Pattern

Pattern, 16mm film transferred to 2K video. Colour, silent, 15 mins.

'Pattern' is an observational film made up of three film ‘sketches’ shot in: the Wood workshop of Tokyo Gedai, Japan; a domestic garden in South London; and the 400 year old Ritsurin ‘strolling’ Garden, Takamatsu, Japan.
The sketches feature the artist Asako Shiroki making a complex Japanese wooden joint, Mary Mellors, the co-designer of a hand-built early-1970s geodesic dome, and Hiroko Suwaki, a gardener meticulously shaping the future growth of a tree.
This material was shot speculatively between 2015 and 2019 in the background of larger, funded projects and each sketch focuses on a single subject, shot in a single afternoon on a couple of 100ft rolls of film. The focus in all three films is on the dexterous hand and the absorption of making and crafting.
This notion of the absorption of making is reinforced by the circumstances under which ‘Pattern’ was made. Unable to continue with other projects during the pandemic due to the closure of our studio, travel restrictions, and the need for one of us to shield/ isolate, we maintained some semblance of a joint studio practice - and the immersion of making - by revisiting and editing these film ‘sketches’ in online meetings.

The film sketches were originally shot as intuitive, exploratory camera tests in tandem with 2 commissioned films. Both of these films are preoccupied with things being made, or manipulated, by hand.
As we looked at the sketches, we became interested in other films in which the hand is isolated and framed in close up [by Robert Bresson, Jean Luc Godard, Haroun Farocki, Yvonne Rainer, Richard Serra].
We were especially interested in identifying a film language that conveyed the ‘time out of time’ and absorption of making and crafting. Here we started to think about utilising the close up as an analogue of attention [a concept derived from Mary Ann Doane’s ideas about the close up as a purely cinematic technique, found in her book Bigger Than Life. The Close Up And Scale In The Cinema.].
For a talk at an exhibition by the artist Asako Shiroki at the Daiwa Foundation Gallery, London [Asako Shiroki is the woodworker in Pattern (one)] we drew these ideas together in a narrative that focussed on our research for the film and Shiroki’s exhibited sculptures. Firstly, we looked at prehension [the ability to grip]. Secondly, we discussed the pleasurable absorption of watching someone themselves absorbed in a hand-based task. And thirdly, we made a connection between the hand-held tools of analogue 16mm film making [the clockwork camera, the splicer, the glass grading prism] and the hand-held tools of woodworking.

The work exists within the following fields:
1. The observational documentary film of artists and craft makers at work.

2. Films that focus on and isolate the hand and its gestures and actions in close up:
Farocki The Expression of Hands (1997)
Godard The Image Book (2018).
Bresson L’Argent (1983)
Films by Yvonne Rainer and Richard Serra from the 1960s that focus on the close up of the hand moving in front of the camera.

Our research included the following references:
Yvonne Rainer Hand Film (1966)

Richard Serra Hand Catching Lead (1968), Hands Scrapping (1968), Hands Tied (1968)
Haroun Farocki The Expression of Hands (1997)
Robert Bresson L’Argent (Money) (1983) [Bresson’s last film, in which the close up motif of money passing from hand to hand is incessantly repeated throughout the film]
Jean Luc Godard The Image Book (2019); Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario” (2020)
Volker Pantenberg ‘Two or Three ways of Speaking with the Hands’ in Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory Amsterdam University Press
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky The Hands of Jean-Luc Godard Mubi Notebook
Barry Monahan Hands on Film. Actants, Aesthetics, Affects. Amsterdam University Press
Colin McGinn Prehension. The Hand And The Emergence of Humanity [MIT, 2015]
Michael Fried Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot.
Mary Anne Doane Bigger Than Life. The Close Up And Scale In The Cinema. Duke University Press 2021

Whilst drawing extensively on the film examples above, particularly the technique of the close up as a purely cinematic means of forcing attention, Pattern also foregrounds the role of the lens and camera placement in producing differing forms of close up:
In Pattern (One) the close up is the result of using a macro lens with the camera placed close to the subject.
Pattern (Two) features the same macro lens but with the camera at a distance.
Pattern (Three) uses a 150mm telephoto lens at great distance to produce a close up with a very shallow depth of field.

In Pattern (One) we also experimented with rhythmic editing as a form of absorption. Here we used a metronome set to the tempo of the saw and wood plane as they are pulled and pushed to determine the length of a shot and the timing of an edit.
The film also aims to foreground the temporality of making and crafting: over the three films we witness a shift from something being crafted in the present, to a discussion of something made in the past, to an attempt to control the future.

Pattern (One, Two, Three) online exhibition at Springseasonlondon 26th February 2021 – 30 April 2021 [during the 2nd UK covid pandemic lockdown].
Hand and Eye: Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone present their short film 'Pattern' and discuss the hand-made in the work of Asako Shiroki. The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Gallery, London. May 2022 (an event for London Craft Week 2022).
Sanctuary Brewers Towner International, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, Group exhibition. Following an open call, 23 artists were selected by a panel including Elizabeth Price (Turner Prize-winning artist), Sepake Angiama (Artistic Director, INIVA), and Noelle Collins (Exhibitions & Offsite Curator, Towner Eastbourne). 15 October 2022 to 22 January 2023.
Touched. Gripped. Held. Recent 16mm films by Graham Ellard & Stephen Johnstone.
Image Forum, Tokyo, Japan (November 2022). Q&A with Koyo Yamashita, Director, Image Forum.

Slowly, and by hand— a programme of films by Graham Ellard & Stephen Johnstone. The Kaleide Theatre, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, (April 2024). Organised by the Artists Film Workshop, Melbourne.

Pattern is held in the LUX Collection and is distributed for screening and exhibition by LUX.