Configurations - Lateral Film Festival (Lateral Selection 2022)

The inner gesture of the camera, embodied as the movement of the hand holding the brush; frames scribbled like title cards from the silent era. Memories are confused but it is up to the artist to configure them in new and unexpected relationships. For Edmonds, it seems that the internal/external relationship is privileged over everything else, he loves to look (from the inside) out the window, the usual light gilding the usual objects, the usual profiles – internal/external, internal/external, insistent thought of home. From the outside, one under construction, without glass, desired; from the inside, one made of only windows, with the gaze of the one who has to leave. The director knows that, in his art, the gap between thought, gesture and canvas is thinned to imperceptibility, the thought of the image is immediately the representation of the image. Perhaps this is why the foot works better than the hand in this cinema: the filmmaker paints just by walking.

https://www.lateralefilmfestival.com/lateral-selection-2022/

Configurations (2021), de JamesEdmonds - Gabriel Linhares Falcao (LIMITE Revista de ensaios e crítica de arte, 2022)

In Configurations (2021), James Edmonds achieves a consistent image, sound, spatial and temporal discontinuity that comes closer than all his previous films to polyvalence in editing. The impression here is that there is a single center that expands in different directions of disconnected space-time fragments.

At the center of this versatility, being accumulates. James, who assembles the fragments in an organic and nostalgic way, like a series of memories and quick inserts, tracing different feelings based on his relationship with the fragments, which point in different directions because they do not mix pictorially. The central regime is characterized by the relationship between the filmmaker and the 16mm camera: there is a lack of definition between the mental, due to the instantaneous relationship of the filming between the interior and the outside world, and the spectral, due to the a posteriori relationship in the montage that organizes these impressions, but certainly an embodied presence that unites the artist and the apparatus encompassing consciousness and unconsciousness, impulse and body. In this process, the inserts then become glimpses, flashes of a transit.

Among the different motifs recorded in Configurations, there is a beach region, a walk on a lake/stream, a walk through the trees of a forest, celebrations inside a residence, a lonely apartment in an apparently urban building, architectural monuments in the sky open, among others. Sometimes these are overlapped with some of his paintings. These contain thick brushstrokes that resemble Zen calligraphy, but without apparent semantics, on monochromatic plates; a simple style that studies the “inner gesture of the brushstroke”. The overlaps promote analogies and encourage the study of the inner factor between the gestures of the brushstrokes and Edmonds' quick gestures with the 16mm camera, describing the Configurations process as follows: “The small myths and personal structures that we set up to help the survival of psyche in times of low harvest. Finding subtle points of reference in the subject and camera movement, the landscape, its details and the traditions of the time, I seek to connect the exterior with the embodied camera and the interior gesture of the brushstroke.”

The editing operates with the short duration of the fragments in a way that encourages us to always want to see more, fueling an abstractionist enthusiasm in looking at the incessant. Edmonds' fragments are characterized by their short duration and determined pictorial and luminous particularities. For example, a recording of an empty urban-style apartment is filmed in low light and with a grayish tone on the film, so whenever we return to other recordings made in the apartment at nearby moments, it will have the same characteristics revealed first, typical of the roll development. Each diary fragment contains its own configurations that will not be reproduced in any space-time other than the one recorded.

The stitching of these polyvalent fragments and directions occurs in the sound, which is also discontinuous and reproduces records related to images or elements already seen in the quick montage, but in an asynchronous way to what is visualized at the moment; all belonging to one larger idea of all: James' perception. In a few moments, an image element awakens its sound equivalent instantly, but in these cases the image quickly follows its course while the sound element resonates. Edmonds, who already presented an intriguing work with the sound mesh in his previous films, now explores an even more complex seam and consequently full of possibilities.

