Nocturne

Across the surface of the forest, light, colour, shadow shift; rhythmic, kaleidoscopic. Matter and the immaterial in constant counteraction. The screen becomes a painting in animation. Ordinarily, light describes the motif. Here, the forest is almost – almost – occluded as the light that delineates the world becomes autonomous, visible; describes itself as subject. There are some very strange effects: light and shadow grow, die back; bark shimmers; branches tremble, or clouds pass above; trees shiver in the cold, or shake in threatening gesture; sunlight flickers, on and off, like an electric bulb. The portrait lives. These films are not the index of space and objects, but a cinema of time, movement, light; flickering lashes of mesmerised eyes in the click of an aperture.

Construed in the time of running clouds, a panoramic and another examination of vacant buildings on the British shore (Orford Ness), a deserted place on Earth, place of non-specificity as a base for an open course of events that shape the sense, consisting in interaction between the image and the viewer.

Petrolia takes its name from a redundant oil drilling platform sat in the Cromarty Firth, Scotland. The film looks at the architecture of the oil industry along the Scottish coastline where oil and gas supplies are predicted to run dry in the next forty years. Shooting on 16mm film, using time lapse and long exposure techniques, the film presents a record of industrial phenomena, – the toxic beauty of the refinery at Grangemouth, huge drilling platforms gliding across the water as they come in for maintenance and repair at Nigg and the last dance of the shipbuilding cranes in Glasgow harbour.

Belying their apparent stillness, Emily Richardson’s time lapse studies make for compelling and surprisingly eventful viewing: in the case of Redshift (named appropriately, after Hubbles law regarding the different wavelengths of light from stars), the activity is on a galactic scale: the wheeling of the heavens over a ragged line of coast. — Shane Danielsen; 57th Edinburgh International Film Festival 2003, Black Box Activity.

Day through night Block is a portrait of a 1960s London tower block, its interior and exterior spaces explored and revealed, patterns of activity building a rhythm and viewing experience not dissimilar from the daily observations of the security guard sat watching the flickering screens with their fixed viewpoints and missing pieces of action.

Levon Cade left behind a decorated military career in the black ops to live a simple life working construction. But when his boss's daughter, who is like family to him, is taken by human traffickers, his search to bring her home uncovers a world of corruption far greater than he ever could have imagined.

Set during the summer of 1957. Ex-racecar driver, Enzo Ferrari, is in crisis. Bankruptcy stalks the company he and his wife, Laura, built from nothing ten years earlier. Their tempestuous marriage struggles with the mourning for one son and the acknowledgement of another.

Arboreal is a short film by Emily Richardson commissioned for IF: Milton Keynes International Festival 2021. It was premiered during the concert given by Orchestra for the Earth on 24th July 2021. The music is Elgar's Cello Concerto in E Minor with soloist Rebecca McNaught and was recorded live during the event.

Following on from MH50 – 50 Years of Design, a short film by Margaret Howell and Emily Richardson made to commemorate Margaret Howell's 50th birthday, Margaret and Emily have made another short film, Affinities – 50 Years of Design. The film attempts to show the affinity Margaret feels for certain aspects of life in Japan. It includes personal photographs and objects that have appealed to Margaret on her many visits to Japan, from 1983 onwards.

During Summer 2000, the mayor of the Greek island of Lesbos tried to ban 26 lesbians from arriving on a package holiday from the UK; but he ended up biting off more than he could chew. This programme follows the love, lust and laughs over the course of their holiday as the women drink, dance and snog their way around the island. Despite being shadowed by the papparazi and some negative islanders, nothing can stop our women from fighting for their right to party.

Immaterial Terrain is a film made by Emily Richardson along a seven-mile stretch of the Suffolk coast between Sizewell nuclear power station and the mythic drowned city of Dunwich. Camera in hand, over the duration of a year Richardson repeatedly walked this coastline. These walks – pilgrimages and acts of protest – structure a film that documents a singular and fragile landscape at an uncertain moment. Plans to expand the nuclear power station at Sizewell will have a lasting impact on the environment.

The Spender House in Essex was designed in 1968 by Richard and Su Rogers (Team 4) for photographer and artist Humphrey Spender. It was a prototype and precursor to the iconic house, Parkside, designed for Rogers’ parents the following year, making it the first example of hi-tech domestic architecture in the UK.

Memo mori is a journey through Hackney tracing loss and disappearance. A canoe trip along the canal, the huts of the Manor Garden allotments in Hackney Wick, demolition, relocation, a magical bus tour through the Olympic park and a Hell’s Angel funeral mark a seismic shift in the topography of East London. With commentary and readings from Hackney, That Red Rose Empire by Iain Sinclair

Beach House is a film about a unique example of rural modernism, built on the UK coast of Suffolk by architect John Penn. Penn was an architect, painter, musician and poet whose nine houses in East Suffolk are all built with uncompromising symmetry adhering to the points of the compass in their positioning in the landscape they use a limited language of materials and form that were influenced by his time spent working in California with Richard Neutra. They are Californian modernist pavilions in the Suffolk landscape.Beach House is John Penn’s most uncompromising design in terms of idea as form. The film combines an archive film made by Penn himself on completion of the house with experimental sound recordings made during the same period and material recently filmed in the house to explore a convergence of filmic and architectural language and allow the viewer to piece together Beach House in its past and present forms.

Richardson stalks the abandoned Suffolk house of deceased modernist architect H.T. Cadbury Brown. Aural textures gleaned from personal possessions and materials soundtrack the mysterious structure.