Movies: Mike Dunford

Faces pass by in quickly edited, split-screen recordings. A 'structuralist' film in which the film material itself plays an important role. Grain, scratches and flickering give the film texture. The music is by Steve Reich....

The piece is built on a framework of tracking down and up a parking garage staircase, with a carwash in the basement, (since demolished) the same take repeated a number of times, and therefore a different, but same repetition. A second strand of the ...

A film on unemployment that invites the spectator to resist capitalism and the consumption society, made by Mike Dunford, who was unemployed at the time, with the intention of providing a catalyst for discussion at Claimants Union meetings....

A surfer, filmed and shown on tv, refilmed on 8mm,and refilmed again on 16mm.Simple loop structure preceded by four minutes of a still frame of the surfer. An image on the borders of apprehension, becoming more and more abstract. The surfer surfs, ...

In 2008 de-regulated globalised finance capital brought the world to the brink of disaster. Its ideology of market fundamentalism and unconstrained corruption proved to be utterly bankrupt and a recipe for the destruction of the social order as well ...

Part of the Logical Propositions series. 16mm, colour, sound...

Part of the Logical Propositions series, 16mm, colour, sound...

Another approach to the same complex of story and videographic operations. This time the videographic work takes primacy and is almost wholly abstract. The story-telling strand is presented (enclosed) as a self-contained element within the overall im...

Marks another stage of work which I called “distributed narrative”. In this a strand of thought, an idea or a story, and related or unrelated material that adds or conflicts is constantly re-presented over the course of the work, to create in the tot...

A small meditation on light, wind, and Cecil Taylor...

Ronald Reagan had been elected US president in 1981, and began the long unwinding of post-war progressive economic and social policy awaited by the American ruling class, but which had produced social welfare and full employment for the 50’s and into...

This film came after Arbitrary Limits, and expanded the aspect of the social context of the film’s production to essentially dominate the latter half of the film, and derail the initial formal plan for filming almost completely. Although this was unl...

Arbitrary Limits is a documentation, and a documentary, of the making of itself, a self-reflexive narrative that encompasses the relationship between film-maker and sound recordist, and their relation to the ongoing film, a commentary on the film’s p...

Scratch begins as a standard 8 film fragment, originally filmed in our 60’s basement kitchen, and reprojected as a loop 5 times with a repeated coda of junk and glitch footage, onto a ground glass screen, refilmed in black and white on 16mm film stoc...

Standard 8 colour film, refilmed and slowed down, edited into a formal work on 16mm film, of camera pan sequences of a woman lying naked. Almost abstract images slide from darkness to light and back, repeated, repeated, in a pattern of repetitions th...

Using video colorising, pushing u-matic tape –tracking close to breakdown, and slo-mo, a video devoid of narrative structure, interspersed with inserted interpretations on the title and music track, a dance of edited movement in camera, and edit suit...

Five experimentations with film as a medium, a physical object and a record of social reality....

Early experimentations with film by a materialist sculptor and future structural filmmaker....

'Still-Life with Pear' takes a subversive position towards the illusion inherent in the film-image, its apparent transparency to representation, but rather than dealing with this by countering with strategies of foregrounding the actual materiality o...

All part of a series called LOGICAL PROPOSITIONS. The simple aim of this series was to didactically select several elements of film naturalism, which work to create the illusion of representation on screen, and make each the subject of a self-descrip...