BT: Bringing Innovation & Technology Together

Off-Screen: Jeff Wall Film Programme - Jean Eustache and Frederick Wiseman

Saturday 29 October 2005 – Sunday 8 January 2006

Jeff Wall frequently refers to his work as cinematography, and his photographs draw upon the formal, narrative and technical conventions of filmmaking. His images reverberate against the history of cinema in an ongoing reappraisal of its critical engagement with still images and photography. Whilst acknowledging that films are essentially acts of photography, he has, throughout his career, been concerned with differentiating the isolated moments of the pictorial arts from moving pictures.

This film programme, which accompanies Jeff Wall’s retrospective at Tate Modern, presents work by two filmmakers, selected by the artist, whose films engage the charged territory between the ‘imaginary space of the studio and the seamless actuality of the documentary approach’.

The programme begins with an overview of the brilliant, unsparing films of Jean Eustache, including his searing masterpiece La maman et al putain (The Mother and the Whore, 1973).

The Eustache retrospective will be followed in December by nine films from legendary American documentary maker Frederick Wiseman, including classics of his 'direct cinema' such as High School (1968), as well as rare glimpses at critically acclaimed films like Essene (1972) and Wiseman's first colour film, The Store (1983).

Frederick Wiseman introduces the screening of Public Housing (1997) on Sunday 11 December.

This series is related to the Jeff Wall exhibition

  Film