Wednesday 9 December 2009, 18.30

Glasgow-based artist Stephen Sutcliffe's film Despair (2009, 19 min) is inspired by and titled after the 1934 Vladimir Nabokov novel, a story of mistaken physical resemblance, murder and identity theft. Nabokov's themes of power and delusion, doubling and gameplay are anchored in Sutcliffe's collage through a prismatic treatment of visual material and sound. Sutcliffe quotes a parade of society portraits, photocopied handouts from a lecture series entitled 'Theories of Montage,' and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1978 adaptation of the novel in a dense sequence punctuated by baroque music composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully for the seventeenth century French king, Louis XIV.

Sutcliffe's film is followed by a screening of Laughter in the Dark (1969, 101 min) by Tony Richardson, one of the iconic directors of Britain's Free Cinema movement. Richardson's adaptation of Nabakov's novel presents Sir Edward More, a wealthy art dealer, who becomes infatuated with a young cinema usherette, Margot, and tries to initiate a discreet affair. His fascination with the young girl backfires at every turn.

'One reason for making my version of Despair was my inability to track down a copy of Fassbinder's version. In the spirit of this I have chosen a film to accompany my video that I also haven't seen. The idea of Tony Richardson directing Nabokov is very interesting and almost impossible to predict. A somewhat mercurial director adapting an author who was notoriously spiky about interpretations of his works.' Stephen Sutcliffe

'There is something predatory about the use of the moving image in the work of Stephen Sutcliffe - it is both determined and persistent. Gestures and movements, cultural legacies and histories are carefully observed, identified and cut-up. Severing with surgical precision, and splicing words and images together to present a mood or attitude, Sutcliffe reaches into the archive and pulls out his version of its heart.' --Mark Beasley

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
Free
First come, first served.