This programme kind of brings together films that all deal with the spoken word, or with text as the impetus for sound-image exploration.

It includes:

Robert Nelson’s Bleu Shut: a kind of audience activating, structured film riddle in the manipulation of time, sound and image. The film is a pretty funny yet serious meditation on cinematic time and is a direct challenge to the film viewer to participate in the what they are seeing. Bleu Shut’s guessing game manages to allow different clips of film to remain just what they are (postcards, adverts etc) while giving the task of synthesizing them into a whole ‘film’ over to you the viewer, while still playing with your sense of time with both an aleatory aesthetic and a sense of humor.

It’s a hard one to pin down without giving the game away, but I personally assure you that it’s a lot funnier than how I’ve just described it.

Peter Rose’s Secondary Currents: a film about the relationships between the mind and language. Delivered by an improbable narrator who speaks an extended assortment of nonsense, it is an “imageless” film in which the shifting relationships between voice-over commentary and subtitled narration constitute a peculiar duet for voice, thought, speech, and sound. A kind of comic opera, the film is a dark metaphor for the order and entropy of language.