Beatrice Gibson’s The Future’s Getting Old Like The Rest Of Us
is a 16mm film conceived in the format of a TV Play and set in an older people’s home. The film is part documentary, part fiction. The script for the film was a collaboration between Beatrice Gibson and writer and curator George Clark, and was constructed from transcripts of a discussion group held over a period of five months with the residents of four Care Homes. Taking B.S. Johnson’s 1971 experimental novel House Mother Normal as its formal departure point and employing the logic of a musical score, the script is edited into a vertical structure, featuring eight simultaneous monologues.
‘Beatrice Gibson’s films investigate the utterances that form people and places. They are composite works, exploring sound, literature, collective production, the slippery operations of language and problems in representation. She uses her interest in improvisation and experimental music in her films through open ended compositional structures, that are, to varying degrees, given over to a collective apparatus and blend social modes of working with a diverse range of references. This makes that Gibson’s films challenge conventional notions of authorship and filmmaking from their socially engaged foundations.’
Recent exhibitions include CAC Bretigny (2013), Index, The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; The Showroom, London (2012) ; Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart (2010), The Serpentine Gallery (Sackler Center) (2010). Gibson’s films have screened at numerous experimental film venues and film festivals nationally and internationally including Light Industry, Anthology Film Archives NY; LA Film Forum; Rotterdam International Film Festival; London Film Festival; CPH: Dox, and Oberhausen Short Film Festival. Gibson has twice won the Rotterdam International Film Festival Tiger Award for short film. She was one of five artists shortlisted for the 2013-15 Max Mara Art Prize for Women and was nominated for the 2013 Jarman Award.
The Future’s Getting Old Like The Rest Of Us features B.S Johnson’s long time collaborator William Hoyland, pianist and AMM member John Tilbury, alongside actors Roger Booth, Corinne Skinner Carter, Janet Henfrey, Ram John Holder, Anne Firbank, and Jane Wood.Commissioned by The Serpentine Gallery, London. Funded by Arts Council England and Camden Council Homes for Older People. Developed with the Support of FLAMIN, Film London.