The Artist and the Poet (Leonard Baskin & Ted Hughes in Conversation) (PG)
Noel Chanan | 2009 | UK | 40min
In 1983 poet Ted Hughes and American printmaker and sculptor Leonard Baskin, his collaborator for many years, took part in an unrehearsed audio recording in which they talked about their long-standing friendship and the nature of their collaborative work on illustrated books of Hughes’s poems.
The outcome of the recording by renowned filmmaker and photographer Noel Chanan is a lively, entertaining, and revelatory documentary where Hughes and Baskin explore in intimate detail the genesis of such key works as CROW and CAVE BIRDS.
Includes previously unseen photographs, extensive illustrations of Baskin’s dramatic prints and sculptures and readings by Hughes himself.
+ Q&A with Noel Chanan, poet Tom Paulin, Nicholas Penny (Director of the National Gallery), and Nicholas Spice (London Review of Books)
The Artist and the Poet will be preceded by the short film THE GHOSTVILLE PROJECT
Tim Daly | 2009 | UK | 12min
This short documentary was shot in October 2009 on the remote Cowal Peninsula in the West of Scotland. It details arts collective Agents of Change’s transformation of the abandoned village of Pollphail into an open air art gallery. The brutalist 1970s concrete structures had never seen human inhabitants. The site was originally constructed ostensibly as a base to house workers needed to construct concrete oil rigs, but the plan was subsequently abandoned, and now it is ideally suited to the separate styles and methods employed by the collective. Drawing inspiration from the marked contrast between the architecture and the surrounding landscape of rolling hills, forests and lochs, the artists worked for three days through challenging physical conditions to produce foreboding yet hauntingly beautiful artwork all over the site. The viewer is rewarded with a unique insight into the world of the graffiti artist and an opportunity to experience the creative process behind such a huge undertaking.
18:30 / 17 November 2010
Barbican Cinema 1
Tickets: £8.50 online / £10.50 full price; Members £6.50 online / £8.50 full price; Concessions £7.50; Under 15 £5.50
subject to availability BOOK HERE
