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Mechanical Ballet

The original material that forms the basis for Mechanical Ballet is an anonymous short reel of film of what appears to be car crash tests, carried out in a deadpan and somewhat cumbersome manner. Reworked into a two-screen film and divorced from their original context, they take on both a sinister and humorous quality. Mechanical Ballet was born out of an interest in ‘found footage’ film (in its relation to collage and assemblage) and the possibilities offered by the London Film-Makers’ Co-op workshop in terms of manipulation of the filmstrip and the film frame, projection, duration and the film printing process.

Mechanical Ballet

NR 1975
The Most Powerful Politician in America

Alabama governor George Wallace made his name as a segregationist remembered for standing “in the schoolhouse door” of the University of Alabama in 1963 in an attempt to stop the enrolment of black students. John Pilger subsequently interviewed Wallace on the campaign trail during two general elections.During the second, in 1972, Wallace was shot in an assassination attempt, leaving him paralysed and in a wheelchair. In The Most Powerful Politician in America, made in 1974, Pilger looks at the likelihood that a reinvented Wallace will run for the White House two years later, manipulating contemporary American passions and exploiting his influence in the powerful “Dixie” states controlled by the Democratic Party.

The Most Powerful Politician in America

NR 1974
Windowframe

Windowframe is an investigation of the way in which we may perceive a specific image – that of two people, seen through a window, involved in some activity. This is the image seen at the opening of the film. Subsequent sections of the film present to the viewer differing juxtapositions of the four segments of this image which are created by the cross-bars of the window. Tensions are created between what we expect to see, and what we do see. We see the original image as a single whole.

Windowframe

NR 1976
An Unjustifiable Risk

The potential dangers of nuclear weapons and the planned new breed of plutonium-fuelled reactors are the subject of An Unjustifiable Risk, made in 1977. John Pilger begins by explaining that just a speck of plutonium, the main component of an atomic bomb, can cause cancer, but there is no absolutely safe way of storing, protecting or transporting it. Although the government is planning to build the first commercial nuclear power station fuelled by plutonium – a so-called fast-breeder reactor intended to solve the country’s energy problems – an independent royal commission has declared the process dangerous.

An Unjustifiable Risk

NR 1977
Van Morrison: Live at The Rainbow

Van Morrison’s classic 1974 live album It’s Too Late to Stop Now is generally considered to be one of the greatest concert recordings of all time. For it, he was backed by probably the best band he had ever (or would ever) assembled. The eleven-piece Caledonia Soul Orchestra, which included strings and a horn section. The group was a finely tuned rhythm and blues machine, able to stop and start on a dime. The Rainbow show was taped by the BBC. The following year, after the album came out in February–lavishly packaged in a triptych fold-out cover– the concert was simulcast on BBC 2 television and on Radio 2 in FM stereo for “stereo TV” on May 27th, 1973.

Van Morrison: Live at The Rainbow

NR 1973
The Ten Commandments of Love

Two people in an impassioned embrace on an ocean pier as Harvey and the Moonglows start singing “The Ten Commandments of Love”. “In the autumn of 1979 I was looking through a stack of old film stills in a secondhand record shop. I found a still from King Creole and decided that I would make a film from it. I had 10 new prints made from the still and hand tinted all of them. I seem to recall that at the time the image of 1950’s love on the waterfront was irresistible, although with hindsight the film looks like an exercise in formalism” (Cordelia Swann)

The Ten Commandments of Love

10.0 1979