A Necessary Music

A Necessary Music

2009 · 30 min

A collaboration between artist Beatrice Gibson and composer Alex Waterman, A Necessary Music is a science fiction film about modernist social housing. A musically conceived piece, referencing the video operas of Robert Ashley, the film explores the social imaginary of a utopian landscape through directed attention to the voices that inhabit it.Treating the medium of film as both a musical proposition and a proposal for collective production, A Necessary Music employs the resident of New York’s Roosevelt Island as its authors and actors, gathering together texts written by them and using them to construct a script for the film. Framed by a fictional narration taken from Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1941 science fiction novel ‘The invention of Morel’, the film self-consciously dissolves from attempted realism to imagined narrative; what begins as a enthnographic study becomes instead an imagined fiction and an investigation into the mechanics of representation itself.

Directed by Beatrice Gibson

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Dil Chahta Hai

Dil Chahta Hai · 2001

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Three inseparable childhood friends are just out of college. Nothing comes between them - until they each fall in love, and their wildly different approaches to relationships creates tension.

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Six women in Paris traverse the anxiety of the city after dark. A filmmaker struggles to understand the film she is making. A Black single mother refuses the categories imposed on her. A former sex worker reflects on her past. A poet gives up trying for a child. Taking place over a single night, the film intertwines dream, fiction, and reality, liquefying one into the other.

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Reframing our current political moment in intimate terms, Gibson’s urgent snapshot of worldwide social calamities doubles as a document of practical resistance. In Gibson’s hands, the music of Pauline Oliveros and the words of poets CA Conrad and Eileen Myles imbue images of street riots, the Grenfell Fire, and the mass refugee migration with complexity and grace.

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Based on Gertrude Stein’s eponymously named screenplay, written in 1929 as European fascism was building momentum. Beatrice Gibson’s adaptation, set almost a century later in contemporary Paris, deploys Stein’s script as a talismanic guide through a contemporary moment of comparable social and political unrest. An original soundtrack, written especially for the film by British composer Laurence Crane, responds to the repetition, duplication and duality at play in Stein’s script. Both a fictional thriller and an act of collective representation, Deux Soeurs proposes empathy and friendship as means to reckon with an increasingly turbulent present.

Leisure, Utopic

Leisure, Utopic · 2024

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The first episode in a series of “adaptations” of poet Bernadette Mayer’s book Utopia that artist Beatrice Gibson envisions to undertake over the next decade, producing a series of small, quotidian films that together, and over time, will constitute an epic. This first film is drawn from Chapter 4, entitled “The Arrangement: of Houses & Buildings, Birth, Death, Money, Schools, Dentists, Birth Control, Work, Air, Remedies, and So on” and was shot at home during the pandemic.

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A psychosexual sci-fi about a planet without speech. Its narrator, ambiguous in gender and function, weaves us slowly through a mental and physical landscape, observing and chronicling a space beyond words. Based on a dream had by the radical British composer Cornelius Cardew.

Beatrice Gibson to Barbara Loden, Nina Menkes and Bette Gordon

Beatrice Gibson to Barbara Loden, Nina Menkes and Bette Gordon

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Garbiñe Ortega, Artistic Director of Punto de Vista, came up with the idea of creating a collective audiovisual project in which several filmmakers would make a filmed letter addressed to another filmmaker they did not know personally and who was as far as possible from their own cinema. This is how THE LETTERS THAT WEREN'T AND ALSO ARE was born. The result is an exciting journey through their affinities, their admiration and their creative processes.

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‘Some Place in Your Mouth’ is shot in the Forum car park on the edge of Palermo. Young men sit on bouncing mopeds; cars overloaded with sub-woofers pound with base. The camera registers male posture. But it also captures moments of being together, of unspoken courtship, of physical, sonic encounters. A voiceover reads a poem by American writer Magdalena Zurawski, from which the film takes its title. The tight 5 stanzas, here translated into Italian, pull the listener in. Their fleshy tones and disarming syntax feeling their way through the sublime, the bodily and the ecstatic. The meeting of Zurawski’s poem, images of Sicilian sub-culture and found footage of wheelies and races is both unlikely and tender; their different worlds, and forms, becoming strange and close. (Nick Aikens)

The letters that weren’t also are

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Idea by Garbiñe Ortega, celebrating four years of work, cinema and love.

The Tiger's Mind

The Tiger's Mind · 2012

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An abstract crime thriller set against the backdrop of a brutalist villa. Six characters, the set, the music, the foley, the special effects, the narrator and the author battle one another for control of the film as it unfolds on screen. The film explores the relationships between these characters as they emerge and unfold: grappling, wrestling, and dreaming with one another. The film's production elements were produced - employing the character-driven improvisational score The Tiger's Mind, by Cornelius Cardew - by Alex Waterman as Tree (foley), Jesse Ash as Wind (special effects), John Tilbury as Mind (soundtrack), Celine Condorelli as Tiger (props), Will Holder as Amy (narrator) and Beatrice Gibson as the Circle (author).

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