Perhaps viewing material from the collection prompts ‘recognition’ of some visual elements that seem familiar. The accumulation of further thoughts or (sensory) ideation accretes around the footage.
How does a collection become an archive?
Sarah Turner’s Perestroika (2009)
Turner made an essay film travelling across Russia – Moscow to Irkutsk, Siberia – filming every day on the train journey, reenacting the same journey she took 20 years earlier. The use of memory is subjected to a formal methodological constraint where she is not allowed – by collaborator Matthew X – to review or make comments on her filmed material until the next day. This separation of the time of capture from the time of reflection of the filmed material feels similar to shooting then reviewing Super 8 film later.
Glitterbug – Arena broadcast
Gerald’s Film
Jarman was given a Super 8 camera in the late 1960s, and began to experiment. Jarman’s first Super 8 film in his studio on Bankside. Shot partly in colour – this documents the inside of his studio and people visiting – and the black and white shots document mainly the exteriors, along with portraits of his friends.
Gerald’s Film (1976) is a portrait of the actor and cinematographer, Gerald Incandela, who is credited as the film’s co-photographer, filmed in the ruins of a Victorian boathouse in Essex.
I remember that in the film, Jarman filmed Gerald Incandela in the wreck of a barn, through the windows or through a gap in the wall.
Hand-held camera looking though the bones of an old boathouse. I think I saw the film projected, the thing I really noticed was that the film was really slowed down, so it was almost frame by frame. This wasn’t something I expected to see in the cinemas it was really remarkable. The camera focused on this beautiful man’s face, inside the boathouse. The golden light and the faltering, yet very intimate, gaze. Its dreamlike quality shimmered in a space between still and moving image, the unstoppable present of cinema subverted by the readability of individual successive frames.
Filmed at 6 frames a second and projected at 3 frames a second, it was a blurry kind of stop-motion photography. Focused on this handsome man’s face, stood inside the boathouse.
The beautiful golden light and the faltering, yet very intimate, gaze.