OUTPOST and LUX present THE WAYWARD CANON DEAD OF NIGHT / HORROR YOGA / BOUNDARY THEORY, Norwich

Dead of Night / Boundary Theory is a night of horror and yoga: A yoga video found in a Greek newspaper and the classic horror movie Dead of Night. You are invited to follow the movements of the upper body yoga instruction video before watching the movie. The yoga movements that we follow will recur later in the evening on screen in The Cassiopeia Plan, an artist’s video by Mark Aerial Waller, pastiched alongside elements of Dead of Night in a condensed form. Recursive shifts in the film’s form set up a topology which we shall test with the tools of ‘Boundary Language’.
 
The portmanteau film Dead of Night (1945) is a co-direction between Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden & Robert Hamer. Walter Craig, an architect, is summoned down to a country house by a prospective client whom he does not know. On arrival he strongly experiences the feeling that he has been there before…
 
“English decency is being molested by unspeakable evil.” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian.
 
The overarching narrative of a recurring dream provides a circular structure for a series of tales, where one form of consciousness slips into another, where horror lies within our own slippages of sanity. The film’s structure curiously follows a logical/empirical philosophy where ‘p’ and ‘not p’ are able to occur simultaneously in a grey zone. The film sits comfortably within its own contradictory state, a fight between empirical and continental philosophy.
 
The Wayward Canon was set up in 2001 in order to exhibit films that were made commercially but had slipped from mainstream critical attention, the project developed to become an experimental field for the reinterpretation of cinema in terms of content, environment, event and audience.
 
This event organised in coincide with the Mark Aerial Waller exhibition at OUTPOST from 2 – 21 March 2011 and as part of a ongoing series of events in Norwich leading up to the launch of a new artists’ moving image festival in the city in 2012.