Projects
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Peter Bromley is to direct a feature length documentary for the Somme Project. Filming will take place across 2010.
The film is based around the opening day of the Franco-British offensive on the Somme on the 1st July 1916. The idea is to walk the front-line as it was, immediately prior to the opening stages of the battle and record the walk in image and sound as it is now; continuing Bromley's ongoing interest in the 'missing men' within the landscape of the Somme. Beginning with the British Third Army's diversionary attack at Gommecourt, moving southwards to the Fourth Army's attack at Serre, Beaumont-Hamel, Thiepval, la Boisselle, Montauban, Fricourt and Mametz. In addition to the French Sixth Army's attack towards Maurepas. The film will try to reflect losses on all sides...the walk itself will set out the narrative.
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The Somme.net is a ten-year photographic project involving Peter Bromley, Historian Adrian Jackson and Sound Recordist Stephen Oldfield. Started in 2006, the project will end with the centenary of the Battle of the Somme in 2016.
The Somme project will revisit the frontline of the Battle of the Somme, the places where thousands fell, and capture the landscape as it appears now in photographs. The project has been undertaken in a spirit of exploration. A new website is launched specially dedicated to the project, www.thesomme.net
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Peter Bromley is to direct a short film on the work of artist Joseph Beuys. Beuys inspired people from all backgrounds, not just artists. He is most famous for his ritualistic performances and his energetic championing of 'every man is an artist'.
Beuys also made many video-based works. These are as important as the drawings and large-scale sculpture for which he is better known.
Filming will take place in and around the town of Krefeld, Germany, where Beuys was born. The crew will have access to some of the original rooms that Beuys himself constructed and installed at the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld. Bromley will also interview Dr. Martin Hentschel, Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum and former Beuys student.
James O'Brien will also contribute to the film. O'Brien was working at the Demarco Gallery which was in the process of staging a Beuys exhibition when the artist died in 1986.
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Peter Bromley´s feature length documentary on Charles Hayward, avant-garde drummer and experimental percussionist will be released late autumn 2007.
Hayward hit the experimental rock scene of the 1970´s with the band This Heat. Since then he has remained at the forefront of innovative music, which extends the musical experience.
This film attempts to give us an insight into Hayward´s music, his inspiration and his creative drive. Bromley spent 18 months filming this comprehensive exploration of the Hayward world of music.
Hayward performs as a solo artist and with musicians with whom he has collaborated through the years, some over a period of two decades. Bromley has collected footage from live gigs and other impromptu sessions.
Hayward shares his thoughts on music and much more during intimate interviews. Musicians who play regularly with Hayward discuss the musical journey they embarked on when they began to play with Hayward. All these musicians abandon themselves to experiment and achieve musical constructions only possible where boundaries fall away.
Openness, energy, excitement, passion, freedom to explore are the hallmarks of the music produced during the filming of this documentary. Bromley captures the total involvement of these artists with their music and demonstrates the centrality of Hayward´s genius to the musical edifice that this sensitive film examines.
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Marking the 200th Anniversary of the birth of John Stuart Mill, Rendition tests the precepts of his most famous work, "On Liberty" (1859).
Set in an indeterminate hellhole in an unidentified state, we follow the interrogation of a rendered prisoner, following the guidelines laid down by the C.I.A.
Rendition is a coruscating meditation on how far the war on terror colours our own prejudices and illustrates the lonely death of liberal England. By contrasting the central tenet of Mill's book "On Liberty", we can consider the brutalising effects of the external, perceived threat.
James O'Brien and Peter Bromley have again collaborated to produce a searing, brutal take on a Dystopian reality, can we afford to let this action be codified without the debate the subject matter, according to Mill, requires?
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The 1968 Film Group are to make a documentary on the musician Charles Hayward (pictured on the right).
Hayward has been playing on the British / international music scene for over 30 years and has produced some truly amazing records, his live gigs are legendary.
More information about Hayward's records can be found by visiting the Locus Solus website.
Bromley is to make a documentary on the French experimental filmmaker Jean-Pierre Lazare. Pre-production begins in October 2005, with the working title Jean-Pierre Lazare (Scenes).
