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Grant Gee | |
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 Grant Gee (2008) | |
| Born | Grant Robert Gee 24 October 1964 |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation(s) | Film director Cinematographer |
| Years active | 1989–present |
Grant Robert Gee (born 24 October 1964) is a British film maker, photographer and cinematographer. He is most noted for his 1998 documentary Meeting People Is Easy about the British alternative rock group Radiohead. [1]
Gee was born in Plymouth, Devon and studied Geography at St Catherine's College, Oxford. He did postgraduate study at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. [2]
In the early 1990s Gee worked on U2's Zoo TV and Zoo Radio, and collaborated with Mark Neale on several projects (many through London production company Kudos Productions), including "The Memory Palace", an experimental multi-media project combining film and live performance for the Expo '92.
In 1996 he directed a twenty-seven-minute short film commissioned by progressive house band Spooky for parts of their album "Found Sound" (namely the tracks "Central Heating", "Bamboo", "Aphonia", "Lowest Common Denominator", "Hypo-Allergenic"/"Interim"). The film was displayed on a continuous loop outside the Centre Georges Pompidou as part of its re-opening. [3] [4]
Gee followed the band Radiohead whilst they were on tour for their highly acclaimed 1997 album OK Computer . [1] Gee's 1998 documentary of the tour, Meeting People Is Easy , was nominated for a Grammy award for Best Long Form Music Video. [2]
His short films including Tel Aviv City Symphony (commissioned by onedotzero), the documentary JC-03 (about John Cale at work) and the dance film Torsion (choreographed by Russell Maliphant) have been shown internationally as part of touring packages by the British Council, onedotzero and Film and Video Umbrella. [2] Gee has also made music videos for British bands including Radiohead and Blur. [5]
In April 2006 the Creative Commons-licensed film project A Swarm of Angels announced that Gee has joined the project team as Director of Photography. In 2007, he made Western Lands, a ten-minute film about climbing the Old Man of Hoy. [6] In November 2010 Grant received funding from the UK Film Council to develop the project New Career in a New Town: David Bowie in Berlin, a music documentary on David Bowie's Berlin period. [7]
Gee's 2007 documentary, Joy Division, told the story of the eponymous Manchester band and was made in collaboration with writer Jon Savage. [8] The film received generally positive reviews from critics. [9] In Variety , Robert Koehler wrote that the documentary was "emotionally deeper" than the biopic directed by Anton Corbijn, Control . [10]
In January 2011, Gee completed his film Patience: After Sebald based on Sebald's book The Rings of Saturn , which was accepted by the Vancouver International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. In The Observer, Philip French called it a "modest, immensely enjoyable documentary". [11]
In 2015, Gee's documentary film Innocence of Memories , made in collaboration with Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk and based on his novel The Museum of Innocence , was screened as a special event in the Venice Days section at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival. [12]
Radiohead are an English rock band formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 1985. They comprise Thom Yorke ; brothers Jonny Greenwood and Colin Greenwood (bass); Ed O'Brien ; and Philip Selway. They have worked with the producer Nigel Godrich and the cover artist Stanley Donwood since 1994. Radiohead's experimental approach is credited with advancing the sound of alternative rock.
Thomas Edward Yorke is an English musician who is the main vocalist and songwriter of the rock band Radiohead. He plays guitar, bass, keyboards and other instruments, and is noted for his falsetto. Rolling Stone described Yorke as one of the greatest and most influential singers of his generation.
Zero Patience is a 1993 Canadian musical film written and directed by John Greyson. The film examines and refutes the urban legend of the alleged introduction of HIV to North America by a single individual, Gaëtan Dugas. Dugas, better known as Patient Zero, was the target of blame in the popular imagination in the 1980s in large measure because of Randy Shilts's American television film docudrama, And the Band Played On (1987), a history of the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Zero Patience tells its story against the backdrop of a romance between a time-displaced Sir Richard Francis Burton and the ghost of "Zero".
Ferit Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic, and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, he has sold over 13 million books in 63 languages, making him the country's best-selling writer.
