Heated Gloves (2015)
115 minutes, colour and black and white, sound, occasionally silent. Featuring Captain Maurice Seddon (Royal Signals, retired, deceased 2014). Film by William English, a British independent experimental filmmaker who also presents Wavelength every week on London radio station Resonance 104.4 FM. He has been making films since the early 1980s.

The film screening will be followed by a discussion with the film-maker, William English, and Clive Graham, the head of Paradigm Discs, who released Captain Maurice Seddon's 'The Seddon Tapes Volume 1' in 2015.

"One of the most extraordinary feature-length works here (London Film Festival 2015) was William English’s Heated Gloves 2015, a portrait of Captain Maurice Seddon, a bachelor, heir to a lost fortune, aficionado of raw garlic and inventor of a range of electronically-heated clothing. Seddon was English’s close friend from the early 1980s until his death in 2014, and as a subject he is never shown merely as a kook or freak. The bulk of the film comprises TV footage of Seddon demonstrating his heated garments (low voltage electrified wires sewn into gloves, leggings, jogging tops) to reporters from Australia, Germany, Japan and Sweden, and from his appearances on the David Letterman and Johnny Carson shows. Bookending this is English’s own meditative 8mm, 16mm and video footage – recorded over a period of 20 years at the inventor’s ramshackle home – resulting in a work that reflects on time’s passing, technological redundancy and alternative ways of living." – Colin Perry, Frieze Magazine 2015

"Modest living, the international mass media, the materiality of moving images and the residual noise of a life lived very differently. It centres on Captain Maurice Seddon, a man who came from money but very quickly had very little money indeed. In fact his anti-normative, unconventional lifestyle was extremely sparse and particular, as this film reveals. He developed and sold electrically heated clothing to people with health conditions and those of limited means. He was able to advertise his wares through numerous international TV appearances and many of these are gathered here, brilliantly sequenced to slowly reveal more about this eccentric, distinctly charismatic man who said “one does things which differ from the things done by others”.

Heated Gloves makes for a rich, immersive viewing experience. It highlights the textural elements of its source material, which includes VHS, 16mm and mobile phone footage. The viewer gradually gets to know Seddon, though is simultaneously made aware that their experience is shaped by his treatment in the media – and by media itself. The film includes brilliant appearances on talk shows with David Letterman and Johnny Carson, both of which paid Seddon to travel to the USA. The film’s more overtly enigmatic moments draw the viewer in, emphasising subjectivity and physical sensation. Seddon is very frank and insightful – in gentle terms – about the consequences of divorce, family breakdown and the trajectory of his life. This viewer was profoundly moved." – William Fowler LFF curator Experimenta.

Screenings include:

London Film Festival 2015,

Rotterdam Film Festival 2016

Norwegian Film Institute Oslo 2016,

Close Up Cinema London 2017

no.w.here 2017

Phoenix Cinema Leicester