Black Drop (dir. Simon Starling, 28 min.)

Simon Starling's 'Black Drop' is a film about the beginning (and end) of the film medium. A medium, which was really a bi-product of the scientific experiments of the 1870s to map outer space, as we learn from a man who is sitting at the editing table and trying to bring coherence into some 35mm footage shot in Hawaii and Tahiti in connection with the planet Venus's transit phase in June 2012 - a phenomenon that was filmed for the first time by the French astronomer Jules Janssen, and which will only take place again in 2117, at a point when celluloid-based film will have b€een passé for about 100 years. Janssen's 'chronophotographic' technique grew from a desire to eliminate human fallibility in the objective representation of reality, and had a great influence on Étienne Jules-Marey and the Lumière brothers' further development of the film medium. With the shadow of Venus as a black drop on the white circle of the sun, Starling has found a beautiful and simple motif, which is just as enigmatic as the complex narrative that he binds together over one and a half hours to an infinitely fascinating and timeless whole.

The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott (dir. Luke Fowler, 61 min.)

The paradigm shift from an authoritarian to a (self-)critical educational policy in post-war Europe takes shape in the form of the Marxist British historian and scholar Edward Palmer Thompson, who in post-war England became a public figure in his fight for reforms. Luke Fowler makes Thompson's discursive method his own, and the man himself the subject of an archive-based (institutional) analysis of the period's revolutionary ideals in an archeological synthesis of materials, from the time when TV debates still took the democratic objective seriously. At the age of just 24 years, Thompson was employed by The Workers' Education Association to teach industrial workers literature and history - a social class, that previously had not had access to university education. His Marxist programme also became the platform for the new, interdisciplinary 'Cultural Studies' tradition, which especially revolutionised academic practice after 1968. Is William Blake's poem 'London', for example, a poetic elegy of a soulless metropolis's blackened sadness? Or is it an analysis of the concrete social reality in the English capital of the 18th century, after the French but before the industrial revolution? The interpretation remains in the hands of the readers - but the reader himself is in turn influenced by society's dominant ideology and values. Fowler here develops his interest for forgotten (cultural) personalities, who have stood for the most radical cultural revolutions of the recent past. The question is, what have we learned since?

Simon Starling's 'Black Drop' is a film about the beginning (and end) of the film medium. A medium, which was really a bi-product of the scientific experiments of the 1870s to map outer space, as we learn from a man who is sitting at the editing table and trying to bring coherence into some 35mm footage shot in Hawaii and Tahiti in connection with the planet Venus's transit phase in June 2012 - a phenomenon that was filmed for the first time by the French astronomer Jules Janssen, and which will only take place again in 2117, at a point when celluloid-based film will have been passé for about 100 years. Janssen's 'chronophotographic' technique grew from a desire to eliminate human fallibility in the objective representation of reality, and had a great influence on Étienne Jules-Marey and the Lumière brothers' further development of the film medium. With the shadow of Venus as a black drop on the white circle of the sun, Starling has found a beautiful and simple motif, which is just as enigmatic as the complex narrative that he binds together over half an hour to an infinitely fascinating and timeless whole.

'Black Drop' is screening with 'The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott'.

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The paradigm shift from an authoritarian to a (self-)critical educational policy in post-war Europe takes shape in the form of the Marxist British historian and scholar Edward Palmer Thompson, who in post-war England became a public figure in his fight for reforms. Luke Fowler makes Thompson's discursive method his own, and the man himself the subject of an archive-based institutional analysis of the period's revolutionary ideals in an archeological synthesis of materials from a time when TV still took the democratic objective seriously. At the age of just 24, Thompson was employed by The Workers' Education Association to teach industrial workers literature and history - a social class, that previously had not had access to university education. His Marxist programme also became the platform for the new, interdisciplinary 'Cultural Studies' tradition, which especially revolutionised academic practice after 1968. Is William Blake's poem 'London', for example, a poetic elegy of a soulless metropolis's blackened sadness? Or is it an analysis of the concrete social reality in the English capital of the 18th century, after the French but before the industrial revolution? Fowler here develops his interest for forgotten personalities that shaped modern culture, and who have stood for the most radical cultural revolutions of the recent past.

'The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott' is screening with 'Black Drop'.

• Credits
• Contact