Obsessed with de/reconstructing our corrupted visions of media, celebrity and appearance, Johan Grimonprez assembled a bewildering gaggle of Hitchcock lookalikes, staggering in girth and exacting in attitude, in a quest to find the most accurate specimen.
Make it new John tells the story of the DeLorean car, its creator John DeLorean and the workers of the Belfast-based car plant who built it. The film deftly contrasts the DeLorean dream with its spectacular downfall during a critical period in Northern Ireland's history, and the canonisation of the car - the DMC12 - as a symbol of the American myth of mobility. As with the earlier works such as Bernadette (2008) and Falls Burns Malone Fiddles (2003), in Make it New John, Campbell fuses a documentary aesthetic with fictive moments, using existing archive news and documentary footage from the 1980s as well as new 16mm footage which imagines conversations between DeLorean factory workers. Campbell questions the documentary genre and reflects here on broader existential themes and narrative drives.
Continuing her recent collection of film portraits, Tacita Dean’s Michael Hamburger is a moving portrayal of the poet and translator, a resident of Middleton in Suffolk and great friend of W.G. Sebald.
As we follow The Seeker, who moves between the city and the sanctuary, "MASS" carves out the intimate communal spaces and intangible signals that characterise the contemporary Black experience.
Triggered by a pamphlet of instructions for pro-democracy demonstrators, called How to Protest Intelligently, Hold Your Ground dissects the semantics of the crowd, and the resulting performative speech act.
