Gesture Piece – a film with a score by 7 artists

A film by Vicki Bennett (2013)

Soundtracks by:

Andrew Sharpley (00:06) | Matmos (01:02) | Wobbly (05:08) | Gwilly Edmondez (07:48) | Dave Soldier (09:38) | Jason Willett (11:02) | Ergo Phizmiz (13:23)

Gwilly Edmondez , Matmos , Ergo Phizmiz , Andrew Sharpley , Dave Soldier, Jason Willett and Wobbly each composed a score for a chapter of GESTURE PIECE, without any knowledge of who else was collaborating on the project or what the rest of the film would look or sound like.

The completed film stitches back together the seven chapters with their individual soundtracks, creating new connections between apparently unrelated film sequences. The result is a fascinating and witty reinterpretation of familiar film footage, with scenes arranged in surprising and often very funny combinations.

The title of “Gesture Piece” is partly self-explanatory – within human communication it is part of our hard circuitry that for instance we use hand gestures to articulate our speech, which is essentially graphically describing/enforcing audio or spoken discourse. Even when spoken language is not present, a whole series of hand and facial gestures are available to us to communicate expressions. By making a film that both contains human gestures (hands, facial, movement) as well as gestures made by natural and mechanical occurrences we are setting up the conditions for a dialogue between the graphical elements on the films and the improvisers, both with the film as well as with each other.