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Screening of experimental film: Lady Blackshirt

On Friday 22nd October 2021, the Intellectual Forum hosted a screening of the new experimental film Impermanence: Lady Blackshirt, followed by a Q&A session with the creative team.

Directed by Roseanna Anderson and Joshua Ben-Tovim, LADY BLACKSHIRT was born out of the research project DECADE ONLINE. Working with the Paul Mellon Centre, Impermanence commissioned 100 artists to respond to extracts from early modernist magazines. The film, featuring multi-artform work by 30 of those artists, is an abstract-dance collage work with new material filmed on the Bristol Old Vic stage during lockdown.

The film takes its name from one of the featured stories, that of Suffragette Mary Richardson. In 1914 Richardson vandalised a painting of Venus in the National Gallery in protest at Emmeline Pankhurst’s imprisonment, but later went on to lead the Women’s Section of the British Union of Fascists. The film scours through the political ambiguity that existed then and is mirrored today, where a fraternisation of opposites emerges when the status quo or centre ground becomes eroded. 

“Powerful and beautiful” – The Stage

“A polemical bombardment of images” – British Theatre Guide

“Lady Blackshirt surveys the fragility of society” – Bristol 24/7

“Absorbing, challenging, never boring and always surprising” – Dance Tabs

“Filled with moments of brilliance” – Exeunt