Focus

Peter Todd

Part 1 Absence, a More Acute Presence

43 mins

The section Absence, a More Acute Presence begins anew from the pure experience of things and others, cartographing the intervals between the self and the world, and the inevitable distance that opens in the moment of perception, where, with the interpretative act, one finds oneself removed from presence.

Todd’s films in this programme propose a poetic description of immediacy, of the inalienable presence of the world that is ‘always there’ outside reflection, as exercises in rendering visible the sedimentation of time into space, the directedness of consciousness towards matter, and the weight of seeing, of gazing into the world.

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Peter Todd is an English filmmaker and curator, often working on collaborative projects with other artists and filmmakers, whose films tenderly reveal experience as such, showing the inexhaustibly rich potentiality of everyday life. His cinema begins with the refusal of a position of knowledge of the world, with an abandonment of signification, in order to return to things in themselves—to brute perceptual experience—rediscovering a simple contact with lived time and lived spaces.

The filmwork of Peter Todd asks us to inhabit a particular attentiveness to the everyday, renewing our modes of being in immediacy and our ways of sharing presence with the inanimate, as entering these cinematic domains—an archive of domestic impressions and chance encounters with objects—means revisiting our direct engagement with the world and our responsiveness to the familiar.

TICKETS

Thu 28 May

21:30 - 23:00 / ACUD KINO

WHERE YOU HAD BEEN
UK, 2005, 3’ 00”, 16mm, silent

Images of the interior of a house and three short handwritten messages. A brief image-diary where absence takes form through traces and residues. The film suggests the possibility of locating a presence through what remains, while at the same time exposing the difficulty of ever fixing a person, a place, or a moment. Looking becomes uncertain, suspended within a world in constant flux.

OUT
UK, 1990, 7’ 00”, 16mm, DCP

A movement outward, both spatial and perceptual. The film traces a passage from interior to exterior, where looking becomes an act of crossing. Space is not stable but continuously redefined through attention and displacement.

FOR YOU
UK, 2000, 3’ 00”, 16mm, silent

A brief gesture addressed to an absent other. Fragments of everyday life are reoriented through this address, turning observation into a form of offering, suspended between intimacy and distance.

TO RED
UK, 1995, 4’ 00”, 16mm, DCP

A study in color as event. Red emerges not as a fixed property but as a shifting condition, unfolding through light, surface, and duration, destabilizing perception.

AN OFFICE WORKER THINKS OF THEIR LOVE, AND HOME
UK, 2003, 3’ 00”, 16mm, silent

Between routine and reverie, the film follows a drifting attention. The workplace becomes a site of mental displacement, where thoughts of elsewhere interrupt the present, folding time and space into each other.

DIARY
UK, 1998, 7’ 00”, 16mm, DCP

An accumulation of fragments structured through duration rather than narrative. The diary form becomes a field of observation, where repetition and variation register the passing of time.

NOW
UK, 2015, 6’ 00”, 16mm, silent

An attempt to hold the present as it slips away. The film dwells on the instability of the “now,” where each image is already becoming past, exposing time as continuous transition.

CUP AND SAUCER
UK, 2021, 1’ 00”, 16mm, silent, DCP

A minimal observation of an everyday object. Through framing and duration, the ordinary is displaced, revealing subtle shifts in perception and attention.

A GLASS OF WATER
UK, 2019, 1’ 00”, 16mm, silent

A simple object becomes a site of reflection and transformation. Light, transparency, and surface produce a quiet instability within the image.

A SPOON
UK, 2019, 2’ 00”, 16mm, silent, DCP

The reflective surface of a spoon bends and distorts space. Perception turns back on itself, where the act of looking becomes visible within the image.

TOGETHER
UK, 2018, 3’ 00”, 16mm, silent

A meditation on proximity and relation. Bodies and spaces coexist without resolving into unity, maintaining a tension between closeness and separation.

THOUGHTS DURING 100FT OF FILM
UK, 2019, 3’ 00”, 16mm , silent

A reflection structured by the material limits of film. The passage of 100 feet becomes both measure and constraint, where thinking unfolds alongside the physical duration of the medium

Peter Todd

Part 1

Absence, a More Acute Presence

Thu 28 May

Wed 27

Thu 28

Fri 29

Sat 30

Sun 31