British filmmaker Christopher Nolan (Interstellar, Inception, The Dark Knight, Memento), and Tacita Dean, known for her art work in film, will launch the new series of high profile talks – LFF Connects at the 59th BFI London Film Festival. LFF Connects is described by the festival as a brand new series of thought-provoking high-impact talks intended to stimulate new collaborations and ideas by exploring both the future of film itself and how film engages with other creative industries including television, music, art, games and creative technology.
In the LFF Connects Film conversation moderated by BFI Creative Director Heather Stewart, Nolan and Dean will also explore the importance of seeing films projected on film as an essential part of our cultural experience, as well as the necessity of determining new archival and exhibition standards that secure film’s future, and why the debate around film needs to change. They will also be joined in the discussion by Alexander Horwath, Director of the Austrian Film Museum who has written and spoken extensively about the importance of showing film as film and preservation, asking how can any cultural heritage remain intelligible when handed down to future generations without attention to its medium?
Christopher Nolan is internationally recognized for being one of the most successful and innovative filmmakers working today, creating films that bridge blockbuster and art-house including The Dark Knight trilogy (2005, 2008, 2012), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), The Prestige (2006), Insomnia (2002) and Memento (2000).
A British artist based in Berlin, and recent artist in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, Tacita Dean is internationally renowned for her 16mm and 35mm films, as well as other works in various mediums, most notably her chalkboard drawings. She is a former Turner Prize nominee. In 2011, she made FILM for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London and is a founding member of savefilm.org.
Tacita Dean says, “As an artist who makes and exhibits film for reasons indexical to the medium, I have had no choice but to fight to get film re-appreciated for what it is: a beautiful, robust and entirely different way of making and showing images in the gallery and in the cinema. Film has characteristics integral to its chemistry and internal discipline that form my work and I cannot be asked to separate the work from the medium that I used to make it. We need to keep the medium distinct from the technology; we need to keep the choice of film available for artists, filmmakers and audiences.”
Alexander Howath is the Director of the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, formerly with the Vienna International Film Festival and author of books about Michael Haneke and Josef von Sternberg, Peter Tscherkassky and American Cinema amongst others.