Mike Dunford

Faces pass by in quickly edited, split-screen recordings. A 'structuralist' film in which the film material itself plays an important role. Grain, scratches and flickering give the film texture. The music is by Steve Reich.

Early experimentations with film by a materialist sculptor and future structural filmmaker.

A tautology is a circular argument. The film is about framing, about the frame and the image framed, and about the framing of the image. About the image filmed, and the image viewed, and the image received and the links between all three.

A small tree filmed on Hampstead Heath is printed out and re-edited at the Film Coop to form a formal abstract sequence bracketed by juddering naturalism. As with other films, the imagery is used away from its context as representation, as the source for an edited construction

The piece is built on a framework of tracking down and up a parking garage staircase, with a carwash in the basement, (since demolished) the same take repeated a number of times, and therefore a different, but same repetition. A second strand of the work is formed by an ostensibly unconnected set of ideas and concerns, dealing with the gradual movement of our social system from a democratic, to an oligarchic global system. The gradual abstraction of the staircase into colour fields, text, the actress singing and repeating a dialog sequence to camera, make a shifting montage without narrative connection. There is no metaphor in this work.It‘s a loose bag of ideas, some connected, others just there as images, to be organized by the viewer, not really an essay, but thoughts on despair.

Footage of street life in the Bronx and Manhattan, with a continuous soundtrack of the constant crime statistics, and the recent Reagan invasion of Grenada (to fight the Cuban threat to American students and an airstrip). Interrupted with statistics about wealth inequality, and shoals of tropical fish (for respite). A grim 1983 report from ground zero in the evil empire.

In 2008 de-regulated globalised finance capital brought the world to the brink of disaster. Its ideology of market fundamentalism and unconstrained corruption proved to be utterly bankrupt and a recipe for the destruction of the social order as well as capitalist accumulation. In response the governments of the world bailed out the banks with tax-payers money, restarted the broken system, and carried on as before. The ruins of the old system block the way to the birth of the new. This Gramscian situation gave rise to our current condition of an indeterminate interregnum between the old and the new. We don’t have a lot of time.This short video is an oblique essay on this.

"After the standard 8 work this was my first 16mm film. As a film it shows all of the tendencies and concerns that preoccupied my ideas in film, and then video up until the present day. At the same time it is a kind of sound-track time-capsule for the late '60s with sound from the moon-shot, Country Joe and the Fish, hippie music festivals, references to financial chaos, advertising and consumerism, gangster movies, Vietnam, and natural disasters." Mike Dunford

Part of the Logical Propositions series, 16mm, colour, sound

All part of a series called LOGICAL PROPOSITIONS. The simple aim of this series was to didactically select several elements of film naturalism, which work to create the illusion of representation on screen, and make each the subject of a self-descriptive film using that element as subject and demonstration. So Lip sync is about sync sound and the disruption of it, Deep Space is about camera stability and invisibility of the camera apparatus, and Lens Tissue is about clarity of the image and focus. Each of them works by disrupting the element and foregrounding the effect on film, and flattening the representation from image to projected filmstrip.

Using video colorising, pushing u-matic tape –tracking close to breakdown, and slo-mo, a video devoid of narrative structure, interspersed with inserted interpretations on the title and music track, a dance of edited movement in camera, and edit suite.

Scratch begins as a standard 8 film fragment, originally filmed in our 60’s basement kitchen, and reprojected as a loop 5 times with a repeated coda of junk and glitch footage, onto a ground glass screen, refilmed in black and white on 16mm film stock.This sequence then begins a series of repetitions that run through negative image, reversed image, solarized, solarized and double exposed, colourized, and finally solarised and reversed with a colour sequence for each process. The central colour section repeats and starts to reverse the procedure through the sequences to the first iteration.At this point a scratch appears, a rich white line that appears momentarily on the image...

A surfer, filmed and shown on tv, refilmed on 8mm,and refilmed again on 16mm.Simple loop structure preceded by four minutes of a still frame of the surfer. An image on the borders of apprehension, becoming more and more abstract. The surfer surfs, never surfs anywhere, an image suspended in the light of the projector lamp. A very quiet and undramatic film, not particularly didactic. Sound: the first four minutes consists of a fog-horn, used as the basic tone for a chord played on the organ, the rest of the film uses the sound of breakers with a two second pulse and occasional bursts of musical-like sounds.

'Still-Life with Pear' takes a subversive position towards the illusion inherent in the film-image, its apparent transparency to representation, but rather than dealing with this by countering with strategies of foregrounding the actual materiality of the film-strip, the narrative construct is subverted within the film with a counter-narrative.

"In 1983 I was working in San Francisco as a housepainter and much of the time we worked in Burlingame, south of the city. This tape is a meditation on that suburban world, with the actor, me, moodily, incoherently expressing his alienation from the society he inhabits." – Mike Dunford

A film on unemployment that invites the spectator to resist capitalism and the consumption society, made by Mike Dunford, who was unemployed at the time, with the intention of providing a catalyst for discussion at Claimants Union meetings.

Shot in America but edited in the UK, this and NEW YORK STREETS formed a more politicised, agit-prop, kind of production, but closer to the cut ups and scratch video of London Video Arts of the time, and still with some emphasis on formal editing strategies and disruptive soundtracks of the earlier film work. Our Dream is about the violence of the onslaught on democracy, the working class, nation states, and sovereignty that began with the years of Reagan in America and continues to this day. It was a dark time in history, echoed now in 2013. The sense of deep foreboding and future dread let up during the late '80s bubble and boom, but has returned with the financial crash of 2008.

Standard 8 colour film, refilmed and slowed down, edited into a formal work on 16mm film, of camera pan sequences of a woman lying naked. Almost abstract images slide from darkness to light and back, repeated, repeated, in a pattern of repetitions that at some point reverses back to the start again. A small visual love poem, but abstract.

Lip Sync is about sync sound and the disruption of it. [The film] works by disrupting the element and foregrounding the effect on film, and flattening the representation from image to projected filmstrip.

Arbitrary Limits is a documentation, and a documentary, of the making of itself, a self-reflexive narrative that encompasses the relationship between film-maker and sound recordist, and their relation to the ongoing film, a commentary on the film’s production, and the gradual exposition, through asides, and partial explanations through the film, of what the film set-up, and its eventual notional outcome should be.