An extended version of Misplaced

This is the extended version of the test film Misplaced which Rick and I filmed and I have edited. There are some imperfections and improvements technically that we want to make but in essence this has some of the visual ideas which we might develop further. Rick did some filming last week at Mucking Marshes in a grey and misty atmosphere and the footage looks wonderful. I hope he shares it with us when he gets time to look at it again.

One Year On: The Wolverhampton Riots - Sally Payen

In August 2011 the streets of Wolverhampton erupted into violence and disorder. Sally Payen has been commissioned to respond to the events of last summer through paintings and drawings using CCTV, newspaper images and social media as source material. Her previous work has touched on the subject of anarchy and unrest and gives a fascinating insight into the way that people behave in crowds. I visited this exhibition to see Payen's work and was struck by such an intimate yet powerful body of work in the gallery spaces of the Wolverhampton Art Gallery. Here are my thoughts which I wrote at the gallery. Notes on Wolverhampton Riots: One Year On – Sally Payen Stepping in to the gallery was both intimate and powerful; within the space, fragments of the event unfolded, taking siege of the audience in a space.

Ring

I liked the way the figure (?) in the foreground melts under duress from the effect of being overpainted, imposed upon by a new figure. The scene has a translucency to it, a sense of a moment that has passed, a fracture of despair. It is a fable that is retold but in the retelling, changes mutate into something beyond the original actions. An enlightenment and a lens. Generally the colours in the paintings intrigued me because they have a muted, soft tone except for flashes of cerise or red. It reminded me of paintings from the genre of Romanticism. Tintoretto colours. It challenged the raw, gritty and violent scenes that were relayed via the media during the events. I like the ink drawings on vellum very much. I enjoyed the spatiality of them, the way the paper sucks up the liquid and wrinkles slightly, disturbing the surfaces which reflected the consequences of the physical nature of the events. My own perspective of the riots was seeing the events from a 360 degree vision from transmitted images, yet never being there or directly involved. I don’t know the back stories, the intricacies of lives that were battered or reduced to rubble, before, during or after the riots. The work

Riot

has a biblical connotation for me, like a scene of figures clustering around an apostle. One of my favourite pieces. Anna Falcini 2012

It Is Only I - A New Estuary Dialogue film from Rick

My new video: https://vimeo.com/51858106


While making this piece thought about many things. Is there a point to making a cinematic poem? How do people engage with this form? The accidental. Finding the landscape through video-making. The electronic huddle of pixels shaped by light through bulbous eye-like, hill-like lenses making shapes from your own sense making.

Masculine and feminine elements in art emerging subconsciously - the feminine pushing forward into an abstract masculine. Walking as a metaphor a la Richard Long and Gary Snyder. The joining of disparate moments that is editing.

Thought too about Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' with it's dizzying looping movements around a fixed space telling of (male) nostalgia and desire. How this is echoed in the film with Anna walking around that fixed space - somehow a hint that we can stay fixed in space like that without a way out, unless, unless.

And of course Tarkovsky ( damn still haven't read the Geoff Dyer book) with reference to 'Stalker' (with my favourite scene from his films, or rather the one that has haunted me more than any other and fed me through the years) and 'Mirror' ( my personal favourite of his films).

Enjoyed too the subtle energies of the continuous shot (which is edited in the film) where Anna's face and hair and fingers visually touch the water and how this came about in calm and spontaneous ways using focus and exposure and coming close with the camera to give on reflection a sense of immersion - again a statement about art itself to my mind. And the last shot deliberately echoing Caspar David Friedrich, although on a less monumental scale.

Here is the poem too that happens in the middle of the film - spoken with a male voice ( my own) but overlaid with the images of a woman's hands - it is a text about forgetting and the burying deep essential parts of ourselves and how this leads to a kind of warfare. It's central metaphor began as a small wood, a forest so this is why  I thought I would try juxtaposing it with the rest of the film:

It is only I

Restless leaves stroke away all clues,
They too it seems
Have something to hide.

I wonder if it is only I
Who perceives a single crime and
Only I who cannot see those who turn away.

Fearing my task is good impossible,
I take notes all of the time, but
These are removed at twilight - when the forest is noisier than any city.

Less & less:
The fallen white berries like full-stops, the tall building
In front of the old school-house,
yesterday's dream of immediate water.

My mind shrugs
And moves to a different bough, scored
With dark rain and heiroglyphs.

There are numerous crimes,
Fragments of bones and weapons
Half-buried.

I wait, and barely note I have stopped wanting not to,
This barbaric radiance
Is a mother to me now.

Instead, I ponder if their investigations led them
Elsewhere, or if they got scared
Of what I can only guess.

