Kids these days seem to have their pockets full of the latest gadgets – so what better way for them to utilise their iPhones than engaging in some surrealist film-making!
The “It’s A Montage” workshop did just this. Participants Cara and Scarlett were advised to capture photos and video of anything that appealed to them in the exhibition. This material would then be compiled using an iPhone video editing app. Hosted by Laura Hopwood, the session was based on films made by forward-thinking French artists Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger. The films can be seen alongside their other masterpieces in the Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters exhibition.
With their mobile phones in hand to take photos, Cara and Scarlett toured the exhibition, focusing specifically on Léger’s Le Ballet Mécanique and Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema. Duchamp and Leger were preoccupied with the transitions occurring in post-war France. Duchamp’s film from 1926 features a spinning disk on a turntable and shows his fascination with optical illusions. Léger’s film, created two years before Duchamp’s, was made just after his mechanical period, in which machinery and geometry featured heavily in his work.
Marcel Duchamp (American, born France. 1887-1968)
Anemic Cinema, 1926
35mm film Black and white, silent, 6 minutes (approx.)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired from the artist. Preserved with funding from the Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Fund
© 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp
Nothing could be more fitting for a tutorial using modern technology than a study of the fourteen modern masters but as the participants learned after their tour, our modern age is not without its own curiosities to translate into art. To get into the Surrealist frame of mind (if, indeed, that is even possible), Laura asked the girls to brainstorm the positive and negatives associated with our time. Everything from Facebook to cane toads was listed, leaving the girls with plenty of outlandish possibilities for their video montages.
They then took advantage of the Gallery’s free WI-FI to import their snaps into the movie-making application and away they went! Cara’s film explored the idea of what we can’t see behind locked doors and she was spotted taking some photos of the Gallery’s historic doorways. Scarlett focused on the difference between light and darkness in paintings. Both videos will be posted to the website soon and the winning filmmaker will win an unlimited pass to the Picasso to Warhol exhibition.
Stay tuned for more!
Coral Huckstep
