Nothing Is Something

The delicate everyday beauty of soap bubbles, moving water and rainbow reflections.

In Nothing is Something – the title is a quotation from Duchamp – Anne Rees-Mogg directs her gaze to beautifully fragile moments drawn from the everyday: spectrums of colour on bubbles floating on a blue sky or expanding into a delicate crystalline structure, the silky effects of oil on moving water, and rainbow reflections from the filmmaker’s collection of cut glass decanter stoppers. Rees-Mogg was a painter who began making films whilst teaching at Chelsea School of Art and the Slade in the 1960s, encouraging her students to pick up the camera.

Founded in 1966, the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative started life at Better Books, a counter-culture bookshop on Charing Cross Road, where a group led by poet Bob Cobbing and filmmakers Stephen Dwoskin and Jeff Keen met to screen films. Initially inspired by the activities of the New American Cinema Group in New York, the London Co-op grew into a pioneering organisation that incorporated a film workshop, cinema space and distribution office. During its four-decade history, the Co-op played a crucial role in establishing film as an art form in the UK and participated in a vibrant international film scene. This BFI Player collection brings together new scans of films distributed by and/or produced at the London Co-op.