Bild: Overland 2016 -18fps- screenshot_16, James Edmonds

Inside/outside: constructs and the space within
A selection of films by James Edmonds

In most of my films there is a relation to architecture, in a broad and multifaceted sense. This has to do with the way the camera selects and deals with a direct subjective experience of formal space, interiors in particular,
but also how structures are seen from the outside. Are they part of a landscape or part of a fiction? Do we inhabit these spaces or do they simply compartmentalise memory?
There are various ways inwhich I have attempted to articulate my feelings about experience in everyday life, in relation to memory, through film’s uncanny ability to render durational existence as form, to be able to
construct something physical in a medium that is also itself a direct experience of time’s fleeting presence, an exploration of the tensions inherent in capturing a space. (J.E)
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After Hours, 2005, super-8 transferred to SD, 07’18”, colour, sound

“In this work an office building is almost like a moving film: the lights from the windows shine in the night as if they were film perforations sliding. Handheld camera, panoramas, still lives and improvised rhythms.
Night and day. Space is not just something we simply inhabit. A deserted building is like a film: it has a history that is revealed by the play of light and shadow on the various elements that compose this space.” (TONID’ANGELA)

Fleeting Landscape, 2006/2007/in progress, super 8 in 3 parts, variable durations, colour, silent

An imaginary filmic landscape that uses fragments of the real world seen in flight, as the camera moves almost continuously and rapidly through various passages of transit. Certain structures recur in rapid succession: towers and masts, industrial or institutional buildings and equipment, significant landmarks that seem to fade into one another like an unknown omnipresent force or infrastructure.

Fragments/Structures, 2007/2015, super8 (12fps), colour, soundtrack

Brief vignettes of urban scenery, colourful rhythmic glimpses of structural detail from a coastal town. The materials and detritus, people and architecture, fragments of daily life, are collected through the ritual of
single-frame shooting, forming patterns directly on the filmstrip as they are discovered, just as pebbles are collected on a walk across a beach.

Inside Outside, 2008/2015, 6 min, super8, colour, soundtrack

A fictional architecture of interiors and exteriors constructed through intuitive observations with the lens. The juxtaposition of the two spaces act as both metaphor and experiential resonance for the inner and outer worlds of the self, quietly documenting a life between two places.
“A constellation of internal and external forms, in a continuous return, moving from closed to open form, from one film to another.” (TONI D’ANGELA)

OVERLAND, 2016, super 8, 22min, colour and black+white, soundtrack

A fragment of memory is briefly evoked. The memory of travelling as a child. Born into the universe, a flow of images, constantly shifting chromatic modes. The substances of the earth and it’s elements circulate and accumulate in material fluctuation. The flora and fauna give way to the human. The glimpses of lives as portrait – the concrete, the societal, the ritual of the everyday. This moment again gives rise to other realities. Signs, symbols, silence and stillness animated through the uncertainty of the image as guiding force. Light is shed in silent intervals of black, traces of something long ago. Architectural follies appear as history.

A Return, 2018, 16mm, 6min, colour, sound

“James Edmonds’s intricately constructed 16mm montage film brings two disparate settings—Berlin and a village in the South of England—into the same cinematic headspace. Locating likenesses between soft light and overcast coasts, the comfort of sun-dappled interiors and the warmth of a tree-lined field, Edmonds both summons natural juxtapositions and creates unexpected harmony through deft superimpositions.” (NYFF)
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James Edmonds is a filmaker and painter from England living in Berlin. His practice is driven by a personal poetics in which the nature of recorded human gesture, articulated through the material reality of a medium, offers a tangible yet paradoxical analogue for what is lucid and fleeting – our personal experience of
existence as form, our innermost sense of being. Films, painted gestures and immersive musical works are
occasionally combined in space with various other detritus to explore overlapping subjectivities.
He has presented work at film festivals such as TIFF Toronto, NYFF New York, L’Âge d’Or Brussels, Process Riga and Fronteira Brasil, and at events and spaces such as 3 137 Athens, Cinema Parenthèse Brussels, Nocturnal Reflections Milan, Auslands-Filme, and Another Vacant Space Berlin. He recently contributed to a book on filmaker Jeannette Muñoz – The Landscape As a Sea (Revista Lumiere 2017) and since 2015 organises a film series in Berlin called Light Movement.
For more information see jamesedmonds.org