Open space technology

_Firstly, quite a generic question, but a pertinent one nonetheless: what about the medium of film attracted you to it as your primary means of expression?_

I began as a painter/photographer and moved into filmmaking while studying Fine Art at college, initially through installation works involving slide projections and Super 8 loops. I found it possible to express much more through a moving image and installation environment than a static painted or photographic image. On leaving college I realised that I not only didn’t have anywhere to make these installations, I had nowhere to store them and no real means of realising them.
It was only then that I began to work with film in a more focused way as I could create pieces and put them in a can or on a tape and send them where-ever anyone wanted to see them.

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_You attained your MFA in film at SFAI, which is an institute with an illustrious list of alumni both having studied and taught there (I’m thinking Broughton, Kuchar, Frampton etc…) Such a lineage I would imagine distinguishes it from most prestigious film schools in that the thrust isn’t almost exclusively on narrative cinema, with more encouragement to explore filmic stratagems which aren’t necessarily in line with the institutional mode of representation. Do you think if you had chosen to study elsewere you’d be making a different kind of film now and do you ever see yourself working in the genre of feature-length narrative films?_

SFAI was a unique experience in that respect. I didn’t actually want to go to a traditional film school so SFAI was perfect for me as it was all about filmmaking within the context of art rather than cinema or televison.
We were taught by filmmakers including George Kuchar, Ernie Gehr, Larry Jordan, Guy Sherwin and Martin Arnold so the emphasis was firmly on film as a medium for making art. I’m sure that has had an influence on the approach I take to my filmmaking practice. I’m not sure I will ever make a feature-length narrative film but never say never – I might.

_William Fowler writes of how in your films you make use of actuality not in the tradition of documentary or cinema verite but in a manner far more akin to how a musician uses samples. Despite this digital manipulation and time lapse, you also make extensive use of the deep-focus long take and I was wondering what implications this had on the critical paradigms of Bazinian ontology, most notably the idea that the deep-focus long take allows us access to an unmediated reality._

All the images are created in camera – there is no digital manipulation within the image only the sound. The soundtracks are processed and manipulated from natural sound recordings but the image is untouched. I certainly use the forms of both documentary and cinema in my films to create a personal responce to the environments I’m working in.
As far as the deep focus long take is concerned I would agree that it is closer to our natural perception of the world but it’s also a way of focusing our attention to something, the shot is framed in a particular way and has a particular duration.
I am interested in the idea that through looking long enough things can be revealed that might otherwise go unnoticed. The films work on this line between the visible and the invisible.

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_Your films are often discussed as richly evocative portrayals of place (with which I certainly agree), yet I feel there is also something quite cold and distanced about them. This is not necessarily due to the lack of human presence (indeed, it is surely only out anthropocentric view of the world that this is notable), but because human presence is implied yet not revealed or, if it is revealed (as in Block), we gain no insight into the humans’ interiority whatsoever, scarcely even recieving shots of their faces.
I think Block is particularly notable in this respect because there is that series of shots of the interiors of the various flats, wherein the respective inhabitants seem not only remote to us but totally disparate from one another and then later comes that wonderful time-lapse shot from outside the tenement where windows turning on and off make it almost resemble an equaliser L.E.D. or something, as if it is a piece of machinery composed of heterogeneous units which are completely alienated from each other.
I was wondering what you thought of such readings of your films and whether you have certain meanings in mind when you make them or if your creative process is more intuitive._

That’s an interesting reading on Block – I would agree that there is a sense in the tower block that people are all living very close to each other yet are completely isolated from one another. I shot the film over about nine months and it was very much a response to being in the space.
There is a feeling of isolation, like being in a huge ship at sea or something, having these expansive views across the city – there’s a distance – whe you start thinking about it it’s strange that we choose to live in this way. And as you say in the films the human presence is always implied rather than seen but I am also working with the idea of the viewer’s relationship to other people or situations within a film, as you would expect from a cinematic experience. I strip away everything except the place.
My creative process is intuitive in that I don’t script the films and often have no idea about what the final film will look like – they are made through a process of exploration and discovery of particular places, often involving spending long periods of time in each place gathering material (photographs, stories, background research, test shots, sound) and then working this into the initial shooting of the film, responding to these shots and so on until the film takes shape and I feel that I am ready to start the editing process.

_Finally, this is a polemical and leading question which you should thereby feel free to evade, but do you think it is a shame that creative film like yours is largely ghettoised to the art galleries, where the majority of people drift in and out of the screening rooms without heed for when the film might have begun or when it ends? If yes, do you think there should be more outlets in the mainstream or conventional cinematic environments for such works?_

Although my work is often shown in a gallery situation the films are included in programs shown in cinema spaces. Although they may appeal to a wider audience I do also think that the gallery and screening situation is an appropriate context for the work to be seen in a critical light.

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