TEMPO ADAGIO was selected from almost 1300 entries to be one of 32 finalist to be shown at the Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux in Paris on the 13th October 2023.
The Spanish film critic, Borja Castillejo Calvo, has reviewed the 16mm film in his blog…
Here is a transcript/translation:
CINESINFIN a blog by Borja Castillejo Calvo
TEMPO ADAGIO
Kate Beaugié & Ewan Golder (2022)
Ludwig Van Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 (Opus 131) is heard in its first movement almost as if guiding derailed images in their calm motor beauty. Tempo Adagio is a film that refers to the nature of 16mm in the form of a hand-processed film-music of remarkable finesse and delicacy.
The origin of the project can be traced back to a residency where Kate Beaugié was with the Sacconi Quartet. On the beach at Sunny Sands she looked at the time and tempo of the first movement of Beethoven’s opus and how the film should be conducted, paying attention to the variation of the waves and the sunlight reflected and incident (forming shadows) in the arches located next to each other beyond the shore. All the images you see invite us to think of something idyllic, but Ewan Golder’s montage lashes out against an overly calm calm and inserts different counterpoints through the montage. This is something that manages to make the film a vehicle similar to Beethoven’s work (one of the last he composed, when he was already deaf) following the guideline “adaggio ma non tropo e molto espressivo”.
The expressiveness of Beaugié and Golder’s film refers to a past of cinema, to the twenties or thirties, but in a very current way due to the decision to show the entire film strip or to overlap it with “properly projected” roll. The formation of double exposures using this resource entails an abstraction in rhythms and textures, making the images of the sea, the string quartet and the bows illuminate more or less depending on the incidence of the sun at each section. Following a purely natural guideline, with the movement of the sun through the day, a materialization of time is undertaken around bodies. The light shines and the shadow obscures parts of the stone, the instruments and the water to understand a multitude of images, a multitude of notes, in just seven minutes of film.
Published on 13th October, 2023
For a limited time period, the film can be viewed here…
Thank you to Borja Castillejo Calvo for his perceptive, sensitive and insightful response to our film.
Kate Beaugié | blog 