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“The film began as a document of abandoned farms in South East England, but went off on a tangent, exploring the collision between the real and the imagined, and the hope of creating an hermetic world within that. The work also attempts to merge a marginalized, uncommercial approach to filmmaking with the spectacular, and consequent mass appeal, of CinemaScope! This continues the use of cinematic reference in my work as a way of involving the audience, who come with their own set of references, and expectations to be confounded. I found the title in an out of date Thesaurus looking up the word “mystery”—which is essentially what this film remains to me.”—B.R.
“The belle of the ball surrounded by suitors. A vigorous 3-D that can be seen without special spectacles and even by the one-eyed”—K.J.
“This film was shot a frame at the time using laborious extreme optical close-ups. Anonimatograph: the reanimated image of an unknown amateur at the beginning of the century who becomes middle-class as he focuses on friends, movie camera in hand, indoors and outdoors surrounded by war and by his sisters. I have tried to reconstruct an extravagant film diary from which I have painstakingly torn out little pages of frames. These frames were exposed and abandoned on negative on a number of photographic reels, cut together at random in two 60-meter reels in 35mm and acquired by me for 500 Lira from a flea-market vendor.
Many frames were shot vertically, others only partially exposed, sometimes
properly developed, sometimes not. I tried to animate these little reels using a flicker technique with light stroboscopic touches; in short, a film that could not be recommended to anyone. [I wanted] to create the possibility of there being born from a non-film, a kind of pre-film: a little story of an innocent anonymous filmmaker a bit like me. In this way, superimposing my imagination directly onto layers of negative, syncopating the frames in a sort of manipulated notebook—electrifying them—in this cinematic mosaic of comings and goings, I encountered Him, the involuntary author of my experimentations, an insane cataloguer of images, divided between locomotives and ladies, film and orphaned children, informal excursions and soldiers. In the theatre, in the audience, some gentleman might realize he is watching his own stolen images and kill me.”—P.G.
“Strips of previously unexposed film went into the ocean and these fragments are what returned.
In this final installment of a nine year project documenting the underwater world off the coast of South Carolina, both the sounds and images are the result of the oceanic inscriptions written directly into the emulsion of the film as it was buffeted by the salt water, sand and rocks; as it was chewed by the crabs, fish and underwater creatures.
The initial parts of the project, complied as What the Water Said, Nos. 1-3 were completed in 1998. After an absence of many years I returned to the island in late December of 2005. To mark this return —and the beginning of a new phase of my life —the project was resumed. The material in No. 4 was submerged in January of 2006 and the filmstrips in No. 5 were flung into the ocean in August. On December 29th, 30th and 31st, a final series of offerings were made.”—D.G.
A unexpected letter leads to an unanticipated encounter and an extravagant gift.
Some windows open easily; other shadows remain locked rooms.
Advice is sometimes easy to give, but often hard to follow.
Have a cup of tea dear.
I’ll trade you a stitch from the past in return for a leaf from the future.
This is a Valentine and this is a fragment: for the one who mends my rips; from the next installment of the Byrd project Secret History of the Dividing Line, a True Account in Nine Parts. — D.G.
“Tziporah is the Hebrew word for a bird. This film is another cinematic reflection on loss and grief.”—A.R.
Uncaged ancestral memory and psychic unease prowl like fog on little cat feet. — Mark McElhatten
Mark and I made this film for our friend David Gatten, as a prayer, an offering, a “get well soon” card... for all three of us. It was made on the last night that I saw Mark, my best friend of 32 years.—P.S.
Someone tells me: “I looked at the flower, but was thinking of something else and was not conscious of its colour,” Do I understand this? - I can only imagine a significant context, say his going on: “Then I suddenly saw it, and realized it was the one which......”.
Or again: “If I had turned away then, I could not have said what colour it was.”
“He looked at it without seeing it.”- There is such a thing. But what is the criterion for it? - Well, there is a variety of cases here.
If you observe your own grief, which senses do you use to observe it? A particular sense; one that feels grief? Then do you feel it differently when you are observing it? And what is the grief that you are observing - is it one which is there only while it is being observed?
'Observing' does not produce what is observed. (That is a conceptual statement.) Again: I do not 'observe' what only comes into being through observation. The object of observation is something else.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Philosophical Investigations
The days grow longer for smaller prizes
I feel a stranger to all surprises
You can have them I don't want them
I wear a different kind of garment
In my rehearsals for retirement
The lights are cold again they dance below me
I turn to old friends they do not know me
All but the beggar he remembers
I put a penny down for payment
In my rehearsals for retirement
Had I known the end would end in laughter
I tell my daughter it doesn't matter...
—Phil Ochs, Rehearsals for Retirement
Farewell my friends
Farewell my dear ones
If I was rude
Forgive my weakness
Goodbye my friends
Goodbye to evening parties
Remember me
In the spring
To work for your bread
Soon you must leave
Remember your families
And work for your children
I don't need much
and the older I become
I realize
My friendships
Will carry me over
any course of distance
any cause of sorrow
My friends that last
Will dance one more time
with me.
I don't need words
This, I need.
—Polly Jean Harvey, Before Departure
Inspirations: Caspar David Friedrich, Edward Hopper, Georges Seurat (drawings), Janie and Lewis, and all of the filmmakers alluded to or borrowed from...
All images for In Memoriam were captured from the videogame series Grand Theft Auto
where Mark and I,
boys of summer,
were allowed to roam and wander
without mission
without murder
“cheating” our way through the streets of polygonal horrors,
finding (to our continuing astonishment)
amusement,
poetry,
and
darkness,
just over there
at the edge of town...
—P.S.
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Sat Oct 6: 5:00
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