Angry Film - Sam Austen

About

Angry Film is a delicately handcrafted work that blends the sights and sounds of the area surrounding the artist's studio with his ongoing fascination with the fantastical landscapes of science fiction and the early pioneers of abstract cinema such as Len Lye and Oskar Fischinger.

The result is a film that flirts with the possibility of some meaningful narrative whilst at the same time presenting us with seemingly meaningless, punchy monosyllabic words and commands as well as surreal collaged and overlapping sentences. The text moving against a black night backdrop in garish, often flashing, neon colours; like a Las Vegas casino façade, or from motel and diner signs lining the American highways. Although from places we may not have seen, Angry Film explores the notion of being transported through cinema and the effective lending of desires and promotion of dreams and fantasies that are littered onto our landscapes.

This attention grabbing, billboard style presentation looks and feels familiar, but something's not quite right… There are no flashy cars or half naked models, just a collision of text and abstract shapes. In the same way that Austen has this undeniable ability to transform the most basic techniques and materials into something dreamlike and ethereal, here too, stripped of their context the words and letterforms come to possess some strange and hypnotic power all of their own.