LONDON.- Frieze Film is a programme of artist films screened to coincide with Frieze Art Fair. This year, it is curated by Sarah McCrory and includes four commissioned films as well as a curated film programme that will be shown in a specially constructed cinema outside the entrance to the fair that will be free to the public.

The artists commissioned to make new work for Frieze Film are: Jess Flood-Paddock, Linder, Elizabeth Price and Stephen Sutcliffe.

The commissioned films by British artists will be shown alongside specially selected programmes as well as existing films by this year’s Frieze Projects artists. Full details of the guest-curated programmes will be available from late Summer.

The four Frieze Film commissions will be previewed in Channel 4’s innovative ‘3 Minute Wonder’ slot during the week of Frieze Art Fair from Monday 11 October to Thursday 14 October, at 7.55pm. In previous years collaborations between Frieze Film and Channel 4’s ‘3 Minute Wonders’ have averaged audiences in excess of one million viewers.

Commenting on Frieze Film, Avi Grewal of Channel 4 added: ‘I am thrilled to be involved with this project, Frieze Film has established an unrivalled reputation for producing bold, irreverent and audacious films. Channel 4 is proud to be a part of this movement, taking risks, pushing boundaries and inspiring change is at the heart of what we do.’

Frieze Film is presented as part of Frieze Art Fair’s unique curated programme.
Frieze Film commissions 2010:

Jess Flood-Paddock Island - A Regime.
Drawn from an exhibition and residency taking place in Malta, Jess Flood-Paddock will make a three-minute film looking at the benefits of perimeters, routines and regulations of creativity; investigating how things are made.

During this residency, involving researching art collectives, alternative energy, and access to information, home and industrial economies, making, baking, gardening, swimming and film screenings, elements of time were spent looking at an alternative way of living and will edge into the film.

Shot mostly on a mobile phone, with brief sections and passages on a higher resolution camera to create momentary contrast, the work will have the grainy look of lo-fi video. It will feature three main movements exploring scale, travel and disorientation, and distance from the location creating an island narrative that can be compared to the stories of Where the Wild Things Are and King Kong. The video will have an original sound track made by two solo musicians, a banjo solo by Sam Steer and a psychedelic rock drone solo by Alexander Tucker.

Linder – Forgetful Green
Linder’s commission for Frieze Film 2010 will be filmed in the aftermath of her upcoming Chisenhale Gallery performance.

On July 10th, a 13-hour improvisational performance, The Darktown Cakewalk: Celebrated from the House of FAME will take place at the Chisenhale Gallery, London. On the next day, the characters from The Darktown Cakewalk – a Star, a Muse, Puella Aeterna, a Witch, a Cakewalk King and Queen - will find themselves blinking in the early morning light in the Rose Field of Cants of Colchester, the oldest rose growers in Britain. The three-minute film begins here – the morning after the night before as if in Heironymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights - now manicured, suburban and retail. Abandoned hairdryers, vacuum cleaners and other domestic appliances amongst the roses pun on the use of 20th-century Bosch electrical appliances.

The three-minute duration of the film mirrors that of the seven-inch single. Three minutes of sound was the optimum recorded length for a single due to the constraints of manufactured vinyl from 1900 until the 1960s. Songwriters and musicians composed and recorded songs appropriate to the constraints of this format. A three-minute single, a ‘spiral scratch’, is reflected in the filmed choreography throughout the rose garden, and echoes the mystical spirals of Dante or the mythic site of Glastonbury Tor.

The characters from The Darktown Cakewalk circle through the rose garden led by Linder as Minerva (Minnie Mouse’s original name) and eventually meet the artist Harminder Singh Judge as the goddess Kali by way of Gene Simmons from the rock group, Kiss. The film traces a compressed history of glamour, from its origins in 18th-century Scotland describing enchantment, to its present day aerosolic ghosts.

Elizabeth Price – The Tent
The Tent, Elizabeth Price’s new work for Frieze Film, will extrapolate an eventful fictional narrative from a black-&-white printed booklet and the body of art that it features in its pages. Presenting artworks with reduced economies, the book, a 1972 Arts Council publication entitled Systems, includes drawings, documentation of works, and photographs of the artists in the ‘British Systems group’, along with extended texts written by each of them.

The video’s imagery will be derived from recording both the object of the book and the images it contains. The videography will employ experimental, high contrast exposures that will cause white pages to bleach away almost entirely, and black pages to intensify so that they become suggestive of spaces rather than surfaces; so that the diagrams/images on those pages seem to float in voids.

The narration will be formulated from the text of the book and delivered as motion graphics. Fragments of text will be excerpted and reorganised, to compose a fractured story that reveals the ideological and imaginative world articulated within the book. The narrative will exploit the publication’s recurring themes: apocalyptic anxiety and futurological urgency; the idealized relations between social and aesthetic economies; and ambitions for art’s social agency.

The soundtrack will also be drawn from the material of the book. Sounds (of flicking pages for example) will be amplified and manipulated to form the basis of the soundtrack.

Stephen Sutcliffe
Stephen Sutcliffe’s point of departure for his commission for Frieze Film 2010 will be Colin Wilson’s seminal book the The Outsider. In this book Wilson uses Thomas Mann’s 1943 novel Doctor Faustus as an antithesis to his own idea of a ‘positive existentialism’ and claims that Mann’s model for the character of Leverkühn was Friedrich Nietzsche.

In Chapter 25 of Mann’s Doctor Faustus the composer Adrian Leverkühn has a meeting with the devil. This hallucination is brought on by a suspected syphilitic infection picked up from a brothel visit, for which Leverkühn has been unsuccessfully treated earlier in the book. He is then enticed by the devil to sell his soul for musical perfection for a period of years, whilst his body slowly fails.

For Sutcliffe’s new video work Colin Wilson himself will meet the amorphous character of the devil, confronting Mann’s theme directly, by collageing Wilson’s criticism from The Outsider with Chapter 25 from Doctor Faustus.

Sutcliffe’s new work will continue his interest in collage, not only in the integration of both of the texts, but also with the implementation of differing filmic techniques to themes of artistic self-doubt with explorations of interior psychology, and in this case, Mann’s favourite topic: of the discord between genius and sanity.