Framing Jarman New Tate Visual Arts Channel in Beta

Film Studies For Free wanted to rush you the great news that the Tate has just launched a new, highly elegant and very user-friendly channel to enable the viewing (and embedding - yay!) of hundreds of videos about visual arts, like the great film above in which James Mackay, friend of British film artist Derek Jarman, talks about Jarmans experimental work on super 8. These films that he began making in the 1970s are rarely shown. Mackay, who later produced some of Jarman’s feature films including The Garden (1990) and Blue (1993), agreed to open up his archive of these ground-breaking short films for TateShots.

FSFF also came across an even more detailed interview with Mackay about his work with Jarman here at the 400blows website. You can also find interviews there with the following people about their work and friendships with this filmmaker: Jenny Runacre; Simon Fisher Turner; Tilda Swinton; Peter Tatchell; Christopher Hobbs; Tony Peake; Tariq Ali; Ron Peck; and Gaye Temple;

FSFF has only just begun to explore the riches and the capabilities of the new Tate channel; it gleefully urges you to do the same. But it closes, today, happily in a Derek Jarman frame of mind with a sublime Jarman artifact, from his 1987 short Aria, starring Tilda Swinton, music by Gustave Charpentier from his opera Louise with its aria Depuis le jour, sung here by Leontyne Price:

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Expanded Cinema and Video Art Tate Video and Essays from REWIND Cubitt Atherton Hatfield

Expanded Cinema: Activating the Space of Reception. A Tate Video - Works identified as Expanded Cinema often open up questions surrounding the spectators construction of time/space relations, activating the spaces of cinema and narrative as well as other contexts of media reception. In doing so it offers an alternative and challenging perspective on filmmaking, visual arts practices and the narratives of social space, everyday life and cultural communication.

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you more choice links to valuable resources on the topics of expanded cinema and video art. Not only the wonderful Tate Video embedded above but also, courtesy of a great scholarly website -- REWIND - Artists Film & Video in the 70s and 80s -- the following essays:

• Greyscale Video and the Shift to Colour by Prof. Sean Cubitt, University of Melbourne, Australia. View a pdf of the Essay in Art Journal, Fall 2006 edition here. A video essay version of the paper is viewable here.
  

• Projection: Vanishing and Becoming by Prof. Sean Cubitt, University of Melbourne, Australia. In Grau, Oliver, Eds. MediaArtHistories, pages pp. 407-422. MIT Press. View a pdf of the Essay here.

• The Trouble with Video Art by Kevin Atherton, Head of Media, National College of Art & Design, Dublin. View a pdf of the Essay here.

• Expanded Cinema - And the "Cinema of Attractions" by Dr. Jackie Hatfield. (Published in Filmwaves, Issue 27/1/2005). View a pdf of the Essay here.

• The Subject in Expanded Cinema by Dr. Jackie Hatfield. (Published in Filmwaves, Issue 24/2/2004). View a pdf of the Essay here.

An addendum: if you live in London, or care about cinema in that city, Film Studies For Free urges you, please, to visit the website of the Picture Palace Campaign for the regeneration of the former art deco cinema, now bingo hall, soon to be (possibly) evangelical church, at 25 Church Road, SE19 (Crystal Palace). It was originally built in 1928 as a cinema and the beautiful interior was designed by the renowned cinema architect George Coles (see also here).

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