Tate Modern Film

In Focus: Betzy Bromberg 2

10 September 2022 at 18.00–19.40

An abstract image of plants against an orange and light green coloured background

Betzy Bromberg, A Darkness Swallowed 2005, film still. Courtesy the artist and LUX, London

About Betzy Bromberg
Transcript of A Darkness Swallowed
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The artist gives striking form to reflections on memory in A Darkness Swallowed

Artist Betzy Bromberg joins us in person for a survey spanning four decades of her experimental filmmaking, presented across Tate Modern and Open City Documentary Festival. Following a screening of the her early short films, the artist will introduce a screening of A Darkness Swallowed, which culminated a 1990s turn towards abstraction within her practice.

Dedicated to the artist’s mother, A Darkness Swallowed is an abstract mediation on layers of memory. It was shot over a period of three years in the artist’s backyard in Tujunga, California, using a wide range of inventive camera and optical techniques. Extreme close-up shots create a kaleidoscope of rich hues and textures as the sun hits the landscape at different times of year.

The film’s dissonant soundtrack plays with and against its otherworldly visuals. Driven by various percussive sounds, it mixes in jazz and sounds recorded ultrasonically from inside the body.

Programme

Introduction by the artist
A Darkness Swallowed 2005, 16 mm film, colour, sound, 78 min

In Focus: Betzy Bromberg is the first in-depth survey of the artist’s work in the UK. The series is curated by Charlotte Procter (LUX) in collaboration with Open City Documentary Festival and Tate Film.

Betzy Bromberg is an artist based in Tujunga, California, who has been making 16 mm films since the mid-1970s. Her films meditate on urban life and sexual politics, light, sound and memory. Alongside her artistic practice, Bromberg worked in visual and optical effects in Hollywood, working as optical supervisor on films such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day 1991, Bram Stoker's Dracula 1992, True Lies 1994 and Johnny Mnemonic 1995. Bromberg is a professor in the Film and Video programme at CalArts, Los Angeles, for which she formerly served as Director.

Female voice: What I find so fascinating about these photographs, these little snapshots, is not what they are, but what they are not.

For one, they are not from the correct time period. They are not the correct type of car. They are from an entirely incorrect location, and I have no idea who the child is. I do not even know if the child’s gender is correct, cannot tell if it’s a boy or a girl. Nor is the child the correct age. Nor do I know if the car is the correct shade. Although I do know that it is not the correct make nor the correct model. The real car was not dented in the rear, but rather the front.

The photos, in fact, hold no fact. They are not my family. They are not even my family’s photos. I picked them up in a thrift store many years ago. I liked the scalloped edges, the sepia tones, the borders. But they are not my family. Their actual history resides elsewhere.

But in these photos there is an imagined history, a profound representation of an event that occurred before I was born, for which I was not bodily present yet remain psychically bound. The event eludes me, has always eluded me, yet has sifted down and risen up like so much scattered ash within me.

I appreciate the simplicity of these snapshots, the necessity of the pair. It takes two snapshots to tell the story. First the child is there, then he is not.

All Tate Modern entrances are step-free. You can enter via the Turbine Hall and into the Natalie Bell Building on Holland Street, or into the Blavatnik Building on Sumner street.

The Starr Cinema is on Level 1 of the Natalie Bell Building. There are lifts to every floor of the Blavatnik and Nathalie Bell buildings. Alternatively you can take the stairs.

There is space for wheelchairs and a hearing loop is available.

All works screened in the Starr Cinema have English captions.

Fully accessible toilets are located on every floor on the concourses.
A quiet room is available to use in the Natalie Bell Building on Level 4.
Ear defenders can be borrowed from the Ticket desks.

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