Tonight we are golden brings together fourteen films from the six programmes that made up the first season of S1 / salon for a series of screenings in venues ranging from experimental cinemas and artist-led spaces to national centres for contemporary art.

  
 
 
 
 

Castlefield Gallery / 18 February
Phoenix Arts / 15 March
FACT  / 16 March
Side Cinema / 17 March
ICA / 4 April
Outpost / 23 April
Spike Island  / 1 May
Vivid / 14 June

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Elena Näsänen (Helsinki)
Drive 2003
9’15”
A road movie following a lone woman’s cyclical journey in a snowy landscape. Sound from absent car chases, police sirens and violent collisions gradually drown out noise from the engine as the driver picks up speed on icy roads.
Gil Pasternak (London)
Untitled 2003
34”
A thirty-four second film composed of one hundred and thirty-four digital still photographs of the night sky. Pasternak took the images from the window of his flat during several hours of observation. Each photograph has been exposed for sixty personally-counted seconds so that star and aircraft trails have written themselves into the image.
Matthew Noel-Tod (London)
Jetzt Im Kino 2003
11’40”
Jetzt Im Kino (literally, “Now in Cinema”) weaves excerpts from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film, Rudolf Arnheim’s Film as Art, David Cooper’s polemical psychology book The Grammar of Living and writings from and around Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film The Marriage of Maria Braun into a hybrid narrative floating across the cityscape of modern Berlin.
Lucy Purdon (London)
Douglas 2003
9’15”
Douglas used to run a cinema, showing action movies from his home in Riruta village, Nairobi, Kenya, he called it “Studio America”. To Douglas the ‘American dream’ represents “absolute freedom”. Purdon’s short documentary is a portrait of a Hollywood-mad electrician.
Sara Fletcher & Edward Adam (Cardiff)
A Phantom Treat Exposed 2003
3’20”
Filmed on Super-8, hand processed and then transferred to DVD, A Phantom Treat Exposed is a striptease in reverse order. Clothes appear to fly onto the body of a masked lady so that we watch her vanish limb by limb as she melts into the background. In the final frames a dustsheet swoops down to shroud her completely.
Lapinu (Bronchiniole Wood)
The Marcel Duchamp’s Rock 2003
4’41”
Lapinu is a direct descendant of popular art rabbits. A prolific rodent, producing videos, drawings and music. In this film the six-foot white rabbit combines dungarees and dancing with art-historical burlesque and psychedelic graphics.

 

 Burgundy Leisure
(London & Norwich)
Celebrity Wedding of the Year sponsored by Burgundy Leisure 2002
5’ 07”
Burgundy Leisure is a fictitious light entertainment company invented by artist Susannah Hewlett in collaboration with Pete Beck and Russell Purdham. Manager Stanley Handson promotes artistes, look-a-likes, puppeteers, strippers and cabaret acts from his HQ in Backford, Norfolk. In this Super-8 film Stan sponsors his niece, Golda Yarmouth’s wedding day. Tears, trauma and lots of Cava.
Jill Miller (San Francisco)
I am Making Art Too 2003
3’ 31”
Miller inserts herself into John Baldessari’s 1971 video performance piece, I am Making Art, transforming his meditative gestures so that they both appear to be dancing to the Missy Elliott soundtrack. All I am Making Art footage used with the enthusiastic permission of John Baldessari.
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay (Toronto)
I Am a Boyband 2002
5’ 12”
A cloned boyband co-opt an Elizabethan madrigal about heartbreak and lost love to a pop-synth backbeat. Nemerofsky plays all four members of the group, honeyed singing and well-oiled dance steps parody sameness in contemporary culture and mass produced articulations of masculinity, love and relationships.
Mika Tajima (New York)
Solo Project 2001
2’ 34”
Taking the idea of a band or an orchestra Tajima has formed a group, playing all the necessary band members herself. She creates a visual and aural pattern, and although the piece obliterates itself, the chaos accumulating a strange order.
The Cartwright Brothers (London & Manchester)
The Heap 2003
3’04”
A digital fantasy where pixel creatures wander the forest and gravitate inexorably towards the rhythmic splendour that is the quivering heap of primal matter. Creatures are drawn to and transfixed by the elemental fountain as it achieves a state of wild transfiguration. A wonder of fecundity, the spitting geyser taps deep into its mucilaginous reservoir, its ceaseless convulsions describing a natural cycle of life, death and compostation.
McCormack & Gent
(Sheffield, London)
Rampy 2000
2’48”
Rampy features a miniature mobile ramp and its encounters in the East End of London. Like all of us the ramp is shaped by its wish to measure-up, to find a place where it can fit in. The soundtrack is herb soup by My Little Problem.
Graeme Stonehouse (Sheffield)
The Nelson Riddle 2002
11’
The Nelson Riddle was filmed during Mike Nelson’s exhibition, Nothing is True Everything is Permitted at the ICA in London. Stonehouse investigates the mysterious appearance and subsequent disappearance of the “Nelson’s Ices” van parked at the back entrance to Mike Nelson’s installation.
Francis Gomila (Newcastle)
Night Out 2002
11’35”
A high-rise view of a drunken conflict between a man and a woman on the streets of Newcastle. Police come and go, the group is dispersed and the camera follows as the man wanders. Filmed in one take, Gomila’s only intervention with the narrative is a melancholic soundtrack.