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Emily Richardson

Beach House

Doc. expérimental | hdv | couleur | 17:0 | Royaume-Uni | 2015

Beach House is a film about a unique example of rural modernism, built on the UK coast of Suffolk by architect John Penn. Penn was an architect, painter, musician and poet whose nine houses in East Suffolk are all built with uncompromising symmetry adhering to the points of the compass in their positioning in the landscape they use a limited language of materials and form that were influenced by his time spent working in California with Richard Neutra. They are Californian modernist pavilions in the Suffolk landscape. - Beach House is John Penn’s most uncompromising design in terms of idea as form. The film combines an archive film made by Penn himself on completion of the house with experimental sound recordings made during the same period and material recently filmed in the house to explore a convergence of filmic and architectural language and allow the viewer to piece together Beach House in its past and present forms.

Emily Richardson is a UK based filmmaker who creates film portraits of particular places. Her work focuses on sites in transition and covers an extraordinarily diverse range of landscapes including empty East London streets, forests, North Sea oil fields, post-war tower blocks, empty cinemas and Cold War military facilities. She is currently doing a practice-led PhD researching modern architectural space in artists’ film and video at the Royal College of Art in London. - Richardson’s films have been shown in galleries, museums and festivals internationally including Tintype, London; Tate Modern and Tate Britain, London, Pompidou Centre, Paris; Barbican Cinema, London; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Tulca 2012, Ireland; Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Paris; Botkyrka Konsthall Sweden; The Wapping Project, London; Artprojx Cinema at the Armory Show, New York; FACT Liverpool; Danielle Arnaud, London; Wurttembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; Uppsala Museum, Sweden and Venice, Edinburgh, BFI London, Rotterdam and New York Film Festivals. She was awarded the Gilles Dusein Prize, Paris 2009 in recognition of her films. Her films are distributed by Lux, London and Light Cone, Paris.