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Film-work as Dream-work (PG*) + ScreenTalk

Themes et Variations

Film images glide by. So too do dream phenomena, yet their fantastical machinations linger in our memories.

While dream symbolism has inspired artists from the Surrealists to the contemporary, this programme of artists’ and experimental films focuses on the performative play of dream phenomena and their translation into moving image.

Selected to coincide with Daria Martin’s exhibition at Barbican’s Curve Gallery, the programme features two of Martin’s previous ‘dream’ films and a number of others by women from different eras. Maya Deren’s dreamy mise-en-scene in Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) generates an uncanny poetics of association, while Germaine Dulac’s Thèmes Et Variations (1928) emphasizes the dream-like pleasures of kinetic movement. In Laure Prouvost’s Grandma’s Dream (2013) the lyrical space of dreaming becomes suffused with anxiety and humour.

After the screening, Daria Martin will be in conversation with the curator of tonight’s programme, Dr Maria Walsh.

Harpstrings and Lava

UK 2007 Dir Daria Martin 13 min

One of The Things That Make Me Doubt 

UK/US 2010-11 Dir Daria Martin 32 min

Meshes of the Afternoon

US 1943 Dir Maya Deren 18 min Digital LUX HD file

Thèmes Et Variations (version restaurée)

France 1928 Dir Germaine Dulac 11 min Digital

Grandma's Dream

2013 Dir Laure Prouvost 9 min Digital

Total event run time approx. 120 min

About the speakers

Dr Maria Walsh is a writer and art critic. She is Reader in Artists’ Moving Image at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL and Reviews Editor of MIRAJ (Moving Image Review & Art Journal). Her books include Art and Psychoanalysis (2012) and the anthology Twenty Years of MAKE Magazine: Back to the Future of Women’s Art (edited with Mo Throp, 2015). She is currently writing a monograph on performative therapeutics in contemporary artists’ moving image.

Daria Martin is an internationally exhibited artist living in London, and Professor of Art at The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Martin’s films aim to create continuity between disparate media such as painting and performance, between people and objects, and between internal and social worlds. Martin was recently awarded the 2018 Film London Jarman Award. She is represented by Maureen Paley, London.

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Barbican Cinema 3