Peter Bromley and James O’Brien work together again on a new short film, with the working title “The Re-enactment of Allendes suicide on The Camberwell New Road”. Filming starts late March 2005.
The film is written and directed by O'Brien and produced by Bromley's production company 1968 Film Group. The actors are Orlando Vitorini, Alice Margarolia, Daniel O'Brien and Mark Extance. The films outline is:
A vivid tone poem following the downward spiral of the Chilean poet and dissident Ronaldo. The re-enactment charts the human cost and individual disintegration of the human spirit in a psychic post-traumatic landscape. Addled by drink and despair we follow Ronaldo's journey across South London to a defining moment of catharsis juxtaposed between Ronaldo the refugee and the dynamics of Pinochet's"Coup D' Etat".
Bromley is shooting a 35 min drama at the end of August 2003
Working title - “Still Life” (morto vita).
The film is set in London and is based around the feature script idea written with James O’Brien at the end of 2002.
The film unfolds in five acts and holds seven characters across these. It is mostly set indoors, but opens and closes in the country. The theme of the film is loosely based around creative/personal relationships and the filmmaking process............
The film will be shown in festivals from May 2004 onwards.
A series of colour images are soon to be released, which have been taken over the last three years. Some of these have appeared in the short films and others are "stand alone" images.
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MALAISE - A FILM PROPOSAL
We propose to make a feature length film charting the rise, fall and death of the artist in contemporary Britain, using the Tate Modern and the highways and byways of South London as a moody and atmospheric backdrop to the central narrative.
The story is a savage and satirical assault on the art establishment, revealing the morally bankrupt world of art finance and its corrupt practices of wheeler-dealing. The film explores how the art establishment effectively kills the art it claims to champion, paying vacuous lip-service to the act of creation as an adjunct of its own internal hierarchies.
The opening shots are dramatic and spectacular with a forensic intensity examining the structures and recesses of the great abattoir, Tate Modern. From the exterior the camera moves to the interior where a curator is giving a presentation on Art, revealing his arrogance and ignorance of the work in a grimly farcical scene. The humour is further developed in the next scene, in an optician, where the curator undergoes extensive tests to restore his focus revealing that he is in fact blind to the Art masterpieces he is entrusted by the nation to maintain and explain.
The curator appears as a ‘buffoon’, a fall guy to the greater integrity of the ‘Artist’. Yet as the film progresses a seismic shift in our perceptions is revealed, with the curator metaphorically ‘killing’ the Artist as he rises through the ranks of the curatorial morass.
The following scenes show how in thrall the art world is to big business. The Art Dealer and the curator hail the Artist as a genius, the ‘one’. The acquisitions board has sanctioned a buying spree that will make the Artist's reputation and guarantee his place in the pantheon of contemporary Art. The deal will allow the Artist to move out of his seedy studio and become a recognised figure, celebrity/artist. It also transpires that one of the trustees on the acquisitions board is also a financier/developer and has agreed with an architect to transform the now empty Artist’s studio complex/colony into lucrative luxury living apartments.
We then have a series of startling visual vignettes as the inter-connectedness of the art world and its vectors is explored; the curator's actress girlfriend; a student discussing the meaning of film; a feral boy who roams the riverside; the film student masturbating to a whore's chanted litany of filmmakers' names; the boy befriending the poet/ tramp as a procession to the culmination of the deal escalates.
The retinue of characters assemble for a celebratory dinner to clinch the deal, but it is here that the whole art con is revealed. The world of art finance and the capitalist establishment is exposed as a cruel and malicious sham, ruthlessly self-serving and callously dismissive of the artists it purports to represent.
The moral and sexual degeneracy of the ensemble is summarised in the finale to the film, where a drug enhanced, debauched orgy reveals a hideous congress of the drunken protagonists as they fuck each other senseless while symbolically fucking Art.
The final scene creates a haunting tableau, a ‘ship of fools’ rises out of the mist, floating down the Thames, containing all the main players from the celebration dinner. Locked in their private, exclusive world and language, the ship moves out to the darkness of the river. Looking on from the riverbank is the artist, the boy, the tramp…The ship floats away, the dissolute crew on board…going nowhere, sterile, deluded, and intact...