Art Cinema is a female-led collective of content creators founded by Myriam Blundell Phillips devoted to high-quality, cutting-edge productions in film, publishing, performing and visual arts.

Collaborating with prominent cultural institutions, artists, writers and directors, Art Cinema’s approach to concept design, curation and filmmaking generates a synergy between these media and a space where creativity and innovation can flourish. While engaged with the work of artists from diverse backgrounds and practices, Art Cinema celebrates the female gaze as a creative imperative for storytelling in the 21st century.

Founded with rebellious spirit and ambitious objectives, the company strives to create content that informs and inspires, challenges pre-conceptions and stimulate appreciation for art in all its forms of expression, delivered to the highest professional standards.

What’s On?

The Photograph That Changed my Life
by zelda cheatle

“I could never have predicted their choices nor the stories” writes Zelda Cheatle about her contributors. “They have all been themselves. They haven’t tried to write something their agent would say was a good idea – thye have written from the heart.”

Release date 8 September 2021

Click here to learn more

 drawing life : remembering terezin
new album  BY  jocelyn pook

“What shines through in these works, and also in many survivors’ testimonies, is the capacity to find hope, courage and beauty in the direst and bleakest of circumstances. It is about the human ability to find ways to nourish and strengthen the spirit even in the harshest conditions, against all the odds. This piece is, I hope reflective without being devoid of light” Jocelyn Pook

Inspired by the drawings of the children held in the Terezín concentration camp, the song cycle Drawing Life – Memories from Terezín by the multi award-winning composer Jocelyn Pook is to be released on disc, 80 years after the establishment of the concentration camp in Terezín in November 1921.

Drawing Life – Memories from Terezín is released on Jocelyn Pook’s newly-launched label, Humming Records, with a physical release on Wednesday 26 May 2021, available from jocelynpook.com. Based on Pook’s 2014 song cycle, and recorded in part during the 2016 production, Drawing Life – Memories from Terezín also features newly-recorded material created during lockdown.

Drawing Life was originally commissioned by the Jewish Music Institute in 2014 to mark the 70th anniversary of the disintegration of the Terezín concentration camp; after its premiere, it toured around the UK in January 2016, in a staged production that featured video projections including survivor interviews, archive footage from the propaganda films produced inside the camp, and the drawings made by children inside the camp.

Release date 26 May 2021

 The ghost within
A FILM BY KEN MCMULLEN FEATURING SIR IAN MCKELLEN

 

“Hamlet Revenant is the emerging cinematic form, a visual and dramatic evocation of preconscious and unconscious impulses that lie latent beneath words”

Ken McMullen’s adaptation of Hamlet is a radical cinematic re-interpretation of Shakespeare’s iconic play focused on creating a highly compelling visual score.

Over the past few years Ken McMullen has brought together a renowned group of actors, artists, international thinkers and high-level cinema technicians to carry out ‘concrete’, recorded research in a filmed process exploring the chasm between language, image and meaning.

This exploration aims to be resolved in a time-based moving-image work. As its focus this work began to explore, in close readings and dissections, the text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and other closely related texts.

Release date December 2020

AVANT-GARDE Cinema
PATRICK HAAS

 

 

” In turn or in parallel, cinema became Futurist, Cubist, Dadaist, Constructivist, abstract and surrealist… Freedom was these “artists-filmmakers” priority. “

During the roaring twenties a number of artists rebelled against moral, cultural and artistic conventions, challenging the traditional hierarchy between the arts : amongst others, Marcel Duchamp, László Moholy-Nagy, Luis Buñuel, Hans Richter, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Len Lye, Man Ray, Walter Ruttmann, Dziga Vertov. They refused to reduce cinema to a documentary technique used to capture reality and to a narrative device modelled on Hollywood’s stereotypical stories. They thought of cinema as an art form, endlessly experimenting with the camera. Doing so, they turned cinema into a lab for artistic experimentations and echoed the other artistic avant-garde of the beginning of the 20th century.

