Introduction

Installations/ Expanded Cinema

Films

Images

Writings

Installation Exhibitions

Individual Film Screenings

Group Film Screenings

Film & Video Collections

Distribution

DVDs

Online Work: Taking Time

Works in Progress

Contact

     
Writings on Chris Welsby's Work   
 
The following list of writings is incomplete. The filmmaker asks that anyone knowing of other writings on his work, please contact him at: welsby@sfu.ca
 
Thank you
________________
 
Commentary
 
"Welsby's vision is unique in the context of the English Avant-Garde." (The British Film Institute)
 

"Welsby's work makes it possible to envisage a different kind of relationship between science and art, in which observation is separated from surveillance, and technology from domination."

Peter Wollen, in Millennium Film Journal, New York.
 
"The primary achievement of the avant-garde cinema in this area has been to force a contemplation of the natural world in different mediations by the cinematic apparatus. The landscapes of the narrative cinema, as Eisenstein and Bazin suggest, are latent expressionistic theatres, confronting or echoing the minds of the human figures within them. The aleatoric magic Tarkovsky describes in Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1960) ultimately confirms this version of the pathetic fallacy. But there is a fundamental change of aesthetic orientation when there is no actress in the scene, no body on which the snowflakes can land. Snow, Brakhage, Welsby and other landscape film-makers have used cinema to look at the natural beauty of the world, and watching their films we share their surprise and excitement at the disjunctions and the meshings of the rhythms of the world and the temporality of the medium."
P. Adams Sitney, "Landscape in the cinema: the rhythms of the world and the camera," Chapter 5 in Landscape, Natural Beauty, and the Arts, edited by Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskel. (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
 
"The significance of the landscape film arises from the fact that they assert the illusionism of cinema through the sensuality of landscape imagery, and simultaneously assert the material nature of the representational process which sustains the illusionism. It is the interdependence of those assertions which makes the films remarkable - the 'shape' and 'content' interact as a systematic whole."

Deke Dusinberre, in "St. George in the Forest: The English Avant-Garde," in Afterimage, Summer 1976.

 

"In Chris Welsby's work the camera is always an obvious presence, either directly visible or lurking off-screen. These days obvious allusions to production are too often shorthand for empty irony, signaling nothing but a twitch of postmodern conceit. But like Jacobs, Welsby – whose films were shown last month at Millennium – illustrates how self-reflexivity can still create a moral, aesthetic. And/or political imperative."

Village Voice, April 25th 1989, NYC.




Selected Writings
Please click on the linked publication names below to see related articles and resources.
 

Experimental Film and Video Anthology
2006
Edited by Jackie Hatfield
John Libbey Publishing, London

Chapter 3 "Films and Installations – A Systems View of Nature," by Chris Welsby

Also published by:
Indiana University Press, North America
Elsivier Publishing, Australia
United Publishers Ltd., Japan

 
Millennium Film Journal
Fall 2006
Issue Nos. 45/46 — HYBRIDS
Artist Pages: Chris Welsby
Millennium Film Workshop, New York.
 
Ripples in Time – New Work from Chris Welsby
2004
By Mike Leggett
Scan – Journal of Media Arts Culture
 
Blowin' in the Wind - Films by Chris Welsby
By Fred Camper
From Chicago Reader – On Film
 

Tide Line - at the Tate Gallery St Ives
20th May 29th October 2000
by Al Rees
A broadsheet publication accompanying the exhibition.

 

Chris Welsby - Lost Lake
May - June 1999
by Petra Watson
At the Western Front, Vancouver (Gallery Programme Notes).

 
Chris Welsby - Films/Photographs/Writings
1980
Published by the Arts Council of Great Britain
Introduction by Peter Wollen
 
"Landscape in the Cinema: The Rhythms of the World and the Camera"



The Village Voice
April 25th 1989
NYC
by Manohla Dargis
 
Abstract Film and Beyond
1977
Current Developments, by Malcolm Le Grice, pp. 124–126, 129. Studio Vista, an imprint of Cassel & Collier Macmillan Publishers Ltd., London.
 
Afterimage
Summer 1976
No. 6 (Special Issue: Perspectives on English Independent Cinema). St. George in the Forest: The English Avant-Garde, by Deke Dusinberre, pp. 11–13. Edited by Simon Field. Afterimage Publishing, London.
 
Cantrills Filmnotes
December 1990
Numbers 63, 64 (Twentieth Anniversary double issue), pp. 4453 (A review of independent cinema and video edited and published by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, Box 1295L, G.P.O., Melbourne, Vic. 3001, Australia.)
 
Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film
March–April 1977
At the Hayward Gallery, London (Gallery Programme Notes). Landscape 1 by Chris Welsby. Arts Council of Great Britain, London.
 
Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film
May–June 1979
Hayward Gallery Exhibition, London, p. 150. The Arts Council of Great Britain, London.
 
Undercut 7/8
Spring 1983
Number 7/8 (Special Issue on Landscape in Film, Photography, and Video). Interview with Chris Welsby by Michael O'Pray and William Raban, pp. 69–77. London Film-makers' Co-op, London.
 
Millennium Film Journal
Fall/Winter 1986–1987
Nos. 16/17/18 (Millennium Film Workshop: 20th Anniversary Issue). Landscape, Meteorology, and Chris Welsby by Peter Wollen, pp. 208–211. Millennium Film Workshop, New York.
 
Film als Film 1910 Bis Heute
1978
Academie der Künste, Berlin, 1978, pp.184, 253, 258.
 

The British Avant Garde Film 1926–1995
1996
University of Luton Press, pp.14, 15, 22.

 
The Oxford History of World Cinema
1996
Oxford University Press, p. 548.
 
A History of Experimental Film and Video
1999
A. L. Rees, BFI Publishing, pp. 2, 8081, 93, 116117.