Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

This paper will discuss the short interconnected films that I am currently making, concerned with the visual poetics of representing space. Picking up on Edward Relph’s brief discussion of the ‘absurd landscape’ (in Place and Placelessness, 1976), my films weave around fictional voice-overs which draw together anecdotal fragments that speak about how class and disparate levels of affluence affect our sense of belonging to, or alienation from, landscape. The films juxtapose pastoral, industrial and coastal locations, and use a number of visual devices (including stop frame animation, hand tinting, historical processes) to explore how the camera can know place in a new way; it is at different times a mechanical observer, a watchful character, or an active participant moving and dancing through physical and psychical locations. References will likely include: Jarman’s video for The Queen is Dead. (1986), where the hyper-energised camera expresses his vision of Britain as corrupt and repressive; Christopher Smith’s New Town Utopia (2017) that documents eruptions of creativity in the stifling placelessness of a ‘new town’, Basildon, in Essex, UK; Strand and Sheeler’s Manhatta (1921) that shows the city as a spectacle of labour. Critical texts cited may include writings from Cinema 2, The Time Image (Deleuze, 1989), Landscape (Wylie, 2007) and Film Theory: An introduction Through The Senses (Elsaesser and Hagner, 2010).