Blue Movie is Jordan Baseman’s second exhibition at Matt’s Gallery and features a 16mm film that incorporates found pornographic footage (originating from the early 1940s during Nazi occupied Belgium) with an original soundtrack based on academic enquiry and discourse. The voiceover for Blue Movie has been created from interviews with the cultural commentator Pamela Church Gibson, Reader in Cultural & Historical Studies at the London College of Fashion.

In Blue Movie the main body of the found film is replaced with clear leader footage: allowing only a few seconds per edit, following the existing structure of the source material. Without censoring the original footage, the replacement material creates a charged space that is actively occupied by the soundtrack.

We hear the narrator simultaneously discussing the history of pornography and its relationship to feminism from the right channel of a stereo system, while describing and analysing the Belgian made film document from the left. The merging of the two soundtracks, spoken by a single voice, creates a poetic and layered narrative for the film. Blue Movie expands Baseman’s recent focus on voice-propelled narratives, creating a synthesis between the aural and the visual.

Through the restoration and subsequent use of the original film and the recording, transcription and construction of the interviews with Pamela Church Gibson, Blue Movie deals with ideas of power, patriarchy, feminism, authorship, the history of film, and voyeurism.

This work contains explicit material.