Fire Film

A derelict piano in the yard outside the old Film Co-Op. The keys had come loose and floated off. I play it, moving the keys and listening carefully.' - AN.

Le déjeuner sur l’herbe is simultaneously perceived from four different camera positions in a work which engages with the pro-filmic in order to question documentation, illusion and the film viewing process.

'I tried to make a kind of environment in the room where I lived in Kentish Town and to make a film within it. There were pieces of paper and screwed up, transparent gels hanging from the ceiling; it was quite dense in some parts. I wandered through it with a camera and then other parts were filmed on the rooftop at St Martins. I think I was just very much trying to find my way in a whole new area of work. I remember it involved a lot of refilming, which was the part I liked. The process was very fluid, similar to painting. I got quite interested in the specks of dust and dirt on the film and the re-filming gave me a chance to look at that more closely. Probably the thing that attracted me to film was the light ... the kind of floating quality you can get, images suspended in light.'

"The original was standard 8mm material that I'd shot in a village in Italy. The material had gone through a process of deterioration. I'd used it in performing and taken it through an old Russian slide projector. I took the lens out of this projector so I could pull the film strip through it, and that meant the image could be focused on different surfaces. Instead of the image falling onto a screen, I could direct it around the room with the lens in my hand. In the process it got very torn and scratched, and it was that material I eventually put in the contact printer and made into the 16mm film Frames." – Annabel Nicolson

A last look at the London Filmmakers' Co-op when it was housed in an old Victorian dairy. 'In the dark room, single imagess [sic] succeed eachothers [sic] in a continous [sic] motion towards the dairy, where she and the other english filmmakers stayed in an area of demolishing. she penetrates with the camera in rapid flicks, hesitates at single things, and glides on in a staccato flow. that is how she works, annabel nicolson, goes into a room and gives sigth [sic] of everything.' —Helge Krarup, Denmark, 1976

'Slides' came about through some fascination with the phenomena of matter, its frailty and transcience, the oddness of tiny filmed images from my earlier work lying around. Working with these parts, 35 mm slides cut into strips, thread, sewn film, light leaked footage, 8mm and 16mm fragments, I hand held this material in the contact printer. Images were created by movement and handling, literally keeping in touch with the elements.'

A summer afternoon lying in a field. Slight breeze. Friends in the distance sit talking. Looking at a book sometimes I see them. - AN.