Perspectives: At Saint Martin’s, I was making large scale abstract colour field painting, my influences (inspiration) came from Abstract Expressionism, such as Rothko and Newman. I loved making this work, nevertheless, the male domination of the painting world and anti critical stance to production made me eventually (like many other women) put down painting. I came to film through writing and forms of ‘scripts’ rather than through a fascination with film as material (which was the opposite of my painting practice).

Practices: In 1980 I was at Environmental Media at the Royal College of Art which was at the cutting edge of time-based art; installation, performance and video. There was a highly articulate, critical framework created by Peter Kardia and artists/teachers such as Lis Rhodes, Peter Gidal and notably, Stuart Marshall who visited. Destructively, it was shut down in l986 by the new politics in Britain and at the RCA which wanted to streamline and compartmentalise because the work was unclassifiable and ‘outside’ of the conventional fine art denominations. Environmental Media wanted to break down boundaries and create interdisciplinary approaches to fine art. Video was at the centre of these activities, its portability was being used by artists. I found it ‘cold’ and I didn’t think in conceptual ways so it didn’t suit me. I avoided video’s immediacy (and its tendency to be trapped in the present) and concentrated on exploring narrative, voice and temporal displacements and the intimacy and terror of the dark cinematic experience with slide-tape and in the sound-studio. I made First Memory (l980), a large scale multi media piece which was shown as a special one-off screening at About Time at the ICA, the first important show of time-based work by women. I had made a connection with the Film School so that I could use 16mm film. I think this initiative was unusual given the strict departmental divisions at the RCA and the new troubles brewing at the Film School which had started to dismantle artists’ film and begun the road to an industrial model like the National Film & TV School. I came across structural filmmakers, Michael Maziere, Lucy Panteli and others. I felt alienated from that way of film, it didn’t speak to me and I concentrated on my own path, though I have returned to the best of it more recently and found it beautiful.

Black film & Measurement: I discovered the power of duration and the potential of the acoustic in cinema. Using my own voice, because then I knew how to control delivery and keep out acted speech. I concentrated on pace and delivery. Film is a form of construction in time. I made First Memory (1981) on 16mm film. This time thinking about the different viewing experience of single screen. I found editing was a way of imposing a tension. The material was time, made physical ie editing as a form of measurement of time. Lengths of film strips passed through the manual pic-sync, turning the wheel to pull the film at roughly 24 fps through the flickering dark viewer, in this way the body is connected. Using a flat bed Steenbeck in Close to Home (l985), working with distance - the sea and black spacing and voice to create tensions brought forth as a result of what cannot in the end be located in any physical geography.

Representations: In the mid-80s I saw the first important films by women made in the 70s in Europe. Chantal Akerman’s and Marguerite Duras’. These were beautiful but were visually familiar to me and confirmed my own experiments in form and vision, especially the voice. The elegant co-joining of the personal and the formal in News from Home (l976) was an influence. Gender and film were trying to find new forms to speak and represent from the woman’s experience, to validate ‘low’ subjects such as the domestic and the ‘personal’ and the lives of women (as an enterprise of cultural representation)...

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Nina Danino, 1998

Thanks to Catherine Elwes and A.L. Rees