In Configurations, polyvalence, which aims for a freedom in editing that instantly unites the most distinct and distant spaces and times, dilutes these pictorial determinations into a range of possible paths, consequently underlining the ever-present discontinuity. In his film A Return (2018), he seeks to bring together fragmentary records of southern England and Berlin into a single synthetic cinematic perception. Discontinuity is a common movement in his films, just as the transit between England, Germany and other countries is also recurrent. In Configurations, the locations visited are not determined by the viewer; we witness a study between congruence and incongruity of spaces in perception through short recordings in an expanded and at the same time synthetic sense of everyday life, which moves away from monotony and repetition, remaking itself through paths of return, like a constant journey.

The filmmaker gives us a sense of the totality of the record (we clearly remember the monument, the beach, the swamp, the empty apartments, the apartment in celebration, the apartment in the city, the journey through the water...) and an efficient communication of the feelings involved (the celebration, the solitude, the adventure), so that both are consolidated in the final result, but never reveal themselves obviously in the process.

https://limiterevista.com/2022/11/12/configurations-2021-de-james-edmonds/

(S8) XII MOSTRA DE CINEMA PERIFERICO DE A CORUÑA 2021 (Cineartemagazine 2021)

James Edmonds' film pictures always hide a trace of tension, definition and restlessness. Whether due to the absence of human beings in the images of After hours or Inside/Outside or due to their ghostly and elusive presence in Movement and Stillness or Overland, whether due to the contrast, contradiction or paradoxes that their film records convey, the world and the Reality in Edmonds' cinema seems like a continuous question that finds no answer. The clash between rural and urban reality, the passage of time, the fragmentary nature of our memory, the continuous offering that nature and objects seem to give us, our presence as simple guests in a beautiful and harmonious world and our indifference to the necessary balance of the natural world are expressive lines that seem to be intuited in some beautiful and serene frames that ask themselves at the same time that they ask us to find answers that I had never imagined or anticipated before.

https://www.cineartemagazine.com/2021/06/s8-xii-mostra-de-cinema-periferico-de.html

Seasons/Patterns - Lateral Film Festival (Lateral Selection 2021)

Four reels for four seasons, made between 2016 and 2017; patterns of lights and plants hold them together, carrying with them the atmosphere and feeling of a year that passes by. And James Edmonds, reviewing the diary form from a pantheistic point of view (Deus sive natura), watches this time unravelling in daily actions at home, in the faces of loved ones, in the proportions of common objects dissected by knives of light. The room follows the natural cycle of the world by observing the arms of trees stretching over the water or skirts dancing like rose petals. And it does not matter whether a tree is filmed or its reflection on the sidewalk, whether the light is the one of the sun or the one of fireworks: the artist, poetizing about geometry, extrapolates the shapes and loads them up with infinity.

https://www.lateralefilmfestival.com/lateral-selection-2021/

James Edmonds – Flickering Everyday - Lina Louisa Krämer (Shortfilm.de 2019)

A fleeting view of a garden through a window. The sky a radiant blue, completely cloudless. A close-up of an insect, intently pursuing its purpose. In James Edmonds’ filmic universe, only rarely does a person traverse the unfolding events as a nameless, marginal figure. The British artist and filmmaker, who was born in 1983 and studied fine arts with a focus on painting at Brighton University, has lived and worked in Berlin for several years now. Commencing with canvas and paint, he became drawn to filmmaking during his studies. He brings together both – filmmaking and painting – in exhibition settings, utilising his painted canvases partly as projection surfaces or applying pictorial gestures to the film frames to engage in the events occurring there.(...)

Full article here: https://www.shortfilm.de/en/james-edmonds-flimmernder-alltag/

A home of geometry and poetry - Mattia Fiorino (il tempo impresso, 2019)

“A journey, a home for the exiles” is the subtitle of the article presenting this pseudo-section dedicated to Laterale Selection 2019; A Return is, among the exiles, one of the most exile and in need of a dwelling, a film that makes the concept of return its raison d’être. His creation is, in fact, given by the alternation of footage of two different places that the director has impressed on film and that he overlayed according to criteria that could be defined as harmonic/musical rather than logical-syntactic.1 It is not difficult to have the sensation to be in front of what Jonas Mekas called “glimpses of beauty”, yet there are differences in the way in which these two directors relate to their personal “glimpses”.

