Double Bill
Beyond Zero: 1914-1918
Directed by Bill Morrison | USA | 2015 | Doc/Experimental | 39 mins
Film source: Icarus Films
A work for quartet with film. Utilizing only original 35 mm nitrate film shot during World War I, director Bill Morrison (Decasia) creates a unique, mesmerizing cinematic experience that is both historical document and experimental meditation. Rare and fascinating footage – most of it unseen by modern audiences, all of it in some stage of deterioration – evokes the fragmentary and elusive nature of memory and illustrates our tenuous and mutable relationship with the past. Serbian composer Aleksandra Vrebalov’s score was inspired by “the writings of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, the music of Satie and Debussy, and the Dada movement,” and is performed by the Kronos Quartet, for whom the film was originally commissioned.
War Work: 8 Songs With Film
Directed by Michael Nyman | UK | 2015 | Doc/experimental |65 mins
US Premiere
Film Source: Filmmakers
VTIFF is proud to present the North American premiere of this powerful new work. Internationally renowned composer Michael Nyman (whose scores for films include Jane Campion’s The Piano and multiple collaborations with Peter Greenaway) directs this experimental, musically driven meditation on the horrors of WWI. Comprised of archival material and documentary footage from the period, examples of visual arts and films made in response to the war, as well as chanson vieilles and other texts from English and European poets, War Work is an immersive rumination on the devastating impact of armed conflict. With its recurring images of disfigured and debilitated veterans and its depiction of everyday life affected by war, the film is a powerful and haunting statement that resonates profoundly with current circumstances around the globe.