Lis Rhodes

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

In the trap of a neoliberal economy lives are determined by conditions of increasing inequality and accumulating debt. There is very little protection for someone with little or nothing. Without proof of address, without papers, existence becomes subject to manipulation and debt. Debt is a means of control. The distortions of corporate wealth and cheap labour are made to appear inevitable. There is no ambiguity in the reasonable reasons for the journeys made by many – to escape conditions that are organised, imposed and untenable. War, poverty, unemployment move people.

‘At the work's core is an experimental approach to the stuff of film and a fiercely political outlook. Dresden Dynamo is an abstract assault on the senses. Eschewing a camera, Rhodes affixed patterned Letratone stickers to the film itself and used filters to create red and blue colours. Stripes, dots and wavy lines surge across the screen, and their forms dictate the accompanying barrage of white noise and atonal bleeps.’ --Ben Luke London Evening Standard 26 January 2012

The bloodstained bed suggest a crime..No answers are given, after the torrrent of words at the beginning of the film, all the film offers are closed images and more questions..Is it even blood on the bed, what fracture is there between seeing and certainty? If there has been a crime, 'she' might still be victim..How can a crime of such complexity and continuity be 'solved'? The voice searches for clues, sifting through them, reading and re-reading until the words and letters loom up nightmarishly, no longer hung on the structure of language.

The origin of the word riff is unknown. In music it is used to represent a repeated phrase. It has been suggested that a riff is a refrain : …recognition places one in many, many in one place, removed and removed again, categorically policed… In front of our eyes they are clearing the streets for the record. Voices become refrains that defy political violence.

Lis Rhodes’ latest essay film Disquiet, made against the backdrop of the pandemic, continues her ongoing project of documenting and drawing attention to the progressive eradication of justice, equality and individual liberties as a consequence of neoliberal capitalism. Using still images, sound, text and her distinctive voice-over, Rhodes calls out the evils of globalisation whilst taking a truly global approach in her incisive analysis. From the atomic destruction of Hiroshima to the conquest of the skies, Disquiet draws connections between the local, the transnational, and even the extra-terrestrial, in order to untangle the relationship between violence and profit. As Rhodes poignantly asks: ‘can warnings warn, when violence is a profitable industry?’

In 1985 as part of research into the state of drinking water supplies Lis Rhodes and Mary Pat Leece, an American artist living in the UK, visited West Virginia where open cast mining had polluted the water sources. While there they met Pope Barford, in Raleigh, and having talked about the devastating effects of open cast mining he began telling them of another major problem – that of migrant farmworkers. ‘I mean why is there slavery – why are people held against their will – if there’s not something …..Without the illegals … and without the migrants in general their system – it really does collapse. Like most systems it has a rational explanation for its existence.….. They’ve got to have that cheap labour – you’ve got to have a pool of quiet cheap workers …’ The farms thirty odd years ago were not that large. The farmers were white . They were armed. The soundtrack was recorded in 1985. Minimal photographs were taken because of endangering or exploiting the migrants further.

In "Pictures on Pink Paper" Rhodes analyses language as a cause rather than symptom of gender inequalities by looking at the ways in which the association of women with nature and men with culture is linguistically embedded, (seen, for example, in the consistent use of female pronouns to refer to "natural" objects). This film asks how women's oppression can be articulated without mimicking that very expression and language which defines power relations. despite the structuring of the women's voices the film is non-narrative - here, even time is broken down.

Shows the surveillance of a woman by overseers who have judged her to be mad. What is most provocative about this film is that it proposes multiple credible points of view even as the woman is being certified insane by the Censors. We voyage into the skull of a woman and peer out to a monumentally static cold waste with planetary slow motion. It is the bunker-eye view.

Lis Rhodes' poem dwells on the moments before a political thought is translated into a distinctive physical organisation, such as the women who surrounded the Greenham missile base. Part of 'Hang on a Minute', a series of thirteen 1 minute films which grew out of a series of short poems written by Lis Rhodes, reflecting on the traditional patterns of oppression in women's lives (pornography, violence, nuclear weapons) and the many forms that resistance takes. Made with the artist Jo Davis and commissioned by Channel 4 for television broadcast.

Hang On a Minute addressed issues topical to the political landscape of the period – many of which are still urgent today, from Greenham Common to domestic violence – with formal ingenuity, wit and contained but steel-edged anger at injustice. Here language unrolls across the screen in the form of statistics, newsprint, legal document, poetry, prose and hand-written words; it is spoken, sung and recited.

‘When watching In the Kettle which focuses on the topical subject of protest, then one may feel that Rhodes is only concerned with finding a way to get a message across, but her work has a visual richness that gives it another dimension. The use of bold compositions in her photographs which fade into each other creates a hypnotic, submerged state, as if she is constructing a dream – a mixture of real experience, news events, fantasies and fears.’ – Paul Hardman

Journal of Disbelief tears pages out of the last 20 years to remind and to warn. In September 2001, Barbara Lee, a Democrat from Oakland, was the one member of the US Congress out of 535 who voted against handing President Bush unconditional power to take military action. In 2003, the UK government’s legal advice was that there were in- sufficient legal grounds for a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. The days before yesterday are still on the horizon — still being enacted in front of our eyes.

Orifso is in the form of a fable, though based upon histories of Europe, 1942 -1998, located in the picture space, on a road in France and on the streets of London.

Light Music is a classic work of expanded cinema. Formed from two projections facing one another on opposite screens, Light Music is Rhodes’ response to what she perceived as the lack of attention paid to women composers in European music. She composed a ‘score’ comprised of drawings that form abstract patterns of black and white lines onscreen. The drawings are printed onto the optical edge of the filmstrip. As the bands of light and dark pass through the 16mm projector they are ‘read’ as audio, creating an intense soundtrack that proposes a direct relationship between the sonic and the visual. What you hear is equivalent to what you see.

A compressed, single-screen version of Rhodes’ famous fusion of optical sound and image. Light Music was shown in a 16 mm single screen format (1976). This version is a digital translation. The ‘score’ is divided into five movements which are characterised by their differing duration, pitch and accent of sounds. – Lis Rhodes

‘Dissonance and Disturbance, a two-screen installation, brings together Cold Draft (1988) and two films partly shot amid recent protests in London.The narration to the largely abstract Cold Draft is a poetic critique of Eighties economics, which gains a new potency through being shown alongside Rhodes’s video-camera shots from within police kettles as protests raged against the causes and effects of the economic crisis. She also tells the story of a flour mill in Gaza bombed by the Israeli military. Over the years, Rhodes has shifted from abstraction to near-documentary as her anger at governments becomes palpable. Her work is all the more compelling because her eloquence with film matches her political convictions.’ – Ben Luke

‘Through the use of blur, Lis Rhodes in Just About Now (1993), reproduced on an Arts Council publicity postcard, abstracts the video image in a painterly fashion. Video as a palette of shape, form and colour is powerfully translated.’– Esther Johnson

Short film by Aura Satz & Lis Rhodes.