
Cerith Wyn Evans
Directing
Biography
Cerith Wyn Evans (born 1958) is a Welsh conceptual artist, sculptor and film-maker.
Known For

A retelling of the life of the celebrated 17th-century Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio through his brilliant, nearly blasphemous paintings and his flirtations with the underworld.
Caravaggio

An aged art connoisseur (Beaumont) and his young female neighbour (Coles), who has a job posing naked in a club, meet and exist in fantasy and reality. Although this raises certain much-discussed questions about the nature of representation, and about the construction of narrative and daydreams in films, 'Phoelix' tends to treat these as just pretty and pertinent issues, opting instead for a mannered concentration on detail.
Phoelix

The artist's personal commentary on the decline of his country in a language closer to poetry than prose. A dark meditation on London under Thatcher.
The Last of England

The Angelic Conversation is a lyrical, haunting film about a young man’s search for love in a dreamlike landscape. Its tone is set by the juxtaposition of slow moving homo-erotic images and opaque landscapes through which two men take a journey into their own desires. Offscreen, Dame Judi Dench recites a sequence of Shakespeare's sonnets that counterpoint the action. Jarman called it, “My most austere work, but also the closest to my heart.”
The Angelic Conversation

Imagining October explores art and politics in the final years of the Cold War, drawing connections between pre-Perestroika Russia and Thatcherite Britain. The title refers to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and Sergei Eisenstein’s propaganda film October: Ten Days That Shook the World 1928. The project began during a trip to the Soviet Union sponsored by the British Film Institute in October 1984. Jarman was invited to present The Tempest in Moscow and Baku with fellow filmmaker Sally Potter and film theorist Peter Wollen and asked in return to make a short film for the London Film Festival in November.
Imagining October

A fictionalized portrait of the British dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, depicting a day in his life as he and his company prepare for a performance.
Hail the New Puritan

A 16mm anthology of experimental super 8 films by Derek Jarman, Michael Kostiff, Cerith Wyn Evans and John Maybury, with framing footage by Tim Burke of Brion Gysin using a dream machine. Jarman's contribution is a version of his 1977 Art and the Pose (aka Arty the Pose), refilmed at 3fps, with a musical soundtrack. Jarman planned The Dream Machine as a commemoration of William Burroughs and Gysin's 1982 visit to the UK, and received initial funding from the Arts Council in 1983, then rethought the project as a portmanteau film featuring Gysin alone. The production remained in limbo until 1986, when James Mackay obtained completion funding from the British Film Institute. (Since this film was released on VHS accompanied by Jarman's Broken English: Three Songs by Marianne Faithfull, T.G.: Psychic Rally in Heaven and Pirate Tape under the umbrella title The Dream Machine, synopses of this film have often muddled up its details with those of the earlier films. )
The Dream Machine

Inspired by a poem by William Blake: a short experimental film about the perception of vision.
Degrees of Blindness

Turner Prize-winner Luke Fowler's film focuses on the life and work of the socialist historian EP Thompson and his involvement with the Workers Education Association. Presented in a documentary style format, combining archive and contemporary footage, the film questions our notions about how history is constructed.
The Poor Stockinger, The Luddite Cropper and The Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott

A gallery, divided in two by a wall with a large two-way mirror. Leigh Bowery appears on one side under a spotlight, only able to see his reflection. On the other side, the audience watches. Sounds of insects and the street outside can be heard. Different scents, like banana and marshmallow, fill the room
Mirror
A gallery, divided in two by a wall with a large two-way mirror. Bowery appears on one side under a spotlight, only able to see his reflection. On the other side, the audience watches. Sounds of insects and the street outside can be heard. Different scents, like banana and marshmallow, fill the room. This was the set up of Bowery’s first performance in a gallery. In October 1988, he posed at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, for two hours each day, across five days. He wore a new look every day, selected from those he had worn over the last four years. The spots suit, checkerboard dress, and green feathery jacket were remade by designer and corsetier Mr Pearl (some of which are displayed in Room 2) due to the originals being covered in ‘disco dirt’. Bowery worked closely with the gallerist Lorcan O’Neill, who had invited him to perform, the artist Cerith Wyn Evans, who also filmed and edited the video documentation, and DJ Malcolm Duffy who worked on the sound.
Mirror

Intimate portrait of artist Sarah Lucas, whose witty and provocative work explores questions of identity and sexuality. With contributions from Angus Fairhurst and Damien Hirst.
Two Melons and a Stinking Fish

'The Sky Is Thin As Paper Here...' (Kunsthaus Graz Remix, 2005) by Cerith Wyn Evans is yet another attempt at mapping out the potentiality of BIX façade as a particular site of spectacle within the performative architecture of the Kunsthaus Graz. Inspired by a novel 'The Place of Dead Roads' by William S. Burroughs, and in collaboration with Luis Augusto Pecora Marques Pinto, São Paulo-based musician and DJ, this complex project combines literary reference with a polyphonic musical score and results in a beyond-architectural, sophisticated edifice of sound and light, as well as an image and a text. 'The Sky is Thin As Paper Here...' enters urban space as both an imaginary projection and a real challenge for perceptive agencies.
The Sky Is Thin As Paper Here...

By the end of the punk movement in the mid-80s, London’s vibrant club scene had become a source of inspiration. Cerith Wyn Evans’ Epiphany is a colorful documentation of this underground hedonism.
Epiphany
A record of screen tests carried out to select young male actors suitable to perform in the singer Kim Wilde's newest promotional video.
Kim Wilde Auditions

An epicene angel flutters its wings and smokes a cigarette in this ejaculatory study of frustration, torment, stupidity and insolence. With Cerith Wyn Evans as the angel and music by Michael Nyman. Made at the Royal College of Art.
L'ange frénétique

The film documents a small event situated on the Idroscala di Ostia, close to the place where Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered on the night of November 2, 1975. A vandalised concrete sculpture now commemorates the spot where Pasolini died a few hundred yards away from the mouth of the Tiber.