First Memory, 1981

The interior of a house. Outside, the sun parches the landscape. A woman’s voice tells a story.
Filmed from 35mm slide projection on 16mm reversal Fuji film with in camera fades and pans.

“It was wonderful to see First Memory. I was very struck by the way that the images conjured up by the text seem to superimpose themselves over the images on the screen – so vivid and very moving” Laura Mulvey

“Finally got a chance to watch your beautiful and disturbing film. How quietly it works its way into one’s consciousness.  Unsettling but so slowly. I was quite unprepared for the revelations offered and resisted. The earlier part was so evocative (or so I thought) of these kinds of spaces relationships between generations and so on but then it was so particular and the beauty of the images made what you said that much more acute, quite awful at the end…. It must have been quite intense making such a film and the sense of it will stay with me”  Annabel Nicolson

“First Memory (1981), originally a two-screen, tape-slide piece, is characterised by its lack of images, its blank spaces. It reveals confined and confining space, glimpses of décor picked out of the darkness as it by torchlight, while at similar intervals, the slightly hesitant narrator releases discrete memories”.   Jo Comino, ‘A Directory of British Artists’ Film and Video, 1995

Voice Nina Danino
Camera: Ian Duncan
Audio-visual Technician: Alan Vallis
Produced by Nina Danino at the Royal College of Art,London.

1981 Premiere: New Contemporaries, ICA, London

Collapsing the Frame, Reel to Real, Tate Modern,2016
“…and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens”, The Garrison Library, Gibraltar, 2013
Retrospective: The Subjective Camera, Greenwich Picturehouse, London, 2007
Experiments in Moving Image, Old ‘Lumiere’ Cinema, University of Westminster, London, 2004
Women in Film, Brewery Arts Centre, Cumbria, UK, 1984
Word and Image, London Filmmakers’ Co-op Cinema, UK, 1983
New British Avant-garde Film, Freunde der Deutche Kinematek,
Arsenal Cinema, Berlin, Germany 1982