Last week I wrote a short reflection to accompany a screening of Moyra Davey's 2006 film Fifty Minutes and Horse Opera (2022), curated by Georgia Puiatti at Peepshow in Melbourne. I have been drawn to Davey's work ever since reading her book Index Cards when it came out around six years ago. That book exemplifies Davey's use of citation of other people's writing and work to shape her own view on things and, through that, weave a kind of self-mythology. Fifty Minutes shows Davey encountering passages of writing and photographs in her NYC apartment and there's real joy to be felt in seeing her think and move around various living spaces. I find writing about art and film in a way that is textural and observational much easier than any kind of academic writing, which you can probably tell from reading this...

My laptop is propped up on a pile of books on my coffee table and I am watching Moyra Davey's film Fifty Minutes. In an early segment of the film, Davey is sitting at a desk in her bedroom, looking into the camera and reciting a piece of writing about the management of food in her fridge. Davey reads aloud in a detached way as though she is trying to get to the core of her writing. The camera cuts three times as she makes attempts to recall and locate the words, before going on to liken the gradual emptying out of her fridge to the time-lapsed decay of animal carcasses in Peter Greenaway's 1985 film A Zed and Two Noughts. In other segments, her camera pans around various rooms as though it is trying to work out what to focus on. There is an unmade bed and a rifled-through chest of drawers. Other images show Davey sorting through an inventory of notes and envelopes; searching for something, and this is how the film progresses. 

This searching can be felt in Davey's frequent citation of the work of other artists and writers. In Fifty Minutes, this search takes a physical form as the camera pores over, like a finger across a page, annotations from essays and newspaper articles. Davey picks out photographic sentences from a literary review by Vivian Gornick that describe the absence of nostalgia in literary culture after the advent of 9/11. Phrases such as 'a stillness beyond pain, fear, or agitation' stick in the mind as Davey pauses after reading and repositions the camera to give her own reflection on Gornick's piece. There is space to breathe and piece together thoughts in the silence between Davey's recitations. When the camera silently trails over her kitchen table, I feel drawn to the zucchini flowers and rosemary cuttings placed together in a glass, which now feel suffused in melancholy and solitude. It is this play between citation and the present moment, the gradual ebb-and-flow of images and feeling building over time, that gives Davey's film a kind of magic quality. 

Davey continues to play with temporality by examining a book containing the eleven photographs that are ritualistically burned in Hollis Frampton's 1971 structural film nostalgia. While lingering on each image, Davey gives a concise description of the film and how Michael Snow's regretful narration permeates nostalgia. Davey captures the essence of nostalgia when she says that it is 'regret over things never said and amends not made.' It was strange to see the photographs immortalised in the book, without the original narration, and I somehow felt a stronger sense of loss for the images than in Frampton's film. On this unsettling note, Davey finishes with a quote from the narration: 'I think I should never dare to make another photograph again' and then the camera pans up to a view of a blank white wall. After the fifty minutes came and went, I closed my laptop and looked across to the fridge in the corner of my cramped bedsit. 

I took this in Wales

This blog format is a bit like a room, like a gallery where I can put anything up and people may or may not come and see it.  Here's our sofa as the clock struck midnight into the new year last night, and also, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

A brief break on our walk to Sissinghurst, which took us through an apple orchard.

The atmosphere on Frioul, just off the coast of Marseille, was so intense.  The dry, chalky texture of the sandstone, the light air, the succulents and arid plants growing between rocks, the dust trailing down winding paths.  When I was there a couple of weeks ago, I felt a really strong connection to the landscape, so earthy and free.  For the next film I make, which I'm going to make about a very specific mountain landscape, I want it to be silent and so visually tuned in to the atmosphere of the landscape that it goes beyond simple representation. 

 

Letter from London

A two minute film I made over July-August, shot on super 8 and transferred to digital video.  It is my first foray into sound design, you can probably tell, with recordings made on my phone from around London and on our filming expeditions along the river.  First shown at D'shut in Melbourne, at a screening organised by my good friend Simone.  I thought of the film as a little letter or drawing sent to all of my friends that I miss back home in Melbourne. 

Thanks to On8mil and Robert Frederick Green. 

Recently I've been thinking about intimacy felt from a distance, and about boats and travelling, while spending my evenings filming on the banks of the Thames.  I'm putting together a film shot on super 8 about boats which I think I will call 'A Letter from London.'  It's going to be shown at a screening alongside work made by friends in Melbourne on 5th September.  More info here: https://www.instagram.com/p/C-kEg3pxMY_/?hl=en if you're interested in attending. 

In June I've been looking at the beach, boats, and Harmony Korine's paintings which I saw when Sophia came to London.  

