Beatrice Gibson b. 1978
A Necessary Music (2009)
2009, HD film, 30’.
A collaboration between artist Beatrice Gibson and composer Alex Waterman, A Necessary Music is a science fiction film about modernist social housing. A musically conceived piece, referencing the video operas of Robert Ashley, the film explores the social imaginary of a utopian landscape through directed attention to the voices that inhabit it.Treating the medium of film as both a musical proposition and a proposal for collective production, A Necessary Music employs the resident of New York’s Roosevelt Island as its authors and actors, gathering together texts written by them and using them to construct a script for the film. Framed by a fictional narration taken from Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1941 science fiction novel ‘The invention of Morel’, the film self-consciously dissolves from attempted realism to imagined narrative; what begins as a enthnographic study becomes instead an imagined fiction and an investigation into the mechanics of representation itself.
Narration by Robert Ashley
Funded by The Graham Foundation For Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and Arts Council England.
RELATED RESOURCES:
"Ten Women Who Use Film" curated by Jennifer Higgie
Beatrice Gibson's films are available through Lux
A collaboration between artist Beatrice Gibson and composer Alex Waterman, A Necessary Music is a science fiction film about modernist social housing. A musically conceived piece, referencing the video operas of Robert Ashley, the film explores the social imaginary of a utopian landscape through directed attention to the voices that inhabit it.Treating the medium of film as both a musical proposition and a proposal for collective production, A Necessary Music employs the resident of New York’s Roosevelt Island as its authors and actors, gathering together texts written by them and using them to construct a script for the film. Framed by a fictional narration taken from Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1941 science fiction novel ‘The invention of Morel’, the film self-consciously dissolves from attempted realism to imagined narrative; what begins as a enthnographic study becomes instead an imagined fiction and an investigation into the mechanics of representation itself.
Narration by Robert Ashley
Funded by The Graham Foundation For Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and Arts Council England.
RELATED RESOURCES:
"Ten Women Who Use Film" curated by Jennifer Higgie
Beatrice Gibson's films are available through Lux