WHITE LIGHT
White Light
6 mins
4K video projection
2020
The White Light project is a commissioned film and series of photograms based on a poem written and performed by Vera Graziadei. The experimental film follows an anonymous supernatural character on a philosophical journey through a disused greenhouse containing a world made of letters, books and mysterious objects.
This short, philosophical film with an original score by Fiona Brice escalates as the character’s futile rituals referencing exposure, growth, and mourning descend into a storm of book pages. Eventually, the words, the photograms, the plants, the greenhouse, and the character all sink to a dark page of her own making.
WHITE LIGHT PHOTOGRAMS : THE ROSE DISINTEGRATION SERIES
WHITE LIGHT PHOTOGRAMS : THE POEM
Directed, designed & edited by Richard Nik Evans
Written, performed and produced by Vera Graziadei
Director of photography Rami Bartholody
Original score by Fiona Brice
Costume design by Kate McGuire
Millinery and props by Nikole Tursi
Make up and hair by Faye Bluff
Camera Assistant Jay Coates
Production Assistant Lauren Evans
Gaffer Alex Jason
Lighting Technician Joshua Rumball
The Art Department Harry Gibson, Adriana Hervas, Ruby Todd & Alexandra Doyle
Colorist Phil Humphries
Sound technician Nicolas Liebing
Filmed on location at Rochester Square
Winner, best Experimental Short, New York Independent Film Festival, 2020
Selected, London Independent Film Festival, 2020
C.A.G.E.
C.A.G.E.
HD video projection
20 mins 34 sec
2013
C.A.G.E. narrated by Sam Andoe. is a fictional documentary about ‘Variations on a Plain Index' a 1945 sound work by an anonymous experimental composer.
C.A.G.E. is a subtle and philosophical story about an artist’s relationship to environment and how component elements of an artwork can represent subjective states of mind.
C.A.G.E. refers to a psychological or physical cage, to the notes C, A, G and E which make up the final noise, the structural experiments of John Cage, La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier and Marcel Broodthaers and the names of the mine shafts in Skidoo Mine, Death Valley.
Shot in Utah, California and Evans’ New York studio the film concentrates on a fictional composer’s fascination with landscape and describes how that becomes both the inspiration and the material for the sound work.
The composer records the wind in an old forest in Capitol Reef National Park and then plays that recording in disused mine shafts in Death Valley using a multi channel recording process. Here the channels are not electronic but physical channels, mines shafts. The noise of the wind is played and then re-recorded in the mines. The resulting sound work is a sonic description of the shape, volume and materiality of the shafts, a representation of the sordid culture and history of the mine and an elegy to the horrific past of the dead forest.
The film follows the sound work through several stages; natural, electrical, mechanical, geological and acoustic. These changes of state are echoed in the levels of the ‘family tree score,’ the system used to make the recordings in the mine. This process involves the pairing up of recordings made in several mines, re-pairing and re-recording them until there is only one recording.
This single recording is encased in plastic and ‘exhibited’ in an abandoned electrical substation. This sound is a physical distillation of identity, history, landscape, process and technology.
Winner, best Experimental Film, Crown Heights Film Festival, New York, 2013
Selected, Greenpoint Film Festival, New York, 2013
Selected, Improvisation Summit of Portland, Portland, 2013