Release date: Date to be announced soon
Price: TBC

For orders and general enquiries, please email: info@artcinema.art

 

NOTHING WILL EVER STOP THE MUSIC

 

Opening Date: TBC

NOTHING WILL EVER STOP THE MUSIC is an artwork of such grace, insight and power that its emergence at the end of the pandemic year cannot be seen as a coincidence. A decade in the making by filmmaker Max Pugh, it is a unique two hour epic poem through time and history and our own lives moment by moment, leading to a sonorous rush of clarity about what it is perhaps to be human right now in this fragile world we have almost ruined in our quest for more of everything.

It is a stunningly beautiful masterwork layering elements of storytelling, personal history, global travel, with the history of the earth in such a way that we are swept up in an emotional wave. Seduced by the elegance of its pace, the richness of a sound track culled from music of many rich traditions, this is art that harks back to the innocence and purity of an artist like Bo Widerberg’s Elvira Madigan (1967), to the demonic energy of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982). Fifty years later we are still caught in a mad desire to get away, see more, feel extreme intensity one after another.

This work achieves, an affect as sensual and lyric as life affirming; the insistence of its pace pulls the viewer, like a heartbeat along as if reading an epic poem. It is a work for all time, but especially for this time; Pugh’s unique mixture of truth telling mixed with acute sensitivity to the sheer beauty and sadness of a world lost to itself, mingles and layers across the history of everything we know, from the beginning of time. But his is a bigger vision than any one of us can take on; which is actually the salvation that is offered curiously here, it is the story of the earth that is both vertical and horizontal taking us into a torrent mixing the past and present. It is impossible to turn away.

“So this becomes a film about the beginning of time, the end of the world and the interconnectedness of all things in-between, but it is also a film about love. In all these endings, there are new beginnings. Nothing will ever stop the music.” Max Pugh

 

I thought i knew you

 

Opening Date: TBC

Ben: the successful gay art dealer with a painful past. Hans, his feted artist lover with an imminent career-defining show. Frank, his contrary father who has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Meet an unconventional family living under one terribly stylish roof. But as Frank’s condition worsens, bringing with it chaos, inspiration and everything in between, the emotional turmoil causes Ben to reassess whether this family is better off apart…

I THOUGHT I KNEW YOU is a warm comedy drama about family relationships; trying – and often failing – to do the right thing, forgiving each other for past wrongs, and the life-altering experience of looking after an ailing, elderly parent. Always brutally honest but honestly funny, the film shows that the darkest of times can be overcome by love, laughter and a mind open to beauty.

 

I THOUGHT I KNEW YOU is a film about trying to forgive and trying not to forget. Ben appears to have everything: a great job, money and the social life that goes with it, a beautiful house and, most of all, a handsome, talented and loving boyfriend. But enter his aggressive and bigoted father Frank, and unresolved and painful issues come flooding back to pollute the comfortable life Ben has created for himself. This is a darkly comic yet deeply moving story of fraught family relations and the suffering caused by having never been accepted by a parent.

 

Exhibitions

Licence to dream


Collages and PHOTOGRAPHic works BY ANN RAY

“Don’t you dare to step into my dreams unless you have been invited to.

Now you know.” Ann Ray

Ray used the confinement in Paris to keep working in her atelier on her first series of collages – initiated in 2019. A few collages will be exhibitied as a worldwide premiere, along with various photographic works at the Gallery Sabine Knust, Munich.

View the Invitation

Exhibition: 15th October – 28th November 2020 

Gallery Sabine Knust

Ludwigstraße 7, 80539 München, Germany

 

ALCHEMY AND INTUITION 


CELEBRATING THE JEWELLERY OF SHAUN LEANE  with  PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANN RAY

While working as a goldsmith in Hatton Garden, Shaun Leane began a long-standing collaboration with the late Lee Alexander McQueen. United by a shared passion for craftsmanship, together they created breathtaking, provocative catwalk jewels with iconic status.Exploring the role of the jewel, they challenged femininity and fashion, and the perceptions of form, preciousness and meaning.

Please join us to a must-see group show of photographer Ann Ray and jewellery designer Shaun Leane while celebrating his upcoming book.

London and New York Dates to be announced soon, 2020

THE dIANe VENEt JeWeLLERY COLLECTion
a JEWELLERY cOLLECTION MadE BY 20TH AND 21ST CENTURIES ARTISTS FROM PICASSO TO JEFF KOONS

“A piece of “artist’s jewellery,” like a painting or a sculpture, is a work of art. Springing from the same creative approach, it possesses the same force, poetry and ability to provoke, sometimes even the same humor. It is only their ultimate purpose that distinguishes one from the other.”

