William English

The latest in an ongoing series of portraits including inventors Maurice Seddon and Hugh de la Cruz. Here, filmmaker Rose Lowder prepares a macrobiotic meal in her tiny flat in Paris in October 2005. As Rose describes what she is cooking and why, we hear about Rose's childhood spent in Peru through to her current life in Avignon and glimpse a singular creator.

A sequence of shots, mostly of dwellings; houses, a camper van, disused pill-boxes (bunkers), patched marquee; reflections/virtual abstraction in a foxed mirror in a 1940s ex-military shower unit.

Originally silent but now with sound by Daniel Wilson composed for this film in 2019. A series of images, some double exposed, some in negative. Reeds moving in the wind in Suffolk. A now obsolete car wash near to Smithfield. The metallic prows of gondolas in Venice at night. A detail of a Victorian dam in the Elan valley, Wales.

A sequence of shots from a fourteenth floor flat in the City of London, starting with a building shattered by the IRA, focusing on a crane and its driver, roadworks, a building site, passing seasons. The last minutes of the film pass into abstraction accompanied by sounds which could be fireworks or gunfire. Footage dates from the 1980s up to 2015. Soundtrack composed by Daniel R. Wilson in 2018.

A series of silent images in various locations; the traces left by tents (Cornwall); derelict houses in Wales; an automaton in an amusement arcade on the south coast; Bekonscot model village; a fragmented poster on City Road London; film slipping through the gate.

Captain Maurice Seddon was a British eccentric who preferred to heat his body than his house, and so he invented electric clothing. This curious portrait is also a striking piece of media history, as it partly comprises Seddon’s countless TV appearances, for instance in the David Letterman Show.

Out takes from Heated Gloves; 16mm film of Maurice Seddon and his garden. The soundtrack is a telephone conversation between Maurice and someone trying to sell him a chest freezer, one of hundreds of telephone conversations that Maurice recorded, some of which were issued as a vinyl LP on paradigm discs called The Seddon Tapes Volume 1.

Originally filmed on standard 8mm Kodachrome, double exposed and stretch printed. Virtually abstract imagery shot from a basement looking upwards via a pavement level window towards the side of Southwark Cathedral through dayglo ribbons which were part of some roadworks. A consequence of absorbing Peter Gidal’s theory of Structural Materialist film which I first encountered in 1975 in the issue of Studio International devoted to Avant-Garde Film. It was suggested that I should make more films like this, but it was unrepeatable for reasons hard to define. Apart from the technological issues, the film is very specific to a particular time and place. Passages was something of a sequel.