Expanded film performance with sewing machine, 16mm projectors and a long loop of film. Black and white, variable duration.

UK 1973

Reel Time is a complex choreography of live actions and pre-recorded representations that fuse the technologies of film with those of (feminine) domestic labor. Seated in the middle of the room with her shadow cast onto the wall opposite, the artist threads a loop of film containing images of a woman in the act of sewing through an actual sewing machine. The machine hammers holes into the celluloid and projects it back to the audience until the film eventually deteriorates and the performance ends. The performance “draws attention to the projection situation as material event” (Le Grice 2001: 165), complicating the relationship between the live and the recorded. Like much expanded cinema of the period, emphasis is also placed as much on the physical presence of the filmmaker as the material presence of the film apparatus. (Kim Knowles)

“The shadow that Annabel Nicolson casts in her 1973 film performance Reel Time […] asserted an unwavering presence in contrast to the slow disintegration of her adjacent projected self, a result of the systematic destruction of the celluloid film image beneath the needle of her sewing machine over the course of the performance” (Reynolds 2011: 153-4).

Annabel Nicolson, born in 1946, lives in Scotland.

Reference

Malcolm Le Grice, “Material, Materiality, Materialism,” in Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (London: BFI Publishing, 2001), pp. 164–171.

Lucy Reynolds, “Magic Tricks? The Use of Shadowplay in British Expanded Cinema,” in Expanded Cinema. Art, Performance, Film, eds. A.L. Rees, Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), pp. 148–156.