Graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University
Selected by Clarissa Corfe
Men from Harlech, 2006
If cinema is characterised by its capacity to represent the reality of human relationships, then Gordon Culshaw's take on the 1964 film
Zulu in his piece 'Men from Harlech' is an examination of war and its effects on the human spirit.
Culshaw has dissected the subject matter of the film into four different categories running in parallel; the first one is focused on the activities surrounding the protagonist, the second is focused on the tensions within the small British Garrison as it awaits attack, the third is focused on the casualties and the forth is focused on the Zulu combatants, thereby shortening the entire film to a quarter of the length. Although each disjointed category is played out in isolation and divorced from its original source, it is still possible to follow the narrative. The device Culshaw has used serves to emphasise the lack of Zulu perspective in the original film whose choreographed movements are a mere extension of the scenic backdrop and are emblematic of a clichd, westernised perspective.
Next to the film, Culshaw has hung a wall chart called 'Zulu MS Excel' in which he has meticulously split the 1095 clips of the film into colour-coded categories to inform the composition of the piece. The futility of the exercise is an examination of the way in which the writing of history and in particular the accepted view of the Zulu War may have been influenced by imperial myth making.
More broadly, Culshaw's work examines the way in which the media is managed and the way that the reporting of historic and current events are appropriated resulting in an oscillation of myth and reality, fact and fiction. The shooting of Zulu, which was carried out under the watchful eye of the apartheid Nationalist Government specified that the British actors and white extras should not socialise with the Zulus who worked on the film. Culshaw's piece articulates an understanding that cinema/media is composed both of the narrative it projects and the space in which we see it and what we experience depends not just on what we are told but where we sit.
(Clarissa Corfe, 2006)
Qualifications and training
- 2006 MA Fine Art, Manchester Metropolitan University
- 2005 BA (Hons) Fine Art, Liverpool John Moores University
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