Five Films - Mike Dunford, 1969

Mike Dunford’s 8mm films were made within a short period of time between 1968 and 1971 whilst he was a sculpture student at Goldsmiths College. Using offcuts, junk footage banality, politics, performance, pastiche, escalators, flowers, aeroplanes and motor cycles, Dunford experimented with film as a medium which he approached as a materialist sculptor. For Dunford, “the reality of a filmstrip running through the gate, and all its previous incarnations as a representational record of a social reality, an object to be worked on, physically scarred, in its existence and evidence in and of time, its evanescent fragility as modulated light, this was the true subject matter of these films. In Five Films a motorbike is repaired during the moon landing, a man mixes dough on a bowl and applies it on his face in a hand processed and bleached film, a busy London street is filmed through a red filter…