Mike Dunford
2021In the Dark
Mike Dunford
This film came after Arbitrary Limits, and expanded the aspect of the social context of the film’s production to essentially dominate the latter half of the film, and derail the initial formal plan for filming almost completely. Although this was unlikely to have been the initial purpose, it became the narrative subtext.
In the Dark
Our Dreams
Mike Dunford
Shot in America but edited in the UK, this and NEW YORK STREETS formed a more politicised, agit-prop, kind of production, but closer to the cut ups and scratch video of London Video Arts of the time, and still with some emphasis on formal editing strategies and disruptive soundtracks of the earlier film work. Our Dream is about the violence of the onslaught on democracy, the working class, nation states, and sovereignty that began with the years of Reagan in America and continues to this day. It was a dark time in history, echoed now in 2013. The sense of deep foreboding and future dread let up during the late '80s bubble and boom, but has returned with the financial crash of 2008.
Our Dreams
Part-Time Virgin
Mike Dunford
"After the standard 8 work this was my first 16mm film. As a film it shows all of the tendencies and concerns that preoccupied my ideas in film, and then video up until the present day. At the same time it is a kind of sound-track time-capsule for the late '60s with sound from the moon-shot, Country Joe and the Fish, hippie music festivals, references to financial chaos, advertising and consumerism, gangster movies, Vietnam, and natural disasters." Mike Dunford
Part-Time Virgin
Windless Closure
Mike Dunford
Another approach to the same complex of story and videographic operations. This time the videographic work takes primacy and is almost wholly abstract. The story-telling strand is presented (enclosed) as a self-contained element within the overall image although even here the unity of sound and picture is abandoned – none of the sound recorded matches with the image of the speaker telling the story of Nohi Abassi. The story penetrates and interrupts, and is interrupted by, the processed imagery and sound in narrative sequence, but its imagery is also made an element within the videographic episodes. It is accompanied by rainforest recordings, as a simulacrum, a stylised assemblage referring to the idea of an alternative/magic, ideology of existence and order. Sharp collisions of content. Everything is permeable, every image becomes information and processing.
Windless Closure
Arbitrary Limits
Mike Dunford
Arbitrary Limits is a documentation, and a documentary, of the making of itself, a self-reflexive narrative that encompasses the relationship between film-maker and sound recordist, and their relation to the ongoing film, a commentary on the film’s production, and the gradual exposition, through asides, and partial explanations through the film, of what the film set-up, and its eventual notional outcome should be.
Arbitrary Limits
Nohi Abassi
Mike Dunford
Marks another stage of work which I called “distributed narrative”. In this a strand of thought, an idea or a story, and related or unrelated material that adds or conflicts is constantly re-presented over the course of the work, to create in the totality of the viewing a synthesis that is somewhat open, mediated but not fixed. The story of Nohi Abassi is a rainforest myth and is told within the hard architecture of the computer processing centre, and the hard and yet fluid architecture of videographic operations that enclose and abstract the image, and confront the implicit slipperiness of the ideology and the relationship of mankind and nature shown within the myth. The story is read by a non-actor, undermining easy acceptance and transparent listening, and yet giving a different type of authenticity to the tale. The tale is read many times from different points, repeating, double tracking. Every aspect of the recording is present.
Nohi Abassi
Scratch
Mike Dunford
Scratch begins as a standard 8 film fragment, originally filmed in our 60’s basement kitchen, and reprojected as a loop 5 times with a repeated coda of junk and glitch footage, onto a ground glass screen, refilmed in black and white on 16mm film stock.This sequence then begins a series of repetitions that run through negative image, reversed image, solarized, solarized and double exposed, colourized, and finally solarised and reversed with a colour sequence for each process. The central colour section repeats and starts to reverse the procedure through the sequences to the first iteration.At this point a scratch appears, a rich white line that appears momentarily on the image...
Scratch
True Love
Mike Dunford
Standard 8 colour film, refilmed and slowed down, edited into a formal work on 16mm film, of camera pan sequences of a woman lying naked. Almost abstract images slide from darkness to light and back, repeated, repeated, in a pattern of repetitions that at some point reverses back to the start again. A small visual love poem, but abstract.
True Love
Still-Life with Pear
Mike Dunford
'Still-Life with Pear' takes a subversive position towards the illusion inherent in the film-image, its apparent transparency to representation, but rather than dealing with this by countering with strategies of foregrounding the actual materiality of the film-strip, the narrative construct is subverted within the film with a counter-narrative.
Still-Life with Pear
