Sarah Wood
Three Minute Warning
2012, 3′
27 September – 3 October
The parallel histories of cinema and aviation re-shaped the twentieth century, generating irresistible fantasies of freedom and control. Three Minute Warning is a fast-forward history of the real impact of blue-sky thinking. You’ve had your three minute warning: now is it time to resist?
Credits
Director: Sarah Wood
Editor: Lucy Harris
Online editor: Sue Giovanni
Commissioned by Jacqui Davies for FACT for Channel 4’s Random Acts series.
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Bio
Sarah Wood works with the found object, particularly the still and moving image, as an act of reclamation and re-interrogation. She works mainly with the documentary image to interrogate the relationship between the narrating of history and individual memory. Recently she’s been focusing on the meaning of the archive, in particular the politics of memory, asking not only why some objects are preserved while others are ignored but also why preservation is made at certain historical moments. Wood also work with artists’ film as a curator. With Selina Robertson she co-founded Club des Femmes, a positive female space for the re-examination of ideas through women’s art.
Filmography
Athos, 2016
Boat People, 2016
Murmuration x 10, 2015
I Am A Spy, 2014
Three Minute Warning, 2012
For Cultural Purposes Only, 2009
The Angel of History, 2008
The Book of Love, 2008
I Want To Be A Secretary, 2006
Surrender, 2005
Manifesto For Love, 2003
Living Space, 2003
More details here.
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Links
BFI article discussing I Am A Spy, Three Minute Warning and Murmuration x 10
“I am writing these notes during a time of war, in a country that’s at war, unofficially. Britain did not declare war on Afghanistan under the Taliban in 2001 or Iraq under Saddam Hussein in 2003. It has not officially declared war on another country since the 1940s. War, it would seem, has shifted from a state of legality to a state of being: a kind of banally ubiquitous constant as Orwell describes above in the fiction of Nineteen Eighty-four… [read more here].” From Sarah Wood’s unpublished artist’s notes on I Am A Spy and other recent works (courtesy The Essay Film Festival).
“For my part, I am concerned with retracing the steps that led to our current visual framing and to express the near-hidden history that used the experience of British birdlife and its habitat as a frame for the way British surveillance has been conducted in the century just past, and how it is still conducted in the 21st century. With its own ironic inversion, this project is also a questioning of how we, as a surveilled society, behave when we ourselves watch the freed-up movement of birds… [read more here].” Sarah Wood (courtesy of Resurgence & Ecologist).
“I hadn’t realised how angry I could be. For the first time I had found out how to resist. When I remember this I can sleep and this is what I dream…” From Three Minute Warning.