Carroll / Fletcher‘s current exhibition Now Showing is conceived as a journey that explores the fundamental elements constituting filmmaking; each piece investigates experimental approaches towards technical processes, narrative structures and the history and culture of filmic material.

Featured works include Oliver Pietsch’s Tales of Us (2014), which is themed around notions of desire, love and togetherness. Using sequences from independent films and Hollywood Blockbusters, the narrative forms a chronological timeline from adolescence to old age – navigating through a dream-like existence.

Another key piece is Matthias Müller’s Meteor (2011), an interplay of found footage bound together to explore universal and psychological subject matter, and create new layers of meaning and narrative. Meteor is a montage of elements from feature films, vintage science fiction motifs and fragments of fairy-tales. Beginning in a child’s bedroom and ending in outer space, the various elements are assembled to trace the phantasmic journey of the child to the threshold of self-discovery and disentanglement.

Other artists’ films manipulate feature-length movies in order to question the relationship between sound and visual context. In Aleksandra Domanović’s Anhedonia (2009), the audio from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) is superimposed onto stock images sourced from the vast Getty Images archive.

Mika Taanila’s My Silence (2013) is a reductionist video and sound piece, in which all spoken word is removed from Louis Malle’s My Dinner With André (1981); a film renowned for its multi-layered dialogue. The absence of the film’s most important element leaves only gestures, facial expressions, camera movements, lighting and décor – inventing a new opportunity for inhabiting an alternative perspective.

From experimental technology to a physical approach to analogue, and from an investigation into sociological themes to a more formal approach to the mechanisms of image construction, the spectrum of works in Now Showing presents an inquisitive overview of contemporary film language.

Now Showing runs until 22 February at Carroll / Fletcher, London. For more information visit www.carrollfletcher.com

Credits
1. Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Collapse (2009). Courtesy of the artists and Carroll / Fletcher.