Tuesday 18th June: SEA STORIES AND SEE STORIES

Passengerfilms – the car-crash shipwreck of geography and film – presents ‘Sea Stories and See Stories’ on Tuesday the 18th of June.

Filmmakers leverage the ocean as a venue for seeing the worlds in which we live, from those of our inner psyches to the circulatory rhythms of global political economy. But in the process is the ocean as a space of matter and affect truly explored…or is its erasure merely taken to a new level? Indeed, is it truly possible to tell a narrative about the ocean, or is a ‘sea story’ necessarily about seeing something else?

We’ll be grappling with these questions through screenings of two films:

The Forgotten Space (2010, 112 min) by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch, winner of the Special Orizzonti Jury Award (best feature-length film) at the 2010 Venice Biennale. An extension of Sekula’s 1996 photo-essay Fish Story, The Forgotten Space uncovers the hidden role of the ocean – and, in particular container shipping – in the global economy.

Ama (2012, 10 min) by Rona Lee (commissioned by the John Hansard Gallery and Arts Council England). Made as part of a larger body of work That Oceanic Feeling, created while Lee was Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence at the National Oceanography Centre, Ama adopts the lens of Oceanographic survey as a means of reflecting on difference, knowledge production and what might be understood by our attempts to ‘see’ into the environmentally vulnerable darkness of the most inaccessible and least understood environment on the planet – the deep sea.

The programme will conclude with a discussion regarding the links between vision, narration, knowledge, and the sea, featuring Rona Lee , Reader in Fine Art Practice at the University of Wolverhampton, Phil Steinberg, Marie Curie International Incoming Fellow in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Alex Colas, Senior lecturer in International Relations at Birkbeck College, University of London.

About the discussants:

Alex Colas teaches international relations at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Empire (Polity, 2008) and co-editor with Bryan Mabee of Mercenaries, Pirates, Bandits and Empires: Private Violence in Historical Perspective (Hurst, 2011).

Artist Rona Lee is a specialist in critically engaged fine art practice, and Reader in Fine art Practice and Deputy Leader of the ‘Art, Critique and Social Practice’ research cluster at Wolverhampton University. Her work is research led and context responsive, encompassing a range of settings and forms of intervention and utilising fine art media in conjunction with technologies and techniques from non-arts disciplines. Exhibitions and commissions include work for: Beaconsfield, The Ikon Gallery, Tate Modern, Firstsite, Newlyn Art Gallery, John Hansard Gallery, Henie Onstad Museum, Oslo, San Francisco Art Commissions Gallery, La Chambre Blanche, Quebec City and The Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Phil Steinberg is Professor of Geography at Florida State University and Marie Curie International Incoming Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has written extensively on the forgotten and (in)visible spaces of the ocean (The Social Construction of the Ocean, 2001), the urban (What Is a City? Rethinking the Urban after Hurricane Katrina, 2008), the infosphere (Managing the Infosphere: Governance, Technology, and Cultural Politics in Motion, 2008), and the Arctic (Contesting the Arctic: Politics and Imaginaries in the Circumpolar North, 2014).

(Images from ‘Ama’ courtesy of Rona Lee)

Monday 13th May: LOMAX THE SONGHUNTER – sounding place, placing sound

Passengerfilms are back on the 13th of May for an evening of film and discussion devoted to exploring and mapping the role of sound, music, and field recordings in place.

Featuring Roger Kappers’ documentary Lomax the Songhunter (2004, 90 mins), which traces the travels and encounters of the legendary Alan Lomax, who dedicated his life to collecting and championing folk music. Kappers tells Lomax’s story through interviews with friends like Pete Seeger, archival recordings of musical legends including Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, and footage of the settings where Lomax recorded sounds and songs.

The screening will be accompanied by talks:

Musicologist Jo Hicks (Oxford) will introduce the Hearing Landscape Critically research network – “an inter-disciplinary and inter-continental project addressing the intersections and cross-articulations of landscape, music, and the spaces of sound” – and speak on urban stasis and circulation in René Clair and Erik Satie’s short film Entr’acte (1924). Jo’s research is primarily concerned with late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century French music, especially music in and about Pari; this is overlapped by an interest in the politics and poetics of the audible landscape.

Writer and artist Justin Hopper will present and discuss his sonic poetry walking tours and their use of Anglo-American folk song to explore the hidden pasts and underworlds of urban landscapes. Justin’s work is rooted in his past as a journalist, but replaces traditional non-fiction with poetry as a way to approach truth in a fragmented world; he uses writing tied to specific locations to haunt them with myth.

Writer, radio producer and researcher in political geography Dr. Anja Kannigieser (RHUL) will discuss ‘Letting Atmospheres Speak’, introducing the speaking of atmospheres, both in terms of particular assemblages of spaces, infrastructures and sounds, and in terms of the voices that resonate to contribute to the feeling of a moment. With a background in performance and communication/sound studies, Anja’s interests intersect contemporary labour, voice, technology, collaboration and social movements. She holds an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship in geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, and her first monograph, Experimental Politics and the Making of Worlds, will be released by Ashgate in Summer 2013.

