Sun 20th 10:30pm

The Farewell Special of the 7th Berlin International Directors Lounge

Nyman With A Movie Camera is a 64-minute, shot-for-shot remake of Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera with a live score played by the Michael Nyman Band. Nyman has been heavily involved in cinema for most of his working life, creating the Oscar-winning score for Jane Campion’s The Piano and numerous other features including Peter Greenaway’s Drowning By Numbers and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover.

Conceived and directed by Nyman, Nyman With A Movie Camera painstakingly reconstructs Vertov’s iconic silent picture of 1929 using footage from Nyman’s own film archives shot over the last two decades. A press release offers some further explanation:

“Deeply rooted in Vertov’s original ideas concerned with ‘the perception of truth’, the documentation of ‘life as it is’ and that of ‘life caught unawares’, Nyman’s film attempts to capture the essence of ‘what is there’, and reflects on what he calls ‘the persistence of glance’ a multi-sensorial experience of time as it occurs, of life as it happens and as recorded by the human memory. The film is a modern-day take on experimental documentary film making through the bias of cinematographic collage and proposes to renew a discourse with the ideological and aesthetic precepts once defended by Vertov in his pursuit of the ultimate ‘cleaning up’ of film language from the ‘corrupting influence’ of drama.”

“Nyman’s previous engagement with Vertov’s film dates back to 2003 when he composed the original musical score for Man With a Movie Camera. The encounter with the Russian master was instrumental in defining Nyman’s own aesthetic phraseology and experimentation with the medium of film and documentary. In Man With a Movie Camera, the shot sequence follows a systematic and paced visual pattern in an attempt to mimic the language of the visible, the raw and the unscripted.

“Vertov’s driving vision was to capture ‘film truth’ — that is, fragments of reality, which when organized together have a deeper truth that cannot be seen with the naked eye. Whilst Vertov’s rhythmic patterning unifies the aesthetic surface of his film, Nyman’s choice of footage for Nyman With a Movie Camera, is a random punctuation of a visual text drawn from his own film and sound repertoires and from his photographic archives. The result is a patchwork of imagery embroidered in Vertov’s threads of the newsreel and of the dogmatic values of the film truth.”

via

screening made possible in cooperation with Myriam Blundell Projects

Mon 14th 6pm

photo by Sheila Rock

Cine Opera | An Evening with Michael Nyman in cooperation with  Myriam Blundell Projects

“When I started there was no intention to make films or a book of photographs. It happened because I was there, had a camera and an eye and a curiosity, my own visual diaries of a distracted but persistent mind.” 

Michael Nyman, 2009

CINE OPERA is a series of video works shot by composer, artist and filmmaker Michael Nyman in various parts of the world during the past fifteen years. Drawn from his globe-trotting travels, introspective journeys and life-changing discoveries, the series is a collection of 50 cinematographic records documenting various capsules of every-day life, spontaneous events and chosen circumstances through first-hand observation. The work is an attempt to capture living cultures and forgotten traditions in a format which illustrates a diaristic study of modern-day life. Although, an obvious parallel can be made with the current reality TV phenomena in pop culture and in some cases to the polemic argument over pervasive CCTV surveillance in most countries, Nyman’s intentions go beyond the act of simple observation, and the obvious criticism of continuous scrutiny and voyeurism in contemporary societies. “Cine Opera” appropriates content from everyday life and delivers a quirky yet brutally truthful view of the world in which we live. The footage is blissfully accompanied by Nyman’s soundtrack which is deeply influenced from borrowed, local sounds and blended with the vast range of his musical repertoire. As a result, the mundane becomes peculiar, the unknown romantic, and the forgotten suddenly recalled. The series emerges as a thorough study of our uneasy times and attempts to reflect on the human condition in this nascent century.

still from Witness I

Myriam Blundell Projects

Michael Nyman

Mon 14th 8pm

still from Wistle While You Work

Cine Opera | An Evening with Michael Nyman in cooperation with  Myriam Blundell Projects

“When I started there was no intention to make films or a book of photographs. It happened because I was there, had a camera and an eye and a curiosity, my own visual diaries of a distracted but persistent mind.” 

Michael Nyman, 2009

CINE OPERA is a series of video works shot by composer, artist and filmmaker Michael Nyman in various parts of the world during the past fifteen years. Drawn from his globe-trotting travels, introspective journeys and life-changing discoveries, the series is a collection of 50 cinematographic records documenting various capsules of every-day life, spontaneous events and chosen circumstances through first-hand observation. The work is an attempt to capture living cultures and forgotten traditions in a format which illustrates a diaristic study of modern-day life. Although, an obvious parallel can be made with the current reality TV phenomena in pop culture and in some cases to the polemic argument over pervasive CCTV surveillance in most countries, Nyman’s intentions go beyond the act of simple observation, and the obvious criticism of continuous scrutiny and voyeurism in contemporary societies. “Cine Opera” appropriates content from everyday life and delivers a quirky yet brutally truthful view of the world in which we live. The footage is blissfully accompanied by Nyman’s soundtrack which is deeply influenced from borrowed, local sounds and blended with the vast range of his musical repertoire. As a result, the mundane becomes peculiar, the unknown romantic, and the forgotten suddenly recalled. The series emerges as a thorough study of our uneasy times and attempts to reflect on the human condition in this nascent century.

still from Witness I

Myriam Blundell Projects

Michael Nyman