Paul Rooney: Bellevue

Friday 2 Apr 2010 - Sunday 20 Jun 2010
10.30am - 4.00pm

In the Servants’ Hall, Below Stairs

2008 Northern Art Prize Winner Paul Rooney brings his film Bellevue to Harewood this year.

Bellevue was filmed on location at Harewood in the Summer of 2009. The film’s main character, 'Bill', is taking part in an advertising company's focus group meeting, which uses the conference facilities of Harewood House itself. But Bill also appears to be acting out or imagining scenarios set in a 1930s New York psychiatric institution, in which he takes on the character of a failed jazz musician recovering from alcohol abuse. Eventually, this 1930s world, and the shadow it casts over the present, entirely disrupts the proceedings.

The film draws on the English writer Malcolm Lowry’s time in a psychiatric ward at New York’s Bellevue Hospital in 1935, which informed his novella 'Lunar Caustic'. Rooney was interested in the book’s study of the disorientation of addiction and intoxication, but also in the idea of Lowry's voluntary attendance at Bellevue (he could check out when he liked), which parallels the privileged position that art has in relation to real life: it is always easier to visit states of desperation when you know that you can leave at any time.

Bellevue was co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella with Bluecoat, Liverpool, in association with Harewood House and Spacex, Exeter.

Film and Video Umbrella is the UK’s leading agency for the commissioning and production of artists’ film and video work. For over twenty years the organisation has presented a consistently ambitious and engaging programme of contemporary moving image commissions. Delivered in collaboration with galleries and venues across England, Film and Video Umbrella projects bring the most exciting new artists’ moving image work to audiences across the country. To find our more visit www.fvu.co.uk