In films such as Reminiscences of a journey to Lithuania, the subject (Mekas) is external to the object (the house) and contemplates it with a sweetness and sincerity proper to the Lithuanian director, who remains abstract (his off-screen speaking is a clear one exemplification) in the very idea of ​​using cinema as a blank sheet on which write about memories and thoughts. Here, then, his old house is a goal, something on which focus from the outside. In A Return, on the other hand, the director is on the inside and looks outwards, his gaze projected from the house towards what lies beyond the window, the aestheticization is also intrinsically given by the form and not “attributed” to the content. In other words, the aesthetic of the “glimpses of beauty” of Edmonds differs from those of Mekas in the will to assemble “glimpses” poetically intense a priori and not made such by something that is linked to them (in the case of the second director that “something” is given by the awareness of his position towards what is taken up, awareness given by the famous writings that appear in his films and by his practice of “lyricizing” memories and thoughts).
The places of A Return transmit – in their exchange and mixing – the warmth and beauty of a nest, the faces of loved ones, animals, trees, skies: everything is home, everything is a single atmospheric representation of dwelling and proximity.

The relationship between the two places in which the film fragments were shot is interesting as an alternation and overlaying of two macro-aspects of the image: the geometric-linear one and the pictorial-sfumato one. What in fact differentiates the two locations is the director’s choice to reproduce structural elements and natural elements in the transition from Berlin to the south of England, weaving them and creating completely new forms, now angular, now curvilinear, finally merged to create a new house.
This (re)alignment of images is nothing but a mixture of suggestions sedimented in memories, a common process that concerns memory and that leads to the re-elaboration – clearly distorted – of a place that is not what it really is, and that at the same time it is what it is (the poetic truth of memory consists precisely in its opacity).

In the artist’s eyes the world is exactly the one in the works, with his personal rules and schemes. Returning to the Mekas-Edmonds comparison it is possible to clarify further the question concerning their perception of things around them.
The first one observes the world in a completely natural way (where “natural” means the mechanical representation given by the camera) and yet – here is the pleasant paradox of the director’s cinema – gives to its viewer an extremely unique and personal vision, modulated and artistically formed after the shooting and before the completed film; the second starts from a vision that is aesthetically realized in the frame itself, created by him in the moment of shooting, poetic in its completeness and realized in the symphony staged in the completed film. It could be said, remaining in the musical sphere, that the cinema of Mekas is composed of songs and that of Edmonds by instrumental pieces.

The most complete expression of this musical idea of ​​the film is perhaps the choice of using as a soundtrack the sound of a river that meets the sea, one of the most powerful scenes to which one can think in relation to the idea of ​​overlaying and natural interweaving of images: it is precisely in this way that the fragments of the film follow one another, according to a purely instinctive and “natural” logic, as if the images were attracted to each other and the director’s task was only to satisfy this tension/attraction. The return home is, in this case, a non-physical journey (as been said about the position of the director towards the places that have been filmed – he looks at everything from the inside. He is already at home, basically) mnemonic and evocative, in which mathematics and poetry dialogue with each other and finally converge: Mondrian and Kandinskij, Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, Policleto and Fidia, Bach and Händel. A Return is a symphony of «two worlds become one».

https://iltempoimpresso.wordpress.com/2019/05/09/areturn-recensione-review/?fbclid=IwAR1NSbljReCa8NhrVvEW129qN7sd3StAOqXmhcUz8_FNs3mxOpS2MO0MC_g#englishversion

Toni Pipolo - Strangest Things: on Projections at the 56th New York Film Festival (Artforum, 2018)

James Edmonds’s A Return is a bracing demonstration of the continued power of montage and of 16 mm, bringing widely disparate spaces together in a manner so personal and visually arresting that it recalls the work of Stan Brakhage—all in six minutes.

https://www.artforum.com/film/tk-76939

Michael Sicinski - Toronto: Wavelengths Preview — "We Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Contrarians" (MUBI Notebook, 2018)

There are few pleasures as profound as discovering a first-rate talent, and James Edmonds fits the bill. He has been making films for quite some time, although his work clearly hasn’t received the attention it deserves. Fortunately, a number of programmers are rectifying that with his latest film, A Return, a near-perfect marriage of impulses that are often understood as being in competition: the formalist and the personal, the structural and the atmospheric.

