Nicky Hamlyn is one of the UK's key artist filmmakers of the past 30 years, working in 16mm film and video, he has produced a large body of both single screen work and installations in both media. His current practice has two distinct concerns, based on the medium he is using. In much of the film work he has been concerned with developing structures that are derived as closely as possible from the form of the subject matter. In recent years the subjects have been predominantly architectural, but also topographical. He often works frame by frame, in the manner of an animator, and this approach acknowledges the importance of the individual frame as a building block for bigger structures. The aim in establishing a reciprocal relationship between the film frame, the framing edges and the subject’s formal properties, is to eliminate subjective decisions about framing and allow given parameters to have a determining effect. Much of the video work, by contrast, explores the spontaneous interactions between complex events, such as the swirling movements of layers of net curtain, and the  video technology used to record process the data it receives. This DVD makes available for the first time his major film and video works from the past 38 years and is accompanied by new essays by Simon Payne and Federico Windhausen.

In the 1990s, James Benning’s films were characterized primarily by an ongoing investigation of the relationship between the image and the (spoken or written) word. This 2-disc set features the two key works representing the peak of this “text-image film” period. In Deseret Benning (by way of the New York Times) retells the history of America’s Mormon State Utah through spectacular black & white and color images. Art and landscape join as one in Benning’s following film Four Corners, which serves as both a tribute to the famous region in the USA where four states converge and a portrait of four very different artists. 

Peter Emmanuel Goldman's rarely screened debut, an underappreciated landmark of the New American Cinema, chronicles the lives of twenty-somethings adrift in New York City, finding tremendous pathos in the smallest moments: a furtive glance across a museum gallery, girls putting on makeup, a stroll beneath the pulsing lights of Times Square marquees. Composed with a lo-fi purity and bereft of diegetic sound, its shadowy images of youthful flaneurs are paired with evocatively hand-painted title cards and a dynamic soundtrack drawn from the artist's LPs that, when combined, conjure up a ballad of sexual dependency like none other.

Mad Dance is a trilogy of provocative and beautiful short films that re-envision the way we think, speak and feel about mental distress and wellness in today’s chaotic world. These transformative films offer new maps for navigating madness with insight, healing and hope.