MESH film/video/multimedia/art journal

JOHN MAYBURY PROGRAM: MIMA @ THE STATE FILM THEATRE

A program of work by leading British film and video maker, John Maybury.

MAN TO MAN (1992)

The program will include Man to Man (1992), a film which features Tilda Swinton, is an inventive reworking of Manfred Karge's theatre piece about a woman who experiences German life of the past 50 years in the guise of a man. Swinton first played the role in an Edinburgh theatre festival production in 1987, transferring to London's Royal Court Theatre the following year. John Maybury gives the production a fresh spin. In a series of reminiscences by aged crone Ella Gericke (Swinton), who recalls taking her late husband's job as a crane-driver to earn a living in pre-war Germany, Swinton gives a tour de force performance. Sporting an incredible range of make-up and prosthetics, Swinton clearly has a lot of fun in her multiple disguises, revealing major comic as well as dramatic talent. The text's play with sexual role-playing and commentary on German socio-political history never subsumes the film's entertainment values.

Man to Man won the Critics Prize at the 1992 Edinburgh Film Festival.

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS FAST

Maybury's major new video work Remembrance of Things Fast (1993) is a highly visual bricollage of various styles and techniques, drawing on experiences of world television/satellite broadcasting to portray ideas of surrealistic erotic confrontation, aesthetics, morality and social comment.

PREMONITION OF ABSURD PERVERSION IN SEXUAL PERSONAE Part I (1992).

"And in the end it's our unshieldness on which we depend. If I should fall back in time, to shift and drink in memory. The things I remember are just the things I remember. And know that the cause of death is love. Eroticism is a place stalked by ghosts."

John Maybury

Born in 1958 in London, John Maybury was a Fine Art student at the North East London Polytechnic in the late 1970s, where as part of his course, he shot his first films on Super 8 in an around London's punk scene. He was introduced to Derek Jarman, who was looking for new talent to work on his film Jubilec (1977). Maybury remaine part of the Jarman set and was to later work on The Last of England (1987) an War Requiem (1988).

By the early 1980s, Maybury was; leading light of the British underground film movement. Along with his equally precocious contemporary student Cerith Wyn Evans, Maybury pioneered with a style that was unashamedly exotic, with influences from Kenneth Anger to Jean Cocteau. The movement's first major show, entitled A Certain Sensibility, was at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London in 1981. 1983 saw a one man show at the ICA entitled Cultural Impotence of Stupid Boys.

Maybury also became involved with the emerging pop video world, making promos for Neneh Cherry ('Buffalo Stance'), Boy George ('No Clause 28') and Sinead O'Connor. His promo of her 'Nothing Compares 2U' won MTV and Grammy awards.

Maybury's major filmwork includes Absurd (1989), previously screened by MIMA, and the films listed above. Alongside his filmmaking activities, Maybury has also been a successful artist, with exhibitions of his paintings held internationally.