Anna Thew
2021Cling Film
Anna Thew
16mm film, 23 mins, premiered Berlin Film Festival Panorama '93 and UK Channel 4 Midnight Underground series (censored version with fireworks, TV noise and icecreams) with Kenneth Anger's Kustom Kar Kommandos and others - fast cut and witty Arts Council film encouraging safer sex at the height of the AIDS crisis, irrespective of colour, gender, orientation, with coloured captions, hand painted walls, garish Mates packets and rubber wear from Libido. Subversively visual and humorously earnest, featuring an all performance art/artist cast “filmed from never before filmed camera angles” (AT). Buffs spot the homages to favourite on the edge experimental/avant-garde/underground films; Taka Iimura, Bunuel/Dali, Kenneth Anger, Marie Menken/Willard Maas, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneeman, Fluxus, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Curt McDowell, whilst Anna Thew plays Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart as a shocked and horrified voyeuse.
Cling Film
Poems and Constructions
Anna Thew
Reel 1 – the walls of Trastevere in a myriad of transitory stop frame sequences shot on a clockwork Bolex with a 25mm macro lens - peeling stucco, graffiti, torn posters, street signs, from the Terme di Caracalla to the bridge over the Tiber; glimpses of ‘FILM STUDIO 80’ and lingering out takes from ‘Toni with smoke’ and a fight scene filmed in a dark alley outside Rome prison long ago (see Eros Erosion clip Il Racconto di Lisabetta, the murder of Lorenzo played by Philippe Barbut and Toni Dominici) Reel II – L’Isle sur Serein with Rameau - late afternoon, early autumn. Close up of apple blossom and the turning pages of an old French history book reflected through a macro lens in the bevel edge of a mirror with a worm eaten frame and a very dirty window pane, framed with flash frames of gravestones and autumn leaves in the Forêt d’Hervaux; accompanied by Rameau harpsichord music from Steve Farrer’s record collection and the slowed dripping of a tap.
Poems and Constructions
Mourning Garden Blackbird
Anna Thew
My mother's garden in Spring, filmed the Easter after her death. My mother died suddenly in December 83. In the Spring the blossom came through as though nothing had happened. I filmed the Easter morning and evening. 2 reels of Super 8. Like a song. The sound was recorded in the same place one year before the image, that is before her death. It does not tell. It is her garden for the last time.
Mourning Garden Blackbird
Lost for Words
Anna Thew
A parody on the post urban devastation wasteland film with a slant on 'rectangular' thought patterns in which a little girl recites from Marx's Communist Manifesto between two cardboard cut out trees and Alfa, the last man on earth to read and write (improvised by Yehuda Safran), is interviewed on TV (improvised by painter Jock McFadyen); with cameo performances by Alexe Sayle eating a Chelsea bun, David Medalla and Oriel de Quadras in non-sensical conversation and Giles Leaman consming reams of rectangular text.
Lost for Words
Fragments For Eye Drift
Anna Thew
A film about seeing. A cut up of fragments from personal diary films intercut with WWII archive footage of the fire bombing of Dresden and Hamburg from the air and the ground (...) The ruins of Dresden's Frauenkirche and cranes are silhouetted against the sky. My daughter Ra as a child runs past the apple tree in Gran's garden in winter. Summer fruit ripens on an Umbrian hillside. Darren is sleeping. Dark streets of Perugia. The train to Siracusa the year after Mum died. The train from Dresden Hauptbahnhof to Berlin the year Derek and my mentor and curator Manfred Salzgeber died. Ten years on. With friends with HIV. Music from Simon Fisher Turner.
Fragments For Eye Drift
Terra Vermin
Anna Thew
"Mama, Papa, last night I had an ugly dream which sent shivers down my spine..." Cine terror wrecked my eyes with images that lurk. The thief with his face against the cold wall murmurs in riddles and weeps for peace as Mario spins. Off loading trauma from having been glassed after the first public screening of CLING FILM in Britain, Franko's art assemblages, scars, tattoos, broken glass and blood red crosses in his flat translate into bad bad dreams as life/art footage cross cuts with indelible images of Oedipus Re, Mario spinning, a man with dark wavy hair and stubble crying, WWII stereoscopes of bombed French or German cities; negative/positive flashback images of blindness...
Terra Vermin
Behind Closed Doors
Anna Thew
An elegy on the death of the film-maker's mother. Fragments from dreams, nightmares and memories combine with natural sound and landscape in this short film poem "a myriad of instances in transit" M. Maziere, Independent Media. Through various texts and spoken diaries oblique reference is made to the persistence of the imagination; the dark, wild wood of Dante's Inferno with Paolo and Francescs buffeted on an infernal breeze, whilst an iconoclasic re-depiction of a Renaissance painting of the deposition by Raphael, describes an age in which the reality of death and grief were less hidden.
Behind Closed Doors
Train Pieces
Anna Thew
Overnight from Rome Termini to Messina, the train to Siracusa. Celestino is sleeping. From Dresden Hauptbahnhof to Berlin Zoo, "branches cut against the sky like paint strokes". Sounds, rhythms, machine landscape, smell of steel... I am obsessed by trains. On a train I am someone else. I am in another language. I am in the land of escape. Accompanied by that particular sound of steel reflected off sheet marble of thirties Roman buildings with the train approaching Roma Termini + a CD of Scanner, "aranciata, birra, coca... aranciata, birra, coca..." - A.T.
Train Pieces
Autumn Rush for Kurt Kren and Winter and Spring and Summer
Anna Thew
A close up observation of trees in Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer, filmed in single stop frame motion on a clockwork Bolex using a 75mm and 25mm macro lens, where alternating pulsations of 24 still frames per second in image time, translate into optical syncopation. Each reel consists of over 3,500 images with mathematically planned sections, improvised cross rhythms, variations in colour, density, tree species and shape, with sequences following the Fibonacci series (Kren’s ‘Golden Section of film’) and countered with staggered 2:3; 4:3 rhythms. Part scored, part random and rough edged echoing the Japanese musical phenomenon. "wind in the trees"…
Autumn Rush for Kurt Kren and Winter and Spring and Summer
Temenos
Anna Thew
Quick portraits of filmmakers, artists and writers attending last year’s Temenos 2016 open air screenings of Gregory Markopolous 16mm films in the Pelopponese in July, shot on a handheld clockwork Bolex through a 25mm macro lens Anna Lascari, Nina Zy, Kathryn Siegel, Robert Beavers, Ute Aurand, Maria Palacio Cruz, Mark Webber, children eating, the local bar owner, his beautiful daughter, her young man and others with in camera superimpositions of plane tree leaves and pink blossoms blowing in the wind.
Temenos
Plum Tree Zoom
Anna Thew
Super 8 blow up to 16mm, optically slowed and stretch printed on Kodak 7272 - leaves of a plum tree in the the wind hand held full zoom to macro, Summer '99 at Dickins Farm near Sutton. S. Yorkshire, with simple 3:2 repeat phrases from Bartok's Mikrokosmos like a round played on Dad's old piano as roughly and imperfectly as the print - re-filmed off the wall on obsolete DV Cam
Plum Tree Zoom