Join us 7:30pm, Monday the 13th May, The Roxy Bar and Screen, 128-132 Borough High Street, SE1 1LB. Entry £5. See map.

Saturday 4th May: WANDSWORTH ARTS FRINGE FESTIVAL – The River Wandle: Urban Waterway

As part of Wandsworth Arts Fringe Festival, Passengerfilms have put together a collection of short films celebrating and exploring urban waterways and the River Wandle.

Join us for Animation, Abstraction and Archive footage, screened on the banks of the Wandle with Unorthobox to mark the opening night of the Fringe. We’ll be looking at the creatures that live in the water, the history and industry on the banks, the science of how and why urban waterways are so important for our drinking water and as a place to experience nature and find inspiration on our doorstep.

The evening also includes a dazzling mix of physical theatre and installations and performances fom Yael Karavan and Bruno Humberto aka. Boris and Boris. And the Wandsworth Festival Team are already busy building a bar on the open air site especially for this event!

Films include:
The Hidden Life in Pond Water
Daniel Stoupin, 2013
“We don’t need to dive into the deep ocean to find the most unusual lifeforms. This short film is a journey into a bizarre world of microscopic inhabitants of pond and river water.”

Invocation
Marina Nikitina, 2013
Marina Nikitina is currently studying painting at Central Saint Martins College of Art. Having recently expanded her painting and drawing into animation, her work brings to mind microscopic cellular structures as well as huge storm swept landscapes.

Mills of the River Wandle
Courtesy Wandle Industrial Museum
With a fall of 38 metres and a length of 12 miles, the Wandle is a very fast flowing river. This made it suitable to power watermills, which it has done since Roman times. A wide range of different industries used water-power in their manufacture including mills producing paper, gunpowder, iron, dyes and copper, snuff, leather, drugs, peppermint, oil mills (such as lavender oils), calico and silk.

H2 Oh No!
The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is a nonprofit organization that strives to demystify the urban policy and planning issues that impact local communities. In this short film we learn about New York City’s urban waterways.

Waterway
Britta Johnson, 2011
This stop-motion animated film follows large drops of water as they travel through rocks, ferns, plant roots, microbes and other creatures that naturally clean them.

The Last Days of Young’s Brewery at Wandsworth
Wandle Industrial Museum, 2006
The earliest mention of commercial brewing at the Ram Brewery in Wandsworth is in 1581 in the reign on Queen Elizabeth I. Brewing continued on the site and in 1832 the Young family acquired the brewery. They continued until 2006, when this film was made, and now the site, with its many listed buildings, is awaiting redevelopment.

Wandsworth Arts Festival: The Festival Hub
8pm, Saturday 4th May 2013
Wandle Triangle, Wandsworth High Street SW18 4LB

Tickets £5 – BOOK NOW

Threads: Un/ravelling Space + WOOL 100%

Join us on Monday the 25th of March for an evening of film and discussion on the theme of ‘Threads: Un/ravelling Space’.

Featuring a rare screening of “wild but gentle” fantasy film Wool 100% (2006), directed by Mai Tominaga, in which two aging junk-collecting sisters return home one day to discover a stranger knitting a red dress in their house. We’ll also be screening Jenni Nelson’s documentary short Tightly Knit (2010), which explores the story of three passionate characters obsessed with knitting, introducing contemporary trends in a vibrant knitting community.

Plus Dr. Jonathan Faiers on knitting and catastrophe in cinema, Perri Lewis on knitting’s ‘scene’ in London, and a discussion chaired by Laura Price and Professor Philip Crang from Royal Holloway, University of London.

And if you’d like, please feel free to bring any knitting/craft to work on whilst watching the talks and films!

Kicks off at 7.30pm on Monday the 25th March at the Roxy Bar and Screen, 128-132 Borough High Street, SE1 1LB. Entry £5; just show up and pay on the door.

Monday 25th February: FROM THE SEA TO THE LAND BEYOND – music and movement through landscape

Join Passengerfilms at the Roxy this February for an evening of film, discussion and live performance investigating sound, cinema and landscape.

How does music shape our stories of journeys, near and far? This month we’re grappling with that question. Our feature for the evening is From the Sea to the Land Beyond (2012, 74 mins) – a unique filmic exploration of the role the coast plays in our lives. The film is a collaboration between Penny Woolcock and the band British Sea Power, combining archival BFI footage with an original score, and we’re pleased to say that this is the first non-theatrical screening of it in the UK. We’ll also be showing Way to the Sea (1936, 9 mins), a classic GPO documentary short about the London to Portsmouth railway, with music by the inimitable Benjamin Britten.

