I am introducing a screening of ‘Swandown‘ for Gareth Evans, in the Hackney ‘Hole’, on Sunday 5th October at 4.30.
More details available here:
http://www.digcollective.co.uk
Swandown (12A)
Directed by Andrew Kotting with Iain Sinclair
2012, 94 mins
Free
4.30pm
5 October 2014
Introduced by Iain Sinclair
In association with Gareth Evans
Many thanks to Andrew Kotting
“This documentary by quirky British film-maker Andrew Kötting and the eccentrically brilliant urban historian and social geographer Iain Sinclair traces a journey they made recently by sea, river and canal from Hastings on the Sussex coast to the site of the 2012 Olympics. Their vessel was a pedalo in the shape of a swan, Kötting wore a dark three-piece suit and Sinclair jeans and a battered baseball cap, and the aim was to draw attention to the antisocial, hubristic stupidity of the Games and their chosen location. Along the way the pair comment on the surrounding countryside and its history, using old newsreel film and quoting from Edward Lear, Conrad, James, Eliot, Edmund Spenser, Edith Sitwell, Pound, Brecht and Werner Herzog, and occasionally they let others do some pedalling.
Like a cross between Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat and WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, this is a constantly beguiling movie with an underlying touch of bitterness, especially towards the end. The best line comes from the author of graphic novels Alan Moore, who takes over briefly at the pedals and remarks of Sinclair: “He doesn’t think that anything should happen in Hackney without his permission.”
– Philip French, from The Observer
Dawn til Dusk: A Swan Song. Freya Gabie
Sunday 28th September, dawn until dusk plus viewing from the tower of St John at Hackney Church, 2-4.30pm
The Swan Song is an expression born from an ancient belief that the swan, a silent creature throughout life: emits a beautiful, haunting song only once, at the point of death. An articulation of loss, transcendence, beauty, entropy: it encapsulates a moment of both rupture and rapture. It is the boundary point between two states: the edge. In ‘Dawn til Dusk: A Swan Song’, artist Freya Gabie will give the ancient condemned site of St John’s Rectory Garden its own Swan Song, attempting to give the landscape a voice at the moment of its death.