This evening of film screenings and readings is programmed as part of Chisenhale Research, looking back through Chisenhale Gallery's archive of artist commissions and exhibitions. 

besides, in tangent features the FVU co-commission Make it new John, an ambitious work by Duncan Campbell. The multi-faceted film takes the viewer on an accelerated tour through the history of the second half of the twentieth century, highlighting the urge for technological innovation and personal reinvention that shaped the post-war period.

One of the prime movers in this new-model consumer economy was the engineer and entrepreneur John De Lorean, whose rise, first in one of the top jobs at General Motors, and then at the helm of his own sports-car company, marked him out as one of the key myth-makers and trail-blazers of the American dream.

Hitching De Lorean’s rise and fall to the example of the slickly stylish but technically flawed DMC12 sports car that was produced at the factory (and was featured in the film Back to the Future, 1985), Make it new John contrasts the car’s glamorous image of upward mobility with its maker’s subsequent crash. The film also traces the repercussions of that fall-out through its impact on the factory workforce and against a wider backdrop of failed promise and disappointed dreams.

Other films included in the event are Hito Steyerl In Free Fall (2010), and Peter Wächtler’s Far Out (2017).