Quote:
Lis Rhodes uses often mysterious, dangerous and highly personal images. –Amy Taubin, ‘Village Voice’ New York, 1978‘The film begins in darkness as a woman’s voice is heard over a black screen. The voice is questioning, searching. She will act. But how? Act against what? The bloodstained bed suggests a crime. . . could it be his blood? Could it be her blood? The voice searches for clues. . . . The clues suggest it is language that has trapped her, meanings that have excluded her and a past constructed to control her. Light Reading ends with no single solution. But there is a beginning. Of that she is positive. She will not be looked at but listened to…’ –Felicity Sparrow, ‘Her Image Fades as Her Voice Rises’, publ. The Arts Council 1982, reprinted in ‘Films for Women’, Charlotte Brunsden, Ed., publ. British Film Institute, 1986‘Light Reading is the possibility of a new direction in film, not to be co-opted by an overriding definition.’ –Peter Gidal ‘Materialist Film’ 1989‘Rhodes manipulation of, and dexterity with, cinematic techniques is a constant throughout her work. Light Reading is a technical and aesthetic tour de force of rapid fire editing, myriad techniques, and a compelling text which both manipulates and questions language. The constant themes of repression and the price of rebellion are all anchored around the hypnotic elliptical voice.’ –Gill Henderson, A Directory of British Film & Video Artists, 1996‘Ominous riddle: Light Reading (1978) sedately paced but radical in approach is a constantly shifting filmic collage of photographs, film strip and text. Rhodes’s almost riddlish narration splices together descriptions of the film making process with traces of an ungraspable narrative, hinted at in a photograph of a bloodstained bed to which the film returns, and ominously.’ –Ben Luke London Evening Standard 26 January 2012Selected Screenings : in ‘Lis Rhodes – Dissonance and Disturbance’ – Exhibition ICA London, 2012 ; ‘In person’, Lis Rhodes, Film Museum, Vienna, 2009 ; ‘Essentials : Expression’ : The Secret Masterpieces of Cinema’, Tate Modern, 2008 ; ‘Art and The Feminist Revolution’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2007 ; Anthology Cinema, New York, 1978

263MB | 19m 52s | 765×57 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/F67AA380F308B29/Light_Reading.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post Lis Rhodes – Light Reading (1978) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Shows the surveillance of a woman by overseers who have judged her to be mad. What is most provocative about this film is that it proposes multiple credible points of view even as the woman is being certified insane by the Censors. We voyage into the skull of a woman and peer out to a monumentally static cold waste with planetary slow motion. It is the bunker-eye view.

‘A Cold Draft is drawn from (a drawing of) the conditions produced by ‘liberal’ economics in the UK in the 1980’s. Truth is reckless, certainty a sham, but such is faith in repetition that line by line certainty is drawn. The account may be fictitious, a representation, but the events are the result of the imposition of private ownership.’ – Lis Rhodes 2008

Lis Rhodes makes radical and experimental films and videos that challenge the viewer to reconsider the moving image as a communication medium. She uses film, performance, photography, writing and political analysis to explore the impact of language on perceptions, interactions and social relationships. Rhodes attended North East London Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, and has taught at the RCA and the Slade. A key figure at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, where she was the cinema programmer, she was also a founding member of the feminist film distribution network, Circles. She served as Arts Advisor to the Greater London Council from 1982 to 1985. Rhodes’ works are in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Tate Modern and Arts Council England, and have featured in The Video Show (Serpentine Gallery, 1975), WACK!: Art and The Feminist Revolution (MOCA LA, 2007), The Tanks: Art in Action (Tate Modern, 2012) and Insomnia (Fundació Joan Miró, 2013). The publication of Telling Invents Told coincides with the major exhibition Lis Rhodes: Dissident Lines at Nottingham Contemporary (May to September 2019). A previous career survey, Lis Rhodes: Dissonance and Disturbance, was held at the ICA in 2012. Rhodes received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists in 2012 and the Freelands Award in 2017. She lives and works in London.

438MB | 28m 35s | 765×574 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/A760A4AC89AA6D8/A_Cold_Draft_(Lis_Rhodes_1988).mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post Lis Rhodes – A Cold Draft (1988) first appeared on Cinema of the World.