The film is about literal returns, as it captures Edmonds’ movement between Germany (where he was working on a film restoration project) and his home in the U.K. One observes certain things about A Return as it unspools; it’s a film that gradually teaches you how to watch it. In the first half, we see various superimpositions around the foyer of an apartment building, and these segments are notable for their rectilinear character. There are motifs: light through a stairwell, potted plants, and views of a city out the window. The superimpositions not only overlay the gridlike structure of the bannister over the organic plant forms. Edmonds also moves the camera in opposing directions, resulting in a push and pull of linear movement. These portions of the film echo the work of Stan Brakhage and Robert Beavers, but have a countervailing tension all their own.

In the second part, we are clearly back in Britain. It is not only the sheep fields or grayer weather that reveals this. Edmonds masterfully captures the palpable air of Blighty, the thick fog and the granular light that registers on the filmstrip as chunky grain. And as we see specific details—a Barbara Hepworth sculpture, or an older man backlit against the windowed wall of a kitchen—Edmonds gradually moves us out into the landscape, and finally out to sea.

Edmonds’ film is packed with small gestures that are so controlled as to virtually explore. The pan down from a stair rail, oriented on the vertical and horizontal axes, to reveal the relative chaos of a potted fern, has the power of a firework, simply because Edmonds’ camera has zeroed in on this unexpected detail. A Return is a subtle collision of these domestic micro-events, articulated with other images that capture the expansiveness of land and sea. This film is a little miracle.

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/toronto-wavelengths-preview-we-do-not-care-if-we-go-down-in-history-as-contrarians

Jordan Cronk - Cosmic curiosities: umpteen highlights of Toronto’s 2018 Wavelengths showcase (Sight and Sound Magazine 2018 - BFI website)

In a manner after Matsumoto and Dorsky, the 35-year-old Edmonds’s quietly astonishing A Return traverses spatial and temporal boundaries with a preternatural command of form. Comprised of two reels of 16mm film shot in Berlin and his hometown in the south of England, the film brings these disparate locales into communion with one another through intuitive juxtapositions – achieved through multiple exposures and gentle superimpositions – that marry the soft light of domestic spaces with muted coastal skies, and intimate scenes of urban and rural life with the grandeur of the natural world.

Accompanying these intoxicating images are sounds – of rushing water, whipping winds and unsettlingly alien sine waves – that the filmmaker captured on location. On evidence of A Return, Edmonds, who’s spent considerable time in recent years working with Robert Beavers (another, even more obvious touchstone), possesses an innate sense of place and a spirit of creative curiosity to match; his quicksilver montage, brisk but never hectic, manages to locate an emotionally resonant space through familiar forms, building upon tradition in fresh and inventive ways.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/festivals/toronto-tiff-2018-wavelengths-cosmic-landscape-highlights

Alonso Castro - Tiff 2018. Wavelengths: A Return By James Edmonds, Trees Down Here By Ben Rivers (Desistfilm, 2018)

Cinema and poetry can be bonded strongly, but such an association doesn’t occur gratuitously, and one can’t expect it to happen out of the blue. The cinematographic language has the potential to explore narrative and aesthetically, achieving a harmony between what’s been represented and the representations through symbols or concrete facts.

In the case of English filmmaker (currently residing in Berlin) James Edmonds’ A Return (2018), the link between cinema and poetry is more than explicit. There’s a harmony in the composition between cut and cut that happens, in most part, because of its narrative fluidity. The movement of the film is established only through the composition of each frame, of each situation portrayed, by the camera of the filmmaker, acquiring different textures from the texture of color 16mm film, and lighting tonalities.

