A film by Tal Rosner
Camera Jack Clough
Grading Sonny Sheridan

Without You is a visual exploration of London's industrial suburbia.

Without You is a visual exploration of London's industrial suburbia. Following colours and surfaces into abstraction, the film reveals the complexity of apparently simple forms.

Inspired by a poem by Josef Albers, Without You is a visual exploration of London's industrial suburbia. Focusing on an imaginary circle drawn at a 10 mile radius from Charing Cross, where the natural and manmade environments lie side by side in harmonic indifference, the film follows a colour-coded and surface-determined path, where identifiable or 'simple' forms are sculpted and submerged into one another, resolved only through the abstraction of their immense revealed complexity.

Shot and recorded on HD solid state.
Combining a small number of stills photographs.
Then animated and edited in After Effects.
Mastered in HD.

I am currently returning to my 4 prime locations (West - Brentford, North - Brimsdown, East - Barking and South - West Croydon) to capture HD footage of my selected structures and their surroundings. The animation using photographs from these locations is at an advanced stage. I have met with Nicholas Fox-Weber, who is the executive director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and had an extremely stimulating chat. He told me that Josef and Anni, on a few special and unforgettable evenings, hosted poetry readings in their house in Connecticut, where the Swiss born Hollywood star Maximilian Schell, who was a close friend of theirs, used to read Albers' poems to a select group of colleagues and friends. He also told me that he always felt that the poem I selected was read, directed at Anni, almost as if it was a personal message from Josef, encapsulated in 4 lines. I have found an even more significant symbolism in the poem, especially for me, and I am using it as a guide in my film.

Calm down

what happens

happens mostly

without you

As a result of meeting someone who knew Albers personally, I also realised I had a very strong conceptual connection to Albers' way of thinking and practice, mainly in the exploration of textures and materials through the study and abstraction of spatial structures, where our 3 dimensional world is represented in a 2-dimensional form: in his case, in paintings and drawings and in my case, on screen, creating important links between art, design and architecture.

Tal Rosner