phasing interplay of two identical film loops, shown on projectors that are manipulated during projection. The sound is generated directly by the image’s overlapping the soundtrack area of the filmstrip.