Daniel Sayer

Daniel J Sayer

Films and Woodcuts

My work spans filmmaking and visual art, with the two intertwining through the affective quality of the image.

The way we recognise things does not always depend on the things per se, — it's an interplay of memory, thought and perception.

A subtle flashback from looking at your childhood photo; an instant of falling in love with someone you just met; or a familiarity with a place you have – or have not – been to, – all of this takes only a millisecond. This millisecond, however, is both eternal and hard to grasp.

Through my films and woodcuts I try to address the materiality and the fiction of this moment.

The naive simplicity of these images is linked to the way memory works: it’s fibrous, embodied and tactile, just as a wood grain or a hand-made paper. Here two ways of time perception – immediate, child-like on one hand, reflexive, retrospective on the other, – flow towards each other and blend together.

Titled A Novel Without the Words, this series is autobiographical yet can be shared by many, just as any personal story.

I often take stills from films, ripping them from their cosy life amongst other images within a film sequence. By means of woodcuts and then prints I create a new sequence for them, trying to keep the two bridged by the materiality and the grain of the surface.

Here are the examples from the experimental films of the Ukranian-American director Maya Deren or the Russian director and screenwriter Andrei Tarkovsky.

Alba is a story about two old friends, who meet again at a house party after many years apart. As the evening draws in, the couple are left with the rare space to reminisce, share likes and dislikes and get to the heart of the matter. From a situation in which nothing can happen, anything is possible.

Hit The North is an existential and poetic road movie which follows a hitcher up the A1 motorway. He is in search of his father but finds much more. Amidst the UK miner's strike of the 1980s, past, present and future meld as he makes his way through lost possibilities, love and defiance of time.

In Madrigal, three women strive for freedom in London. As they wait, wonder and wander, an underlying disquiet pervades their every move.

Education:

University of Amsterdam. Film and television.

University of Kent at Canterbury. Film, Literature, Arts.

Recent Exhibitions:

Prints and Woodcuts. Middle Floor, Leeds.

Prints and Woodcuts. Piglove Brewing Co, Leeds.

Selected Documentary Films:

Secret Lives of the Classics. A pilot for a series of films about the composers of the 20th Century. In collaboration with Barowitz Music and the conductor Mikel Toms.

Memory and Place in the 20th Century Italian City. A mini-series of five films exploring the history and legacy of five Italian cities.

21st Century Testimonies. A film about the corporate globalisation and the World Social Forum’s resistance. Shown at Leeds International Film Festival.

Digital partisan. A short film about the European Social Forum.

daniel.sayer@gmail.com

instagram.com/jonnyborowicz/