Meeting People Is Easy is a 1998 British documentary film by Grant Gee that follows the English rock band Radiohead on the world tour for their 1997 album OK Computer. It received positive reviews and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Music Film at the 42nd Annual Grammy Awards in 2000. It sold more than half a million copies on VHS and DVD.
7 Television Commercials is a collection of music videos by the English rock band Radiohead, covering the period from The Bends (1995) to OK Computer (1997).
Alex Rutterford is a British director and graphic designer working mostly on music videos.
"No Surprises" is a song by the English rock band Radiohead, released as the fourth and final single from their third studio album, OK Computer (1997), in 1998. It was also released as a mini-album in Japan, titled No Surprises / Running from Demons.
onedotzero is a contemporary digital arts organisation based in London that aims to promote new work in moving image and motion arts. The organisation conducts public events, artist and content development, publishing projects, education, production, creative direction, and related visual art consultancy services.
Joy Division is a 2007 British documentary film on the British post-punk band Joy Division, directed by Grant Gee.
The Museum of Innocence is a novel by the Turkish Nobel-laureate novelist Orhan Pamuk, published on August 29, 2008. The book, set in Istanbul between 1975 and 1984, is an account of the love story between a wealthy businessman, Kemal, and a poorer distant relative of his, Füsun. Pamuk said he used YouTube to research Turkish music and film while preparing the novel.
Yvonne Welbon is an American independent film director, producer, and screenwriter based in Chicago. She is known for her films, Living with Pride:Ruth C. Ellis @ 100 (1999), Sisters in Cinema (2003), and Monique (1992).
Jens Hoffmann is a German director, writer and cinematographer.
Ofra Bikel is a documentary filmmaker, and television producer. For more than two decades she was a mainstay of the acclaimed PBS series FRONTLINE producing over 25 award-winning documentaries, ranging from foreign affairs to critiques of the U.S. criminal justice system.
Paul Kelly is an English film director, musician, photographer and designer.
Simon Pummell is a British filmmaker currently based in Amsterdam in The Netherlands, best known for directing Bodysong (2003) a documentary feature film that portrays the human life-cycle through archive footage from across a century of moving image creation.
Innocence of Memories is a 2015 British documentary film written and directed by Grant Gee. Inspired by Orhan Pamuk's 2008 novel The Museum of Innocence, it premiered at the 72nd edition of the Venice Film Festival, being screened as a special event in the Venice Days section.
Vivo Film, established in Rome at the beginning of 2004 by Gregorio Paonessa and Marta Donzelli, is an Italian independent production company for art-house films.
Grazia Toderi is an Italian artist working primarily in the medium of video art. Born in Padua, and trained in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Bologna, Toderi began working in the medium of media and video art in the 1990s. Currently working out of Milan and Turin, the MIT Museum describes her as "one of the most recognized visual artists working in Italy today". Toderi is inspired in part by Giotto and other early 14th-century painters, but "draws more heavily on contemporary experience, from distant views of cities glowing at night to the zero-gravity ballets of the U.S. space programs". Latvia's NOASS has described Toderi as first gaining critical attention in 1993 after participating in the 45th Venice Biennale, and "often referred to as one of the most important contemporary artists, working in fields of video projection and installation art and is recognized for her iconic use of aerial images of nighttime metropolitan cities." Much of Toderi's video art involves visualizations of the infinite, and Toderi credits this to a "formative moment in her childhood—watching the simulcast of the first moonwalk."
The soundtrack for Patience (2012), a film by Grant Gee, was composed and produced by English musician Leyland James Kirby under his ambient music project the Caretaker. The official soundtrack album was issued on 23 January 2012. Unlike other albums of the Caretaker that used old recordings of playful and bright ballroom music, Kirby's score for the film uses a 1927 recording of Franz Schubert's song cycle for voice and piano Winterreise (1828) as its main audio source. It also differs from other works of the project where hissing sounds are used instead of crackles, the loops are shorter in lengths, and the non-musical aspects of each track serve as the foreground of the mix. The soundtrack was favorably received by professional music journalists.
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