Following Gravity's Rainbow:Brit Bunkley at the Film Archive
"And it is just here, just at this dark and silent frame, that the pointed tip of the Rocket, falling nearly a mile per second, absolutely and forever without sound, reaches its last unmeasurable gap..." - from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow
Following Gravity's Rainbow, an installation by Wanganui-based American artist, Brit Bunkley is currently showing at the Film Archive on Taranaki Street.
The installation takes it's name from Thomas Pynchon's seminal novel Gravity's Rainbow."I had lived for many years in the US - at the potential receiving end of "Gravity's Rainbow" (a colloquial term from Pynchon's book, now applied to the arc of a ground to ground missile trajectory). MAD, or "mutually assured destruction" in a nuclear war was the stated policy of the US military" says Brit with his feet now planted firmly in New Zealand.
Following Gravity's Rainbow is a vertically projected animation-video that weaves together 3D animations, text and conventional moving images that obliquely reflect sinister and paranoid/whimsical social-political realties.
The video loop is projected from a brick structure on the ground which houses the video projector - in one section of the video, a photograph of the structure's bricks is mapped onto a 3D animated image of a chimney. (As restated in the novel Gravity's Rainbow, the chimney is the structure most likely to withstand an atomic blast.) The recurring use of the chimney and chimney forms in Bunkley's work function as signs of industrialisation and anxiety in the atomic age.
The soundtrack is by Set Fire to Flames (a spin-off group of Godspeed ! You Black Emperor): "In Prelight Isolate" and "Jesus Pop"
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The Film ArchiveThe New Zealand Film Archive has three key missions: to collect,
protect and project New Zealand's moving image heritage.Having just celebrated its 30th year of a unflinching commitment to New Zealand’s film and television history, the New Zealand Film Archive is an independent charitable organisation.
Housed within the Film Archive are more than 120,000 films, videos and television programme from 1895 to the present day. Every genre of film making – feature films, documentaries, short films, home movies, newsreels, TV programmes and advertisements – can be found at the Film Archive, meaning it’s a great source of information of New Zealand’s cultural past and present, as well (of course) as a great source of entertainment.
But the Film Archive is more than just film. There is also a significant documentation collection which includes publicity materials, stills, posters, production records, props, costumes and equipment housed in Wellington.
The Film Archive draws on its rich repository from the collections for regular screenings and events in its purpose-built cinema and gallery in Wellington, with screenings also held regularly around New Zealand as part of the community access and Te Hokinga Mai programmes.
The Archive has research libraries in Wellington and Auckland available at no cost to the public, with staff on hand to assist.
And from Wellington, the Film Archive is meeting the interests of New Zealanders from all corners of the country through its Medianet initiative, which is a network of digital access sites in art galleries and museums across New Zealand with more signing up each year.
