Overnight MuteLoop
10 – 16 June 2006
This week welcomes back The Bigger Picture’s experimental timeslot, Overnight MuteLoop. This is, as the title says, a chance for artwork to run after dark for seven straight hours! The screenings will become part of the nocturnal life of the city, speaking to the people who wake, work and watch over it at night.
Most of the featured work has been selected from The Bigger Picture’s third ‘Open Submission’ for 2006. The volume and quality of work sent in was outstanding. Highlights include a cinema advertisment made c.1920 to advertise Telegraph soap, manufactured by Gossages of Widnes. This North West Film Archive submission is a film that celebrates early and ingenious examples of the mixing of live action, trick photography and animation – before the days of digital wizardry, and is screened with the permission of Unilever Archives. Another not to be missed is Martin Hamblen’s tribute to postal graffiti with his film Ich bin European. Martin has also contributed a piece entitled Poison.
Interestingly the final three selected silent shorts all have in common the theme of movement and rhythm; Jane Short’s Untitled (Butterfly) experiments with time, movement and the natural form, Patricia Townsend’s Full Circle documents the rhythmic rises and falls of water as it enters and emerges, in continuous and perpetual motion, an everyday plughole, whilst Nynke Deinema’s Honey is a “mouth spitting honey, doing so, altering the image”?!
Also forming this month’s Overnight MuteLoop is Eye Move, a one minute film by Rob Vale that allows the viewer to experience life, literally through somebody else’s eyes, – as the body moves through the city we watch the journey via the reflection in the body’s eye ball. Asylum Birds, from Kooch Cinema Project, a community initiative working with members of the Middle Eastern diaspora living in the North East, is a film about trying to find a home and a place to be accepted. Lastly, and certainly not least, don’t miss Alexander Lorenz’s The story that never took place. The city at night with its inanimate life is the protagonist of this video. Movie-like establishing shots make the spectator wait for an action that will not happen. Somewhere between film and photography both art forms are questioned by this work.
The Bigger Picture Overnight MuteLoop will screen everyday, nightly from Midnight – 7.00am. (Schedules are subject to change).