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Rhodes's diverse feminist films focus on his obsession with language, a symbol system that reveals but reinforces the structural oppression faced by the world's most vulnerable people.
Rees Rhodes, stills from the film Journal of incredible (2016).
An investigation by British experimental feminist filmmaker Lis Rhodes (1942, known for the intensity, focus and poetry of his visual works) called "Lis Rhodes: Dissident Lines" was well received. The project spans her 50-year career – from iconic early films that lash out at the patriarchal structures of British society and the English-speaking system to recent works focusing on the migration crisis, slave labor and student protests. These works, which include 16mm experimental films, film installations, photography and paper works, have in common Rhodes's obsession with language, which as a system of symbols reveals but also reinforces the structural oppression faced by the world's most vulnerable people.
Exhibition scene of "Rees Rhodes: Dissenting The Route", 2019, Nottingham Centre for Contemporary Art.
Since the 1970s, Rhodes has repeatedly called for public attention to the issue of women being disenfranchised. Her early feminist phase was represented by works such as the black-and-white film Light Music (1975–76), inspired by gender inequality in music composition. The work, in its original form, was staged at the Nottingham Contemporary– a dual-channel 16 mm projection in which beams emitted by the projectors intersect and play each other. The installation is also partially immersive, as visitors can shuttle through the flow of light and become part of the artwork. This work stemmed directly from Rhodes's experiment, in which he simultaneously created 16 millimeters of sound and images (usually recorded separately). In this case, Rhodes took a series of drawings with a video camera on the podium and then printed them on the film's optical soundtrack. Then what we see is the visual representation of the soundtrack: rectangular black-and-white stripes moving vertically across the screen, widening and narrowing – an optical dance that is amazed by its creativity and intense auditory disharmony.
Rees Rhodes, video installation Light Music (1975-76).
Light Music exhibition scene, 2019, Nottingham Centre for Contemporary Art.
Rhodes further deepened her interest in feminism through films such as Light Reading (1978), a 20-minute 16mm film made up of negatives and extreme zoom enlargement. Inspired in part by the writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946, American women writer and poet), Light Reading dramatically presents the reading process as a cultural and social construct. Rhodes draws our attention to the subjectivity of frames and cuts in the film, as well as grammatical structures such as subjects and objects. The Printed Stills of Leofoo in Light Reading (1978/2019) show strings of letters that capture Rhodes' obsessive desire to deconstruct language and restore its basic elements.
During her career, she has worked with many female artists and filmmakers, including American filmmaker Mary Pat Leece, who shot Running Light (1996) at an open-pit mine in rural West Virginia, where many illegal immigrant workers were employed. The film's black-and-white images echo iconic poverty scenes such as Walker Evans (1903–75), an American cinematographer, and James Agee (1909–55), an American novelist, who wrote "Let Us Now Famous Praise Men" (1941), a book that chronicled the lives of poor tenant farmers during the Great Depression. The inside of the crumbling farm, but to protect the identity of the workers, was cropped or blurred here and kept pace with verbal abuse.
Rhodes uses film as a tool for reflection and protests aggressively—a persistent focus on anti-exploitation that was returned in her recent two-channel installation Dissonance and Disturbance (2012). The work is a synthesis of three of her previous films, in which she slammed the British economy in the '80s, which she called "taxing for living," while also showing students protesting funding cuts to education and the economic devastation and displacement of Palestinian communities. In another 40-minute, single-channel video, Ambiguous Journeys (2019), Rhodes links her investigation into how Britain's underground economy profits from exploiting migrants with slave labor in Myanmar. In all of these works, she often uses voiceover directly to dissect the story of poverty giving rise to cheap, vulnerable labor.
Reece Rhodes, stills from the film Discord and Riot (2012).
In the 1980s, Rhodes tried to move her work beyond the gallery, co-directing the one-minute collage video collection Hang on a Minute (1983–85), a vibrant series of films that aired on Channel 4. The politically charged experimental tv series was discontinued after six episodes. Rhodes's recent work, List of Deaths (2019), a new attempt to connect galleries and public spaces, consists of a panel that straddles a wall of lists of when, where and under what conditions European migrants and refugees died, a list that is being compiled by a group called the United for Intercultural Action) is compiled by a non-profit organization. While this latest attempt doesn't have the exciting quick thinking and imagery of Rhodes's earlier work, it testifies to her enduring desire to reinvigorate and reinvent film as a viable way of protesting and expressing itself. These experimental films and installations powerfully illustrate the extent to which Rhodes has merged her enduring interest in language with her broader socio-political concerns—viewing language as a living, malleable, and manipulative element. Her career was driven by a fanatical belief in the potential of cinema, and in fact, as Godard (1930, the founder of French New Wave cinema, who challenged and countered the filming methods and narrative styles of Hollywood cinema), images are indeed thoughts—and it is the artists' task to study and question the reliability (solidity) of their thinking.
Rees Rhodes, stills from the film Riff (2004).
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This article is originally created by the public account [ABAGo] manager Happy Big Fat
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