13 January 2015
Central Station
SummerhallTV is an arts channel dedicated to capturing and sharing artistically wonderful happenings. For the past year their channel, Art in Scotland TV has been dotting about Scotland to cover various art news and events. With such a vast archive of videos, we decided to ask creative individuals to filter these and share their favourites. First up is SummerhallTV’s Director, Dave Rushton.
My Top Five
As the first Top Five I’ll let my selection start with the early days of making news-clips on Super 8 film. Many of these films are now accessible on the Archive pages of www.summerhall.tv and also form part of the National Library of Scotland film collection… in chronological order:
So this is Christmas… 1980
A roughly edited film of a demonstration in Glasgow in 1980. As a single copy Super 8 film this had a maximum audience of fifty viewers when it was shown two weeks after filming at Red Star’s Cinema held at the Netherbow (now the Storytelling Centre) on Edinburgh’s High Street. In August 2014 it went viral and was watched almost 3000 times over a couple of weeks, as a digital clip from Red Star’s Super 8 films archived on www.summerhall.tv.
Gore Vidal: In Conversation
Another ‘sleeper’ clip, this time made by Robert Morgan for Edinburgh Television in 2001. It started to be more widely seen after we launched www.writerstories.tv in January 2014. One of several hundred short arts, political and community clips originally shot on standard definition mini DV for Edinburgh Television and Channel Six Dundee between 2000 and 2004. The author interviews continued throughout many of the Edinburgh International Book Festivals with clips now finding a home on our Vimeo sites.
Angelika Schnabel
Moving away from arts-news this film from 2004 opens-out an interview with artist Angelika Schnabel. Here the construction is more lyrical, a montage of picture and soundscape, affecting the quiet confidence of working in the enclosed slow-paced discipline of Angelika’s Buddhist tradition.
Phillipa Aitken: Gerhard Richter
Shot by Ben Grieve for www.artinscotland.tv this interview with Phillipa Aitken is a good example of our daily arts-news coverage of exhibitions and artists throughout Scotland. These are now filmed on a variety of HD camcorders and DSLR cameras. Published openly via social media arts-news, these clips fit the short-time span required of .tv and increase the ‘virtual footfall’ to Scotland’s artists, writers and performers by remote and international ‘visitors’.
Ellie Harrison: After the Revolution, Who Will Clean Up the Mess?
Luci Wallace’s clip of Ellie Harrison’s Referendum Canons was our most watched arts-news clip of 2014. Luci’s film explores an event that at the time of filming may or may not take place depending on the Referendum result. A sequel was filmed on the morning of the announcement [Ellie Harrison: Counterpoint]. While the project didn’t go off with a Bang, the metaphor proved resilient; the result not so much a whimper as a Bigger Bang postponed.