The Dream Machine

Another cutting-edge visual experiment from British artist John Maybury, Premonitions Of Absurd Perversion In Sexual Personae, Part 1 serves up a video tribute to the male body, a steamy Kenneth Anger for the video age. Pieced together from a ten year stockpile of evocative, personal images, Maybury’s tape uses multi-form mixing techniques in a typically freeform exploration of the polymorphous field of desire and sexuality.

The Union Jacking Up is an ode to friends, including Trojan and Leigh Bowery who feature in the film among others, as well as a collage of news footage of 80s Britain. The film’s haunting soundtrack is composed similarly to the video and 16mm footage that fades and dissolves on screen, often montaging two sources to create abstract combinations and juxtapositions. - ICA

A military veteran goes on a journey into the future, where he can foresee his death and is left with questions that could save his life and those he loves.

A woman pretends to be her dead husband in Nazi Germany in order to survive.

A model poses in bright primary colours alongside a number of oblique words. Images of a woman rotating wearing long flowing dresses are overlain and played at different speeds.

Remembrance of Things Fast represents the culmination of Maybury's work in video, which has developed alongside the technology itself. Starring Tilda Swinton and Rupert Everett in lead roles, the tape confronts the conventions of world television and satellite broadcast, drawing on the fragmentary nature of the medium and the clich_s of the three minute attention span. At the same time, it replaces bland mainstream images with darker, more satirical observations and studies. The environment is surreal, a virtual reality television land of landscapes and imaginary cities, enhanced by Marvin Black's dark, dense soundtrack. It is a cyberspace where the impossible is all too possible. Within this parallel world, a series of archetypes act, observe and comment, informed by a strong sexual sensibility. '..a mesmerising, sometimes hysterically funny, cinematic bricolage with a strong sexual and mostly gay sensibility'. - Cordelia Swann

Maybury's significant contribution to experimental film and video becomes apparent through a complex reworking of his own archive footage. "The film's attempt to re-create an acid trip is showcased in this creature's dance: whenever she moves, a rainbow of colors and shapes appear, as if her appendages are the artist's brushes". (Gary Morris)

When the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and his flirtatious wife Caitlin sweep into war-torn London, the last thing they expect is to bump into Dylan's childhood sweetheart Vera. Despite her joy at seeing Dylan after so many years, Vera is swept off her feet by a dashing officer, William Killick, and finds herself torn between the open adoration of her new found beau and the wily charms of the exotic Welshman.

The concert was recorded live at the Dominion Theatre in London, on June 3, 1988. TracklistHide Credits 1 Jackie 2 Just Like You Said It Would Be 3 Mandinka 4 Just Call Me Joe 5 Never Get Old 6 Jerusalem 7 Troy 8 I Am Stretched On Your Grave

This music special is dedicated to dispelling the prejudices associated with the HIV infection and raising money for AIDS research and relief. Some of today's most celebrated recording artists performing their interpretations of the classic songs of Cole Porter.

A dramatization, in modern theatrical style, of the life and thought of the Viennese-born, Cambridge-educated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose principal interest was the nature and limits of language. A series of sketches depict the unfolding of his life from boyhood, through the era of the first World War, to his eventual Cambridge professorship and association with Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes. The emphasis in these sketches is on the exposition of the ideas of Wittgenstein, a homosexual, and an intuitive, moody, proud, and perfectionistic thinker generally regarded as a genius.

A collage of Derek Jarman's super 8 footage spanning over 20 years.

Derek Jarman’s Will You Dance with Me? is an essential document of LGBTQ London that was unseen until 2014, 30 years after it was originally shot. In September 1984, Jarman was invited by director Ron Peck and writer Mark Ayres to record improvisations at Benjy’s, a gay club in East London’s Mile End district, as part of the early experimental work for their feature film Empire State, a neo-noir that would be released in 1987. The coed, racially diverse crowd of roughly 100 people at Benjiy’s that night included club regulars, bar staff, and potential players in Empire State. Every single detail captured in Jarman’s on-location assignment abounds with era-specific riches: from the New Romantic cutie journaling while nestled in a corner booth to the DJ’s cheerful exhortations and the songs he spins (“Let the Music Play,” “Planet Rock,” “Relax").

Queen Elizabeth I visits late twentieth-century Britain to find a depressing landscape where life has changed since her time.

Derek Jarman's film portrait of American writer William S. Burroughs was shot in September 1982 during his first visit to England to attend the legendary Final Academy events at the South London Ritzy Cinema. These were Burroughs-themed art and performance nights curated by Psychic TV. Jarman’s film shows Burroughs on Tottenham Court Road signing autographs with fans and inside a shop buying alcohol. The industrial soundtrack by Psychic TV features a sample of Burroughs repeating "boys, school showers and swimming pools full of 'em'". Additional footage shot by Jarman during Burroughs' visit is reported to have been confiscated by Scotland Yard in 1991 and remains lost. Jarman and Psychic TV would continue to collaborate (“magic bound us together” Jarman wrote), with Jarman directing the music video for Catalan 1984 and staring as the spokesperson for the Psychic TV film Force the Hand of Chance - Message 1982.

A silent short movie, is a literal journey that we can experience. We are being taken to Avebury and given the chance to admire it for 10 minutes. The shots are incredibly beautiful, as we see a huge stone or trees bathed in orange light of sunset.

An experimental short film by Derek Jarman includes images of a man combing his hair, death reflected in the mirror and various burning objects.

An experimental film by Derek Jarman that captures the decay of an urban environment.

In this experimental short, four naked men are touched by death.

Super 8 footage shot on location in Sardinia in 1975.

A record of screen tests carried out to select young male actors suitable to perform in the singer Kim Wilde's newest promotional video.

The film documents a small event situated on the Idroscala di Ostia, close to the place where Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered on the night of November 2, 1975. A vandalised concrete sculpture now commemorates the spot where Pasolini died a few hundred yards away from the mouth of the Tiber.

By the end of the punk movement in the mid-80s, London’s vibrant club scene had become a source of inspiration. Cerith Wyn Evans’ Epiphany is a colorful documentation of this underground hedonism.

Inspired by a poem by William Blake: a short experimental film about the perception of vision.