Nicky Hamlyn

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Avant-garde appeal on behalf of and made by the adventurous leftist London cinema, The Other Cinema, using the facilities provided by the BBC community programme unit.

Silver Street was shot in a single day from my student house in Reading, Berkshire, where I studied Fine Art. Shots were made indoors and outdoors every hour. I adopted a shooting system using consistent framings, interspersed with variations. The film contrasts the interior personal space with the noisy street outside. - Nicky Hamlyn

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

Power Hub is a site-specific time lapse film shot over 24 hours in a disused bus factory in Maidstone, Kent, UK. The film was projected onto the window through which it was shot.

White Light consists of extreme close-up shots of chrome bath taps and their reflections, including the camera lens, which becomes its own subject, as it closes in on its reflection. This material is mixed with rotoscope animation, created on various surfaces including cel and hand-made paper, where scratched lines are lit from an acute angle to create an image from light and shadow.

Static shots with moving shadow of the tripod, including the shooting camera, are shifting through the film about direct association between an object and the machine which transforms it into an image - shadow drawings are completed one day by windows, clouds in a lake and texture of walls.

Tobacco Shed is one of a series of films based on agricultural buildings, mostly concerned with tobacco production, in northwest Umbria.

Ghost stories opens with a sequence of polemical shots: a mysterious shadow, an ambiguous advertisement which has deeper ambiguities unknown even to itself, and a lengthy quotation from Roland Barthes on the nature of autobiography. These opening shots outline the context in which I hope the bulk of the film will be seen: as a critique on so-called visual literacy, which is frequently based on a complacent mis-reading of images, and also as a rejection of film-biography, whose efficacy depends on such visual complacency. The body of the film consists of fragmentary views of the interior of a house, in which desultory activity occasionally takes place, sometimes in front of the camera, sometimes not. A ghost story is told, firewood is sorted.

Details, fragments, transformations and shadows of a confined space.

Set in a particular location, a stretch of ‘white’ – unmetalled – road in Umbria. Structured around ordered and disordered features of the landscape.

Panni is a visually arresting work in its formal structure and visual expression of colors. The subject matter of the film is a row of bed sheets flapping on a clothesline, drying in the wind. The colors punch through the screen as orange sheets flutter against a green backdrop of grass and trees.

The film is composed from thirty-second long time-lapse sequences, filmed in Northwest Umbria. Condensing days into seconds, Hamlyn makes use of lap dissolves and time-lapse photography to compress the temporal duration of the Italian landscape. The film invokes some pre-cinematic technologies mainly in the shadow plays where light and shadow manifest as the movement of trees, clouds, and other objects cast by the sun project and dance onto white walls and other surfaces, emulating and interacting with the film’s grain

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

Polytunnels was filmed in the Upper Tiber Valley, a tobacco growing area in central Italy. Tobacco is still produced there but the EU subsidies end in 2013, after which the appearance of the landscape will change significantly.

Minutiae was made for the BBC 2 programme The Late Show, and was filmed in the same studio. The aim was to make an event-specific work that would contrast with the way the studio appeared on TV.

WATER WATER revisits the bathroom location of a previous film WHITE LIGHT (1996). It is based around a set of antinomies that operate at various levels, from between frames to between the two halves of the film. The black and white first part is composed of individually filmed frames (animation) which form shots of interlaced contrary motion that nevertheless can be read as sequences of individual frames, and/or in which alternate frames are lit in contrasting ways so as to emulate negative-positive juxtapositions. In the colour second half, dissolves replace cuts, light softens and contrast decreases. Continuity, by way of isomorphic features in the room, replaces the discontinuities of part one.

Honoré Nicolas is a study of a garden in Arles, Provence, shot over a one week period from the same camera position, and edited entirely in-camera. The curtain, which conceals a car-port, dances wildly to the Mistral wind.

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

A short shot made from a train traveling from south to north through East Croydon station is cut into three-frame sections, each of which is looped for ten seconds. Each loop advances by one one frame at a time. The looping process generates complex artifacts and kinetic illusions in the image.

The film is composed of receding planes in a landscape: a back garden and the houses beyond. The wooden lattice fence, visible in the image, marks the border between enclosed and open, private and public space, and forms both a fulcrum for the work and a formal grid by which the shots are framed and organised.

A chronological study of the view from a single window onto the skylight of Passaporta, a bookshop in Brussels. Shot over eighteen months and making extensive use of time-lapse filming. The work is underpinned by Siegfried Kracauer's assertion that we can never exhaust the field of view.

Series of films recording the dismantling of gas holders in North London, while Henderson's Grain Tower centres on a giant power station chimney that has recently been demolished.

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

In Hole, the subject matter is a man made hole near a construction site. Employing static camera shots and conventional compositions, the film is an exploration of light, but also of scale as the filmmaker contrasts the human and feline appearances that pass through the hole

The work is a double film loop for 16mm film projector, silent, indefinite duration. Two identical loops, ten seconds long, but one shorter than the other by one frame, run through the same projector. Every ten seconds the conjunction between the two loops changes by a frame, generating shifts in the moiré patterns generated by the superimpositions. It takes forty minutes (240 frames x 240 repetitions) to exhaust all the permutations.

Double Fence was shot from the balcony of a B&B in Porto Potenza Picena , on the Adriatic coast near Ancona . The work explores the changes that occur with slight shifts in framings of the same scene, and the dramatic alterations in light, colour , space and movement between early morning and late afternoon. The work is the third in a series that records spontaneously occurring moiré patterns and related phenomena. The multifarious birdsong emanates from a nearby animal and bird sanctuary.