Art and Time | Film

Artist film making is connected to technologies of vision and in turn to those technology's complicated and fascinating relationship to our own eyes and consciousness. Technologies of moving image do and have expanded, limited and influenced the ways that we think about memory, about power and about time.

Thinking with images and through images as they speak to each other, contradict one another and morph between specificity and abstraction is one of the great privileges of film making. Editing allows us to have a conversation with the past from the present. It allows us to find connections that have been obscured by common sense and speak directly to the rhythms of other human bodies.

Most film making necessitates collaboration. Within a pedagogical situation, film making can also be an opportunity to think about social bodies and shared experience. Film making, like music, requires both discipline and letting go. It contains all the contradictions of needing artifice to appear natural and rigour to seem relaxed. 
Film making is haunted by all the films that have been made and all the lives that have been lived out within the echoes of films gone by. The proximity of film to mainstream moving image provides a fertile space for artists from which to create, comment and divert.

The intersection between art and film has always been a place where ideas can test themselves within fantasy and lived experience, where the powerful to the displaced can tell their sides of the story, where industry influences and disorientates and makers stand firm against that disorientation. Film making is a part of structures of power that are reflected in sight lines of who gets to see whom and where perspectives can be highlighted and shifted. Cameras allow us to get close to things that are far away and zoom back to see things that were previously discrete. This mobility of seeing and its relationship to surveillance and intimacy is important for artists. That artists have the dexterity to use this medium which is much younger than painting or sculpture has a fascinating provenance and an important future.

- Emily Wardill