Container #18 Urthworks
and a few new upcoming screenings!
Hello. Thank you once again for joining us.
Tonight’s Screening:
Urthworks, Ben Rivers, 2010-19, 86m
A rendering of otherworldliness and a vision of the future after some unknowable apocalypse. A trilogy of films developed between Ben Rivers and the American science fiction writer Mark von Schlegell with each film blurring documentary and the present with speculative visions of potential futures.
Slow Action (2010) is filmed in four locations: Gunkanjima – an island off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan; Tuvalu – a country in the middle of the Pacific; Lanzarote – one of the driest climates on earth; and the green pastures of Somerset in England. The film proposes a future where sea levels have risen drastically, cutting off small societies that have developed into tiny utopias in isolation
Urth (2016) is filmed at the American earth system science research facility Biosphere 2 in Arizona. The film imagines the biosphere as a sealed home of the last woman on Earth, making a log of her days as she struggles to keep her biosphere, and herself, alive.
Look Then Below (2019). Taking ideas from Hollow Earth theories and fictions about civilisations living under the surface of the planet, such as Jules Verne’s Journeys into the Centre of the Earth, Rivers explores the caves in the British countryside area of Somerset as a location for imagining future lost civilisations, fusing computer generated imaging and documentary footage.
Unrated 15+
With thanks to Ben Rivers and LUX
Upcoming Screenings:
9 May: Ben Rivers’ Urthworks
23 May: Recent 16mm films retrieved from NYC (in partnership with Artist Film Workshop)
6 June: Cyril Schäublin’s Unrest (pictured above)
20 June: Ashley McKenzie’s Queens of the Qing Dynasty (pictured below)
4 July: James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus (in partnership with Prototype.)
We’re delighted to reveal our next wave of Container screenings for 2023. A few acclaimed Berlin titles, a showcase of recent experimental 16mm work from New York, some lurid queer works we’ve been wanting present for a very long while, and maybe a probing work that explores the relationship between time management, social organisation and watchmaking. (As always there may be some overlap between these categories.)
Thank you. We look forward to catching you tonight for our screening Urthworks, something we’ve been plotting since 2019, and then in a fortnight for our 16mm showcase of key contemporary experimental filmmaking from New York.