Information below on The Maintenance of Silence, The Everyman and Kiwi Animation...
THE MAINTENANCE OF SILENCE
16mm 22 minutesTHE MAINTENANCE OF SILENCE
Colour Sound 1985
** Attending in-person, direct from Miami, filmmaker William Keddell.
On November 18, 1982, Neil Roberts, a 22 year old Aucklander daubed a washroom wall with the graffiti slogan ‘WE HAVE MAINTAINED A SILENCE CLOSELY RESEMBLING STUPIDITY’ then placed a bomb outside the State Security Computer Centre at Wanganui – where files are kept on all citizens. The bomb blew Neil Roberts to pieces.
The film’s central character, Eric, wakes at the exact moment of the explosion, having a déjà vu experience.
Eric sets out to trace Neil Robert’s movements and motivations.
From talking to Neil Robert’s friends and family Keddell was able to form an image of Roberts as somebody with intelligence, highly literate, politically aware and certainly not the maniac depressive he was portrayed as in the media.
Keddell hoped to question the political dimensions of the act and what the graffiti statement actually meant.
“Anxious images are edited with dream logic and complemented by eerily dislocated music and dramatically heightened natural sound in William Keddell’s expressionist film THE MAINTENANCE OF SILENCE … the film’s power derives from its emotional and visual forcefulness. It is a sometimes dazzling exercise in nightmare (there’s a beautifully edited levitation and uncanny lighting of car travel). Director Keddell has a fine eye … and looks like a talent to watch.”
Tom McWilliams, NZ Listener (October 1985).
DIRECTOR: WILLIAM KEDDELL
Returning to New Zealand in 1982 after spending a decade in Europe studying art and making experimental films such as ERIC 1 and THE MONSTERS OF ACHANALT, William Keddell set about producing and directing music videos of New Zealand rock bands the Miltown Stoways, Big Sideways and Screaming Meemees. Around this time Neil Roberts blew himself up as protest against the storing of all New Zealanders into a single police computer or, as Eric, a character in THE MAINTENANCE OF SILENCE (1985) puts it, ‘The State home to files of personal information on all citizens.’
Keddell became intrigued both by Roberts’ motives and media representations of his act. Keddell’s innovative THE MAINTENANCE OF SILENCE screened widely throughout North America as a part of the travelling Invisible Cinema series of New Zealand experimental films. The film featured an innovative soundtrack by Steve Roach, former member of the Techtones, Sheerlux and the Stridulators. Both Keddell and Roach shared the belief that all sound is music. Roach incorporated natural sound, at times mixing up to 25 tracks.
Since 1987 Keddell has resided in the United States, first in New York then later Miami, producing stereographic photographic art works which present various dimensional conundrums and spatial anomalies.
www.williamkeddell.com
THE EVERYMAN
By Brent Hayward
Filmmaker, performance artist and musician Brent Hayward has achieved legendary status for producing challenging transgressive art in whatever medium he works in. Former member of the Wellington punk band SHOES THIS HIGH, then later SMELLY FEET, THE KIWI ANIMAL and FATS WHITE, Hayward took up filmmaking in the 1980s and has produced over a dozen films.
THE EVERYMAN is Hayward’s moving visual sermon for the marginalized, the dispossessed and forgotten members of society.
www.clubbizarre.co.nz
Miriam Harris
Auckland animator Miriam Harris' ROARING, SOARING, DIVING imaginatively explores themes of memory and loss around metaphors of water sports in a South Pacific summer. Harris employs home movie footage, animation, and collage to render beach scenes in random relation to sharks, whales, Captain Cook, a Cook Islands postage stamp featuring a waka, and a lifebuoy - as loosely associated images in a seemingly casual or poetic relation to one another.
Dan Inglis
Dan's animations represent humans as distanced alienated subjects caught somewhere between technology and self.
Raewyn Turner
Raewyn Turner worked with Split Enz from 1975 to 1983 touring with them throughout Australasia, Europe and North America. Her work for the ENZ involved light and set design for their stage and television appearances. Turner also painted the cover for the 1979 Split Enz album FRENZY.
Turner's CYCLE ENGINES, with sound by Eddie Rayner, is an abstract animated film of swirling patterns and cosmic images which unite as a form of visual music.
James Robinson and Rowan Wernham ** Attending in-person, direct from New York, Rowan Wernham
Artist James Robinson inititally conceived of his film X.O. GENESIS (2009) as a way of continuing his childhood obsession with making model spaceships which he sees as vehicles of consciousness, dreams, escapism and alienation. X.O. GENESIS takes the form of an interplanetary creation and destruction myth which could begin, "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." Here its humanoid inhabitants are subjected to information overload, pollution (as alien eco-abortion, over consumption and surveillance in a petro-chemical nightmare that ultimately leads to war.
In FREEKS FORMULER (c2007) James Robinson layers words upon words and images in the manner of a graffiti scrawled cinematic report on the movements of his consciousness. Like a moving visual rant, FREEKS FORMULER is an explicit and organic revelation of the thinking and creative processes through which the artist realizes his singular vision.
