Wednesday 9 December 2009, 18.30

Glasgow-based artist Stephen Sutcliffe's film Despair (2009) is inspired by and titled after the 1934 Vladimir Nabokov novel, a story of mistaken physical resemblance, murder and identity theft. Nabokov's themes of power and delusion, doubling and gameplay are anchored in Sutcliffe's collage through a prismatic treatment of visual material and sound. 

Sutcliffe quotes a parade of society portraits, photocopied handouts from a lecture series entitled 'Theories of Montage,' and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1978 adaptation of the novel in a dense sequence punctuated by baroque music composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully for the seventeenth century French king, Louis XIV.

'There is something predatory about the use of the moving image in the work of Stephen Sutcliffe - it is both determined and persistent. Gestures and movements, cultural legacies and histories are carefully observed, identified and cut-up. Severing with surgical precision, and splicing words and images together to present a mood or attitude, Sutcliffe reaches into the archive and pulls out his version of its heart.'  Mark Beasley 

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
Free
First come, first served.