God Save the Queen

Also in this combined programme

• Busby Berkeley’s Tribute to Mae West

  The meeting of Hollywood’s most famous choregrapher and one of its most famous quotes: ‘Is that a gun in your pocket?’ (Mae West)

  • exploding cinema
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  Till Death Do Us Join

  Men in uniform, naked men, men in tailored suits wearing bowler hats. The digital video collage Till Death Do Us Join is an Orwellian vision, acted out by militairy guards and masked preachers of good morals. The surreal chain of morbid rituals can be explained as a meditation on the institute of marriage. But it […]

  • exploding cinema
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  Manthrax

  Manthrax has been created from re-edited video footage at the Mr Olympia 1980 annual body building contest, starring the then world famous muscle men Frank Zane and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The film maker’s intention was simply to highlight the homo-erotic overtones that are overt in this video and within the sport itself. With the recent instalment […]

  • exploding cinema
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  Feathered Water (Moby Dick)

  With archive material from the Imperial War Museum, Griffin shows the complexity of reactions to a strange example of military technology. At first sight, marine creatures seem to call each other from the deep. A white Polaris evokes different associations: from the symbol for large-scale surveillance operations from the Cold War, to metaphors from Melville’s […]

  • exploding cinema
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  MM

  Like an alien spacecraft landed on a poisoned wasteland, the Millennium Dome makes a fitting tribute to the works of New Labour. Taking the Dome as a potent architectural symbol of the new millennium, MM is a meditation upon time reflecting the changing landscape in London’s East End. After the festive year, the construction turned […]

  • exploding cinema
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  The Remote Controller

  People Like Us samples and mixes existing images and sound from so-called Orphan Films -educational films from the Prelinger Archive in San Francisco and New York. The result is an ironic look at the successes and failures in the history of the experiment with physical and machine interfaces in the 20th century.

  • exploding cinema
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  Punch

  A hand becomes a weapon. Our hands can be opened to greet, caress and touch or, as in this case, they can strike out to cause pain. Punch is a metaphor for the violence that forms the backdrop to our lives. Punch mirrors a world of Hollywood action films, real-time war coverage, domestic violence and […]

  • exploding cinema
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  Cultural Quarter

  Cultural Quarter shows the relations between observation in the city and its inhabitants. In this way, Mike Stubbs tackles ethical questions surrounding surveillance, the look and human behaviour. The film reveals some of the gaps between the dreams of developers and the opinions of urban dwellers about what cultural space means and how it should […]

  • exploding cinema
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  The Whale

  The Whale is a reflection of the micro-politics of contemporary events through black images, images of everyday life and offscreen narration that transcends death. The late Ulrike Meinhof provides the historic perspective with a simultaneous translation.

  • exploding cinema
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  Dad’s Dead

  A young man tries to piece together fragmented moments from the past, memories being triggered by admiration for his best friend Johnno. As the story unfolds, hero worship turns to revulsion, as the web of deception and violence that Johnno creates is revealed. Manipulated live action mutates and combines with ghostly digital animation.

  • exploding cinema
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  Mother Nature

  Zeke Roberts speaks about his life and how he spends his time for a project sponsored by Hull Time-Based Arts (www.speechless.org.uk). He is seen chatting with his mate, Paddy, close to his home, on the (then) impending war in Afghanistan.

  • exploding cinema