Wednesday, October 8, 2008

October 8, 2008


Showing October 8!

James Nares

ROOF
1975. 1/2» video.
Self portrait as a head adrift in the city.


RAMP
1976. S8 to 16mm.
A concrete ball on the off ramp to the old West Side Highway.

NO JAPS AT MY FUNERAL
1980. 3/4» video.
«No Japs at my Funeral» is a deconstructive propaganda piece that demolishes the British version of events in Northern Ireland. It is an eloquent statement about brutality and victims, told mainly by Jackie, an IRA man whose personal account is intercut with images from British television. No Japs has the same formal properties as a typical TV «documentary», but is aimed to show the bias of what is known on TV as «truth»
Gary Indiana. East Village Eye. Summer 1980.


WAITING FOR THE WIND
1982 (?) S8 to 16mm.
«Waiting for the wind is a technical tour de force. Nares creates a tornado-like catastrophe with a hand-held super-8 camera, a shooting ratio of three to one (about $100 worth of film stock), and remarkable timing…fine filmmaking control is used to suggest the terror of a world completely beyond personal control…Nares opens up the possibility of metaphor, evoking forces both terrifying and exhilarating.»
Amy Taubin. Soho Weekly News. June 1982.


THE LIGHTHOUSE
1991 Hi 8 video (30.00 minutes)
A wandering being, in search of sustenance in a wintry wasteland, experiences a strange transformation, which grants him insight into the possibility of a solution to his predicament.
This film, which was shot during the winter of 1990-1991, had been abandoned before the finished edit and remained thus until 2007, when Nares returned to it and brought it to completion.