Monday 14 January 2008

1979, 1992, 2008


Off Off On, 4:08, 1992

Sorting through some tapes I came across a video copy of a super 8 film I made in 1992 when I was living in Melbourne, Australia. I'm taken aback to realise not only that the film was made nearly 16 years ago, but also that it is now nearly 20 years since I accidentally migrated to Australia.

But the text seems to concern a situation in a past more distant than 1992:
...after the crash, Easter 1979, in the flat, travelling, going nowhere fast…
13 years earlier then, perhaps a domestic situation:
...the lapse occurs at breakfast, the cup dropped and overturned on the table…

References to, or reproductions of the past are often the present in disguise, such as is the case in historical dramas and allegory. Images from distorted photocopies of limbs, night-light streets shot on grainy fast black and white super 8, full of claustrophobia resonant with the melancholy and depression of the time it was made. This film is more about 1992 than 1979.

At the time however, it was a remix of Paul Virilio, (‘speed’, which is actually a reference to velocity, not amphetamines, gives the game away), I am riffing on ‘The Aesthetics of Disappearance’.

From this distance and time it is possible for me to view the film with both familiarity and detachment, not so much as though it were made by someone else, more that when I made it I was someone else, of course I was. So now it seems to be a cryptic mix of the personal, claustrophobia and their relationship to speed, history, distance and the production of appearances.

5 comments:

SAM RENSEIW said...

great work! thanks for posting.

i did not really see it as "melancholic", or claustrophobic... more as an intensively, attentive gaze, on conditions... a different strategy of poetics-probably-than the chatham pictures; but the same insisting "stare" , trying to capture more that what might be visually present... an attempt to "unveil", to make a bond between matter and mind... or matter and memory... very bergsonian.

speed? nay!... the time is always now.

Steven Ball said...

Thanks Sam. I think there's a melancholic tone to my voice combined with a kind of anti-nostalgia and a claustrophobia in the interiority of both the description of the flat, the cup on the table and the darkness and closeness of some of the imagery and the intimate quality of the voices (I don't know quite why I double tracked the voice, it sounds like I'm reading over my own shoulder) suggests that this is all coming from a confined space. I think. I don't think it's so much a 'gaze', an observation, which suggests an attentive indifference, this was very much a construction and deliberate, even if I didn't realise it at the time! Although the Bergsonian point about matter and memory is well taken - even if I have only ever read Bergson via Deleuze - which could explain a lot!

SAM RENSEIW said...

ah! fine reding ahead then...

mater and memory is definetely recomendable, as well as bergson's fine thoughts about film /moving images and certainly his ruminations on " elant vital" and the creative impulse...

re: "it's not so much a 'gaze', an observation, which suggests an attentive indifference, this was very much a construction and deliberate,.." the "delibearta" and rationally " constructed" might just be the surface of things... underneath there is a gaze, a view-point, an "eye" that sees....
this might be something constant, even though it might have different appearances through time... this gaze or "eye" might just be a translator, through the poetics of seeing.... translating matter into soul, or vice-versa...

SAM RENSEIW said...

..." delibearta"! nice new serendipitous coinage...
anyway: in any "conscious"work, rational intentions might exist parralelly to the much more powerfull, actual "visual" facts, that -per se- constitute the real and only breack-trough into the world.

Steven Ball said...

indeed!