Speaking of his work the self-taught artist Robinson, winner of the 2007 Wallace Art Award says,
"I'm trying to embody associations and memories searching for meaning. The only way for me to do that is to portray real things from my life ... All you can expect from good art is that it mirrors the psyche of the person who made it."
More coming, watch this space.
Eric sets out to trace Neil Robert’s movements and motivations.
From talking to Neil Robert’s friends and family Keddell was able to form an image of Roberts as somebody with intelligence, highly literate, politically aware and certainly not the maniac depressive he was portrayed as in the media.
Keddell hoped to question the political dimensions of the act and what the graffiti statement actually meant.
“Anxious images are edited with dream logic and complemented by eerily dislocated music and dramatically heightened natural sound in William Keddell’s expressionist film THE MAINTENANCE OF SILENCE … the film’s power derives from its emotional and visual forcefulness. It is a sometimes dazzling exercise in nightmare (there’s a beautifully edited levitation and uncanny lighting of car travel). Director Keddell has a fine eye … and looks like a talent to watch.”
Tom McWilliams, NZ Listener (October 1985).
DIRECTOR: WILLIAM KEDDELL
Returning to New Zealand in 1982 after spending a decade in Europe studying art and making experimental films such as ERIC 1 and THE MONSTERS OF ACHANALT, William Keddell set about producing and directing music videos of New Zealand rock bands the Miltown Stoways, Big Sideways and Screaming Meemees. Around this time Neil Roberts blew himself up as protest against the storing of all New Zealanders into a single police computer or, as Eric, a character in THE MAINTENANCE OF SILENCE (1985) puts it, ‘The State home to files of personal information on all citizens.’
Keddell became intrigued both by Roberts’ motives and media representations of his act. Keddell’s innovative THE MAINTENANCE OF SILENCE screened widely throughout North America as a part of the travelling Invisible Cinema series of New Zealand experimental films. The film featured an innovative soundtrack by Steve Roach, former member of the Techtones, Sheerlux and the Stridulators. Both Keddell and Roach shared the belief that all sound is music. Roach incorporated natural sound, at times mixing up to 25 tracks.
Since 1987 Keddell has resided in the United States, first in New York then later Miami, producing stereographic photographic art works which present various dimensional conundrums and spatial anomalies.
www.williamkeddell.com
THE EVERYMAN
By Brent Hayward
Filmmaker, performance artist and musician Brent Hayward has achieved legendary status for producing challenging transgressive art in whatever medium he works in. Former member of the Wellington punk band SHOES THIS HIGH, then later SMELLY FEET, THE KIWI ANIMAL and FATS WHITE, Hayward took up filmmaking in the 1980s and has produced over a dozen films.
THE EVERYMAN is Hayward’s moving visual sermon for the marginalized, the dispossessed and forgotten members of society.
www.clubbizarre.co.nz
KIWI ANIMATION
Innovative animation by local artists including Miriam Harris, Raewyn Turner, James Robinson, Rowan Wernham and Dan Inglis.Miriam Harris
Auckland animator Miriam Harris' ROARING, SOARING, DIVING imaginatively explores themes of memory and loss around metaphors of water sports in a South Pacific summer. Harris employs home movie footage, animation, and collage to render beach scenes in random relation to sharks, whales, Captain Cook, a Cook Islands postage stamp featuring a waka, and a lifebuoy - as loosely associated images in a seemingly casual or poetic relation to one another.
Dan Inglis
Dan's animations represent humans as distanced alienated subjects caught somewhere between technology and self.
Raewyn Turner
Raewyn Turner worked with Split Enz from 1975 to 1983 touring with them throughout Australasia, Europe and North America. Her work for the ENZ involved light and set design for their stage and television appearances. Turner also painted the cover for the 1979 Split Enz album FRENZY.
Turner's CYCLE ENGINES, with sound by Eddie Rayner, is an abstract animated film of swirling patterns and cosmic images which unite as a form of visual music.
James Robinson and Rowan Wernham ** Attending in-person, direct from New York, Rowan Wernham
Artist James Robinson inititally conceived of his film X.O. GENESIS (2009) as a way of continuing his childhood obsession with making model spaceships which he sees as vehicles of consciousness, dreams, escapism and alienation. X.O. GENESIS takes the form of an interplanetary creation and destruction myth which could begin, "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." Here its humanoid inhabitants are subjected to information overload, pollution (as alien eco-abortion, over consumption and surveillance in a petro-chemical nightmare that ultimately leads to war.
In FREEKS FORMULER (c2007) James Robinson layers words upon words and images in the manner of a graffiti scrawled cinematic report on the movements of his consciousness. Like a moving visual rant, FREEKS FORMULER is an explicit and organic revelation of the thinking and creative processes through which the artist realizes his singular vision.
Speaking of his work the self-taught artist Robinson, winner of the 2007 Wallace Art Award says,
"I'm trying to embody associations and memories searching for meaning. The only way for me to do that is to portray real things from my life ... All you can expect from good art is that it mirrors the psyche of the person who made it."
More coming, watch this space.
