Films by Chris Welsby
Born in England in 1948, Welsby grew up mostly in rural areas; his family had a large garden with trees and a stream when he was very young, he told me, and when he was about ten they moved to the southern coast, where “all of a sudden there were river estuaries to explore.” Welsby began building boats and eventually raced sailboats. (Later he saw “the task of sailing from A to B, which you can only do by working with the winds and tides, as a metaphor for a film.”) In his mid-teens, long before discovering cinema, he began painting landscapes. Cezanne was “a major early influence” because of the tension he created between depiction and foregrounding the materiality of paint. Welsby discovered photography in art school and began to experiment with moviemaking while working as a deckhand on a ferry, where he noticed constant changes in the light, winds, and tides. An encounter with filmmaker Paul Sharits not long after was Welsby’s first exposure to avant-garde film; today he names Sharits, Malcolm LeGrice, and Peter Gidal as key influences.
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The camera’s movement in Seven Days reveals a tiny stream, a group of flowers, some distant ridges. This is not a landscaped garden but a random assemblage of natural objects with an unordered beauty, a beauty the viewer must discover. (Welsby counts John Cage as another influence.)
Welsby abandons nature-driven procedures in the two most recent films on the program. The 26-minute Sky Light (1988) begins with lush, almost slick dissolves of nature imagery so beautiful they approach the syrupy. Then natural sounds yield to mechanical ones–a short-wave radio, for example–and the lush images are interspersed with bursts of light; soon we see desolate snowscapes. The disquieting feeling is that nature is being interrupted or frozen for no apparent reason.
