Screenings: Slamdance Film Festival 2015 — Melbourne International Film Festival 2015 — Hong Kong International Film Festival 2015 (Avant Garde Programme 1) — Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2015 — BFI London Film Festival 2014 — AcreTV: Were the Eye Not Sunlike 2015
The Take-Up consists of one take, a fixed frame, variable speed flicker effect, and just a single sound edit. For all this, the film unspools an audio-visual mystery that looks at digital video anew, and at celluloid sideways. This dark puzzle mixes documentary didacticism and mechanical movie magic to reveal the wonder that lies dormant in a mundane street scene. Sight and Sound: review by Michael Pattison, November 2014 "And then the sublime: two standout works in which one feels that rare pulsating swell of a genuine experiment. In Zagreb it was Alexandre Larose’s Brouillard Passage #14. In London it’s Patrick Tarrant’s The Take-Up...Final word, though, to Tarrant, whose latest film is a magnificently subtle celebration of celluloid – by way of shooting a single digital take through the holes of a spinning 16mm take-up reel. It’s an ingenious concept, and the soundtrack – from Larry Yust’s 1961 documentary How to Bend Light – teases, mystifies, illustrates and primes. And all the while, the flicker of analogue gradually overwhelms the unremitting zeroes and ones capturing an otherwise mundane street scene to head-spinningly enthralling effect." |