Category: Films

5 mins, video
View on Vimeo

Filmed in the Channel sea on Shoreham Beach and shown in connection with Feu Follet, an exhibition in the crypt of St. John’s, Waterloo, 16 November- 9 December 2018. Focusing on the ambiguous and offering momentary glimpses of fleeting subject matter. The brief trails of seemingly airborne colour appeared to arrest time in the atmospheric space of the crypt. The show comprised digital photographs printed on silk, video and large water colour abstract painting. Below ground projection mimicked the filmed underwater silk ballet; adjacent piles of seaweed added whiffs of briny smell and these in turn grew blooms of mould.

5 mins, video
Transition & Influence

The film aims at spinning out a seriality of stills rather than using specific images to connect a storyline. Ming Dynasty Chinese erotic poems are employed as verbal backbone, enriching the visual pace of abstract cloth and relating aspects of this consequently eroticised cloth to the ‘Lotus’ (bound) feet of the female lover and the lovemaking described poetically through repetition, juxtaposition and movement. The title refers to the Jane Birkin- Serge Gainsbourg duet from 1969; Je’aime…moi non plus, (‘I love you…me neither’), that caused a sensation and was fabled to have been recorded live during sex with much heavy breathing, in a studio in Marble Arch. The film conjures three elements: William Hogarth’s pornographic diptych, Before and After, a voice over of poems translated by Robert van Gulik, that accompanied erotic colour prints of the late Ming period, and footage of cloth either at rest or in syncopation, including palimpsest footage of cloth in movement projected onto cloth in motion.

12 minutes, video
video shown at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester & Delhi International film festivals, and projected outside Gallery 339, Philadelphia, USA

Light Curtain/ Drop Sari was a Whitworth Art Gallery commission to illumine the art gallery by night and exhibit work within the gallery spaces by day. This three part film collages images of fabrics collected in the nineteenth century by Forbes Watson, shots of contemporary weaving machinery producing cotton in the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat, in India, with footage of saris falling through space in abstract motion.

Slade Research Centre, UCL & touring.

1 min, video

An animated visit …under the portico, past the statue of Donne and up the geometric staircase, a quick spin around the great model and out onto the roof. This one-minute playful, dynamic tour of Wren’s London icon undercuts the usual reverence accorded to his ‘masterpiece’. The viewer avoids crowds of tourists enjoying a privileged private view of parts of the cathedral not generally open to the public. The vibrant injection of colour and movement of silks as seen against the pale Portland stone, elicits new visual perspectives on an old and familiar landmark.

6.13 mins, video
Shown at On the Shelf, Slade/UCL

This is a literal fusion of word and image. Ironically entitled: Reading with the Master, focuses on the shapes made by the mouth when the poetry is spoken and refers to Billie Whitelaw’s 1973 performance of Not I by Samuel Beckett.

Trying to read simultaneously and synchronise the cadence of the poetry,draws attention to T.S.Eliot’s original vinyl recording. His characteristic voice and method of delivery is the backbone of the piece. The inversion of the mouth in the second poem provokes the viewer into readjusting their perception of the image and concentrate on the expressive changing form of the mouth. 
The onomatopoeic rhythms in the last section, Cape Ann, in Landscapes, evokes the flight patterns of the different birds Eliot saw when he was boy on holiday in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

I first heard the recording in the 1970s (before the invention of CDs), and was always struck by how posh and British Eliot sounded, despite the fact that he was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, USA. and how marvellous it was to hear ‘His Master’s Voice’ on record.

I wanted to use lesser known poems, and ‘reinstate’ Cape Ann, as Ezra Pound had edited out seventy-one lines about that coastline from The Wasteland manuscript. It is a place I know and love to visit.

The Wasteland/and other Poems, read by T.S.Eliot
© 1971 Caedmon Records.

Morning at the Window



La Figlia Che Piange



Landscapes

Tivoli fountains spout and entertain with water from the river Aniene.