Dates to be announced soon

rendez – vous
ann ray and mcqueen

”You know, it was simple. He was part of my life, we loved each other, I had rendez-vous…” Ann Ray 

Art Cinema in collaboration with the Barrett Barrera Projects is proud to present a new selection of pictures that explores the thirteen-year friendship and intimate creative collaboration between the late British designer Lee Alexander McQueen and French photographer Ann Ray, who McQueen personally selected to document his design process and the behind-the-scenes experience of his runway shows.

The exhibition features photographs taken by Ray, reflecting her unique relationship with McQueen between the years of 1997 and 2010, alongside garments McQueen gifted to her over the course of their work together.

 

View the Invitation
Download the press release

Exhibition: 5th October 2019 to 15th February 2020

Barrett Barrera Projects

4568 Manchester AvenueSaint Louis, MO 63110

ANN RAY AT Mcqueen london
stories and processes behind the creation

”For people who know McQueen, there is always an underlying message. It’s usually only the intellectual ones who understand what’s going on in what I do.” Alexander McQueen 

Art Cinema is proud to announce that Ann Ray’s work is shown at the McQueen London Flagship store. The exhibition is focused on the stories and processes behind the creation of specific looks/collections from concept to final product.It is really about work in progress and how the collections come together so showing contact sheets works nicely within that theme. 

Exhibition: Dates TBC

Alexander McQueen

27 Old Bond Street, Mayfair, London, W1S 4QE

Gravitas
Lee alexander Mcqueen by Ann Ray

”…the semblance of silence and the almost immobile, to transmit fragments of anything as long as they are human, sincere and genuine, to picture the working drawing, the almost, the not-yeti the invisible, the unexpected, the beauty, the grotesque, and the terrible, the fragile, the cracked, the marvelled, the terrified and unfinished, to show the dark side of the moon, the flickering splendour of souls and the stubborn folly the damaged works that unsettle and stand up to time” Ann Ray 

Art Cinema in collaboration with the Galerie de la Béraudière is proud to present a new selection of pictures that highlight the Alexander McQueen’s obsessions. The photographer’s eye reveals with great humanity McQueen’s world, somewhere between illusion and reality. With great talent, Ann Ray captures the silence and immobility perceptible in the most hectic moments

View the Invitation
Download the press release

Exhibition: 25th of April until 12th of July 2019

Galerie de la Béraudière

6 rue Jacques Jordaens, 1000 Brussels Tel: +32 2 646 92 15
Mail: galerie@delaberaudiere.com Website: www.delaberaudiere.com

blind faith
 exhibition by Ann Ray

“This is my contribution to the world: a licence to dream” Ann Ray

Art Cinema is delighted to present BLIND FAITH, an exhibition of photography by French artist and filmmaker Ann Ray. Shot over the past fourteen years, the exhibition features numerous encounters between Ray and a wide range of art practitioners, from actors, writers, choreographers, dancers, filmmakers, composers, such as Willem Dafoe, Alexander McQueen and Mikhail Baryshnikov amongst others. The photographer’s brief is to pose with the eyes shut, with the intention to convey a subliminal truth, one which demands the silencing of the sight, as a form of interference. It is said that the eyes are the mirror of the soul but maybe there is another conduit to decipher the most intimate thoughts, dreams and feelings. This is Ray’s attempt to offer an insight into the abstract, the invisible and the unsaid, for a better understanding of human nature.

View the Invitation
Download the press release

Exhibition: April 18th-June 2nd 2019

Ca’ Pesaro
Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna Santa Croce 2076,
30135 Venezia, Italy

Unfinished
Lee Mcqueen by Ann Ray

”I want to tell the truth about Lee, the truth of Lee: He was a man of art, of great beauty. He asked me to photograph everything, anything, without boundaries, with an open heart. Lee was not really a fashion designer, nor an artist: he was truly and simply a poet. I want to bring to light the intricate facets of a wonderful and complex man. It is impossible to understand the oeuvre without understanding the man. This is the man as I knew: this is the truth of the legend” Ann Ray 2017

Art Cinema in collaboration with the Festival des rencontres de la photographie de Arles are proud to present ‘The Unfinished’, an exhibition of photography, moving image and mixed media featuring for the first time ever a selection of works from Ann Ray’s extensive photographic archives documenting her close friendship with the late Icon of British Fashion, Lee Alexander McQueen.

