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Single
Shot
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Something
of the Night: Five film screenings curated by Lumen
Nightcleaners (Part I) (Berwick Street Collective with Mary Kelly, 1976, 90 mins, 16mm, UK) 29 October | Leeds City Art Gallery Lecture Theatre | 7.30pm - 9pm | Free | Curated by Lumen  Nightcleaners, production still, courtesy James Scott A rare opportunity to see this landmark of British political cinema and collective filmmaking. Nightcleaners was originally conceived as a campaign film highlighting attempts to unionise women working at night as contract cleaners in London’s large office blocks. During editing, the conventional TV style documentary footage they had shot was reworked through experimental montage techniques in an attempt to avoid constructing a cinematic ‘truth’ about working class life. Nightcleaners asserts that realism in the cinema is only ever a product of the apparatus used to construct it. The Berwick Street Collective was a London based group making political films between 1970-8, they were joined for Nightcleaners by US artist and filmmaker Mary Kelly. (William Rose) Meditations on Revolution V: Foreign City (Robert Fenz, 2003, 32 mins, 16mm, US) 3 November | Leeds City Art Gallery Lecture Theatre | 12.30pm - 1.05pm (lunchtime screening) | Free 
Meditations on Revolution V: Foreign City film stillForeign City is the final edition to Robert Fenz’s series of short films which explore the meaning of the word revolution. Shot mostly at night the filmmaker re-imagines his city of New York as an unfamiliar place of immigration and displacement. His inquisitive and lonesome black and white cinematography beautifully captures the continuity of unseen and magically foreign surroundings. Anonymous images of streets, sidewalks, subways and cityscapes combine with an interview portrait of legendary Jazz saxophonist and artist Marion Brown as he reminisces on his life. (William Rose) Empire (Andy Warhol, 48 min excerpt, 1964, 16mm, US) 24 November | Leeds City Art Gallery Lecture Theatre | 12.30pm - 1.20pm (lunchtime screening) | Free  Empire film still Warhol’s continuous and stationary eight hour recording of the monolithic Empire State Building is one of the most discussed but rarely seen films in the history of avant-garde cinema. Empire stands as a monument to time, its structure and shape defined by the passage of night over the city of New York. In the mid to late 60s Warhol became pre-occupied with the idea of outrageously extreme duration in film, he once suggested an idea for an all night TV show called ‘Nothing Special’ in which “we’d just sit there and wait for something to happen and nothing would.” Please be aware that we will be screening the first 48 minute reel of the film and not the entire work. (William Rose) Subsurface 26 November | Leeds City Art Gallery Lecture Theatre | 7.30pm - 9pm | Free 
La Premiere Nuit film still; Substrait (Underground Dalies)
film stillThese five films extend the theme of the exhibition to explore the underground of the city and its labyrinth of subterranean tributaries and voids. Beginning in 1905, Interior New York Subway presents a mesmerising and kaleidoscopic journey through New York’s newly opened subway system - the camera mounted to a moving platform at the front of a train. In Substrait (Underground Dalies) and Sous-Sols de Paris [Paris Underground] Gordon Matta-Clark ventures into the underground sewers, water tunnels, car parks, subways, crypts and catacombs of New York and Paris. The Surveillance Camera Players re-enact George Orwell’s 1984 for a security camera in a New York subway; whilst a young boy in Georges Franju’s La Premiere Nuit feels the pull of love and the pain of separation as he searches for his girlfriend in the Paris Metro at night. (William Rose) Films: Interior New York Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street (American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1905, 6 mins, 16mm, US); Substrait (Underground Dalies) (Gordon Matta-Clark, 1976, 30 mins, 16mm, US); 1984 (Surveillance Camera Players, 1998, 8 mins, video, US); La Premiere Nuit (Georges Franju, 1957, 20 mins, 16mm, France); Sous-Sols de Paris [Paris Underground] (Gordon Matta-Clark, 18 mins 40 secs, in French, 16mm, France)
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