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.

The Flicker sweeps away reality, transports us into another environment and acts as a sort of instrument of perceptual experimentation. The filmmaker himself considers it as a kind of science fiction film which, instead of entering us into strange worlds – which have everything to do with this world and the development of conventional narrative structures –, proposes to transport us into a totally different dimension which is abstract and structured in a manner radically different from our environment.

Boston's living legend and a master of small gauge filmmaking! This is volume one and only a drop on the bucket of masterpieces which Saul Levine has produced over the decades.