Shoestring Style Plays With Print
The Age
Thursday July 31, 2008
FILM GUY SHERWIN (with LYNN LOO) Horse Bazaar, 397 Little Lonsdale Street, city, July 29 Penny Webb Reviewer
LONDON film artist (and Melbourne International Film Festival guest) Guy Sherwin and his partner Lynn Loo presented three works to a small but receptive audience at this new-media bar on Tuesday. Sherwin studied painting in the 1960s, but by the early '70s was caught up in the film experiments centred on the London Filmmakers Co-op. Hands-on processing and printing determined the look of his three-minute (100 foot) films from that time (such as At the Academy, 1974, shown at ACMI on Wednesday). And he still processes his own film. However, Sherwin's aesthetic concerns have never been dominated by the systematic approaches of the film formalists among his peers and he is now happily representing his early work with the aid of new media such as mini DV. For his first trip to Australia, Sherwin's program started with a video recording of a performance of Paper Landscape II. Essentially a doubling of live and recorded action by a performer, it is a playful disruption of the spatial and temporal illusion on which representational moving images depend. For more than 30 years, Sherwin has worked with such "expanded cinema" performances. His interactions are often playful, but have a serious intent: to work against passive film-watching. And he does love to manipulate machinery.Also highlighted in these performances is the other dimension he is fascinated with - sound. And the two other works in this program, which was presented by Stream Collective, were superb examples of Sherwin's (and now also Loo's) work in optical sound: Vowels and Consonants, 2005-06 (which also includes sampled sound), and a double-screen presentation of Newsprint #2. (A DVD box set, Guy Sherwin: Optical Sound Films 1971-2007, is available through OtherFilm in Brisbane.) In 1972, he glued newsprint onto clear 16mm film, punching out the sprocket holes so that the strip with the glued-on paper could run through the projector. (At this point in Sherwin's description of this laborious method, a young man sitting next to me clutched at his own hair at the idea of spending a weekend clearing the sprocket holes in many feet of 16mm film.) He then made a film copy of the original. The sounds we heard were generated by the newsprint graphics extending to the optical soundtrack. As Sherwin says, "It's a simple, straightforward job: visual things make sound."For this performance of Newsprint #2, two identical prints of the film were projected superimposed. With a hand on each projector's start button, Sherwin attempted to synchronise the two films by alternately freezing and running the films in the projectors. During brief periods, the image became a strangely pulsing vortex. It was highly dramatic and visually raw - and the work exemplified Sherwin's maxim for production: "Stay in charge. Do it on a shoestring." Sherwin's films have been widely exhibited, but this is his first visit to Australia. He teaches at Middlesex University, the University of Wolverhampton and periodically at the San Francisco Art Institute. Sherwin's partner, Lynn Loo, who has a music background, became interested in experimental film when studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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