|  List of Artists & Works

New Romantics

Reacting against the formal rigour of film experiments of the 1970s, a new generation of artists turned to the films of Kenneth Anger and Jean Cocteau for inspiration. Working with cheap Super8 film, lush colour and music, and a languorous pace, they celebrated the body, decor, and visual excess.

Films showing in this section:

12:59 - Cerith Wyn-Evans Still Life (With Phrenology Head) 1979
13:13 - John Maybury Tortures that Laugh 1978

12:59
Cerith Wyn-Evans Still Life (With Phrenology Head) 1979
14 minutes. Collection: White Cube

This was Cerith Wyn Evans' first film, made while he was still a student. He describes it as 'a kind of sculpture. . I was interested in the idea that you could take things that had various trajectories, histories, meanings and associations and make a collage-like assemblage that would generate different micro-discourses'.

Biography:
Cerith Wyn Evans was born in Wales in 1958. He studied at St Martins School of Art and Royal College of Art, London. While still at the RCA, he began making ambitious scale films on Super8, encouraged by Derek Jarman, with whom he worked intermittently as an assistant and collaborator. He now works in many different media.

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13:13
John Maybury Tortures that Laugh 1978
17 minutes. Collection: Artist

'In his brilliant Tortures That Laugh, shot on 16mm, Maybury uses rhythmic repetition, ritual and symbolism with an hypnotic and insistent soundtrack. Cultural narcissism, sex, drugs and a dark claustrophobic world are convincingly constructed out of borrowings from Surrealism and aesthetic devices hijacked from structural filmmaking'. Michael O'Pray 1995

Biography:
John Maybury was born in 1958. He studied at North East London Polytechnic, and designed sets for Derek Jarman's Jubilee, and worked with him on The Last of England and The Tempest . Initially associated with Super8 filmmaking, his mastery of video technology was quickly evident in a series of music videos (Neneh Cherry, Boy George) and long-works for television such as Remembrance of Things Fast 1993. Following the success of his fictionalised life of Francis Bacon Love is the Devil 1998, he is now working on feature films.

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