Three Portraits

Portrait Of Ga
Regi: Margaret Tait
Storbritannia 1952
16mm, 4min

Four minutes are enough to sum up the essence of a mother, the Ga of the title. Tait tells us of antelopes, buffalos and Vikings… whilst presenting an old lady running after a rainbow, unwrapping a sweet, tending to her flowers, dancing and reading.

Peggy Shaw – A Film Portrait
Regi: Tanya Syed
Storbritannia 2014
16mm til video, 16min

A portrait of the performer and writer with improvised interviews, sketches to camera and monologues from Shaw’s solo shows, this film begins in shadows, the half-light colluding with cinematic references to implicate the queer body as dangerous. We are held by Shaw’s voice and stories, as the film takes us toward a staged performance. We are compelled by the transgressive presence of this fine raconteur, and beckoned away from parody into celebration.

Electro-Pythagoras (a portrait of Martin Bartlett)
Regi: Luke Fowler
Storbritannia/Canada 2017
35mm, 45min

Luke Fowler pays tribute to the work and musical ideas of Martin Bartlett (1939-93) a proudly gay Canadian composer who during the 1970s and 1980s pioneered the use of the «microcomputer». Bartlett is hardly recognised, never mind canonised, in cultural life. He researched intimate relationships with technology and was particularly interested in handmade electronics where, as he states in one of his performances: «the intimacy of handcraftedness softens the technological anonymity creating individual difference making each instrument a topography of uncertainties with which we become acquainted through practice».