This is Now: film and video after punk (Part One)

The first of our This is Now film screenings takes place on October 22nd. This is Now: film and video after punk is a screening series at CCA offered in partnership with LUX and BFI National Archive. Curated by William Fowler (Curator of Artists’ Moving Image, BFI National Archive), This is Now: Film and Video After Punk looks at artists’ film and video from the early 1980s, a unique moment when cheap new technologies enabled new voices to be heard and the DIY approach of punk was reinvigorated.

The BFI National Archive has restored twenty Super 8 and 16mm films from this period, including work by John Maybury, Cerith Wyn Evans and John Smith, and the majority of titles are presented for the first time in over three decades.

Find details of screenings two and three here.

Grayson Perry, Anna Thew and Steven Chivers conjure strange, new, lo-fi worlds with the help of close friends and collaborators, resisting both modern, Christian patriarchy and the conventions of traditional movie-making. Folk tales and arcane beliefs are re-imagined on Super 8 and London is turned into a bleak, austere, post-apocalyptic world.

Lost For Words, UK, 1980, dir. Anna Thew, 26 min; The Green Witch and Merry Diana, UK, 1984, dir. Grayson Perry, 20 min; Men Without Hats: Safety Dance, UK, 1982, dir. Tim Pope, 3 min; Catherine De Medicis Part 2, UK, 1984, dir. Steven Chivers, 25 min

Provocative filmmakers in the early 1980s pursued occult interests, treating the moving image like a mirror or a crystal ball; a surface of divination to remap perception and question distinctions between what is and what might be, the objective and the subjective, the body and the mind. The programme includes challenging, transgressive work originally connected to the industrial scene.

The Wound, UK, 1984, dir. Jill Westwood, 18 min; Winter Journey in the Hartz Mountains, UK, 1983, dir. Cordelia Swann, 12 min; Liquid Video, UK, 1983, dir. Michael Kostiff, 10 min; The Branks, UK, 1982, dir. Akiko Hada, 7 min; All Veneer and No Backbone, UK, 1980-84, dir. Holly Warburton, 5 min; 23 Skidoo: F.U.G.I., UK, 1983, dir. Richard Heslop, 5 min; Grayson/Flowers/Jewels, UK, 1985, dir. Jennifer Binnie, 3 min; Lyrical Doubt, UK, 1984, dir. Judith Goddard, 16 min

Distributed by Lux with the support of the BFI, awarding funds from The National Lottery

Image: Still from All Veneer and No Backbone, Holly Warburton 1980–84