Curated by the maverick Sam Stourdze, the show explores, on the one hand, Lee’s incommensurable patrimony through the study of his artistic inclinations and inspirations; and, on the other hand, the friendship and creative collaboration between Lee and Ray. Thirteen chapters portray the genius and graceful spirit that animated the two artists, leading to some of the most iconic pictures of our time.

View the Invitation
Download the press release

Exhibition: July 2nd – September 23rd 2018

Les Rencontres d’Arles
Atelier Des Forges
33 avenue Victor Hugo
13200 Arles, France

Art Cinema with the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival present in China ‘The Unfinished – Lee Mcqueen’.

Jimei x Arles was co-created in 2015 by pioneer Chinese photographer RongRong (founder of China’s first ever photography museum, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre) and Sam Stourdzé, the director of Rencontres d’Arles, Jimei × Arles has grown to become an unmissable event for photo lovers in China. The festival  brings together photographers from around the world whilst providing a platform for new Chinese Photography. ‘The Unfinished’ is one of eight exhibitions shown during the summer at Rencontres d’Arles that has travelled to China. During his first official visit to China in January 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron recognised the festival as a unique example of Sino-French cultural cooperation.

Download the press release

Exhibition:  November 23rd 2018- January 2nd 2019

Jimei x Arles International Photography Festival
Jimei Citizen Square Exhibition Hall
Jimei District
Xiamen, China

Films

Art Cinema is pleased to present:

I thought i knew you

 

Opening Date: TBC

Ben: the successful gay art dealer with a painful past. Hans, his feted artist lover with an imminent career-defining show. Frank, his contrary father who has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Meet an unconventional family living under one terribly stylish roof. But as Frank’s condition worsens, bringing with it chaos, inspiration and everything in between, the emotional turmoil causes Ben to reassess whether this family is better off apart…

I THOUGHT I KNEW YOU is a warm comedy drama about family relationships; trying – and often failing – to do the right thing, forgiving each other for past wrongs, and the life-altering experience of looking after an ailing, elderly parent. Always brutally honest but honestly funny, the film shows that the darkest of times can be overcome by love, laughter and a mind open to beauty.

 

I THOUGHT I KNEW YOU is a film about trying to forgive and trying not to forget. Ben appears to have everything: a great job, money and the social life that goes with it, a beautiful house and, most of all, a handsome, talented and loving boyfriend. But enter his aggressive and bigoted father Frank, and unresolved and painful issues come flooding back to pollute the comfortable life Ben has created for himself. This is a darkly comic yet deeply moving story of fraught family relations and the suffering caused by having never been accepted by a parent.

 

NOTHING WILL EVER STOP THE MUSIC

 

Opening Date: TBC

NOTHING WILL EVER STOP THE MUSIC is an artwork of such grace, insight and power that its emergence at the end of the pandemic year cannot be seen as a coincidence. A decade in the making by filmmaker Max Pugh, it is a unique two hour epic poem through time and history and our own lives moment by moment, leading to a sonorous rush of clarity about what it is perhaps to be human right now in this fragile world we have almost ruined in our quest for more of everything.

It is a stunningly beautiful masterwork layering elements of storytelling, personal history, global travel, with the history of the earth in such a way that we are swept up in an emotional wave. Seduced by the elegance of its pace, the richness of a sound track culled from music of many rich traditions, this is art that harks back to the innocence and purity of an artist like Bo Widerberg’s Elvira Madigan (1967), to the demonic energy of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982). Fifty years later we are still caught in a mad desire to get away, see more, feel extreme intensity one after another.

