Film
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Luke Fowler (b. 1978)


Three Minute Wonders (2009)


Anna
David
Helen
Lester


As the 2009 recipient of the Jarman Award, Luke Fowler offers these four miniatures in the Channel 4 Three Minute Wonder series. Fowler has been somewhat active as a musician (notably in Rude Pravo & Lied Music) and music publisher, as well as making films, including a recent documentary on Cornelius Cardew.

These are described as "portraits" of four tenants of a west end Glasgow tenement in which Fowler used to live, though the subjects are mostly absent. Instead the camera concentrates - in a nervy & sometimes handheld manner undeniably indebted to Brakhage - on the minutiae of their living arrangements: a half melted candle, a row of paperbacks, a dusty cassette, the weave of a carpet, the play of light and the unremarkable residential panorama outside. These are unassuming little films, and pleasurable for that, evocative as they are of the urban home as a womb. Each has some distinction of character, and all are exquisitely scored by experimental musicians: Taku Unami, Charles Curtis, Toshiya Tsunoda, and Lee Patterson respectively. La Monte Young associate Curtis' piece is particularly successful.