Riverboat Cinema: Flow
Journey to the festival opening in a riverboat cinema!
In partnership with Silverline Cruises, the River Tamar Project invite you on a Tamar cruise with a difference. Journeying upriver, you will experience Flow: a thematic play of artists’ films on watery confluence, curated by artist and film curator Lucy Reynolds. The programme includes the premiere of Richard Allman’s first ever animation Tamarama: a river boat trip in ink and charcoal and Filmwater by David Ward.
The Riverboat Cinema disembarks at Calstock Quay where it is only a short walk to the Open Air Cinema: Steamboat Bill Jr screening.
Space on the riverboat cinema is extremely limited – book early to avoid disappointment.
Due to tidal restrictions, the Riverboat Cinema is unable to make a return trip from Calstock to Plymouth. We recommend that the Tamar Valley Branchline is used for your return trip. The last train leaves Calstock at 10.30pm, after the Open Air Cinema has ended.
Flow Programme:
Walk of the Three Chairs Breda Beban (2003)
Revisiting her Balkan homeland after years living in London, Walk of Three Chairs shows Beban floating on a raft between two banks of the Danube in Belgrade, believed by some to be the point at which the Balkans end and Europe begins.One bank reveals an industrial landscape whilst the other is populated by trees and wooden dachas. The movie takes its title from a traditional Balkan pagan ritual, one that the artist recalls her grandfather performing after winning at gambling. The precarious yet celebratory act performed by Beban against the shifting backdrop, is for her an expression of ‘a complex kind of joy informed by sadness’. This idea of bitter sweet is encapsulated in the love song Beban attempts to sing as she travels:’Who Doesn’t Know How to Suffer Doesn’t Know How to Love’. (luxonline)
Daylight Moon Lewis Klahr (2003)
Klahr’s film conjures the sound and images of the haunting river landscape in Charles Laughton’s film The Night of the Hunter to evoke the memories of childhood experience.”Lewis Klahr’s collage films have always mimed the processes of memory by pulling together the discards of contemporary life (images from ads, text books, or comic books, objects such as game pieces, menus, playing cards) into scenarios that seem like some Hollywood film dimly remembered. In Daylight Moon, he reaches even further back, to try to recall the moments in which a small child configures the world out of patterns of visual fascination, a mode of seeing that relies on touch and the feel of things rather than deep space. (Tom Gunning, University of Chicago)
The Whirlpool Jayne Parker (1997)
Accompanied by the pianist Katharina Wolpe, playing music by Schumann, the underwater performer Deborah Figueiredo puts on a pair of red ballet shoes and walks en pointe across the pool floor. Captivated by the magic of this underwater world she begins to dance, unaware of the danger that lies ahead.
Filmwater David Ward (2008)
In 1995, David Ward travelled by boat for one month on the Orinoco River, moving upstream towards the source of the river, in the Amazonas rainforest region of southern Venezuela: the lands of the Yanomami and YeK’wana people. Along with sound recordings and photographs, he made around thirty minutes of Super 8 film and “Filmwater” came out of some of that footage.The image is simply the surface of the river. The surface undulates but remains unbroken until the last seconds of the film. Focusing on the relationship between the thin, sensitive materiality of photographic film (the reel of Super 8 film) and the skin like surface, the meniscus, of the film of water of the river itself, this short, silent film was made on a stretch of river close to a unique natural waterway, where a channel called the Casiquiare connects the Orinoco and Amazon rivers.
Lucy Reynolds
Film Programme Consultant
Lucy is a writer, artist and curator. Her work moves between these different forms, bringing them together through the questions of feminism, political space, collective practice and film. Her articles on artists’ moving image have appeared in journals such as Afterall, Millenium Film Journal and Vertigo, and she has curated film programmes for museums and galleries from Tate Modern and the South London Gallery to Mukha, Antwerp. She runs the MRES: Art: Moving Image, a research based MA devoted to the study of artists moving image at Central St Martins, in association with LUX. Her own films, performances and installations have shown in galleries and cinemas nationally, most recently in Film in Space at Camden Arts Centre, and as part of the Blue Coat gallery touring exhibition 3am: Wonder and Paranoia.
Travel Information
Make your return journey by train on the stunning Tamar Valley branchline.
Bus routes available: 34 (21/21A short walk)
Parking: there is limited parking available in the village. We encourage travel by public transport wherever possible.
