Artists: Hiroshi Teshikahara and John Smith
Curator: Gawan Fagard

Blight
John Smith
United Kingdom, 1994-96. 16 mm, Video. 14 min.
OV English

The building of the M11 Link Road in East London provoked a long and bitter campaign by local residents to protect their homes from demolition. Blight was filmed during this period, while houses were demolished and land cleared. Using recordings made of people's reminiscences, the score incorporate fragments of speech and natural sounds. The film is based on real events which transformed people's lives, but it is much more than a conventional documentary. Enigmatic stories are created and the mundane is transformed into the marvellous. The music and images are woven into an elegiac evocation of memory and loss.

Suna no onna (Woman in the Dunes)
Hiroshi Teshikahara
Japan, 1964. 35 mm. 147 min. (director’s cut)
OV Japanese, ST English

Eija Okada plays an amateur entomologist who has left Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert; when he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night in the home of a young widow (Kiyoko Kishida) who lives in a hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What results is one of cinema’s most bristling, unnerving, and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of everyday Sisyphean struggle.

Language English