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“Most of Charlotte Pryce’s films – which she herself describes as “observational reveries” – focus on the natural world. Because of this they can initially seem like documentaries, comparable to the mid-century nature films of Mary Field or work by Jean Painlevé in the microscopic attention they give to natural or animal life. Like them, Pryce looks to vivify or make beautiful her natural subjects, fixing on a single subject within nature and enlivening it for the audience. A Los Angeles-based artist who has been making avant-garde short films and what she calls “optical objects” since 1986, Pryce was the subject of a small focus at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam. This consisted of two sessions, each following a retrospective programme of her short film work with a new ‘magic lantern’ performance – live events that combined pre-recorded sound with the manipulation of elaborate hand-made slides. In A Study in Natural Magic (2004), for instance, Pryce films the inside of a flower in extreme close-up, adjusting the camera’s aperture to gradually filter in more light and revealing more and more of the plant’s interior contours. By the end the film serves as a record of the plant, but at the start the only thing documented is a pure abstraction of light. “
Full article on the films of Charlotte Pryce in Another Gaze’s third issue.