Both artists live and work in California, and each film is informed by this environment and its relationship to light. Distinct in their approaches to cinema, the two works, when placed in dialogue with one another, offer explorations of external and interior worlds.

Staff’s La Nuit Américaine takes its title from the French term for the analogue film technique of shooting by day with a complex set of lenses and filters to simulate a deep black-blue night. The technique is employed without concealing that these scenes of Los Angeles were filmed in daylight: golfers, birds, shoppers, and families under sun umbrellas populate the frame. This visual dissonance is amplified by the collage-like nature of the soundtrack, which intertwines the sounds of nature and the city with a pulsating, building score, producing an unsettling experience.

By contrast, Voluptuous Sleep turns inward. Filmed entirely within Bromberg’s California garden, the feature-length work unfolds as a hypnotic and at times hallucinatory two-part 16mm film. Through the attention of her close-up lens, Bromberg observes light moving across water, rocks, and plants. Rippling surfaces, shifting reflections, the textures of leaves and stone: the camera moves so close to its subjects that minute details emerge as their original forms become abstracted, before dissolving into blurred colour and light. Image and sound combine to produce an intensely sensory and at times emotional experience; the score moves between meditative minimalism, moments of foreboding, and melancholy, forming a lasting reverie.

Screening curated by Charlotte Procter, Collection & Archive Director, LUX

P. Staff
For the past decade, Staff’s practice has explored ideas that merge the body, often marginalised, debilitated, or queered, with the architecture of disciplining institutions, somatically and psychically perverting our integration with the built environment. Across video installation, sculpture, and poetry, their work probes the structures of power that produce and define the living and the dead.

Betzy Bromberg
Betzy Bromberg has been making experimental films since 1976 and have shown extensively in museums, cultural venues and festivals within the United States and internationally. Previous to becoming the Director of the Program in Film and Video California Institute of the Arts, Ms. Bromberg worked in the Hollywood special effects industry for many years as a supervisor and camerawoman for the production of optical effects in major motion pictures.

In collaboration with LUX
LUX is a UK-based public arts organisation and accredited museum supporting artists working with the moving image. It delivers a range of activities including exhibitions, screenings, educational projects, commissioning and research.

Founded in 2002, LUX continues the legacy of the London Filmmakers Co-operative, London Video Arts and the Lux Centre, with a history dating to the 1960s. Its collection, the UK’s largest archive of artists’ moving image, includes over 6,000 works by more than 1,000 international artists, available for research, screenings and exhibitions internationally.