A Return

A Return

2018 · 6 min · ★ 5.0

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.

Directed by James Edmonds

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A Return

Songs Overheard in the Shadows

Both from James Edmonds.

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Songs Overheard in the Shadows

Songs Overheard in the Shadows · 2025

Songs Overheard in the Shadows

Balanced on the edge of what is visible, everything comes from nothingness and returns to nothingness. Strands of consciousness trying to convene with each other. Forms of personal significance in a time of crisis, set free into random motion through chance operations. Recurring details point towards a center.

Fleeting Landscape

Fleeting Landscape · 2016

Fleeting Landscape

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

Disappearances · 2023

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

Maybe Tonight

Maybe Tonight · 2021

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

Configurations

Configurations · 2021

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.

Seasons/Patterns

Seasons/Patterns · 2020

Seasons/Patterns

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.

Saint-Nazaire

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A film by Petra Graf and James Edmonds

After Hours

After Hours · 2005

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.

Inside/Outside

Inside/Outside · 2015

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.

Las Manos misteriosas

Las Manos misteriosas · 2024

Las Manos misteriosas

Completed in 2024. 40 sec, Super 8

Movement and Stillness

Movement and Stillness · 2015

Movement and Stillness

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.

We All Live In The Blue Image Forever

We All Live In The Blue Image Forever · 2018

We All Live In The Blue Image Forever

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.

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