Directing

Nicky Hamlyn

Nicky Hamlyn studied fine arts at the University of Reading. He is a professor in experimental films and a filmmaker.

Known For

La Défense

La Défense · 2013

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

Ghost Stories

Ghost Stories · 1983

Ghost stories opens with a sequence of polemical shots: a mysterious shadow, an ambiguous advertisement which has deeper ambiguities unknown even to itself, and a lengthy quotation from Roland Barthes on the nature of autobiography. These opening shots outline the context in which I hope the bulk of the film will be seen: as a critique on so-called visual literacy, which is frequently based on a complacent mis-reading of images, and also as a rejection of film-biography, whose efficacy depends on such visual complacency. The body of the film consists of fragmentary views of the interior of a house, in which desultory activity occasionally takes place, sometimes in front of the camera, sometimes not. A ghost story is told, firewood is sorted.

Power Hub

Power Hub · 2009

Power Hub is a site-specific time lapse film shot over 24 hours in a disused bus factory in Maidstone, Kent, UK. The film was projected onto the window through which it was shot.

Object Studies

Object Studies · 2005

A sequence of short films, each based on a dominant colour. Extensive use of time-lapse and frame by frame filming generates scintillating juxtapositions of light phenomena. Filmed in north west Umbria.

Berlin Moiré

Berlin Moiré · 2013

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

Telly

A study of the TV as the bearer of images and as a scuptural-environmental object. The footage is extracted from an episode of the TV soap Brookside.

Spinning Shadow

Spinning Shadow · 2013

Spinning Shadow

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

Films

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

Filmography

Sort

La Défense

La Défense · 2013

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

Director

Ghost Stories

Ghost Stories · 1983

Ghost stories opens with a sequence of polemical shots: a mysterious shadow, an ambiguous advertisement which has deeper ambiguities unknown even to itself, and a lengthy quotation from Roland Barthes on the nature of autobiography. These opening shots outline the context in which I hope the bulk of the film will be seen: as a critique on so-called visual literacy, which is frequently based on a complacent mis-reading of images, and also as a rejection of film-biography, whose efficacy depends on such visual complacency. The body of the film consists of fragmentary views of the interior of a house, in which desultory activity occasionally takes place, sometimes in front of the camera, sometimes not. A ghost story is told, firewood is sorted.

Director

Power Hub

Power Hub · 2009

Power Hub is a site-specific time lapse film shot over 24 hours in a disused bus factory in Maidstone, Kent, UK. The film was projected onto the window through which it was shot.

Director

Object Studies

Object Studies · 2005

A sequence of short films, each based on a dominant colour. Extensive use of time-lapse and frame by frame filming generates scintillating juxtapositions of light phenomena. Filmed in north west Umbria.

Director

Berlin Moiré

Berlin Moiré · 2013

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

Director

Telly

A study of the TV as the bearer of images and as a scuptural-environmental object. The footage is extracted from an episode of the TV soap Brookside.

Director

Spinning Shadow

Spinning Shadow · 2013

Spinning Shadow

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

Director

Films

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

Director

Light Licks: Pardes: Drowned Hat Rescue Media City Motown Jump

Light Licks: Pardes: Drowned Hat Rescue Media City Motown Jump · 2014

Light Licks: Pardes: Drowned Hat Rescue Media City Motown Jump

Panni

Panni is a visually arresting work in its formal structure and visual expression of colors. The subject matter of the film is a row of bed sheets flapping on a clothesline, drying in the wind. The colors punch through the screen as orange sheets flutter against a green backdrop of grass and trees.

Director

East Croydon

East Croydon · 2012

A short shot made from a train traveling from south to north through East Croydon station is cut into three-frame sections, each of which is looped for ten seconds. Each loop advances by one one frame at a time. The looping process generates complex artifacts and kinetic illusions in the image.

Director

White Road

White Road · 1999

Set in a particular location, a stretch of ‘white’ – unmetalled – road in Umbria. Structured around ordered and disordered features of the landscape.

Director

Tobacco Shed

Tobacco Shed · 2010

Tobacco Shed is one of a series of films based on agricultural buildings, mostly concerned with tobacco production, in northwest Umbria.

Director

Pro Agri

Pro Agri · 2008

Pro Agri is one in a series of films of buildings related to tobacco production in Umbria. It was shot over a two hour period from an hour before to an hour after sunset, at a rate of one frame every two seconds.

Director

Kerfissien-Amlodipine

Kerfissien-Amlodipine · 2020

Kerfissien-Amlodipine

The work is constructed from shots of tidal seawater running over rippled sand and the blister pack for Amlodipine, a blood-pressure reducing drug.

Director

Pistrino

Pistrino · 2003

The film is composed from thirty-second long time-lapse sequences, filmed in Northwest Umbria. Condensing days into seconds, Hamlyn makes use of lap dissolves and time-lapse photography to compress the temporal duration of the Italian landscape. The film invokes some pre-cinematic technologies mainly in the shadow plays where light and shadow manifest as the movement of trees, clouds, and other objects cast by the sun project and dance onto white walls and other surfaces, emulating and interacting with the film’s grain

Director

Guesswork

Guesswork · 1979

Details, fragments, transformations and shadows of a confined space.

Director

Place Vauban

Place Vauban · 2012

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

Director

Quartet

Quartet · 2007

A sequence of twenty three shots of a room occurs four times, twice in colour, twice in black and white. The two colour sequences follow a strict filming plan, the second, black and white, pair are freer.

Director

Red Green

Red Green · 2012

A study in contrast, colour and moiré pattern in a public park in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. The film connects with a series of paintings by visual artist, Angela Allen.

Director

Matrix

The film is composed of receding planes in a landscape: a back garden and the houses beyond. The wooden lattice fence, visible in the image, marks the border between enclosed and open, private and public space, and forms both a fulcrum for the work and a formal grid by which the shots are framed and organised.

Director

Autogrill Verghereto

Autogrill Verghereto · 2008

Autogrill Verghereto

2008 Nicky Hamlyn short experimental work

Director

Double Fence

Double Fence · 2010

Double Fence was shot from the balcony of a B&B in Porto Potenza Picena , on the Adriatic coast near Ancona . The work explores the changes that occur with slight shifts in framings of the same scene, and the dramatic alterations in light, colour , space and movement between early morning and late afternoon. The work is the third in a series that records spontaneously occurring moiré patterns and related phenomena. The multifarious birdsong emanates from a nearby animal and bird sanctuary.

Director

Gasometers

Gasometers · 2015

MovieDocumentary

Series of films recording the dismantling of gas holders in North London, while Henderson's Grain Tower centres on a giant power station chimney that has recently been demolished.

Director