8 min | 2003 | UK
Director: David Hinton in collaboration with Rosemary Lee
http://artsonfilm.wmin.ac.uk/films.php?a=view&recid=391
Archival footage of winter antics from the 1890s to the 1960s is cut and re-combined to create a rhythmic choreography of gesture and action, on the slippery sidewalks and slopes of a bygone era. Originally commissioned Arts Council England, the BBC and NPS for the last Dance for the Camera series, the film is created from fragments of black and white archive footage from the 1890s to 1960s of ordinary people moving on the snow or ice.
David Hinton is one of the most celebrated directors working in dance film today and has worked with some of the best known names in contemporary dance including DV8 Physical Theatre, Siobhan Davies, Wendy Houston and Russell Maliphant.
I think making dance films are probably the most interesting films you could possibly make. On a very fundamental level, making a film and making a dance are a very similar kind of activity; they're both about giving structure to action. If you think of film as just a formal language, and you forget about the acting and the talking you can look at any film as a dance film. All films take images of action and try to put these images together in a rhythmic and expressive way.
Early in his career, David Hinton made numerous documentaries about art and artists of all kinds including painter Francis Bacon, filmmaker Michael Powell, choreographer Karole Armitage among many others. In 1988, he won BAFTA award for his documentary “Bernardo Bertolucci and the Last Emperor”. In 1988, he also completed “Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment”, a largely dramatized account of Dostoevsky’s work, for the UK television (Channel 4). He then went to America to direct “The Making of a legend: Gone With the Wind” (1989) which was shown on BBC and won the Archival Achievement Award of the British Film Institute.
Since 1989, David Hinton has worked entirely independently, making both documentaries, dance and performance films. Among David’s collaborations with choreographers are adaptations of two celebrated stage works by DV8 Physical Theatre – “Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men” (1990) and “Strange Fish” (1994). He has also made a film adaptation of Russell Maliphant’s “Critical Mass” (1999) for Channel 4 and has filmed two stage works by Ulysses Dove “Vespers” and “Heaven” (1995) for the “Great Performance” series at Channel 13 in New York.
Among David’s experimental dance shorts are “Touched” (1995) (created in collaboration with choreographer Wendy Houstoun); “Birds” (2000) and “Snow” (2003) (created entirely from library footage, the latter in collaboration with choreographer Rosemary Lee). His dance films have won many awards, including an a Prix Italia and a Grand Prix International Video Danse for “Strange Fish” (1994). He has twice won the IMZ Dance Screen Award – for “Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men” (1990) and for “Birds” (2000). David Hinton is also a founder of Dance Film Academy in London.