This work achieves, an affect as sensual and lyric as life affirming; the insistence of its pace pulls the viewer, like a heartbeat along as if reading an epic poem. It is a work for all time, but especially for this time; Pugh’s unique mixture of truth telling mixed with acute sensitivity to the sheer beauty and sadness of a world lost to itself, mingles and layers across the history of everything we know, from the beginning of time. But his is a bigger vision than any one of us can take on; which is actually the salvation that is offered curiously here, it is the story of the earth that is both vertical and horizontal taking us into a torrent mixing the past and present. It is impossible to turn away.

“So this becomes a film about the beginning of time, the end of the world and the interconnectedness of all things in-between, but it is also a film about love. In all these endings, there are new beginnings. Nothing will ever stop the music.” Max Pugh

 

 

THE GHOST WITHIN

 

Opening Date: December 2020

Ken McMullen’s adaptation of Hamlet is a radical cinematic re-interpretation of Shakespeare’s iconic play focused on creating a highly compelling visual score.

Over the past few years Ken McMullen has brought together a renowned group of actors, artists, international thinkers and high-level cinema technicians to carry out ‘concrete’, recorded research in a filmed process exploring the chasm between language, image and meaning.

This exploration aims to be resolved in a time-based moving-image work. As its focus this work began to explore, in close readings and dissections, the text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and other closely related texts.

Hamlet Revenant is the emerging cinematic form, a visual and dramatic evocation of preconscious and unconscious impulses that lie latent beneath words.

 

WAR WORK: 8 Songs with Film
by mICHAEL NYMAN

Art Cinema and Marquee TV are proud to announce the digital release of War Work: Eight Songs with Film, Michael Nyman’s creation commemorating the centenary of the First World War. A total artwork, it combines various visual, poetic and musical archives.

Eight songs form a song cycle inspired by the Belgian Gaston de Ruyter’s Chansons Vieilles sur d’Autres Airs (old songs to other tunes). Poems written by poets who all died during the war, except David Bomberg, are set to music based on emblematic tunes by Beethoven, Rossini, Schubert, Chopin and others.

Without a voice-over, War Work reveals the potency of images from German and French First World War film archives which have rarely been seen. The film element, edited by Max Pugh, unearths the bodies of war – mutilated and disfigured soldiers – which have too often been forgotten. War Work does not show the slaughter but the effects of war and its memory: the psychological trauma and the physical wounds caused by a humanitarian disaster after which nothing would be the same again.

“It’s a film without any dialogue, commentary or interviews, and it is basically raw visual material and raw sound material. It’s a thrilling way of making a film and a thrilling way of using images with intelligence. 

“This kind of stream of consciousness approach of being a quasi-documentary maker I think has been the most thrilling film project I’ve ever been involved with, and now I have a real appetite for taking this approach and making other films with available documentation.” Michael Nyman 2018

Digital release: Marquee TV, December 15th 2018

Download the press release

 

Publications

Art Cinema is proud to present
The Photograph That Changed My Life
Zelda Cheatle

“I could never have predicted their choices nor the stories” writes Zelda Cheatle about her contributors. “They have all been themselves. They haven’t tried to write something their agent would say was a good idea – thye have written from the heart.”

ART CINEMA is proud to announce our third publication: The Photograph That Changed My Life by Zelda Cheatle, the pioneering British photography curator and gallerist. More than 50 acclaimed photographers, musicians, filmmakers and collectors each tell her about their life-changing encounters with a single photograph. Their candid stories, presented alongside their chosen photographs, give unparalleled insights into their creative influences.

Release date 8 September 2021

Click here to learn more

Art Cinema is proud to present
Avant-garde Cinema
Patrick de Haas

Avant-garde Cinema
pAtrick de haas

Release date: Date to be announced soon
Price: TBC

For orders and general enquiries, please email: info@artcinema.art

Art Cinema is proud to present
‘Les Inacheves’
a publication of photography to accompany the exhibition

Unfinished
Lee Mcqueen by Ann Ray

Release date: June 21st 2018
Edition Number: 2000
Price: €39

For orders and general enquiries, please email: info@artcinema.art
Available at the
Festival des Rencontres Photographiques de Arles
Librairie des Rencontres d’Arles
2 Rue du Moulin
13200 Arles France
N°ISBN 978-2-9539762-1-2

Printed by STIPA, Montreuil, France.
With the generous support of 23 Capital, La Mode en Images, and the Private Art Collection of Florence & Damien Bachelot.

