Arts Council of Great Britain

A documentary about the life and works of Margaret Tait.

From the idea that glass, even when cooled, is a liquid that changes in appearance over time, an offscreen narrator launches a recollection of the bygone days of manual glassmaking and an observation of the impact of the mass-produced glass on the changing appearance of England over time.

Beautiful but often violent images are interwoven to create an experimental documentary about the hazardous existence of the Serpent River community living in the shadow of uranium mines in Ontario Canada.

Documentary about the composer Elizabeth Maconchy, filmed during the rehearsal of a new composition

Stephen Dwoskin brings together members of the Ballet Negres dance company, founded in London in 1946.

Leave behind the ugly modern multiplex and step back into the glamorous world of the 1930s picture palace, in this charming documentary about Art Deco cinema architecture. Influenced by Le Corbusier, Oscar Deutsch created an iconic cinema brand and house style for his Odeon cinema chain. Designed by modernist architects Harry Weedon and Cecil Clavering, the distinctive buildings were anything but drab, with their sensual curves, glass, chrome and plush soft furnishings.

Repertory consists of one continuous tracking shot, during which the camera completely circles the outside of a locked and empty theatre, whilst a voice describes a three week programme of daily ‘imagined presentations’ inside the theatre.

Early 90s London gets a vibrant dose of African culture in this mini odyssey fusing dance, music and fashion.

Stabat Mater opens and closes with two sung laments, then launches into a breathless torrent of words and phrases, a re-reading of the eternal feminine of Joyce’s Ulysses, which echoes the exultant/feverish swoop of the camera through a Mediterranean landscape

Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman's experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.

Le Grice no longer simply uses the printer as a reflexive mechanism, but utilises the possibilities of colour-shift and permutation of imagery as the film progresses from simplicity to complexity… With the film’s culmination in representational, photographic imagery, one would anticipate a culminating “richness” of image; yet the insistent evidence of splice bars and the loop and repetition of the short piece of found footage and the conflicting superimposition of filtered loops all reiterate the work which is necessary to decipher that cinematic image. - Deke Dusinberre

Introduces the world of painter René Magritte through an assemblage of the painter's images. Includes statements by Magritte about his intentions and anecdotes from his friends Mesens and Scutenaire.

The Arts Council commissioned this film to coincide with their major retrospective of Giacometti's work at the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) in the summer of 1965. A similar exhibition was held concurrently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, sealing the artist's reputation as a modern master.

“London artist John Smith uses light-hearted humour to explore theoretical concerns - Gargantuan, for instance, is both pleasantly silly and acutely conscious of how imagery depends entirely on its framing. A voice-over intones the words ‘huge’ and ‘strapping’ as a lizard almost fills the screen, then ‘medium’ as the camera zooms out, then ‘tiny’, and finally ‘minute’, a pun on the film’s running time.” Fred Camper, Chicago Reader 2001

Ted Hughes's 1993 novel The Iron Woman is the springboard for this multi-media project by Mikhail Karikis. The video section of the installation features seven-year-olds from Mayflower Primary School in East London discussing the novel's environmental themes.

As night falls, the receptionist of a small hotel dutifully performs her routine tasks while strange lodgers descend upon the dark corners of the inn.

Documentary profile of English artist, Paul Nash.

An old, bedridden man plays games that have a hint of the sinister about them.

Video art by George Barber.

Art historian Basil Taylor presents the film and interviews several of its subjects, in between leisurely sequences surveying paintings and sculptures to the strains of the BBC Radio Orchestra.