Day Seventeen: Pulses, Cuts or Breaks

A long day, loose connections and non-sequiturs. Although I chose at an early stage of the residency to give some consideration to a particular image, one ‘scene’ from the Comedy, and then how Dante’s work has been interpreted in film; through each of these translations and media – and to some extent the site on Palace Street – the subject of ‘guidance’ appears significant to me. I enjoy how this kind of archetypal relationship and its modelling, in all its various forms, is unpicked in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Choosing to remake images from cinema (Red Desert) using digital models, where time is erased, vacuumed out, in some sense, has something to say about this kind of relationship. Pulses, cuts or breaks are unnecessary or inherently evident in this kind of image – duration is produced through interactive relations, not directly from editing. Antonioni’s neo-realism departed from those typical ‘white telephone’ movies of the 1930s, escaped from the studios and into real towns and real countrysides to establish the importance of place in his cinema. Although, in Red Desert, the ‘natural landscape is then made artificial through the direct colouring he employed and the composition in-camera. 

I painted reflections, brushed up leaves, blew up balloons for my boys and watched ‘Ada Twist, Scientist,’ with them: their new cartoon addiction. Somewhere, I cut together a few sequences of subtitles with sound to try and get some sense of pacing with the video I’m making. Except for a small section in one of these two examples, the sound seems too overbearing. Single lines of text are more than enough at any one time.

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