Art Cinema are delighted to publish
Picasso-Godard
Collage(s)

JEAN-LUC GODARD ET PABLO PICASSO.
WITH WORKS BY ALAIN BERGALA, ANGE LECCIA,
JEAN-DANIEL POLLET AND ANDRÉ VILLERS.

Curated by Dominique Païni an exhibition exploring the relationships between the filmmaker and the painter’s work. The exhibition sheds light on a method they shared-collage, and suggests surprising iconographic coincidences.

Exhibition: July 2nd – September 23rd 2018

Les Rencontres d’Arles
Abbaye de Montmajour
Route de Fontvielle
13200 Arles

Release date: June 2018
Edition Number: 1000
Language: French
Price: €29

For orders and general enquiries, please email: info@artcinema.art

Available at the
Festival des Rencontres Photographiques de Arles
Librairie des Rencontres d’Arles
2 Rue du Moulin
13200 Arles France
NoISBN 978-1-9164058-0-6

Printed by STIPA, Montreuil, France
The exhibition is produced by the Centre des monuments nationaux (CMN), the Rencontres d’Arles, with support from the Musée national Picasso, Paris and the Swiss Confederation.

Our Team

Myriam Blundell Phillips is the founder and the managing director of Art Cinema. An international impresario and independent multi-media producer, her experience encompasses inter-disciplinary curatorial consultation and talent management as well as content conceptualization and production. Between 2005 and 2016, Blundell Phillips ran her own talent management agency providing both commercial and creative guidance to an eclectic pool of artists, including internationally acclaimed British composer Michael Nyman (for whom she acted as global manager and producer); Belgian artist, writer and theatre director Jan Fabre, British filmmaker Martha Fiennes, Canadian artist and filmmaker Jody Shapiro and French artist Ann Ray. Since 2011, Ms Blundell Phillips produced and released two art house documentaries entitled: NYman with a Movie Camera and “War Work”. Her previous non-executive achievements include leading the Friends of Signy and Olaf Willums Foundation in Aix-en-Provence, sitting as the founding chair of the international collectors forum as well as joining the board of trustees the Contemporary Art Society in London. myriam@artcinema.art

Dominique Païni is the former head of the Cinémathèque Française and director of multidisciplinary projects and Film at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He brings an extensive and wealth of knowledge of curating the intersection between visual arts and film. His expérience as a seasoned essay writer and publisher is a huge contribution to Art Cinema’s focus on producing the highest standards possibly achievable in the fields of writings and Publishing. Dominique Païni’s latest exhibition Godard- Picasso : Collages is currently on display at the Festival des rencontres Photogrpahique d’Arles until September 23rd 2018. dominique@artcinema.art

Topi Lehtipuu In addition to a career as a tenor of international renown, Topi has developed a sharp expertise in conceiving and producing high-caliber productions involving multi-disicplinary approach to culture promotion.  He was Director of the Helsinki Festival from 2015 to 2018 following on  artistic directorship of Turku Music Festival as well as of Joroinen Music Days, a chamber music festival in eastern Finland. topi@artcinema.art

Alix Agret is an art historian. She holds a MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art and a PhD in Fine Arts from the Royal College of Art. Visual culture, representations of the body and eroticism were at the core of the MA in History and the MA in Film Studies she earned in France (Paris-Sorbonne University and Paris West University Nanterre la Défense). She has worked as an assistant curator on several exhibitions in France. She regularly writes articles for art magazines. alix@artcinema.art

Elif Karlidag is the head of branding of Art Cinema. She has a background in composition and music business with a classical music education in piano, composition and conducting. She has worked as a performer and she also has experience working with artists, musicians and establishments, planning, project managing and curating events. She is responsible to work within PR and marketing where she creates, develops and produces content and strategy across all media. elif@artcinema.art

Guk Yu has had experience working in cultural consultancy, performing arts management and production. She has coordinated communications with leading cultural districts in both Hong Kong and London. With her background in urban cultural development, she is interested in developing an international and multicultural cityscape though arts and culture. She is also currently the LAB Manager for China House Arts. guk@artcinema.art

Our Partners

Art Cinema are delighted to work in collaboration with the following partners.

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