Songs Overheard in the Shadows

James Edmonds’s intricately constructed 16mm montage film brings two disparate settings—Berlin and a village in the South of England—into the same cinematic headspace. Locating likenesses between soft light and overcast coasts, the comfort of sun-dappled interiors and the warmth of a tree-lined field, Edmonds both summons natural juxtapositions and creates unexpected harmony through deft superimpositions.

An imaginary filmic landscape that uses fragments of the real world seen in flight, as the camera moves almost continuously and rapidly through various passages of transit. Certain structures recur as significant landmarks of this fiction -the repeating patterns of towers and masts seem to fade into one another like an unknown omnipresence.

Disappearances, 2023, super8, 5min, colour, sound/silent* My first visit to England after a gap of two years, it's as if I’m discovering each subject for the first time. Objects picked up one by one. Every form seems to contain its dissolution, a premonition of loss. Holding on to the edge of a cloud, a hungry ghost throws its wishes to the sea. *can also be show without sound

Three friends wait for traffic to die down before going to Vincent's.

Distant places, stations, loved ones, natural interiors and exteriors, lights, shadows, paintings, colors, and compositions. A rich bouquet of motifs that Edmonds arranges into intuitive configurations of differences and similarities, and where emotions and memories fuse with a singular formal conception of cinema.

The flesh of time, strands of the present, in constant becoming and disappearance. One reel for each season, exposed between 2016 and 2017. Leitmotifs of flora, providing some unity within each season, as a reflection on ist atmosphere and passing presence.

A film by Petra Graf and James Edmonds

Shooting on 8mm film and making field recordings on cassette tape, recorded patterns of light and sound become a low quality, dreamlike plane of stillness, silence and uncertainty, exploring the passing of time through the study of vacant institutional spaces. The transitory spaces of these mundane but haunting buildings become an obsolete reality of forgotten ideals, the filmstrip itself a receiver of these resonances.

A fictional architecture of interiors and exteriors made through intuitive observations with the lens. The juxtaposition of the two spaces act as both metaphor and experiential resonance for the inner and outer worlds of the self, as well as being a quietly autobiographical documentation of a life between two places.

Completed in 2024. 40 sec, Super 8

Quiet observations, variations of light, from strong amber glows to diffused greys, intermittently entering the windows of an internal world. A film about coming home, archetypal images where the eternal meets the temporal. Calm reflection interspersed with travel and the endless search for significant forms, personal chapters of collage and remnants.

A collage of half forgotten sub-truths which is constantly added to over time, from unused fragments of super8 (mostly my own, sometimes others), complete with hand painted and scratched sections. The material impossibility of memory. Named after a line in William Burroughs' The Soft Machine.