Conceal/Reveal
Conceal/Reveal is the Derek Jarman Lab’s pop-up festival of lockdown essay films for Birkbeck Arts Weeks 2021, which showcases essayistic works made in a year in which most creative activity reverted to the pre-social stage of human endeavour. Confined to solitary, yet technologically enhanced urban caves, filmmakers have been forced to work within constraints dictated as much by protocols of permissible behaviour as by the psychological pressure of living in the midst of a pandemic. Searching for a historical truth, illusions of perception, and imagining the future come to the fore as the recurring themes of the presented films.
First on the programme is Lily Ford’s Chasing the Revolution: Marie Langer, Psychoanalysis and Society (2021), which documents the story of the Austro-Argentine psychoanalyst Marie Langer across different continents and ideological regimes. Using fragments of audio and video, and conversations with historians and analysts, it follows the shifts in Langer’s thinking to present a portrait of a psychoanalyst with strong social commitments, informed by her politics as well as her practice. The film was created for the Hidden Persuaders research project at Birkbeck.
Also available to watch are short films created by participants of our Audio-Visual Practice as Research short course: Katherine Mitchell’s Stay, an evocative meditation on space exploration and colonisation from the perspective of the Mars rover, Perseverance, which landed on the planet earlier this year; Márcio Cruz’s Blackness Time ÷ Media ∞, which combines footage of Black subjects with images from Dungeness in Kent; Thilini Prasadika’s Ceylon in Hinterland, which considers the commodification of colonised subjects at the ‘Ceylon Village’ at the Franco-British Exhibition in White City, London, in 1908; and Cynthia Cabañas’s Cinema Looks Back At Itself, an exploration of self-reflexive films and the cinematic gaze.
The closing film of the programme is Bartek Dziadosz’s extended version of Nothing Exists Until You Sell It (2021), an uncompromising mesh-up of commercials and insights into the inner workings of the advertising industry, also created for the Hidden Persuaders project.
You can now watch all the films on YouTube. They will be available until the end of Arts Weeks.
On 21 May 2021 we will also be holding a live event online, in which the filmmakers will appear in conversation to discuss their work and take questions from audience members.
You can book your place for the live Q&A session here. You will receive an email one hour before the start of the event with a link to join. The email will come from messenger@bbk.ac.uk. Please check your spam inbox if you have not received the email one hour before the start of the event.
