Thursday 8 October 2009

Framing Jarman: New Tate Visual Arts Channel in Beta




Film Studies For Free wanted to rush you the great news that the Tate has just launched a new, highly elegant and very user-friendly channel to enable the viewing (and embedding - yay!) of hundreds of videos about visual arts, like the great film above in which James Mackay, friend of British film artist Derek Jarman, talks about Jarman's experimental work on super 8. These films that he began making in the 1970s are rarely shown. Mackay, who later produced some of Jarman’s feature films including The Garden (1990) and Blue (1993), agreed to open up his archive of these ground-breaking short films for TateShots.

FSFF also came across an even more detailed interview with Mackay about his work with Jarman here at the 400blows website. You can also find interviews there with the following people about their work and friendships with this filmmaker: Jenny Runacre; Simon Fisher Turner; Tilda Swinton; Peter Tatchell; Christopher Hobbs; Tony Peake; Tariq Ali; Ron Peck; and Gaye Temple;

FSFF has only just begun to explore the riches and the capabilities of the new Tate channel; it gleefully urges you to do the same. But it closes, today, happily in a Derek Jarman frame of mind with a sublime Jarman artifact, from his 1987 short Aria, starring Tilda Swinton, music by Gustave Charpentier from his opera Louise with its aria 'Depuis le jour', sung here by Leontyne Price:



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