Emily Richardson’s films explore landscapes and environments to reveal the way that activity, movement and light is inscribed in place. Traversing an extraordinarily diverse range of landscapes including empty East End streets, forests, North Sea oil fields, post-war tower blocks and Cold War military facilities Richardson’s films offer a dazzling deconstruction of place and time. They focus the mind and eye to detail, finding transcendence and emotion in the everyday.
Richardson’s films are distributed by LUX and have been shown in galleries and at festivals internationally including Tate Britain, Tate Modern, NFT, Curzon Soho, Artist’s Space, New York and Edinburgh, London, Rotterdam and New York film festivals. A book of her work, Time Frames, is published by Stour Valley Arts, distributed by Cornerhouse, Manchester.

COBRA MIST

16mm anamorphic
Продолжительность: 6 минут 53 секунды
2008

Cobra Mist explores the relationship between the landscape of Orford Ness and the traces of its military history, particularly the experiments in radar and the extraordinary architecture of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. Much of what took place there is still under the official secrets act so will only be revealed over time. The buildings have been left to the elements to deteriorate, creating a tension between the time it will take for their secrets to come out and for the buildings to disappear. The place has a sinister atmosphere, which the architecture itself begins to reveal or hint at. The film records the physical traces of it’s often secretive past using the photographic nature of 16mm film and time lapse to construct an impossible experience of the landscape and expose its history to the camera.

The soundtrack is composed by Benedict Drew from sound recordings taken from Orford Ness by Chris Watson. Chris made recordings out on the Ness and in some of the buildings using very high sensitivity microphones to capture sounds such as the birds bursting out of the old vents that they are now nesting in, dripping water coming through the open roofs, the gulls alarm calls, the faint whisper of the world service from the masts in the aerial field and the sound of the sea in the shingle to capture the atmosphere of the place. These recordings were then used by Benedict to compose the soundtrack that conveys the sense of foreboding that is present in this landscape and its architecture.

Redshift

16mm
Продолжительность: 3 минуты 53 секунды
2001

In astronmoical terminology redshift is a term used in calculating the distance of stars from the earth, hence determining their age. redshift attempts to show the huge geometry of the night sky and give an altered perspective of the landscape, using long exposures, fixed camera positions, long shots and timelapse animation techniques to reveal aspects of the night that are invisible to the naked eye.

The film has a gentle intensity to it, and is composed of changes of light across the sea, sky and mountains. It shows movement where there is apparent stillness, whether in the formation of weather patterns, movement of stars, the illumination of a building by passing car headlights or boats darting back and forth across the sea’s horizon.

The sound has been composed for the film by Benedict Drew, taking field recordings of the aurora borealis as a starting point, and using purely computer generated sound to create a soundtrack that reflects the unheard elements present in the earth’s atmosphere.

Ноктюрн / NOCTURNE

16mm
Продолжительность: 4 минуты 59 секунд

Nocturne is a 5 minute film shot entirely at night in deserted streets of the city. The film attempts to find images of London at night that reveal the presence of the past, or the presence of the dead, hinting at it's concealed history. It is shot in deserted streets around the east end of London and Docklands as there is a feeling of an echoic city filled with shadows that manifests itself there at night.

It is composed of long static viewpoints, each shot slowly unfolding in time as if by looking long enough it's secrets will be revealed. Shooting on 16mm film, using long exposures and timelapse techniques together give the film an intensity of colour and a sense of fleeting or historical time. The drab, deserted streets are transformed as they appear in hyper-real colour, devoid of traffic and human activity.

The film has a neurotic, electric quality as the only signs of life are lights turning on and off in buildings, the occasional ghost image of passing cars and the pulse of overhead trains.

On these forgotten streets the sounds of night puncture the silence with more frantic, desperate outbursts and the silence becomes an active element. The film soundtrack recreates this teeming silence full of the sounds we tend to filter out, sounds such as the faint rumble of cars in the distance, planes flying overhead, the footsteps of people passing by, occasional voices and the wind blowing rubbish along the street.

Аспект / Aspect

16mm
Продолжительность: 8 минут 46 секунд
2004

Colour, light and shadow shift across the surface of the forest as the period of a year is condensed into minutes.

Aspect is filmed in a forest over the period of a year. Using photographic techniques, such as time-lapse and long exposures on single film frames the forest year is condensed into a few minutes. Light, colour and shadow travel across its surface and the film shifts between seeing the trees as trees and seeing the movement of light and shadow abstracting the real environment.

Fragments of unconscious forest sounds, ants in their anthill, the wind across the forest floor, the crack of a twig are reconfigured into an audio piece by Benedict Drew, that articulates the film (and the forest) in an illusive and ambiguous way.

Петролия / Petrolia

single screen version:
Продолжительность: 20 минут 59 секунд

2005

Petrolia takes its name from a redundant oil drilling platform sat in the Cromarty Firth, Scotland. The film looks at the architecture of the oil industry along the Scottish coastline where oil and gas supplies are predicted to run dry in the next forty years.

Shooting on 16mm film, using time lapse and long exposure techniques, the film presents a record of industrial phenomena, - the toxic beauty of the refinery at Grangemouth, huge drilling platforms gliding across the water as they come in for maintenance and repair at Nigg and the last dance of the shipbuilding cranes in Glasgow harbour.

Benedict Drew has created the soundtrack for the film using purely electronic, computer generated sound that works with the threshold between silence and noise as the image works with that between the visible and invisible.

Блок / BLOCK

16mm
12 минут 43 секунды
2005

Day through night BLOCK is a portrait of a 1960’s London tower block, it’s interior and exterior spaces explored and revealed, patterns of activity building a rhythm and viewing experience not dissimilar from the daily observations of the security guard sat watching the flickering screens with their fixed viewpoints and missing pieces of action.

Block was made over a period of 10 month period in a tower block in south east London from 2004 –05. The film is a portrait of the place that came out of much time spent there.

The security guards office and the bank of CCTV monitors with their random editing patterns and missing pieces of action were used as a starting point in terms of the camera techniques and editing structures employed in the film. All seeing, but seeing nothing at the same time. Working with static camera the fixed shots are repeated and edited together in sequence in a similar way to the CCTV camera recordings that flick from one camera view to another, often disrupting the (visual) ‘narrative’.

The contrast between the exterior and interior of the building, the impersonal common spaces and the personal spaces of the interior of people’s flats gives shape to the portrait.

The soundtrack was built up from recordings made on location at the time of shooting and sounds gathered from various sources and was composed and mixed by Jonah Fox.

Block was made for an exhibition at Cafe Gallery, London, was recently shown at Rotterdam International Film Festival and will be part of an exhibition at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in Sunderland later this year.