David Hall

Documentary on the legendary talk-radio comic legend Phil Hendrie, who influenced a legion of great comedic minds through his innovative and relatively short-lived, off-the-wall radio show.

Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) explores Video Art, revealing how different generations ‘hacked’ the tools of television to pioneer new ways of creating art that can be beautiful, bewildering and wildly experimental.

An impending gunfight moves from a conventional confrontation to a confrontation with audience expectation as camera action predominates. A film in which the less you see of what you expect - the more there is exposed.

This surface and Edge [also being screened in this programme] are two of 5 Films (View, This surface, Actor, Edge, Between) made by David Hall and Tony Sinden in 1973. These works investigated the primal conditions of cinema itself. The films explore the relationship between screen image and spatio-temporal illusion – the materiality of the screen in relationship to the image as representation. Ideas that each artist would continue to explore after collaboration. But further to these concerns, these films mark a vital phase in the process of both artists as they sought to create a body of work with intellectual rigour without sacrificing the imaginative and aesthetic qualities of art.

A camera-object travelling through landscape records images of static objects/textures apparently moving, all at variable rates, depth cues constantly changing, the illusion problematic doubled, and representation confounded as projection produces the opposite - a travelling landscape. This was my first film and, as with later films and video work, in some way parallels issues I had been working through in my sculpture'. DH.

“..in his seminal film VERTICAL, Hall manipulates.. perceptual assumptions by translating geometric shapes of three dimensional sculpture on landscape photographed from striking perspectives. Careful attention to laws of perspective and manipulation of framing and composition enable Hall to contradict initial visual information and to violate expectation….” – Deke Dusinberre

Constructed on a pre-determined progressively self-defining ‘phased’ score and lens-matting procedure, Phased Time2 consists of six sections, each out of a 100ft roll. All work was done in camera except for linking with black spacer between sections. Apart from the first, each section is subdivided according to logical cyclic procedures. Each division (take) is a fixed position shot. At every consecutive take the camera is ‘pre-panned’ half a frame’s width to the right. Effectively, the camera is revolving in a ‘static pan’ around a room throughout the film. Also, each consecutive take is partially superimposed over its predecessor (by rewinding after each take) and consequently phases the half-frame moves… The sound phases and eventually superimposes synchronously with the picture, and was produced on a synthesiser and electric organ. -DH

Between is a highly-wrought piece of structuralism which makes no concessions to its audience…it implicates viewers in what is happening on the ‘other side’ of the screen… and one is fully conscious of the role of the photographer. The camera is made to approach a lit screen in a viewing theatre before turning full circle to approach the projector… the trip was made only once, but the sequence is repeated by an intricate process using successive generations of prints – a print from a print etc… Here there is a progressive deterioration of ‘quality’ and the image breaks up into signs and symbols and finally into abstract fragments. What we have then is a clear case of art as truth through fabrication, with the imperative that the fabrication, the contrivance, must be revealed…

Conceived and made specifically for broadcast, these were transmitted by Scottish TV during the Edinburgh Festival. The idea of inserting them as interruptions to regular programmes was crucial and a major influence on their content. That they appeared unannounced, with no titles, was essential.. These transmissions were a surprise, a mystery. No explanations, no excuses. Reactions were various. I viewed one piece in an old gents club. The TV was permanently on but the occupants were oblivious to it, reading newspapers or dozing. When the TV began to fill with water newspapers dropped, the dozing stopped. When the piece finished normal activity was resumed. When announcing to shop assistants and engineers in a local TV shop that another was about to appear they welcomed me in. When it finished I was obliged to leave by the back door. I took these as positive reactions… – D.H.

TV Fighter (CAM-ERA-PLANE), 1977 plays with the experiences of real-time and the video copy, presenting in several iterations a fragment of World War II footage taken from the point of view of a fighter plane as it machine-guns targets on land and sea. Using a Russian-doll structure of images repeatedly rerecorded and reframed, Hall toys with the viewer’s manifold experiences of live and recorded time: the historical time of archival footage, the live experience of watching it on a screen, the déjà vu of watching that “live” footage again on another monitor. This nesting of recorded images within other recorded images implies an emergent sensibility in which the present moment is continually being recorded and reframed by audiovisual apparatus, but crucially Hall’s approach to this phenomenon is as playful as it is provocative. (artforum)

This is a Video Monitor is an attempt to construct a wholly ‘videological ‘ experience, and is built on an initial take of a woman describing the paradox of the real and imagined functions of the monitor on which her image appears…

Ten works commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council were broadcast, unannounced, by Scottish TV in August/September 1971. Later, seven were compiled as TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces).

An intervention in the middle of the street.

Experimental film about early television

Experimental film about early television

Commissioned by BBC TV as the unannounced opening piece for their Arena video art programme, March 1976. Programme produced by Mark Kidel, conceived by Anna Ridley and presented by David Hall. 'Richard Baker [the well known newsreader] describes the essential paradoxes of the real and imagined functions of the TV set on which he appears. The second shot is taken optically off a monitor, the third copied from the second, and so on, until there is a complete degeneration of both sound and image, removing the newsreader from his position of authority...' - Tamara Krikorian, Art Monthly, February 1984.

Ten works commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council were broadcast, unannounced, by Scottish TV in August/September 1971. Later, seven were compiled as TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces).

Commissioned by MTV Networks, produced by Annalogue, and transmitted worldwide (unannounced) through 1993-94.’Conceived in the spirit of the 1971 pieces, TV Interruptions 93 were shot or post-produced using advanced colour video technology, electronic effects and a refinement gained over Hall’s 25 years work in time-based media. Taken together, they constitute a potted summary of Hall’s preoccupations in video and television, and perhaps of the progression of video art as a ‘genre’…

Ten works commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council were broadcast, unannounced, by Scottish TV in August/September 1971. Later, seven were compiled as TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces).