Ways of Seeing concentrates on the way we look. Displaced, in the first instance, by the separate call between what we see and what we hear in Rosalind Nashashibi’s States of Things, we are freed to look in close up at the poise of Vicki Amedume, to look past role in Linda Martina Young’s interpretation of Nina Simone’s Four Women and to see the expression of the world framed by love and desire in Untitled, Delilah and Three. This is cinema at its best: film that reinvents the landscape of the familiar.
Films
The States of Things
Rosalind Nashashibi | UK | 2000 | 4 mins
A jumble sale set to an Egyptian classic love song from the 1920s.
Strong Women
Jayne Parker | UK | 2000 | 15 mins
Strength displayed and strength employed: a portrait of trapeze artist Vicki Amedume.
Four Women
Julie Dash | US | 1977 | 8 mins
An experimental dance film that employs the use of stylised movements and dress to express the spirit of black womanhood from an embryonic stage in Africa, through a struggle she wages to survive in America.
Untitled
John Sanborn, Mary Perillo, Bill T Jones | US | 1989 | 10 mins
A tribute to the life and work of the dancer and choreographer Arnie Zane, who died of AIDS in 1988.
Delilah
Tanya Syed | UK | 1995 | 11 mins
Located in the darkness, a place of no boundaries, Delilah is a “meditation on violence”, love and survival.
Three
Isaac Julien | UK | 1999 | 15 mins
Produced in collaboration with and featuring choreographers Bebe Miller and Ralph Lemon along with British actress Cleo Sylvestre, Three explores aspects of desire through dance movements and symbolically weighted images.