Distribution

Playing in the Light: Ways of Seeing

Dir: various

USA

2005

61 mins

No Cert

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.

This title is no longer available for booking from the ICO

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.

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