Early Films by Guy Sherwin
Tuesday, July 15, 2025 at 7pm
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Sound Shapes, 1972, 16mm, 3 mins
Newsprint, 1972, 16mm, 5 mins
At the Academy, 1974, 16mm, 5 mins
Night Train, 1979, 16mm, 2 mins
Cycles 1 (Dot Cycle), 1972, 16mm, 5 mins
Soundtrack, 1977, 16mm, 9 mins
Musical Stairs, 1977, 16mm, 10 mins
Railings, 1977, 16mm, 7 mins
Metronome, 1978, 16mm, 3 mins
Candle & Clock, 1978, 16mm, 3 mins
As one of the core participants in the London Film-Makers’ Co-op, Guy Sherwin began making films during the collective’s rugged and rigorous 1970s heyday, when a generation of British artists used the organization’s ramshackle equipment to elaborate a distinctive workshop aesthetic, characterized by an untrammelled inquiry into the film medium’s material possibilities. Key to Sherwin’s practice, from this era forward, is his expansion of artistic production not only into the field of post-production, but exhibition as well—for Sherwin, the camera becomes as important as the development tank, the optical printer, and the projector in the creation of the film. Many of his works from this period play with the gaps between human sensory intake and machine-made patterns, frequently via the creation of synthetic noise-music generated when the projector reads photographic images as optical soundtracks; others, like the silent Metronome and Candle & Clock, articulate contradictions of space and time by forcing the viewer to question, as Sherwin writes, “whether the image represented has determined the means of representation, or vice versa.” He often stresses a conception of film not merely as material but as event, created through a process of steps that culminates in the moment of projection with an audience. “In making films, I am not trying to say something, but to find out about something,” Sherwin has said. “But what one tries to find out, and how one tries to find it out, reveals what one is saying.”
Sound Shapes
“One of my first 16mm films, made without a camera as an experiment in how to visualize rhythm. It equates four simple shapes with four simple sounds, made by punching shapes into black film and scratching into the film’s optical soundtrack. The film uses a bar structure similar to a music score. Each bar lasts one second (24 frames of film) and is divided into 2, 3, 4 or 6 aural and visual beats per second... In each section of the film an arbitrary relationship is established between image, sound and beats per second.” - GS
Newsprint
“For Newsprint I glued a newspaper onto clear 16mm film then punched out the sprocket holes to enable the film to run through the projector. Using a strong light I printed ‘newspaper-film’ to copy it onto another strip of film. This shows up the letters and words clearly, which can also be heard as they pass over the sound-head in the projector.” - GS
At the Academy
“At the Academy was made during a period of raiding laboratory skips for junk film. It uses a very simple and highly unprofessional homemade printer. The found footage was hand-printed by winding it on a sprocketed wheel through a light beam. Because the light spills over the soundtrack area, the optical sound undergoes identical transformations to the image. I programmed the printing so that the image gradually builds up in layers superimposed, slightly out of phase, moving from one up to twelve layers. This has the effect of stretching or decelerating individual frames from 1/24 sec to 1/2 sec, causing them to fuse with adjacent frames. A separate concern in the film is the game it plays with the audience's expectations.” - GS
Night Train
“The sound of lights passing through a dark landscape seen from a moving train. Night Train is a timelapse film that reduces the journey from Birmingham to London to 2 minutes.” - GS
Cycles 1
“A hand-made film of a circular form that fluctuates in rhythms of light and sound. Cycles is made by sticking paper dots onto the surface of the film and to its (optical) sound track. On projection these separate instants are converted simultaneously into picture and sound. The gaps between the dots gradually decrease until a fusion of the material occurs; the separate image-moments coalesce into a pulsating ball of light; simultaneously we hear rhythmic sounds fusing into a continuous rising drone. ” - GS
Soundtrack
“A continuous take through the open window of a train travelling at high speed. The camera points at right angles to the direction of travel and the area framed is from the skyline to the rails immediately below the train. The relative speed of the passing landscape decreases with distance…Here distance (perspective) affects pitch, and tonality affects volume. Buildings, objects, trains, passing through the picture area, register simultaneously on the soundtrack. As the train passes through the tunnels the screen goes black and the soundtrack cuts out, signifying to most people a break in filming, which was not the case.” - GS
Musical Stairs
“I shot the images of a staircase specifically for the range of sounds they would produce. I used a fixed lens to film from a fixed position at the bottom of the stairs. Tilting the camera up increases the number of steps that are included in the frame. The more steps that are included the higher the pitch of sound. A simple procedure gave rise to a musical scale (in eleven steps) which is based on the laws of visual perspective. A range of volume is introduced by varying the exposure. The darker the image the louder the sound (it can be the other way round, but Musical Stairs uses a soundtrack made from the negative of the image.) The fact that the staircase is neither a synthetic image, nor a particularly clean one (there happened to be leaves on the stairs when I shot the film) means that the sound is not pure, but dense with strange harmonics.” - GS
Railings
“This particular film makes use of the aural effect of visual perspective; the steeper the perspective on the railings, the closer the intervals of black and white, and the higher the frequency of sound. I also wanted to find out what freeze frames and visual strobe would ‘sound’ like. Visual strobe is created both in the camera (camera shutter v. railings) and in the printer (printer shutter v. slipping frames).” - GS
Metronome
“The passage of late afternoon sun across a mantelpiece during the course of an hour or more, recorded in time-lapse at the rate of one frame per second. The weight on the metronome arm is adjusted periodically during filming to alter the phasing of the two spring-wound mechanisms—one in the camera, one in the metronome.” - GS
Candle & Clock
“A candle burns down over the period of a few hours as the shadow of a clock gradually climbs the wall, obscuring a photograph.” - GS
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.