FILMS/
ARROWS OF TIME
Spotlight
England, 2007, 60 minutes
SHOWTIMES
Fri, Apr 27 / 06:30 / SFMOMA / ARRO27S
Sun, Apr 29 / 02:00 / McBean / McBean
CREDITS
- dir
-
Ken McMullen
- prod
-
Ken McMullen
- scr
-
Ken McMullen
- cam
-
Elso Roque, Yulia Kovas
- editor
-
Justinian Buckley
- mus
-
David Cunningham
- cast
-
Jacques Derrida, Joseph Beuys, Neil Calder, John Shrapnel, John Berger
- source
-
EMAIL: k.mcmullen@lcc.arts.ac.uk
Imagine a film that contains the following scenes: French philosopher Jacques Derrida reinterprets the characters of Oedipus and Antigone, explaining how their stories preempt a new cinema that will emerge in the 21st century; Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) physicists detail a camera that can capture minute slivers of time; German artist Joseph Beuys poses a confrontation between the written word and physical action; and striking reconstructions of John Milton’s, Jorge Luis Borges’s and Fernando Passoa’s poems are spoken and performed by leading actors such as Henry and June’s Maria de Medeiros. All the while, cutting-edge practitioners of high-energy physics at SLAC are caught up in a crime story shot in Los Angeles in 1971 and revisited in 2006. Now imagine that all of these elements are thrown into dialogue during a live multimedia performance, edited in real-time as viewers watch and listen in astonishment. This mind-boggling mix-and-match of content and form makes up the live-cinema spectacle Arrows of Time, presented here as a world premiere. Director and artist Ken McMullen has amassed an impressive array of documentary footage of artists, philosophers and scientists. This material forms the basis for an elaborate timeline of ideas, images and sounds that contrasts new discoveries in high-energy physics with other distinct yet overlapping cultural developments in fields such as philosophy, poetry, film and video. Expect the unexpected.
—Sean Uyehara
World Premiere. Presented in association with the Exploratorium.