- Venue
- XYZ
- Starts
- Saturday, November 23, 2024
- Ends
- Sunday, December 8, 2024
- Address
- 5 Grays Inn Road
- Location
- London
- Organiser
- XYZ
The Compostelan Cycle is a video piece with a duration of five hours, made up of 15 segments or modules, each representing stages along the medieval pilgrimage roads to Santiago de Compostela through France and northern Spain.
Based on a twelfth-century Latin manuscript, the intention is to show only what would have been visible to a traveler in the year 1150. The manuscript describes four routes through France: one passing through the city of Tours, another through Limoges, a third from Le Puy-en-Velay, and a fourth from Arles. The routes then meet in Navarre to become the single Camino Francés.
The Compostelan Cycle encompasses these pilgrimage roads, revealing the medieval infrastructure and forty-two Romanesque portal stone sculptural ensembles, which are rendered in animated sequences.
The intention has been to create a historical and anthropological psychogeography. Any informative documentary approach has been abandoned in favor of an experiential piece aimed at opening up the multiple symbolic layers of meaning in Romanesque sculpture and allowing its oneiric qualities to breathe fully.
‘My name is Georges Meisner. I’m a London-based, UK-French dual national. I studied French and European History at Goldsmiths from 1973–1977. From there, I worked at the celebrated Electric Cinema Club on Portobello Road, from 1977 until its closure in 1984, as a projectionist. I studied at the London International Film School from 1979–1981 and stayed on there to run their projection department. From the mid-’80s to the late ’90s, I worked in various capacities in the Film and TV industry. I directed and produced a short film that went to Carlton Cable TV called The Beast of Bont. More recently, in 2018, I collaborated with an erstwhile Electric colleague, Rob Small, on a film celebrating the Electric Cinema Club, which is available on a dedicated website: https://www.electriccinemaclub.com/. It was specially screened at the current Electric Cinema itself, along with a Q&A. An early iteration of The Compostelan Cycle was screened at the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill and the Ritzy in Brixton.
Part one of The Compostelan Cycle was screened over one weekend at the Galerie La Chouette in Caunes-Minervois in France in the summer of 2023 as part of European Heritage Week’.
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