Boogie Woogie

Feature Film (UK, 2009)

A film directed by Duncan Ward, set against the backdrop of contemporary London and the international art scene. Featuring a stunning international cast engaged in an alarming array of wicked behaviour, this ensemble drama pushes buttons and boundaries. Adapted by Danny Moynihan from his own novel, Duncan Wards daring and accomplished debut circles heartless agents, self-seeking artists, corrupt dealers and sexual predators of all persuasions, through escalating crises and towards a shattering conclusion.

Gillian Anderson, Alan Cumming, Heather Graham, Danny Huston, Jack Huston, Christopher Lee, Joanna Lumley, Simon McBurney, Meredith Ostrom, Charlotte Rampling, Amanda Seyfried, Stellan Skarsgård, Jaime Winstone.

Director: Duncan Ward
Screenplay: Danny Moynihan
Producers: Cat Villiers, Christopher Simon, Danny Moynihan, Leonid Rozhetskin, Eric Eisner
Executive Producers: Valentine Stockdale, Matthew Hobbs
Co-producers: Kami Naghdi, Julia Stannard
Original Music: Janusz Podrazik
Director of Photography: John Mathieson
Film Editor: Kant Pan
Production Designer: Caroline Greville Morris
Art Director: Nick Dent
Sound Mixer: Kenny Lee
Music Production: MRAC Publishing

Boogie Woogie Trailer

Origin

Short Film (UK, 2008)

As a starting point for the music, we have used the last paragraph of the Origin of Species in which Darwin takes us through the cycles of life and death, making us aware that all species are made of the same matter and operate by the same energy and laws.

Video

“…from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful
and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

– Charles Darwin (Origin of Species 1859)

String Quartet, Piano, Voice and Realtime Synthesis
Voice: Anne Bean
Text: Charles Darwin
Music: Janusz Podrazik
© 2008 MRAC Publishing

Screening and exhibitions

Darwin Centre, Natural History Museum
Voices in the Landscape, Mermaid County Wicklow Arts Centre
Shortwave Cinema
Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle
Darwin Festival Australia
Hebden Bridge Arts Festival
Centre for Life, Newcastle upon Tyne
Cambridge Darwin Anniversary Festival
Cambridge Arts Picturehouse
Museu Calouste Gulbenkian Lisbon
R/Evolution exhibition, QUAD, Derby

Dead Men Don’t Remember

Short Film (UK, 1995)

A found Teleplay by Duncan Ward

Director & Produce: Duncan Ward
Actress: Rachel Weisz
Photography: John Mathieson
Music: Janusz Podrazik
Editing: Duncan Ward and Anabel Turner
Sound: Ken Lee and Nigel Heath
Music Production: MRAC Publishing Limited
© 1995 Filmakers Limited

Video Clip from the EYEPLUGIN archives

Art & Space

Experimental Film (UK, 1997)

Portrait of an Art Journey

Director: Duncan Ward
Producer: Duncan Ward and Gabriella Cardazzo
Original Music: Janusz Podrazik
Assisted: Annabel Turner
A Filmmakers Production
© 1997 Filmmakers Ltd.

Video Clip from the EYEPLUGIN archives

Art imitates life it is said and life is a journey

This film takes us on an extraordinary visual journey towards a definition of meaning and power of space in art. Sometimes that space may be a void waiting for an imagination to find peace in its almost holy purity, as in the remarkable spaces of the Panza di Biumo collection in Varese, Italy. At the other extreme the film proposes that lessons in space contained in great art have prepared us ( since the painted frescoes of Giotto, the explicitly numerous early Christian churches and even earlier stone circles) to react to such vast totems of modern technology as the very large array of satellite tracking dishes in Arizona. The soundtrack plays over visual ideas like a fugue, as fleeting statements, fragments, themselves layered in poetic juxtaposition……the film is an eclectic textile woven of ideas, sounds and images constantly connecting, layering, shifting their colours as richly as a seventeenth century Genoa velvet.

Tarkovsky the great film director memorably called the art of cinema “Sculpting in Time”. Through the juxtaposition of different spaces, cultures and works of art, in Italy, Poland, Arizona, India, Scotland and England, Duncan Ward takes us on a journey of comparison from the Ganges to the Western Isles in search of connections between the art of the distant past and that of the present. Film, the medium which has come closest to portraying the quality of memory, is used here to dissolve not only the time barrier between art of different centuries but finds analogies in the way that western eyes see, for example, the scenes ( dream-like in their unfamiliarity ) of the boatman who takes bodies to be burned at Varranasse and the colours and faces in a fresco by Fra Angelico.

From the monument that marks the death place of a witch (she who, as Banquo says in Macbeth “…can look into the seeds of time and see which grain will grow and which will not”, to the formal charred olive tree stumps installed in the garden of Guilano Gori at Celle, Italy. From the theatrical living bas-reliefs of Tadeusz Kantor and his troupe in Warsaw to Dan Flavin’s flickering tubes of fluorescent light illuminating white corridors and empty halls, this hypnotic film takes us into a space which affirms the scared and redeeming qualities of art.

© 1997 Patrick Kinmonth

Tarasewicz

Documentary (UK, 1991)

A Portrait of Leon Tarasewicz

Director: Duncan Ward
Producer: Gabriella Cardazzo and Duncan Ward
Original Music: Janusz Podrazik
Photography: John Mathieson
Editing: Duncan Ward and Anabel Turner
Sound: Ken Lee and Nigel Heath
© 1991 Filmmakers Production

Full length video from the EYEPLUGIN archives