6 mins, Super8 transferred to DVD
Shown at Spazio Cultura Aemilia Hotel, Bologna, Italy

Walking the 3.6 kilometres up the Monte della Guardia under the Portico di San Luca; with its 366 arches supported by colonnades, is a kind of dual mental and physical exercise. The columns fracture the dazzling natural light within the repeated perspectives, recalling Borromini’s trompe l’oeil at the Palazzo Spada, Rome: a mere 8 metres yet purporting to be 37.

7.5 mins, video
Projected onto the Aurelian Wall, via D.Fontana, Rome, and as part of Bites and 1-2-3-4-5-6 CRAAAAAAAK!! RIALTO, Italy

Rideal collates footage of washing hung out to dry from balconies seen from the road of the Mercato di Pugliano, Ercolano, where vendors deal exclusively in recycled clothing and furs. Her focus is on the material of fabric; the everyday draperies of sheets, curtains and table cloths, drying in the typical Neapolitan fashion of seried ranks. The relentless and time immemorial task of washing and drying is emphasized when the film was projected onto the surface of Rome’s ancient aqueduct walls. Water; symbol of the successful city and essential for the cleaning process, is celebrated through the elegiac movement of sheets and lace curtains as they appear to waft in a gentle breeze.

The film was shown in Rome at the following venues, 1-3 with the help of curator Fabio Campagna:
1. The Aurelian wall in Via D.Fontana, Rome. 21 December 2008
2. ESC ATELIER OCCUPATO, via dei Reti 15, Rome. 23 December 2008
3. Rialto, Santambrogio, Rome. 31st of January 2009
And at
The British School at Rome, Cortile. 12 December 2008
The British School at Rome, Façade. 17 January 2009
Palazzo Falconieri, Giardino, Via dei Farnesi. 22 January 2009

12 mins, Super8 transferred to DVD
Projected across the lake at Compton Verney, UK

Premiered at Compton Verney, Rideal’s film was shot on Super 8, in January 2006 in Canada at Niagara, Burleigh Falls and Big Cedar, the film is a conscious meditation on the beauty of the natural world. The water is cold, the snow packed firm on the land, the lake frozen, but cascades continue in Niagara, an endless thunder of unrestrained power. The film tracks the wheeling gulls in the spume, captures the banded rainbow, stalks the camouflaged deer, gazes at the snow laden branches, watches the river run – steam coming off it in wave linked puffs. Not Wonderland but wonderful landscape, enigmatic and pure as driven snow.

6 mins, Super8 transferred to DVD
Shown at Lucas Schoormans Gallery, New York

Shown at Rideal’s third solo show at Lucas Schoormans Gallery, New York, the footage was shot near the mountain village of Le Valtin in France.

12 mins, Super8 transferred to DVD
Sound by Alex Gifford & James Telford
Shown as part of the film season Memory, War & Film Part II, at the Imperial War Museum, London, January 2006


Killing Fields is based on six minutes of super 8 film shot within the Picardy landscape, by the N44 between Reims and Laon. The camera eye follows the waving wheat fields set within the chequered historical landscape of Northern France. Literally a mirror image, the film starts with its end, and ends with its beginning.

Two sound tracks provoke two types of emotional response. Propellerheads’ Alex Gifford’s piano score leads us though the grassy swathes into seductive fields of poignant lyricism. Jamie Telford’s sound track, based on recordings of the Eurostar and Lille train station, offer another interpretation of the same subject. The waspish buzz and staccato crispness of rolling stock lend a malevolent air. The two halves together form a reflexive whole, a kind of abstract self-portrait as the artist’s mother is French, from Picardy. The undulating landscape forms an elegant visual narrative incorporating two opposing sound tracks. The endless life loop reflected through generations of genetic cocktails: rhythmic reiterations.

Sound Credits:
Alex Gifford, Take me down? © 2004 Chrysalis Records
Jamie Telford, Klangfarbenmelodie © 2004 Published by Luxury Noise