Installations/ Expanded Cinema
| Writings on Chris Welsby's Work |
| The following list of writings is incomplete. The filmmaker asks that anyone knowing of other writings on his work, please contact him at: welsby@sfu.ca |
| Thank you |
| ________________ |
| Commentary |
| "Welsby's vision is unique in the context of the English Avant-Garde." (The British Film Institute) |
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"Welsby's work makes it possible to envisage a different kind of relationship between science and art, in which observation is separated from surveillance, and technology from domination." |
| Peter Wollen, in Millennium Film Journal, New York. |
| "The primary achievement of the avant-garde cinema in this area has been to force a contemplation of the natural world in different mediations by the cinematic apparatus. The landscapes of the narrative cinema, as Eisenstein and Bazin suggest, are latent expressionistic theatres, confronting or echoing the minds of the human figures within them. The aleatoric magic Tarkovsky describes in Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1960) ultimately confirms this version of the pathetic fallacy. But there is a fundamental change of aesthetic orientation when there is no actress in the scene, no body on which the snowflakes can land. Snow, Brakhage, Welsby and other landscape film-makers have used cinema to look at the natural beauty of the world, and watching their films we share their surprise and excitement at the disjunctions and the meshings of the rhythms of the world and the temporality of the medium." |
| P. Adams Sitney, "Landscape in the cinema: the rhythms of the world and the camera," Chapter 5 in Landscape, Natural Beauty, and the Arts, edited by Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskel. (Cambridge University Press, 1993). |
| "The significance of the landscape film arises from the fact that they assert the illusionism of cinema through the sensuality of landscape imagery, and simultaneously assert the material nature of the representational process which sustains the illusionism. It is the interdependence of those assertions which makes the films remarkable - the 'shape' and 'content' interact as a systematic whole." |
|
Deke Dusinberre, in "St. George in the Forest: The English Avant-Garde," in Afterimage, Summer 1976. |
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"In Chris Welsby's work the camera is always an obvious presence, either directly visible or lurking off-screen. These days obvious allusions to production are too often shorthand for empty irony, signaling nothing but a twitch of postmodern conceit. But like Jacobs, Welsby – whose films were shown last month at Millennium – illustrates how self-reflexivity can still create a moral, aesthetic. And/or political imperative." |
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Village Voice, April 25th 1989, NYC. |
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| Selected Writings |
| Please click on the linked publication names below to see related articles and resources. |
Experimental Film and Video Anthology |
| Millennium
Film Journal Fall 2006 Issue Nos. 45/46 — HYBRIDS Artist Pages: Chris Welsby Millennium Film Workshop, New York. |
| Ripples
in Time – New Work from Chris Welsby 2004 |
| By Mike Leggett |
| Scan – Journal of Media Arts Culture |
| Blowin' in the Wind - Films by Chris Welsby |
| By Fred Camper |
| From Chicago Reader – On Film |
|
Tide
Line - at the Tate Gallery St Ives |
|
Chris
Welsby - Lost Lake |
| Chris
Welsby - Films/Photographs/Writings 1980 Published by the Arts Council of Great Britain Introduction by Peter Wollen |
| "Landscape in the Cinema: The Rhythms of the World and the Camera" |
|
| The
Village Voice April 25th 1989 NYC by Manohla Dargis |
| Abstract
Film and Beyond 1977 Current Developments, by Malcolm Le Grice, pp. 124–126, 129. Studio Vista, an imprint of Cassel & Collier Macmillan Publishers Ltd., London. |
| Afterimage Summer 1976 No. 6 (Special Issue: Perspectives on English Independent Cinema). St. George in the Forest: The English Avant-Garde, by Deke Dusinberre, pp. 11–13. Edited by Simon Field. Afterimage Publishing, London. |
| Cantrills Filmnotes December 1990 Numbers 63, 64 (Twentieth Anniversary double issue), pp. 44–53 (A review of independent cinema and video edited and published by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, Box 1295L, G.P.O., Melbourne, Vic. 3001, Australia.) |
| Perspectives
on British Avant-Garde Film March–April 1977 At the Hayward Gallery, London (Gallery Programme Notes). Landscape 1 by Chris Welsby. Arts Council of Great Britain, London. |
| Film
as Film: Formal Experiment in Film May–June 1979 Hayward Gallery Exhibition, London, p. 150. The Arts Council of Great Britain, London. |
| Undercut 7/8 Spring 1983 Number 7/8 (Special Issue on Landscape in Film, Photography, and Video). Interview with Chris Welsby by Michael O'Pray and William Raban, pp. 69–77. London Film-makers' Co-op, London. |
| Millennium
Film Journal Fall/Winter 1986–1987 Nos. 16/17/18 (Millennium Film Workshop: 20th Anniversary Issue). Landscape, Meteorology, and Chris Welsby by Peter Wollen, pp. 208–211. Millennium Film Workshop, New York. |
| Film als Film
1910 Bis Heute 1978 Academie der Künste, Berlin, 1978, pp.184, 253, 258. |
|
The British
Avant Garde Film 1926–1995 |
| The Oxford
History of World Cinema 1996 Oxford University Press, p. 548. |
| A History of
Experimental Film and Video 1999 A. L. Rees, BFI Publishing, pp. 2, 80–81, 93, 116–117. |
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