Dr. Julie Brown, Reader in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, will discuss the musical dimensions of the original presentation of J.B. Noel’s 1923 and 1924 films of the Royal Geographical Society expeditions to Mt Everest.  In addition to publishing on early twentieth-century art music, Julie is contributory editor (with Annette Davison) of The Sounds of the Silents in Britain (OUP, 2013), and was Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded Research Network ‘The Sounds of Early Cinema in Britain’ and a British Academy Research Development Award entitled ‘“Film fitting” in Britain, 1913–1926’.  In April 2011 her reconstruction of Frederick Laurence’s original score for Morozko was performed at the Barbican Cinema as part of the British Silent Film Festival.

And the collective Cabinet of Living Cinema will treat us to a performance that explores our aesthetic relationship with seascape and coastline, from Romantic poetry to avant-garde cinema to surf films, with excerpts from Maya Deren’s At Land and live radio piece Sound Journeys of Dorset, recorded amidst the quarries of Dorset’s man-made wilderness. With live scoring and live foley from Kieron Maguire (guitar, viola) and Robert Parkinson (dulcimer).

The event kicks off at 7.30pm on Monday the 25th February at the Roxy Bar and Screen, 128-132 Borough High Street, SE1 1LB. Entry £5.

Wednesday 23rd January: SWEETGRASS, herding, and human-animal geographies

We survived the end of the world (and Christmas! And the New Year’s celebrations!), and now Passengerfilms are happy to be back at The Roxy Bar and Screen on Wednesday the 23rd of January for a much-anticipated night on herding and human-animal geographies.

Featuring Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s stunning documentary Sweetgrass (2009), an award-winning, beautifully shot examination of the link between cowboys and sheep in Montana’s dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains. Sweetgrass is an unsentimental elegy to the American West, following the last modern-day cowboys in search of summer pasture. This beautiful yet unsparing film reveals a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are intimately meshed. We’re absolutely thrilled to be able to screen it after having to reschedule earlier this year.

Accompanied by a screening of Lindsay Blatt and Paul Taggart’s short documentary Herd in Iceland (2012), which follows the horse herders of Iceland across breathtaking landscapes, and Eva Weber’s gorgeous, impressionistic 3-minute short Reindeer (2011) - a haunting portrait of reindeer herding in the twilight expanses of the Lappish wilderness.

Plus guest speaker Hayden Lorimer on herding and transhumance. Dr. Lorimer is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow; his work considers the geographical dimensions of a series of themes: landscape, nature, fieldwork, science, memory, mobility and biography.

So follow the herd to the Roxy on the 23rd! Food, drink, and comfy sofas available throughout the evening…and we’ll be playing herding songs and herding calls from different countries before and between the films.

7:30pm, Wednesday the 23rd January, The Roxy Bar and Screen, 128-132 Borough High Street, SE1 1LB. Entry £5. See map.

 

 

 

Thursday 13th December The End of the World is Nigh: DEEP IMPACT and Geographies of Disaster

With Christmas and the END OF THE WORLD on the horizon, Passengerfilms is here to help you prepare for both. At the Horse Hospital on the 13th of December we’ll be grappling with ‘disaster’ in various forms. Join us for an evening complete with raucous blockbuster, cult classics, a range of sage experts and, of course, festive mince pies. You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! You’ll forget the impending yule-tide doom…

Our feature, Deep Impact (1998, 120 mins), stars Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Elijah Wood, Vanessa Redgrave, and Morgan Freeman, who face a 7-mile wide comet hurtling towards the Earth, threatening mass extinction. A mainline to the mainstream ways in which Disaster props up particular social ideals, and nurtures themes of loss, hope, fear, and family strength.

Before this you get Time Enough at Last (1959, 25 mins), from the classic American television series The Twilight Zone. Burgess Meredith plays Henry Bemis, who finds himself alone with his beloved books after a nuclear war. Considered one of the most famous Twilight Zone episodes, it touches on issues about over-reliance on technology and the distinction between solitude and loneliness.

The evening will be introduced by co-curator Stephanie Morrice (Royal Holloway, University of London). Stephanie researches reconstruction and social response in the wake of natural disasters. She’ll be introducing her current project “Returning ‘Home’? Emotional Geographies of the disaster displaced” and talking about her exploration of these issues in post-flood Brisbane, Australia, post-earthquake Christchurch, New Zealand, and post-hurricane New Orleans.

Emily Candela (researcher and artist, Royal College of Art and the Science Museum) will be showing clips from her Disaster Series and discussing the how the cultural history and mythology of catastrophe twists through 19th century Romantic landscape painting to inform contemporary understandings of human relationships with our environment. And Dr. Camillo Boano (Senior Lecturer at Development Planning Unit, UCL, and one of the Co-Directors of the UCL Urban Lab) will speak on post-disaster practice and architecture. His research interests are focused on urban development, contested urbanism, socio-spatial dialectics, design and urban transformations, shelter and housing reconstruction in conflicted areas, divided cities and post-disaster environments.

Kicks off at 7:30pm, Thursday the 13th December, The Horse Hospital, Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD (See map). Entry £5. Mince pies included!