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.