Projects
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A Life in Stills is an intimate exploration of the life and photographs of Joe Dilworth, whose black-and-white photography immortalized the raw, unfiltered energy of the music scene in London and Berlin. Set against the evocative backdrop of Berlin, this documentary follows Dilworth as he reflects on his decades-long career, revisits iconic moments in his photographic journey, and shares insights into his process and philosophy. Weaving together interviews, archival photographs, and atmospheric sequences of Berlin, the film paints a portrait of a city and an artist united by their resilience, creativity, and layered histories.
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Phil Thomas was a painter and decorator for over 30 years before deciding to devote his every waking moment and energy to art and become an artist painter full time. As he himself says ‘painter to painter’ This short documentary by Peter Bromley gives an overview of Phil’s artwork and art practice in 2023, from his subject matter and painting methods to his development and interests going forward as an Artist.
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Calum Storrie is an architect, curator and exhibition designer with a passion for drawing. Peter Bromley's new documentary 'Calum Storrie: Drawing Etc' captures Storrie making art, collaborating with musicians and artists of different creative disciplines, from soundscapes, music scores, painting and walking the city. Filmed over six months in and around Hackney London & Dundee. The documentary will be released November 2023.
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Peter Bromley - New Book: ELSEWHERE
Peter Bromley has started scanning his B/W film negatives for a new book with a possible publication date in 2028. The film archive starts from 1978 - to the present, the images will be platformed on Instagram @peterbromleyimages Negative formats range from 35mm, 6x6 and 5x4.
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Artist Carol Wyss searches for the structure of things; she takes familiar structures apart and puts them together again. She methodically searches for what holds things together, how and why they work. Peter Bromley’s new documentary ‘Carol Wyss - In Situ’ starts filming in March with production support from 1968 Film Group. The film covers Wyss making a new work for display at John Ruskin’s House Cumbria, England in August. The documentary will show Wyss planning at her London studio and printmaking at the Thames-Side print workshop Woolwich.
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Bromley's new documentary is on Artist Clare French. Clare’s primarily monochrome practice is situated within histories of Modernism and Post-Minimalism. Her paintings operate as poetic objects that elicit a slow, engaged looking and affective response in the viewer. Working in series to undermine traditional categories of meaning facilitates a multifaceted engagement with individual paintings and their relationships with each other and their environment.
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A short documentary on the art literary works of Marcel Duchamp & Gustave Flaubert. Artist Neil Ferguson visits the homes of Duchamp & Flaubert to perform art actions. Filmed in London, Varengeville sur Mer and the City of Rouen.
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The Demailly family have lived in the same area of Paris for more than 100 years. Filmmaker Peter Bromley captures the lives of this working class family at a time of political, social and cultural changes in French society. The documentary asks what does it mean to be French today? What future have French men and women in Europe now, compared with 50 years ago?
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The region of Picardy in Northern France was the location of some of the heaviest fighting along the Western Front in the First World War. Peter Bromley's cinematically rich On The Somme presents a multi-faceted depiction of the landscape of this area. Despite the unmistakable tranquillity of the region, the film conveys the sense with which the conflict and its casualties are written in to the land itself.
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Peter Bromley is to direct a documentary on Pete Fij (Adorable, Polak) and Terry Bickers (The House of Love, Levitation). Pete and Terry are former label-mates of Creation Records, one of the most important record companies of the 80s and 90s.The film will capture a highly creative time for the pair with interviews, gigs and see the release of a new album. The documentary will offer a unique view into two key musicians still passionate about playing and recording music.
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1968 Film Group produce short film on Foil Fencing. Directed by Peter Bromley with Ruben Woodin Dechamps on Camera, Claude Bromley on Sound and Balint Revesz on Lighting. The film also includes Fencing footage of International and GB Ranked Fencers Ayesha Fihosy, Nick Fihosy, Corsini King, Mark Sutton. Plus interviews with Fencers Steve Lennox (ex British Team) Gary Whelan and Xavier Lopez del Rincon Troussel.
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Produce film on Artist Neil Ferguson.
The film will mainly focus on Ferguson's work in the present, but does include 'System Art' the work he produced in 2004 for the Fondazione Baruchello, Rome and the on-going artwork 'Now we are surrounded'
The film also shows Ferguson in his studio, being interviewed and making art in situ for this documentary. The film will be directed, edited by Bromley with Ruben Woodin Dechamps on camera and Claude Bromley on sound.
Peter Bromley to direct documentary for the Somme Project. The film is base 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.
The Somme.net is a ten-year film and photographic project involving Peter Bromley and Historian Adrian Jackson.
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 website is launched specially dedicated to the project, www.thesomme.net
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.
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.
INTELLECTUAL 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...