This looks especially intriguing as the British ghost story classic is screened as part of the Tate series Assembly, a survey of recent artists’ film and video in Britain 2008–2013.
I have spoken to the Tate series curator, George Clark, who told me: "This will be an attempt to rethink what a film screening might be, to create a deeper involvement with a movie for the audience." This is the final part of the Assembly series on artists' work on video in the last five years in Britain. Mark Aerial Waller has produced tonight's event which is the latest in his ongoing series, The Wayward Canon, a series in which Waller attempts to re-think the screening environment. It promises to be a pretty unique event with parts of the film remade and yoga routines book-ending the various episodes in this famous portmanteau film.
Tonight's presentation is entitled Yoga Horror and here is the Tate introduction:
Yoga Horror occupies the convergent space of film viewing where the gallery exhibition overlaps with cinema and social gathering. The event includes a screening of the 1945 portmanteau British horror movie Dead of Night together with specially filmed new sequences and a yoga exercise video. Dead of Night is narrated through the half remembered experience of the protagonist Walter Craig, whose recurring nightmare provides a recursive structure for a series of tales, where one form of consciousness slips into another, where horror lies within slippages of logic and perception. This new production of Yoga Horror presents previously unseen footage constructed specially for the event. It is a dynamic montage of spectatorship and memory, inviting the audience to engage with the gap between waking and dreaming, between the impossible and the real. Their unique events explore the covert languages of cinema, the shadowy half-pronounced areas where humour, horror and truth reside.
Time Out review of Dead of Night:
'Nearly 60 years on, Ealing's compendium of spooky tales remains scary as hell. The best of the five stories, which we see enacted as they're related in turn by guests at a country house, are Cavalcanti's 'The Ventriloquist's Dummy', with Redgrave possessed by his deceptively lifeless little partner, and Hamer's 'The Haunted Mirror', with the splendid Withers a reluctant participant as history repeats itself; least frightening, but amusing, are Radford and Wayne as typically obsessive sporting coves in Crichton's 'Golfing Story'. Best of all, however, is the overall narrative arc, with the framing story finally taking a headlong rush into a nightmarish realm almost surreal in its weird clarity and familiarity.'
Geoff Andrew
Here (and above) is an introdcution by A.O. Scott to the great Ealing studio movie.
I’m glad I have come across your site it seems very helpful indeed.
ReplyDeleteYoga in Ealing