still: Press Quotes
“In Still, she reminds us of the victims of police violence in France—once again, invisible characters without a voice, represented only through this exercise of found footage, images encountered on the Internet … The urgency of Still is expressed in its pixelated images, which serve as the unique testimony of people like Joachim Gatti, a victim of a flash-ball that caused the loss of his eye, and of tens of men and children whose lives were snatched away by police violence … The soundscape is filled with the sounds of machine guns, which punctuate this montage of human misery, exposing the intention to render these lives invisible.”
José Sarmiento Hinojosa, Desistfilm Online Film Journal, Lima
Read article: Panorama: Tres cortometrajes de Laura Waddington (Spanish original)
“Top Ten Films of 2009: Material – Thomas Heise, Gran Torino – Clint Eastwood, Le streghe – Jean-Marie Straub, 36 vues du pic Saint Loup – Jacques Rivette, Mary & Max – Adam Elliott, Waterfront Follies – Ernie Gehr, Vincere – Marco Bellocchio, Still – Laura Waddington, Répons – Marylène Negro, Double Take – Johan Grimonprez.”
Federico Rossin for Il Manifesto, Rome (Best Films of 2009 Poll)
“The filmmaker’s work interweaves the following three main concerns:
—the testing of the latest industrial audiovisual technologies to challenge her own gaze. In this way, her radical experimentation with mini-DV should be seen as an extension of her work begun in the early 1990s: a spy camera sewn into her jacket and controlled by her body in Zone (1995), during a cruise on the QE2; the fifteen Hi8 recordings that she requested over the internet from acquaintances around the world to create The Lost Days (1999); or the images of police violence that she downloaded from the internet to make Still (2009). Technology can then enter into resonance with her two other concerns:
—Resilience and systematic disobedience in the face of the obstacles imposed by anti-immigration policies and the dismantling of the rights of asylum.
—Sustained attention “to those whom society doesn’t care or dare to see, people waiting in limbo and at borders because they do not fit the dominant political narrative or our current economic needs.””
Bidhan Jacobs, Esthétique du signal: Hacker le filmique, Éditions Mimésis, Milan
“A video artist, born in London, Laura Waddington graduated in literature from Cambridge University. She currently lives in Brussels, and works all over the world. Her intense, melancholy films represent simultaneous practical, aesthetic, and existential experiments. Her work involves inventing new devices of depiction (Zone, 1995, The Lost Days, 1999) and empathetically exploring, sometimes for years, precise, obscure, disenfranchised, and threatened sites of human reality (Cargo, 2001, Border, 2004). In 2006, Laura Waddington wrote: “I think to create is to distance oneself from official versions and to try in the simplest way possible to pose the question of who we are and how we are living. When I watch a film, it is to perceive life for a moment through another person’s eyes. Maybe it’s a way of discovering that the ‘other’ is not so different and that difference lies within ourselves. I have an African friend who says about making films that it is “opening windows.” … Perhaps to be a film or video-maker today is to be a sort of itinerant. To know that no deal, no system, no country is so vital to one’s being, that one wouldn’t walk away from it when asked to compromise one’s vision. I’ve come to love this small, ongoing dialogue with people around the world and to associate it with a kind of freedom.” We also owe her for coming up with the title Outrage & Rebellion. To extend her film, Laura Waddington has created a special page on her website where she explains her intentions and gives all her sources, including the Amnesty International report. Read it here.”
Nicole Brenez, Introduction to Still on Mediapart
“[During the filming of Border] the only sources of bright and intermittent light came from passing vehicles on the road, the beams of police torches, or helicopters tracking the exiles from the air like criminals; halos, beams, and glares are amplified by Waddington’s technique [of a slow shutter speed] and transformed into potential sources of danger and destruction. Moreover, the police often temporarily blinded the exiles with their torches, the glare so powerful that Waddington’s equipment retained the traces: some of the pixels in her mini-DV camera were damaged. (Waddington had to duplicate the pixels neighbouring the missing ones during editing. She also used these shots of violent overexposure in her film Still.) In this way, the extreme physical and psychological violence permanently inflicted on the exiles—and which the filmmaker recounts in her moving voice-over but never shows—erupts through this slow shutter speed. These men, women, and children, driven to the border, humiliated, hunted down, martyred at Sangatte, mutilated, or killed in accidents during the dangerous crossings of the tunnel, are depicted through this eruptive vibration, reflecting the crimes suffered, which they will keep silent about forever.”