by Rick Goldsmith

Misplaced - Test Bed

This is a link to a clip from a test film which Rick and I have been developing in anticipation of our real moving image piece on the Thames Estuary. This is my rendering of the footage we shot. It was filmed at a local site called Bodenham Lake which used to be a working gravel pit until the mid 80's and it is now a nature reserve. There are still remnants of the site such as concrete aprons and slabs and rows of uniform trees, planted to block out the chaos of industry and destruction on this once precious meadow. The River Lugg which runs alongside the land, left handy deposits of gravel in the land and it was originally excavated by hand until it became worked by machinery.It has a kind of faded beauty to it and an oddness. The manmade lake is now like a Karl Stockhausen electronic performance piece with the multiple bird sounds which rise and fall, echoing around the flat spatiality of carved land. I think Rick summed up very well what our intentions with this particular test film were in the previous entry (26/06/12 - Bodenham Marshes). It was never intended that we come with a tight script, narrative or bunch of ideas that would be self explanatory. We are aiming to approach the final ED film on the Thames Estuary with a sensitivity to the space, trying to work in a more responsive manner, absorbing the nuances and letting the delicate details of the landscape emerge. At the moment it feels like there is an urgency to complete this sooner than rather than later, with the disastrous idea of the area being threatened for the development of an airport. Of course we inevitably bring our own back stories into play, our individual perceptions. It is almost impossible to remove such stains. I think of it rather like the Stan Brakhage films with those translucent marks painted onto the film strip by hand. It's hard to erase such marks. I'm still thinking of ropes by the way. And drawings.... Link for Stan Brakhage - Dog Man Star http://youtu.be/mTGdGgQtZic

Journeys & Reflections - Jo Roberts and Stephen Turner

I've recently been sent a link to an exciting project in the Medway and Swale areas of North Kent by Urban Fringe which includes the work of Jo Roberts & Stephen Turner. I've long been an admirer of Stephen's work and followed his interactions with the landscape and area around the Medway over a number of years. This is the first time I have encountered Jo's work and I love the idea of hers to explore the perceptions of boundaries through the local community which she has then mapped. It is interesting to note that Jo studied Geography before developing her creative practice. Stephen has been amongst other things, distilling plants and created an essence; Eau du Bordure. I love the twist in exploring what some may consider wasteland, spaces which render little value and then extracting out of it, something of wonder. Well i haven't sampled the essence yet but I bet it is delightful. http://urbanfringes.wordpress.com/exhibition-events/ http://urbanfringes.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/stephen-jo-at-milton-creek-lr.jpg Stephen Turner and Jo Roberts present Journeys and Reflections around the edges of Medway and Swale; a multi media exhibition of drawing, maps, photography, video and pressed flowers, as well as distilled plants oils and papers made from local flora. The exhibition will include an Urban Fringe Library, contained in a small leather suitcase.

Bodenham Marshes Film - beginning a moving image aesthetic conversation'

Anna and I decided to visit Bodenham Marshes last Saturday. We had planned to try a few ideas for the ED film. Before going down to the site I spent some time looking at my own poetics and texts that I feel are linked to the work. Much of this is site specific or landscape-based.

In terms of my normal film-making practice this 'shoot' was very differently approached in terms of pre-planning. There was no storyboard or script. No treatment. I had only have a very abstract sense of what we were going to do on the day - which was exciting. I was thinking of certain structural modes of working e.g. using fixed lengths of camera movements in different directions, and also ways of mapping a space visually, but beyond that i was keen to let alot of the thinking work to be done by my 'back-brain' unconsciousness.

We knew we wanted to try out some techniques e.g. tracking and particular hand-held shots - but beyond that little else was decided. We did try some tracking with a dolly which a local film-making friend, Neil Oseman had lent me. But these didn't really work out - we wanted a very slow and very smooth movement that we couldn't really pull off to our satisfaction. We'll probably use some Hollywood Dolly tracks and dolly from a B'ham based company.

I did have one recurring approach that I wanted to try though - that of the camera hovering close to a figure as the figure explores an environment and bring it vividly to life. On the day this really became an interesting point of departure for both Anna and I. We tried this many times, using different Olympus prime lenses on my Panasonic AG-AF101 camera. It worked best when the camera hovered close to the figure - without revealing the face - it brought up alot of questions and interesting lines of enquiry, which I intend to investigate further.

I wanted to respond quite rawly to the place, and also leave an openness so that Anna and I could truly create an 'a moving image aesthetic conversation' at the site. Of course this could prove quite a dangerous thing to do, but this became a positive.

Later, looked at the footage from Saturday and really, really liked some of it - there were a few shots that I found very effecting - and I started to look forward to begin editing it. I have a poem which began speaking with the imagery, which was weird as I was hoping to record it on the day.

The early filming was very much spoilt by the tracks not doing what we wanted but it's helpful to look at the footage as it gave me some ideas of what we could achieve. A wide shot of the the landscape was particularly good. The main revelation was the footage of you walking through the landscape and then to the lake. Some of the shots really began suggesting some possibilities.

Anna and I both now intend to work on the footage from the day's filming seperately. 

Rick

Incarcerated

I've been focusing on preparations for a funding bid for Estuary Dialogues recently so my drawings and other practical work have taken a bit of a back seat. Going back into my studio last week, I was playing around with some ideas when I picked up a box of these small clear bottles with stoppers, that I had ordered from a company who make containers for collecting insect specimens for my last project, Adventureland. There is something about the scale of these bottles that I liked so I thought about using them in the ED project. On a very thin strip of tracing paper I began to draw a reductive version of a prison hulk. These hulks were originally naval ships but were decommissioned and used to house prisoners offshore in the 1700's to late 1800's. Conditions onboard were grim according to records in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich and the Guildhall Museum in Rochester. Prisoners were poorly fed and clothed, had to do long days labouring shackled together and disease was rife. Often prisoners were sent to America and then Australia as convicts. I wanted to draw these hulks on a tiny scale, with fragility and attention to detail which was quite challenging. I then put them inside the bottles reminiscent of old ships in bottles. I like the fact that the drawings become incarcerated; both a nod to the historic version of events but also a reversal of events. Instead of being the prison, the hulks have now become the imprisoned.