LUKE FOWLER

Luke Fowler (b. 1978, Glasgow) is an artist, filmmaker and musician based in Glasgow. His work explores the limits and conventions of biographical and documentary filmmaking  hence my interest in him and his working methods. Fowlers work has often been compared to the British Free Cinema of the 1950s. He works with archival footage, photography and sound and his filmic montages create portraits of intriguing, counter cultural figures. His work has included films on Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing and English composer Cornelius Cardew.

Fowler says about his own work ‘The starting points can be different catalysts. Either events in my life or something I’ve read, or a piece of music I’m listening to... But generally they stem from a sort of concern of trying to understand a question.’

In the link below Fowler talks about his work for the Turner Prize exhibition 2012. For the Turner Prize Fowler exhibited his film All Divided Selves 2011, an exploration of the ideas and legacy of Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing who did a lot of work on the education of the working classes. The film is a rich collage of well selected archival material, in which the viewer becomes an inadvertent witness to psychiatric sessions and Laing's theories..

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/turner-prize-2012-luke-fowler

The film itself ideals with the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s focusing on charismatic Glasgow born Psychiatrist and celebrity R.D. Laing and his now classic text “The Politics of Experience” (1967). Laing argued that normality entailed adjusting ourselves to the mystification of an alienating and de-personalizing world. Thus, those society labels as ‘mentally ill’ are in fact ‘hyper-sane’ travellers, conducting an inner voyage through aeonic time. "The craziness was all around," Laing says of a mental hospital he visited early in his researches, "and certainly was not confined to the patients." These radical views about psychiatry and society's treatment of the mentally 'ill' made him something of a celebrity for his time.

The film concentrates on archival representations of Laing and his colleagues as they struggled to acknowledge the importance of considering social environment and disturbed interaction in institutions as significant factors in the aetiology of human distress and suffering. The film is a dense, engaging and lyrical collage in which Fowler weaves archive material with his own filmic observation and makes use of a dynamic soundtrack of field recordings with recorded music by Éric La Casa, Jean-Luc Guionnet and Alasdair Roberts. The multi-format fruits of Fowler's archive heavy sliced and diced style create a bewildering bombardment of images and sounds, along with some materials only marginally connected with Laing. These include questionably and self-indulgently, the director's own home-movie footage, suggesting a possible therapeutic element at play. The approach is jagged and ragged in places but it's approach but one which is held together by the force of Laing's fascinating, multi-faceted personality. A natural on camera, magnetic speaker Laing renders complex psychiatric terminology in layman's language. Laing's boundary-smashing career has a distinct stranger-than-fiction air at times, though its wilder aspects do make sense within the volatile, anything-goes cultural and political context of 1970s Britain -- an era rendered in all its dowdy glory here.

The following abridged excerpt is from a review by Neil Young for the Berlin Film Festival 2012 that I feel captures somewhat my own thoughts on the work. "Filmmaker Luke Fowler's documentary is an uncompromising look at Scotland's seminal and radical psychoanalyst R.D. Laing. Infuriating and dazzling in roughly equal measure, All Divided Selves is a wildly experimental documentary on Scotland's seminal psychiatrist-philosopher-polymath of the 1960s and '70s, R.D. Laing. A considerable celebrity in his day, Laing's fame has dimmed since his 1989 death but he remains a figure of interest and controversy for many. Director/editor Luke Fowler's jagged collage vividly chronicles the provocative Glaswegian's life and times even as it awkwardly straddles the worlds of gallery-installation and cinema -- at the Berlinale, it played simultaneously in both arenas. Boldly confrontational in its avant-garde approach, Fowler's debut feature-length effort is suitable for the most adventurously highbrow of festivals and TV networks with suitable late-night berths."


Anne Lyden : Luke Fowler from arts-news on Vimeo.


Depositions 2014 was a film by Fowler as part of the BBC Arts - Artists' Moving Image at the BBC looking at what the results may be when artists specialising in the moving image are invited to explore, investigate and create from the vast BBC film archive? It was part of a unique residency programme based at BBC Scotland, offering six artists of which Fowler was one unprecedented access to the facilities and archives of the BBC.  Following a process of research, development and production at BBC Scotland it resulted in six new moving image art works, all of which use and explore BBC archive. The works showcased a diverse range of approaches to television and the archive, revealing along the way some favourite and some forgotten moments and voices from times past and present.

Fowlers take was to use all of the archive footage to create an alternative and more real version of the truth of the Scottish highlands nature, people and politics of those living unconventionally as travellers from the BBC archives. This films universe uses actual archive footage so at the same time was the real subverted and made more real. It shares few similarities with London (1994) by Patrick Keiller and is equally interesting in the fact that it creates a parallel place, space and time that allows comments on the reality. The narrator this time is a mix of voice over and sound from the BBC archives.

The film attempts to restore some dignity to the images of the communities of the Scottish highlands readdressing patronising and biased BBC documentaries and news features from the 70’s and 80’s. The film repurposes footage from the archives of the BBC and sound from the School of Scottish Studies to create a film about differences and dichotomies. It pits science against superstition, near against far, and the community against the individual.

David Toop commented on Fowler and in particular Depositions. "Luke Fowler’s films dwell on potentiality: what might be, what might have been, what might still be if the world were to turn in a different direction? But film time runs in many directions, as do arguments. Film made only recently can be easily confused with the archival vintage of washed-out or saturated tones and blurred edges. Only the disjunction between sounds that live close within the ear and rich voices from a fading past distinguish archive from present. Gradually the pieces converge: our nostalgia for ancient folkways, traditional song and the romance of freedom, all undercut by scientific rationalism and the pressures of normativity bringing law to bear on lives resistant to conformity. What is an archive if not a collection of letters to ourselves?"




WHAT I WILL TAKE FROM LUKE FOWLERS WORK

• Weaving and reinterpretation of archive footage to create a new meaning.
• The passion towards the causes he believes in.
• The mix or archive, shot and his own footage to create a message.
• The hard cutting style often makes for a hard watch but does expose the techniques he is applying warts an all for a sort of honesty.

https://www.themoderninstitute.com/artists/luke-fowler/about/