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Lis Rhodes uses often mysterious, dangerous and highly personal images. –Amy Taubin, ‘Village Voice’ New York, 1978‘The film begins in darkness as a woman’s voice is heard over a black screen. The voice is questioning, searching. She will act. But how? Act against what? The bloodstained bed suggests a crime. . . could it be his blood? Could it be her blood? The voice searches for clues. . . . The clues suggest it is language that has trapped her, meanings that have excluded her and a past constructed to control her. Light Reading ends with no single solution. But there is a beginning. Of that she is positive. She will not be looked at but listened to…’ –Felicity Sparrow, ‘Her Image Fades as Her Voice Rises’, publ. The Arts Council 1982, reprinted in ‘Films for Women’, Charlotte Brunsden, Ed., publ. British Film Institute, 1986‘Light Reading is the possibility of a new direction in film, not to be co-opted by an overriding definition.’ –Peter Gidal ‘Materialist Film’ 1989‘Rhodes manipulation of, and dexterity with, cinematic techniques is a constant throughout her work.Read More »
Lis Rhodes
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Lis Rhodes – Light Reading (1978)
1971-1980ExperimentalLis RhodesUnited Kingdom -
Lis Rhodes – A Cold Draft (1988)
1981-1990ExperimentalLis RhodesUnited KingdomShows the surveillance of a woman by overseers who have judged her to be mad. What is most provocative about this film is that it proposes multiple credible points of view even as the woman is being certified insane by the Censors. We voyage into the skull of a woman and peer out to a monumentally static cold waste with planetary slow motion. It is the bunker-eye view.
‘A Cold Draft is drawn from (a drawing of) the conditions produced by ‘liberal’ economics in the UK in the 1980’s. Truth is reckless, certainty a sham, but such is faith in repetition that line by line certainty is drawn. The account may be fictitious, a representation, but the events are the result of the imposition of private ownership.’ – Lis Rhodes 2008Read More »