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Still Life With Small Cup

Paul Bush

1995 00:04:00 United KingdomEnglish4:335mm film
Tags:
Animation

Description

A radical reworking of an etching by Italian artist Giorgio Morandi, brought to life by engraving fame by frame into the photographic emulsion of color filmstock. The viewer is taken on a journey through the etching, accompanied by the sounds that the artist might have heard from his window as he worked.

"I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world never really exists as we see it and understand it. Matter exists of course, but has no intrinsic meaning, such as those we attach to it. Only we know that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree."

--Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964

"The viewer is witness to an image, a work of art, coming into being and taking shape... Bush is able to hold, develop and satisfy the viewer's curiosity in part by setting up a puzzle--what do these lines represent? That becomes a narrative through the compelling interplay of image and sound... What we have here is an image of the labour of art. If Bush's work is a homage-in-film to an artist who worked in a different medium, it is one that seeks to explore and indicate the equivalences between the two through a concentration on the specific formal technique employed by himself and Morandi."

--Chris Darke

This title is only available on Paul Bush: Working Directly.

About Paul Bush

 

Paul Bush was born in London in 1956. He studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College and began making films in 1978, after joining the London Filmmakers Co-op. From 1981 to 1993 he taught filmmaking, establishing a 16mm film workshop in South London and supervising a wide variety of courses and the production of numerous student films. Between 1995 and 2001 he taught on the visual arts course at Goldsmiths and recently he has lectured about his work at the Media Academy Cologne, St. Lukas Brussels, Hogeschool Ghent, CalArts in the U.S., and the RCA, the National Film School, and Duncan of Jordanstone in the U.K. Most of his films have been commissioned for broadcast, but he has also made films for arts organizations and the commercial sector.

Bush's Fine Arts background remains an influence on his work, which crosses the boundaries between fiction, documentary, and animation. His films have been shown in festivals, exhibitions, and on television all over the world. Forgetting (1990) won the gold plaque for short drama at Chicago Film Festival. His Comedy (1994) has been awarded prizes at Melbourne, Bombay, and Cinanima Festivals; The Rumour of True Things (1996) won at the Bonn Videonale; The Albatross (1998) at Zagreb, Hiroshima, Cinanima and Bombay; and Furniture Poetry (1999) at Transmediale, Berlin. He makes commercials for Picasso Pictures for clients including Panasonic and Philips, and he was recently ranked second on Creation's top 50 list of directors of animation.