Introduction by Baptiste Jopeck from the review Les Saisons

Artist and filmmaker Lis Rhodes has been making radical and experimental work that challenges hegemonic narratives and the power structures of language since the 1970s. In doing so, she uses film, sound, drawing, performance, photography, writing and political analysis. Rhodes attended North East London Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, and later taught at the RCA and the Slade, where she was a tutor for 30 years. A key figure in the early years of the London Film-Makers’ Cooperative (LFMC), where she was the cinema programmer, Rhodes was also a founding member of the feminist film distribution network Circles.

Lis Rhodes, Light Music, 1975, 2x16mm, 25’
Light Music was motivated by the scant attention being paid to women composers in the European tradition. It began as a composition in drawings. In the filming of these drawings — it developed into an orchestration of noise — whereby the intervals between the lines register as differentiated noise or “notes”. The drawings were then filmed using a rostrum camera (a type of camera used to animate still images). The movement of the camera lens — towards or away from the drawings — is heard; as the intervals between lines narrow or widen, so the pitch of sound rises or falls. The image produces sound — that is, the playing of lines is literally “light” music.

Reading of Lis Rhodes’ Whose History by Elsa Brès (French)

Lis Rhodes, Light Reading, 1978, 16mm, 20’
A turning point in Lis Rhode’s filmography, Light Reading is her first voice-over film as well as her first explicitly feminist film. Light Reading inspired a succession of essayistic feminist avant-garde films in Britain ; not long after its completion, Rhodes wrote “Whose History?”, an essential text that confronts the writing of film history for and by men, and more widely the problem of making history.

Lis Rhodes, Running Light, 1996, digital video, 15’
In 1989 as part of research into the state of drinking water supplies, Lis Rhodes and Mary Pat Leece visited West Virginia where open cast mining had polluted the water sources. As they discuss the devastating effects of open-pit mining, they bring up another major problem – that of migrant farmworkers.

Aura Satz, Lis Rhodes, The Warning that Never Was, digital video, 9’