Exploring moving image through cine-film, analogue and digital video and various forms of light projection; I incorporate these practices into experimental video work, site-specific installation and light show performance.
Julian Hand is an experimental filmmaker occupied with the portrayal of liminal zones: places overlooked, abandoned or forgotten. He has a Masters in Moving Image and Sound from Norwich University of the Arts and a BA (Hons) in Graphic design from Camberwell College of the Arts (UAL).
Using analogue film for its aesthetic and expressive possibilities, he works in a hybrid fashion, combining photo-chemical film and digital techniques. His process is a marriage between analogue and digital technologies. Through observation, the use of framing, editing and sound he aspires to describe the visceral sense of a place more than its function.
His practice explores varied themes such as industrial decay, landscapes and places of abandon, forgotten structures, omnipresent neon poetry, holographic transmission, shifting reality and the exploration of the micro and macro universe.
His work has been screened and performed at music & film festivals and galleries in the UK and internationally. Films have been screened at among others; Raindance Film Festival, The London Short Film Festival, Tate Modern Turbine Hall Festival, London International Documentary Film Festival, Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, US, Romapoesia, Poetry Film Festival, Italy.
He has also tutored workshops in S8mm filmmaking and light show production for various organisations including Raindance Film Festival.
CALLANISH ‘DUSK'
HD Video / 07:42 min / 2016
The Callanish Sessions (working project title) is an experimental short documenting a journey Demian and myself took together to the Island of Lewis located in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland.
Our final destination was the ancient site of Callanish by the waters of Loch Roag on the island’s western edge.
Our intention was to spend a duration of time in the presence of the Callanish Standing Stones and to explore the immediate terrain circumferencing them.
Beyond our personal communion with the stones and landscape, we ventured to capture and record the experience through our preferred mediums of sound & image.
Our goal was to gather recorded material in order to create an experimental documentation of our exploration of the Callanish Stones and the island.
We hope to convey to the audience a sense of the islands remote and barren beauty or otherworldliness and the Stones mysterious and stoic presence.
We also intend to weave a sense of magic or the unknown throughout the piece.
Myself bringing a single Super 8mm film camera, various lenses, film stock and tripod.
Demian bringing an acoustic guitar and Zoom field-recording device.
As long-standing collaborators and close friends, Demian & I have worked together on multiple video instalments for his band and music project The Oscillation.
Our work has always inferred allusion to realms forgotten, places distant or abandoned, psychological zones in which to transcend from one perception to another.
The ‘Callanish Sessions’ will act as a forerunner or test bed project to promote our ideas and future wish to continue recording and documenting in this manner places of cultural significance in the UK and beyond.
NEON RENDEZVOUS LONDON
HD Video / 07:49 min / 2010
‘Neon Rendezvous London’ is an attempt to glean a personal poetic interpretation of the obscured luminescent poem omnipresent across the capitals plethora of neon signs.
‘Neon Rendezvous London’ is a combination of selected signs drawn from the ‘Neon Word Archive’ (Signs, words and shapes found across the cities topography committed to S8mm celluloid) then reconfigured to generate a poem reflecting the capital and one’s existence or experience within it.
The intent of the video piece is to share an alternative view of the capitals neon signs and offer the audience a chance to engage with neon wordplay or the poetry inherent within it.
Accredited with a Mention D’Honneur by John Giorno in 2009 at the Romapoesia film festival.
EROSION - INTER CHANGE OF STATE
HD Video / 09:20 min / 2018
Relentless coastal erosion has seen many metres of land lost to the North Sea’s ravages. With the capacity to both reveal and remove, its sustained attack shapes and creates unique landscapes of which to investigate. But at a cost, as the land recedes with it homes and communities disappear.
The film records the physical traces of erosion upon the coastline using the photographic nature of cine film. Through experimentation with the mediums susceptibility to external forces such as the sea, weathering and physical corruption by hand, it constructs an experience of the landscape exposing the eternal conflict between land and sea.
The soundtrack produced by Demain Castellanos comprises entirely from a one-minute looped field-recording of waves breaking on the shore. The recording was looped and as each loop progressed manipulated, using purely outboard effects for an organic and analogue sound quality. Effects applied were distortion, phaser, flanger, reverb, reverse reverb, all short reflection delays that enhanced tones from the original sound source. These effects were recorded back into the original recording until the ‘waves’ became a wash of sound taking on a violent, corrosive and destructive form.
Drawing attention to this beautiful yet ruthless inter-change of state, I present an alternative perspective from which to observe our eroding coastline and perhaps momentarily change the way we look at it.
The Oscillation ‘From Tomorrow’
HD Video / 06:21 min / 2014
A holographic transmission from the distant future visits the present to wander and survey an apocalyptic landscape. The Oscillation ‘From Tomorrow’ is the long awaited follow up or sequel to my 2010 video release ‘Future Echo’. Continuing the post apocalyptic thread we are confronted by a landscape void of human activity. The barren landscape is cast in negative tones as an irradiated vortex looms on the distant horizon. This time we are guided through this strange and otherly world by a holographic wanderer. The holographic transmission leads us through dead industrial zones and brutalist compounds in pursuit of the floating portal and her way home.