PORTRAITS is an experimental digital work that explores three contrasting experiences of war and conflict in the middle and late 20th century. A woman living in Shanghai is expelled from China after the Communist Revolution in 1949. The ghosts of the Cold War appear and disappear in the crumbling ruins of the Berlin Wall in 1990. A young woman suffers a crisis of identity around the circumstances of her birth at the end of the war in Cambodia in 1978.
AFC
SCA University of Sydney
Scenes From A Shanghai Hotel (2007)
SCENES FROM A SHANGHAI HOTEL
An experimental digital film by Geoffrey Weary
A Russian woman living in Shanghia is expelled from China after the Communist Revolution in 1948. Her story begins in a hotel room in Shanghai and ends on a suburban street in Sydney, Australia. Performative, fictional, and documentary elements are blended into a work that is suggestive and open to multiple readings. Extensive use of film leader and scratchy film surfaces add to the sense that what we are seeing resembles something that is illusive, dream-like, just beyond grasp…..or is it just a newsreel playing in someone’s head? more info........
Captive (2006)
CAPTIVE
An experimental digital film by Geoffrey Weary
CAPTIVE explores the themes of repression, confinement and escape. These themes are expressed through the incorporation of grainy VHS footage shot in Berlin at the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, hand-held camera sequences shot in a maze-like forest and slices of footage composited out of archival Cold War films. As the real historical Wall crumbles under the blows of street hawkers and souvenir hunters, ghostly specters from the past appear then dissolve back into the scratchy surface of a long forgotten newsreel. more info......
My Mother Told Me (2007)
MY MOTHER TOLD ME
An experimental digital film Geoffrey Weary
A young woman tells the story of her family’s destruction during the war in Cambodia, 1975-1978. Later as a refugee living with her mother in Sydney, Australia she suffers an identity crisis that is linked to the unexplained circumstances of her birth and the mystery of the father that she has never known. more info........
The dynamic interaction of film, photography & digital media form the basis of Geoffrey Weary's art practice. His recent work has involved an exploration of the space of the museum as an image repository of psychological,emotional and physical presence. In his new work has taken the idea of the image repository and extended the conceptual meaning of the term by incorporating archival, found and simulated imagery into his work. He coordinates the Master of Film & Digital Image, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. His recent digital film PORTRAITS::SCENES FROM A SHANGHAI HOTEL, funded by the Australian Film Commission, has achieved Official Selection:
International Festival of Cinema & Technology, Los Angeles, USA (2008).A previous cut of the film was selected for competition in the Panoramas section of the 15th Festival Internationale de Arte Electronica, VIDEO BRAZIL, Sao Paulo, 2005.
