Hamilton: A Film by Liam Gillick
by Liam Gillick, United Kingdom 2014, 28'
 

Schermo dell'Arte - Archivio Film
Presented at Lo schermo dell'arte Film Festival 2014

Produced in concurrence with two recent shows by Richard Hamilton at Tate Modern and ICA, London, where two of his famous installations -An Exhibit, from 1953, and Man Machine and Motion from 1955- were re-presented, Liam Gillick’s film is a personal revisitation of and homage to the Master of British Pop, whose works strongly influenced the development of his own method and artistic pratice.  The film was conceived in parallel with the two shows and is constructed as a collage of eight sequences, introduced by titles, which start from Hamilton’s work and generate a story which grows according to thematic and historic affinities, references and correlations between them. As narration for visual episodes of a highly refined aesthetic, Gillick uses diverse materials: footage of the London shows,  computer animation and modeling of works by Hamilton mixed with pieces of classical music, voices taken from promotional films, excerpts from recordings of speeches by Walter Gropius and Max Bill for the 1955 opening of the Ulm School of Design, and Hamilton’s own interview with Marcel Duchamp in 1959, and concludes with the song Que Sera Sera by Sly and the Family Stone (the original version, sung by Doris Day, was the soundtrack for the Tate Modern show).

The credits end caustically with a quotation from Hamilton: “A work of art is evidence that an artist has proposed a work of art”.

www.liamgillick.info


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