Steve Hawley

'A Proposition is a Picture' & 'The Man From Porlock'

With their fondness for wordplay and humorous approach to the issues of meaning and communication, these two films from British writer-director Hawley hark back to the mid-70's heyday of Peter Greenway, before he went all commercial.
'A Proposition is ...'is about the dislocation between words and images, filtered through an intense family history in which a son looks for clues to the whereabouts of his absent language-obsessed father, thereby creating new resonances for himself and the audience from fragments of Esperanto and the selection of chintzy touristic views. Ed Meyer's droll narration brings out the idiosyncratic intelligence of the piece, as it does with Hawley's just finished sequel '... Porlock'.
'... Porlock' takes the famous interpretation to Coleridge's creative processes on 'Kubla Khan' as the jumping off point for a delightful mediation on the break down of language in our contemporary experience. This time it's all concluded in the form of an oddball video diary where the protagonist brandishes a metaphorical compass, becomes fascinated by the way letters fall off shop fronts, and ,from the information overload that assails us each day, picks out the word 'Stenhousmuir'. Smart fun it is too, and unreservedly recommended. (Trevor Johnston, in NFT1 review)

Language Lessons (1995 Steve Hawley and Tony Steyger)

There have been over two thousand invented languages, of which only a handful are still spoken in Britain. Using interviews with speakers of Ido, Esperanto, and Volapruk, and rare archive material, Language Lessons examines the history and present state of the artificial language movement.
The lessons take in Logopandecteision, Lips Kith, and the musical language Solresol, which can be whistled and sung as well as spoken. However, the medium of instruction is that most curious of hybrid languages, English.
Language Lessons was commissioned by Channel 4 Television and the Arts Council of England, under the Experimenta scheme. It uses humour and irony to explore the nature of eccentricity, of language, and of our anglocentric linguistic culture.

Selected Exhibitions/Filmography