Stephen Dwoskin

“My grandfather was a charming artist and he would have acted if he had had an audience. In this film, taken from family images, it is a simple pear that is the object of his panache.”Read More »

`Suddenly and sadly my dear friend Frances died. At that moment of loss I needed to hold on to her. The film is just that.’Read More »

‘An ode to my father, and perhaps to all fathers. Called a “moving painting” by my sister, the film blends found family footage of the young and the ageing father. It takes the tiny gestures of daily life and turns them into the monumental moments of tenderness and respect.’Read More »

Quote:
DIRTY is the reincarnation of two girls, a bottle and one bed. Their bodies, hands and face expressions reach out in a refilm look.Read More »

This autobiographical film evolves from the perspective of events and images over a period of over 50 years.Read More »

continuing with liner notes by Michel Barthelemy :
“This is probably a good time to mention Dwoskin’s use of comedy : Outside in is a film that deals with disability but is also funny and even burlesque. Of course, only the disabled can use this mode to stage themselves as disabled characters.
Bergson states not only that “a deformity thay may become comic is a deformity that a normally built person, could succesfully imitate” but also that “the impression of the comic will be produced (…) when we are shown the soul tantalised by the needs of the body : on the one hand, the moral personnality with its intelligently varied energy, and on the other, the stupidly monotonous body, perpetually obstructing everything with its machine-like obstinacy. The more paltry and uniformly repeated these claims of the body, the more striking will be the result”Read More »

Without turning his back on his earlier experiments with testing the boundaries, Dwoskin made fictional films, including a superb adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Tod und Teufel, in which voids and slips are filmed during acts of speech, rather than the characters and their actions.Read More »

given how he arrived in the world of film, Dwoskin is usually considered to be an experimental film-maker, which he, like any genuine artist, evidently is, but this attitude leads to a misunderstanding, and makes his films difficult to distribute, because his films are immediatly assumed (in a humdrum, unthinking world) to be primarly dominated by considerations of form rather than substance, and thus not only inaccessible to, but also uninterested in attracting, a broader audience
But Dwoskin words do not bear this out. As early as 1981, he explained how “Behindert was intended for a television audience and it was easier to get my message accross by showing myself directly on screen. My aim is to make films that work both in the cinema and on television”(…)Read More »

‘The Silent Cry is a fictionalised narrative film, based on documentary facts and extracts of one English girl’s memories and thoughts, all surrounded, and directed towards her particular dilemma. This dilemma can be summarized as her basic inability to have relationships, especially sustained relationships, and particularly with men. This is the total of her statement and the film. The construction and flow of the film follows the way she thinks – it is her point of view that is followed in the film. So all things are the way she remembers and dwells on them, and which are important to her.’ – S.D.Read More »