Luke Fowler

The Poor Stockinger, The Luddite Cropper and The Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott

Luke Fowler

Turner Prize-winner Luke Fowler's film focuses on the life and work of the socialist historian EP Thompson and his involvement with the Workers Education Association. Presented in a documentary style format, combining archive and contemporary footage, the film questions our notions about how history is constructed.

Patrick

Luke Fowler

Maurice Tani

Luke Fowler’s work has long asked how we come to know someone in their absence. He has explored this question by creating posthumous portraits of individuals through precise compositions of the things they have left behind: recorded images and sounds, papers and notes, artwork, the spaces through which they moved, and the testimonies of friends who remain among the living. Patrick evokes the life of its eponymous music producer [Patrick Cowley] by all these means, taking in the postindustrial charms of San Francisco’s now-gentrified South of Market district, once famous for its dance clubs and leather bars, as if searching for Cowley’s still-lingering energy.

Electro-Pythagorus (a portrait of Martin Bartlett)

Luke Fowler

Martin Bartlett

Electro-Pythagorus is an intimate and subjective portrait of the late Martin Bartlett, the Canadian electronic music pioneer who studied with Pauline Oliveros, David Tudor, John Cage, and Pandit Pran Nath. His contribution as an interdisciplinary composer, educator, and founding member of Western Front, though undoubtedly extensive, is in danger of being erased from cultural memory since his death from AIDS in 1993. Navigating an array of archival materials including letters, correspondences, notebooks, personal photos, and a huge body of unreleased music and field recordings held at the archives of Simon Fraser University, Electro-Pythagoras is a journey through the evolution of Bartlett’s musical time and space, softly guided by Luke Fowler’s insightful camera and montage—creating an experimental portrait that defies one-dimensionality.

All Divided Selves

Luke Fowler

R.D. Laing

Collage film about R.D. Laing, who spearheaded the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s, weaves archival material with his own filmic observations. For Laing normality meant adjusting ourselves to the mystification of an alienating world.

Pilgrimage from Scattered Points

Luke Fowler

'Pilgrimage from Scattered Points' is a film about the English composer Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) and The Scratch Orchestra (1968-73). Cornelius Cardew formed the orchestra with Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton in 1968 and published their draft constitution in "The Musical Times" in June 1969. The constitution set out the framework, which would dominate the orchestra's musical work for the first half of its existence. It proposed a fluid community where students, office workers, amateur musicians and some professional composers would gather together for performance, music making and edification.

Enceindre

Luke Fowler

If the word Enceinte (meaning the “main defensive enclosure of a fortification”) is synonymous with “the body of the place”– what does it means to live within a body that is outside of time and without purpose? could these places be considered Hetrotopias? Or are they – as WG Sebald describes – alien structures denuded from human history? The first collaboration between filmmaker Luke Fowler and acclaimed sound recordist Chris Watson. Enceindre is a study in film and sound of two 16th century fortified cities: Berwick in the North-East of England and Pamplona in the Navarre region of the North of Spain. The film considers the wider psychological and social resonances of what it means to live within a town defined by its historical complex of defensive walls and bastions. By adopting an “infra-sensitive” approach to place; Enceindre draws on overlooked acoustic perspectives and lucid camerawork to propose a new framework in which to consider these anachronistic structures.

Country Grammar

Luke Fowler

Fowler’s film focuses on Tompkins’ performance ‘Country Grammar’ created in 2003, one of her earliest pieces performed within a gallery context.

Bogman Palmjaguar

Luke Fowler

Bogman Palmjaguar is a portrait of a man who became distrustful of people and withdrew into nature. Bogman is passionate about the threatened habitat of Scotland's Flow Country. But Bogman's early life and subsequent diagnosis as "paranoid schizophrenic" conditions his relationships with other people. Describing himself as "the hidden cat" and "wild outlaw of paradise", Bogman is taking legal action to remove the label "paranoid schizophrenic". His is both a search for justice and an attempt to find reason in the course his life has taken over the past three decades. Lee Patterson's evocative field recordings accompany the images.

For Christian

Luke Fowler

Fowler’s portrait of New York School composer Christian Wolff continues his investigation into the legacies of 20th-century avant-garde music. Short, handheld shots taken at Wolff’s New Hampshire farm are assembled in diagonal relation to a soundtrack that features snippets of conversation with Wolff and passages from his compositions.

Mum's Cards

Luke Fowler

My mother is a Sociologist – she came to Glasgow from the south of England in the 60’s to work within the Politics Department of Glasgow University- after a few years the Sociologists broke away and formed their own department, where she taught until she retired. Although the university advocated and furnished her with her own personal computer – she still used index cards to make notes on the books and articles that she read. Now that she no longer has an office her house is filled with shoeboxes and filing cabinets containing these cards. My mother was absent on the day that I shot this film; the interview and sounds were recorded at a later date.

George

Luke Fowler

George was an attempt to reconsider the basic components of my approach to filmmaking and boil them down to their bare essentials. The act of looking is implicit in my past documentary work but in this study it becomes the focus. The starting point for the film was the area that I was born and still reside in; the west end of Glasgow and its conjunction with the location where the film was first installed; a flat in Garnethill. The walk between these locations, and also central to the film is, through the St. George’s X area. The film deals with the relationship between sounds and images, acoustic phenomena and architectural details.

3 Minute Wonder (Anna / David / Helen / Lester)

Luke Fowler

Helen

Luke Fowler

As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. Entitled, Anna, Helen, David and Lester, they are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow. Composer: Lee Patterson

Anna

Luke Fowler

As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. Entitled, Anna, Helen, David and Lester, they are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow. Composer: Lee Patterson

Cézanne

Luke Fowler

Shot on 16mm and featuring a soundtrack by Toshiya Tsunoda, Luke Fowler's film pays tribute to the French master’s impressionistic approach to light and nature (notably his Mont Sainte-Victoire series) through his own resplendant glimpses of landscapes and people in Southern France.

Lester

Luke Fowler

As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. Entitled, Anna, Helen, David and Lester, they are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow. Composer: Lee Patterson