Extracts and full works are available by request.

Talked About Pink

35:00/45:00 Colour/Sound UK 2013/2017 ©poolproductions

I was about 12 years old when Rimmel, the make-up company, stopped production of the lipstick “Talked About Pink”. This was the lipstick that my mother had worn all my life. It had a distinctive perfume and taste; it was bold and vivid in colour, it was more than just a lipstick, it was a key to becoming your own woman”. Talked About Pink (2013 UK  35mins/ extended and revised version 2017) examines how the feminine is viewed and understood in the context of familial relations. 

Win or The Cynical Function of Ideology

5:13/B&W/Sound UK 2013/ 2015 ©gilladdsion

 A crucial moment from the 1973 Hollywood melodrama The Way We Were (Sydney Pollack) is paired with intertitles taken from lecture notes of Slavoj Zizek’s lecture on Hegel and “Absolute Idealism”.

The Way We Were portrays the romance between two incompatible characters. Their romantic history is acted out with key moments in USA political history as a backdrop. The rise of Marxism in the USA, the Spanish Civil war, and the McCarthy trials – all get a Hollywood makeover. The interest I have in this particular mainstream film is the manner in which the political feminine is portrayed at a time when the burgeoning women rights movements were growing.

 The voice-over in Win or Cynical Function of Ideology briefly describes the relationship and focuses on a particular argument, the moment when both parties realise that they can never work through their political differences and that neither of them can “win”, idealism has failed.

Aria

05:00/Colour/Sound/Netherland/UK 2008 ©poolproductions.

She tried to be good, she really did. The problem was the shoe(s) just did not seem to fit.

 A filmed performance, that took place in The Stadhuis, Enschede, Holland. On the last Tuesday of every month, the main hall can be booked for weddings. This performance took place on the last Tuesday of May 2008.

The resulting video Aria is not simply a document of a performance, but a re-negotiation of the difficulties of performing and viewing feminity when the feminine seems at odds with the body that acts it out.

Filmed at The Stadhuis, Enschede, Holland 27th May 2008

Landscapes for leaving her(e) and archive 2006 on-going.

Variable durations, variable formats (super 8 to iPhone)

Fragmented moments of arriving and departing. Ritualistically filmed over a ten-year period and still, in progress, I have documented the arrival and departure from places I have visited. Landscape for leaving her(e) attempts to address the sense that all these journeys are in many ways similar emotionally. The landscape may change, the continent is different – but through the action, through the journey landscapes and memory blend into one - always trying to leave something, somewhere and sometimes someone.

This is Where...

6:00 Colour/Sound/16mm UK 2000 ©gilladdison

This is Where is constructed around individual women’s recollections of first love - and the specific location or place this happened within the locality of the east end of London. Commenting upon how place and location are entwined with memory. The film concentrates on the specific location now - presenting a pictorial representation of the East End of London as determined by memory. The contemporary images are juxtaposed alongside historical maps, photographs and images recreated from the stories themselves.

The stories are told by Mary, Anne and Betty, offer fragments of personal histories and love stories. The narrator presents a  social-historical image of the specific. Bridging the personal with the social, plotting an alternative history of London’s east end - one in which the memory of love lies at its axis.

Commissioned as part of East End Lives - a Four Corners Film Project

Writer/ Director Gill Addison

Cinematographer Noski Deville

Sound Diana Ruston

Camera Assistant Anna James

On-Line Editor Sarah Chambers

Produced by Four Corners Films/Pool Productions

Funded by: Millennium Festival, Kodak Lab, Colour Film Services, London Borough Tower Hamlets

Charlottenburg

Charlottenburg explores the difficulty in capturing and placing ‘memory’

 A journey that never happened, an image that doesn’t exist, a pool never swam in, the memory of desire. A montage of film, video and stills attempts to capture an image for a precise moment in time. A fragmented voice-over in English and German, is interspersed with silence, ordinary sounds and the enigmatic rhythm of a film projector.

Written, directed, edited Gill Addison (U.K) 1999

Super 8/16mm/High 8

Translation: Irene Fick

Post production: Hijack

Colour, black and white.

sound

English and German.

©gilladdison/poolproductions

Distribution: Cinenova http://www.cinenova.org/