In A Return, there’s a vivid reconstruction through fragmented situations of quotidian life moments symbolized in images that flow in constant transposition. Edmonds’ film acquires an aura of intimacy in different environments of his life in Germany and England. Each situation is represented with austerity in the amount of shot objects; however, visual elements like color and light are the ones who conduct the composition of the image in each scenario, represented through pictorial frames.

Thus, Edmonds’ films acquire a form of poetry through the use of cinematographic resources –such as lighting, colors or movement- to compose the situational frames, in low, subtle key, of the scenes of his everydayness in rural and urban spaces of Germany and England. The poetic potential of cinema is exploited in A Return, focusing the gaze in those insignificant fleeting moments of quotidian life.

http://desistfilm.com/tiff-2018-wavelengths-a-return-by-james-edmond-trees-down-here-by-ben-rivers/

Toni D’Angela - Chaos Versus Frame: in conversation with James Edmonds (intro) (la furia umana 28, 2016)

The cinema of James Edmonds (1983) explores the complexities of the real not as a mere substance named “reality” but in its most fluctuating and Turnerian correlation, in those uncertainties that make it impossible to fix it in any specific point in space. A splendor in the world. His last film Movement and Stillness (2012-2014) assembles a series of motives and topics that are recurrent in his work and that situate him within a tradition bringing together Peter Gidal, Leighton Pierce and even Jean-Claude Rousseau. A poetics of space. Edmonds composes a poem about inhabited spaces, a dialectics without synthesis between the internal and the external. The almost fixed frame moves as if it were shaken by the wind, in the same way hung up clothes swell, the camera cuts across rooms, the exposure to the light makes the composition of the images iridescent: stains, halos, colours. The immeasurable intimacy of the house, the intimacy of the open space, the flesh of the bodies, the vapors, the stain glasses that evoke the work of Joseph Albers, the chiaroscuro produced by the shutters, the windows from which the trees outside appear – the ramifications of Being – all of this united by the very fast and kaleidoscopic montage. Movement and Stillness is an “aleph” in which the seasons alternate (the snow and the flowers), and with them the day and the night, the lights and the shadows, figuration and abstraction.

Since After Hours (2005) Edmonds intertwines the mobile and the immobile, the internal and the external. In this work an office building is almost like a moving film: the lights from the windows shine in the night as if they were film perforations sliding. Handheld camera, panoramas, still lives and improvised rhythms. Night and day. Space is not just something we simply inhabit. A deserted building is like a film: it has a history that is revealed by the play of light and shadow on the various elements that compose this space. Also Inside/Outside (2008/2015), that begins with a flirtatious interaction between the clear and the blurry, is like the previous film filled with corridors that, through superimpositions, cross over each other – or perhaps only one or just a few. A constellation of internal and external forms, in a continuous return, moving from closed to open form, from one film to another. Overland Collages (2015) is his most fragmented and abstract work, with echoes of Norman McLaren, a string of lines-force, in fact, from Movement and Stillness.

The segmented and associative montage of Edmonds is not governed by cuts seeking to connect signifier and signified but rather by a lacanian capitoné point (or cushioning). This is an anti-representational and anti-narrative knot, which makes the signifier/signified relation a more dynamic, fluid one, and which does not work with a descriptive language but institutes a topography of desire – a fabric weaving itself with an already existing one. A flux as infinite as desire. A ramification through the frame of windows that open wide the splitting of Being, as a work in progress Sternwarten der Welt. It is not in any case a form of welding – a simple intersection organized around anchor points – but rather a collage inspired by Burroughs’ cut-ups, as it is intimated in another of his works in progress, We all live in the Blue Image Forever. In this case a lyrical quality speaks of another inspiration of the filmmaker, Stan Brakhage.

http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php/61-lfu-28/570-toni-d-angela-chaos-versus-frame-in-conversation-with-james-edmonds