Pandaemonium

'Pandaemonium' encompassed a broad survey of work ranging from film and video into more recent forms of electronic imaging including CD-ROM - London hasn't seen an international festival of this kind since the 70s. Although the gallery installations took pride of place in the Festival catalogue, the real focus of energy and ideas was to be found in the 35 programmes shown over eight days in the cinema and cinematheque. Some of the most innovative work was concerned with expanding the documentary form. Claudia Schillinger's Hermes (1995), for example, follows a knife-edge trajectory between the desires of a self-confessed male paedophile and a mother's expressions of intimacy towards her own toddler son. This breathtaking film is skilfully constructed to implicate the audience directly in the understanding of the tight-rope balance between notions of perversion and normality. Corpse and Mirror (1996) by Kristine Diekman and Tony Allard shown in the 'Altered States' programme, is constructed around Allard's account of his father's lapses into manic depression and eventual committal to state care. This is a riveting, though ultimately less successful documentary because of the lack of distinction as to whether these are real or enacted states of mental trauma being shown and the consequent confusion of identity between father and son. Cordelia Swann's recently completed Desert Rose (1996) is a finely crafted black and white film in the personal documentary mould. Framed around the glittering facades of Las Vegas, it presents a chilling account of the after effects suffered by the 'downwinders' from the Nevada Desert nuclear testing sites in the 50s.

Two long-established filmmakers, Malcolm Le Grice and Taka Iimura were represented in the 'Sound & Vision' programme. Le Grice's Joseph's New Coat (1995) is a striking recapitulation of the formalist concerns evident in his live film projections of the early 70s. Electronic colour fields build into multiple superimpositions of frames within the frame to produce a video experience that can be seen as a contemporary equivalent to the layered screens in Horror Film (1971). Since the late 60s Taka Iimura's work has consistently explored spoken text and linguistic theory to contrast Oriental and Western perceptions of time and language. In Aiueonn (1993), he uses a Sony System G texture mapping facility to grotesquely distort the screen-image self-portrait, as he enunciates to camera the vowel sounds of the Japanese and Roman alphabet. Iimura wittily develops the concept from Jacques Derrida's Différence, to make an elegant distinction between 'image', 'letter' and 'voice'. David Larcher's work-in-progress Text Video Void starts with the raw basics of video 'noise' to explore language/image relationships in an entirely different way. The viewer is navigated through dark electronically constructed seascapes, conjuring a lighthouse beam and the Blue Peter code flag ('all on board - this ship is leaving port') to lead us into a heaving ocean of alphabetic patterns where dolphins formed from letters leap from the waves. Larcher's eloquent stream of consciousness monologue proceeds from a reflexive incantation of video terminology into a philosophical discourse on the state of non-being at the heart of the void itself.

Larcher's two legendary epics Mare's Tail (1969) and Monkey's Birthday (1975) used film printing techniques in a similar vein and were, in their time, a major influence on a number of filmmakers including John Maybury. Completing the work one hour before the screening, John Maybury presented Maledicta Electronica (Premonition of Absurd Perversion in Sexual Personae Part 2) (1996). The piece is a homage to Alan Turing, the British cryptographer who pioneered the concept of machine intelligence. Using Super 8 and Hi-8 images that are brilliantly constructed into composite screen displays, the work evolves in episodic form punctuated by enigmatic inter-titles to both challenge and direct the visual reading.

Some of the artists' videos in the Small Shifting Sphere of Serious Culture programme may have suffered from being shown in an extracted form, but the overall impression was one of naiveté. Despite the abounding influences of popular culture, of which Matthew Glamorre's Smashing Night Out (1994) is a joyful celebration, much of the work appeared to have been produced in a vacuum in relation to filmic history. A number of artists, for example, use the single continuous take as the means of making a low-key documentation of a performance to camera: Gary Hume sits in an overflowing bath whilst smoking a cigarette in Me as King Cnut (1992), while Sarah Lucas takes a painful eight minutes to consume a sausage, a banana and a glass of water in Sausage Film (1990).

Five artists were commissioned to make the gallery installations. Gillian Wearing's The Unholy Three (1996) and Jacki Irvine's Losing Doris (1996) occupied adjacent rooms in the upstairs gallery. The complex interplay between the three large screens depicting scenes of domestic violence in Wearing's piece, was neatly complemented by the Minimalist intensity of Irvine's work. Simon Biggs' outdoor interactive installation Parsing The Book (1996) was unfortunately overshadowed by its surroundings - squeezed between Hungerford Bridge and the Royal Festival Hall. The video projection forming a classical frieze of robe-garbed figures seemed much more appropriate and 'site specific' to the Duke of York steps outside the ICA than to the South Bank Centre, a mile away from the main exhibition.