Portrait of Frans Zwartjes

Hotel Bardo is an effort to convey something of the artist and author Brion Gysin in present time. Resisting biography—refusing historicisation—and instead attempting to harness a narrative borne by Gysin himself. A transcendent un-biography, Hotel Bardo is an ultra-travelogue set in a vision of the public domain in which the living and the dead pass freely to play with the idea of origins and posterity. It manifests primarily through experimental film, documentary, intervention and literature.

Film history from Kafka to Kurt Cobain: A darkly humorous, alternative timeline based on the last films iconic celebrities watched before (and sometimes while) they died – narrated by Jeremy Irons.

To mark his ninetieth birthday, EYE has restored Zwartjes’ very first film, originally shot on Super-8 and long thought lost. Zwartjes started his career as a violinist and visual artist. He took photographs, made music and built instruments – but only really broke through with his equally craftsmanlike films.

Nidder: 'to keep under; to pinch with cold or hunger; to molest.’ America’s most important military surveillance base, Menwith Hill, is the target of a nuclear attack, resulting in the total removal of the English dale, Nidder, where the base had been located. In nearby Bradford, a Sufi Brotherhood of musicians recover in song the landscape and its people lost, including Lindis Percy, the prominent peace campaigner and lifelong National Health Service midwife, and Geoff Workman, a man who spent 105 days occupying the vast cave networks underneath the dale ‘to study the effects of darkness and the absence of time on people’.

Artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah recounts an experience sailing through French Polynesia.

The Lock-In never ends. Consisting entirely of pub footage from the British soap opera EastEnders, it is endless inasmuch as its source is endless and its makers living.

A camera rotates around and above the Dreamachine, the stroboscopic light device known as the 'first work of art to view with closed eyes'.

A word-for-word recreation of Princess Diana's funeral with a Mexican Mariachi band in Manchester.

In tribute to the global prisoner, Brion Gysin, the local prisoner, Norton, takes a newspaper from the morning of Gysin's birth, and a newspaper from the morning that would have marked his 100th year, cutting up and reassembling the two at random. With Iain Sinclair and original music by Vindicatrix.

Shot-for-shot iPhone recreation of Derek Jarman’s incidental 8mm film, JOURNEY TO AVEBURY, made with James Norton.