Sunday, July 14, 2019, 7:00 pm
$7-$10
Bookended by the 2011 London riots, Benedict Seymour’s dramatically, politically urgent new film retells the story of Chris Marker’s ‘La Jetée’. A man has been sent back into the past as a way of rescuing the future, his tale told by way of the Narrator who riffs on familiar film dialogue and contemporary references – unpicking the political implications of his journey and our retro obsessions. A collage, narrative, essay film hybrid, ‘Dead the Ends’, plunders some fifty years of cinema – including dystopian sci-fi – and uses emojis and gifs as ways of exploring the undercurrents of historical and current visual language, as well as present entrenched, systemic inequality. Cross-currents of thought and broad swathes of material are incisively manoeuvred, whilst, in its intellectually and dramatically gripping shape and scope, the piece feels part-situationist, part-Borgesian. It asks, in richly creative fashion, how did we get here?”
– William Fowler, London Film Festival
Benedict Seymour is a film maker, writer and musician. Films: ‘Dead the Ends’ (director, 2017); ‘Can Dialectics Break Gravity?’ (with Matthew Noel-Tod, 2014); ‘Bang!’ (Script; Dir: Matthew Noel-Tod, 2012) and ‘The London Particular ‘(2004, with David Panos). He has been an editor of Mute Magazine in various forms since 2003 and writes essays and fiction that have appeared in various venues, books, and websites. http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/creativitys-rainbow Soundtracks include Melanie Gilligan’s ‘The Common Sense’ (2015) and ‘Crisis in the Credit System’ (2008); Maija Timonen’s ‘Aune, or On Effective Demise’ (2013). Musical projects include Petit Mal (2008) and Antifamily (2006). He is a supporter of Boycott Divest Zabludowicz group [https://boycottzabludowicz.wordpress.com/] and a lecturer in Critical Studies on the MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, London