Bidhan Jacobs, Esthétique du signal: Hacker le filmique, Éditions Mimésis, Milan
“The question posed by Waddington regarding the use of new technologies directly interrogates the ways in which photography, mini video cameras, the internet and smartphones have transformed society; namely, a subversion of the relationship between image and event is taking place, to the point that the latter requires new forms and new techniques of documentation. This reflection arises from the artist’s need to replace her old TRV-900, camera with a new high-definition camera, an HDV 1080i; its “over-lit, perfect sheen”, however, preserves nothing of the contradictions and incompleteness, typical of low-definition shots. Thus, the new media of high definition, ends up being defined as a reinforcement of certain and deliberate narratives, leaving no room for doubt and expectation, fundamental elements in the process of the authentication of the image … Laura Waddington’s … documentaries … lend themselves to an investigation of relationships between new and obsolete technologies, between the quality of the image and meanings that are produced.”
Cecilia Bima, Lacune visive: Bassa definizione per un’etica della testimonianza
“A fragmented narrative of police brutality with injections of silence, quotes taken from International Amnesty reports, and jarring halts and deliberate repetitions in the narrative music.”
Dispatch: Closing Night – December 10 Flaherty NYC (Live Like a Refugee: On The Border), the Flaherty website
“There is a sea of inventive and valuable proposals that we will need to start exploring. To put it succinctly, four important kinds of initiatives can be located on the Internet: images of counter-information, which are direct descendants of the Newsreels, the Cinegiornali, the Ciné-Tracts of the 1960s, the Revolutionary News (Actualités révolutionnaires) of Raymundo Gleyzer’s Ciné de la Base, or Sandinista filmmakers (who are represented in the Anthology program by three very different films whose material nonetheless all comes from footage shot on the frontlines: Mauro Andrizzi’s Iraqi Short Films, This Place is Iran [Cet endroit c’est l’Iran], and Anders Oestergaard’s Burma VJ); essays and critical overviews, some of them brilliant, heirs to the writing of Chris Marker, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, the Cinéthique groups, and Armand Mattelart; the immemorial and indispensable tradition of revolutionary songs and videos that often represent the most poetic and enthusiastic popular expression; and the development of hapax, of completely unique forms following the example of the films of Laura Waddington, Marylène Negro, or Florent Marcie’s Saïa, in Anthology’s program. This fourth aspect remains largely unexplored, and it would require a collective effort to identify, comment on, and conserve the memory of these films. To give but one example that establishes a direct link between the formal innovations of the ’60s (that drew much from sources such as Santiago Alvarez and Fernando Solanas) and contemporary ones: In Chris Marker’s most recent chef d’oeuvre, December Seeds (Graines de décembre), which is inspired by the Greek crisis, we see to what degree Marker is inspired in turn by forms of popular expression on the web. (The film can be found on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com /34246811).”
Nicole Brenez interviewed by Donal Foreman, L’art le plus politique, The Brooklyn Rail, New York
“Vidéaste, née à Londres, diplômée de Littérature de la Cambridge University, Laura Waddington vit actuellement à Bruxelles et travaille partout dans le monde. Ses films intenses et mélancoliques constituent autant d’expériences simultanément pratiques, esthétiques et existentielles. Il y s’agit d’inventer des dispositifs de description (Zone, 1995, The Lost Days, 1999) et d’explorer parfois pendant des années, de façon empathique, des sites précis, obscurs, déshérités et menacés de la réalité humaine (Cargo, 2001, Border, 2004). En 2006, Laura Waddington écrit: « Je pense que créer consiste à prendre distance avec les versions officielles et à essayer de poser de la façon la plus simple possible la question de qui nous sommes et comment nous vivons. Lorsque je regarde un film, c’est pour percevoir la vie, pendant un instant, à travers les yeux d’une autre personne. Peut-être est-ce un moyen de découvrir que « l’autre » n’est pas si différent et que les différences résident en nous-mêmes. Un ami africain dit que faire des films, c’est ‘ouvrir des fenêtres’. (…) Il se peut qu’être un cinéaste ou un vidéaste aujourd’hui consiste à être une sorte d’itinérant. Savoir qu’aucun contrat, aucun système, aucun pays n’est si vital, pour un être vivant, que celui-ci ne puisse s’en détacher si on lui demande de compromettre sa vision. J’ai fini par aimer ce dialogue modeste, continu, avec des gens tout autour du monde, et par l’associer à une sorte de liberté. » On lui doit aussi d’avoir trouvé le titre Outrage & Rebellion.”
Nicole Brenez, Introduction to Still on Mediapart
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