Gerald Fox
Gerald Fox is a filmmaker and artist who has won major awards throughout his career for his films about the world’s leading contemporary artists including: Gilbert and George, Claes Oldenburg, Christian Boltanski, Marc Quinn, Gerhard Richter, Robert Frank and Bill Viola. His awards include: BAFTA, Royal Television Society Best Arts Film, Grierson Best Arts Documentary, Grand Prize at Festival of Films on Art in Montreal, Chicago Gold Hugo and Prix Italia. All these films were shown nationally in the UK on ITV’s longstanding arts series, The South Bank Show, Channel 4 and the BBC 1 flagship arts series Imagine, as well as internationally on broadcast and cable television. They were shown in major film festivals including: Rotterdam, Tribeca, London, Viennale, Naples, Bologna, and Chicago. The films were also shown in major art museums: The Met, Tate, Museum of Modern Art in New York, National Portrait Gallery in London, Centre Pompidou, Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, Fotomuseum Winterthur, National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Uffizi in Florence, Royal Academy in London.
In recent years, as Gerry Fox, he started making large-scale, multiple-screen site-specific film installations that have received wide public attention and critical acclaim. He was the first artist in residence at 176, a vibrant new art space in Camden, London from 2007-2008. His installation Favela Descending was shown as part of the Concrete and Glass festival in October 2008 and exhibited at Village Underground in Shoreditch. Venice in Venice, a six-screen installation about the city in all its guises, made over five years, was exhibited at Palazzo dona della Rose during the Venice Biennale in 2009 and was the subject of a short documentary by esteemed art critic and presenter Waldemar Januszczak. He has also done two solo shows of framed moving image works at Eleven Fine Art in London: Venetian Impressions (2010), inspired by the work of Turner, Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Sargent; and Nudes Moving (2012) based on nude studies by Schiele and Rodin. In 2017-18 he participated in a major group exhibition at The New Art Gallery Walsall (Birmingham) examining the legacy of JMW Turner on contemporary artists, where his works hung next to paintings by the great artist himself. His three-screen installation Staffa (2017), in collaboration with composer Ned Bigham, was shown at Edinburgh International Festival, both at the National Library and live at Usher Hall in the Closing Night Concert with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. In 2018 his show Temple of Love featured multi-screen moving image artworks inspired by sculptures and drawings by Rodin at Hix Art, London.
Works by Gerald Fox
Kinaesthesia
2025, digital video
98 min
Kinaesthesia is a feature documentary that explores the relationship between film and dreams in the Silent era. Serbian actor Goran Kostić plays the late, legendary Harvard film studies professor Vlada Petrić as he perambulates through different “oneiric” landscapes and bizarre encounters, somnambulating his way into over forty chronological dream sequences from the greatest Silent films of all time. Through this phantasmagoria of imagery and finely tuned narration we discover how the most inventive directors from René Clair to F. W. Murnau, Eisenstein to Buñuel, Kinugasa to Chaplin and Meliés to Maya Deren, all utilised uniquely cinematic techniques to activate the sensory motor centres in the brain producing kinaesthesia – the sensation of movement – exactly as happens naturally during dreaming itself. So the film becomes a dream film in and of itself, utilising filmic effects to create a sensorial ‘love letter’ to French Impressionism, German Expressionism, Soviet Montage, and the early American Experimental Cinema. It is all brought to life through newly restored film prints from the BFI National Archive together with a vibrantly composed musical soundtrack by Alan Snelling that ties the many disparate “dream” sequences into a unified whole.
Leaving Home Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank
2019, digital video (original format: Super 16mm)
86 min
“Leaving Home, Coming Home…A Portrait of Robert Frank” is the first ever, feature-length documentary about the legendary photographer and filmmaker whose work reflects his life in an unflinchingly honest way. This film, shot in New York and Nova Scotia, seamlessly interweaves between Frank, aged 80, reflecting on a lifetime of image making and the richly-textured photographs and personal films themselves. He takes us on a journey from his childhood as a Jew in Switzerland during the Second World War, to his life in America and his photographic travels through Paris, London and Wales. He shows us photographs spanning his long and diverse career, including those made during his seminal voyage across America in a car, producing the now legendary series, The Americans, probably the single most influential photographic book of the last fifty years.
The film has rarely been seen, as Frank limited it to three screenings a year for over a decade but has now permitted wider distribution. This is a unique opportunity to see this Grierson, Royal Television Society and FIFA award-winning film which was also acclaimed at Rotterdam, Tribeca, Viennale and many other leading film festivals.
Bill Viola: The Road to St. Paul’s
2017, digital video (original format: Super 16mm)
81 min
This documentary follows video artist Bill Viola and his wife and collaborator Kira Perov over a twelve-year period as they undertake and complete the installation of two permanent video works, Mary and Martyrs, in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. In documenting Viola’s approach, the award-winning arts documentary director Gerald Fox captures the essence of Viola’s creative process, along with the significant changes that occur in these two figures over the lengthy time period. He also looks back at the career of this seminal artist, who since the early 1970s has taken video art to a new level of acceptance in contemporary art.