From http://www.ellardjohnstone.com/assets/ThingstoCome.html
Things to Come
(UK 2011, 16mm, 6.00 mins.)
Things to Come is a 16mm film produced as part of a gallery exhibition at Site Gallery in Sheffield. Working from a series of unpublished photographs a large, highly abstract, metal and glass model based on Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s set designs of a ‘future city’ originally made for the 1936 science fiction film Things to Come was built in the gallery space. From this model the 16mm film was shot, imagining what an audience would have seen had the director, William Cameron Menzies, actually included Moholy-Nagy’s footage in the finished film. It was claimed, by Moholy-Nagy in Vision in Motion (1965), that these images, now lost, were “so rich a visual result that the editor of the film did not dare to use it”.
(UK 2011, 16mm, 6.00 mins.)
Things to Come is a 16mm film produced as part of a gallery exhibition at Site Gallery in Sheffield. Working from a series of unpublished photographs a large, highly abstract, metal and glass model based on Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s set designs of a ‘future city’ originally made for the 1936 science fiction film Things to Come was built in the gallery space. From this model the 16mm film was shot, imagining what an audience would have seen had the director, William Cameron Menzies, actually included Moholy-Nagy’s footage in the finished film. It was claimed, by Moholy-Nagy in Vision in Motion (1965), that these images, now lost, were “so rich a visual result that the editor of the film did not dare to use it”.
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The production photographs, held in the Moholy Nagy archive in Ann Arbor, show an extraordinary ad-hoc studio set–up, comprised of mirrors, scientific glass, polished steel, and string, framed within simple but fantastic contraptions of armatures, pulleys, fly wires and a-frames, that are used to manipulate them.
The film consists of abstract synchronised movement across and around the set, to create a dynamic play of light, shadow, reflection, parallax, depth, surface and prismatic special-effects made possible by Moholy-Nagy’s set. The film, shot in Black and White, is formed predominantly from extreme close-ups and abstract details. These are intercut with extracts from ‘set-piece’ takes, which occured in the gallery in way very similar to short performances. These takes, around the constructed set, draw on the intense choreographed activity suggested by the production stills.
After walking into Site Gallery, the made up studio spaces were full of mirrors, black cloth and carefully placed lights to show reflections of light. Ellard was taking photographs as I walked over to one of the tables and explained that the lights and mirrors made it look like a city. Yet the city looked quite scientific and space-age. The photographs that framed the walls around the table were all black and white and some were more effective than others in connoting the idea of a space-age city. Ellard explained that he used macro photography to make the viewer feel as though they were in the city itself, which sort of transports the viewer to another place.
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