When settling into a new place, the littlest things are given so much importance so as to create an organised and comfortable environment. 

shoe polish

hair cut

lamp

new notebook

film stock

last night I watched incense burn away into ash: 

I keep going back to edit this blog post because I keep seeing 'little' things which attract my attention. Today it was the vegetable allotments on the other side of a river. The ramshackle little garden sheds are fantastic. They've been pieced together from old building materials; tarpaulin and corrugated iron which make them look as though they have been hanging on precariously through the harshness of time. 

             

Everyday I watch different animals use the extensive network of rooftops outside my window to get from one point to another. Today it was one of the local cats, yesterday it was a fox, and the other day, a squirrel. 

To get to work, in fact to get anywhere in London, I often have to transfer from one train to another. Criss-crossing along intersecting paths, like these animals.

I've just moved from one room to another in the same area of London. Despite the change, the one constant has been my proximity to these electricity pylons which run through the suburb. The first place was isolated amongst bushland, next to a river, with one pylon looming large over it. Once I settled into my new room, I looked out the window to study the view, and sure enough, there was a pylon. Despite their bleakness, the field of pylons and their interconnecting wires have become like a path, or a symbol of hope, or kind of synonymous with my situation. They've followed me from one place to another, connecting places, memories, stories, etc. 

In London, I attend the BFI Southbank two or three times a week. Although I realise that that isn't quite as often as the lonesome man that Jeremy Cooper wrote about in Brian. So far I've seen some really good things there: The White Diamond by Werner Herzog, a John Waters film, and the only film Jean Genet made, Un chant d'amour. Every time I go there I need to go for a walk afterwards along the Thames in order to decompress from whatever film I've seen. Over the years, I've always seen things that have interested me in the streets after leaving the BFI, such as people mudlarking with head torches on, or a city fox, or an unusual building. This is what I came across the other evening: a man performing with fire on the shoreline. It was really beautiful... the light of the fire melding with the city lights that reflect on the water. My iPhone camera couldn't handle the movement of the light, so all the images came out blurry, which I really like. I wish I had my super 8 camera with me...

Just before I left for London, I noticed this one red flower that had bloomed in my parents' garden. 

It reminded me of a series of images that appear in Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest. There's a section that contains successive close-up shots of flowers; different kinds of dahlias, echinacea, peonies. There was also another series of red flowers that sinisterly appear in Richard Mosse-esque infrared. The film is largely set within one garden, where its tidiness and beauty is constantly maintained in the midst of barbarity. The flower images seduced me into a calm feeling, as did many of the other images, until I got to the end of the film, and my complacency hit me. I won't give anymore away, but I found the film a truly inspiring and important experience.

As for my mum's flower, the day I left for London, I photographed it; now picked and artfully arranged in a little vase in the bathroom. 

The current Tacita Dean show at MCA is fantastic. As I purchased a ticket, I was informed that there was over three hours worth of films to view and that I was allowed to duck out for fresh air or for something to eat as frequently as I needed. The first work that I viewed upon entering the gallery was the 16mm film Buon Fresco. The film painstakingly documents a Giotto fresco in an Italian basilica, one close-up detail at a time. The images focus on the rigours of artistic process, particularly where Giotto had made mistakes or redone something, minor textures that wouldn't ordinarily be seen from a distance. This film set the atmosphere for the show; for the work requires the viewer to adapt to a slow pace, to consider each consecutive image for its own worth, while also framing Dean's interest in things trapped in the past. 

I loved all of the film work that was presented, but one of the highlights was a portrait of the artist Claes Oldenburg. The work had this kind of ghostly quality as you would watch Oldenburg potter around his studio in a golden hue of sunlight, and watch as his hands inarticulately drew across a sheet. He was devoid of any sense of self consciousness, his attention devoted entirely to his work. What I particularly liked about Dean's work was the sound design which heightened the whirs of the world outside to a kind of eerie effect. I watched it twice, just so I could focus on the sound of cars beeping, sirens, and the echoes of distant conversation.. I later read that Oldenburg died the year before the film was finished, and it is this sort of uncanny link with the dead or the past that lingers over Dean's work. 

Claes Oldenburg draws Blueberry Pie, 16mm, 2023

Self Portrait/AIDS Garden

A recent film that reflects on time, memory, and place.

I'm trying to make a seven minute film about time and memory, shot quickly on a simple digital camera. 

These images below are from the AIDS Memorial Garden in Fairfield: an overgrown, seemingly forgotten place of solitude, filled with reverberations of memory. Amongst the native grasses and foliage are hints of beauty: native flowers, a patch of sunlight filtered through the trees, a hidden plaque. I'm still trying to figure out what to focus my camera on, hence these blurred images. I hope to complete the film by the end of September. 

Some brief reflections, written as a distraction from uni assignments, on three images from films I've enjoyed seeing recently...

Beau Travail, Claire Denis

On a recent rewatch at the cinema I got a lot out of allowing myself to 'feel' Beau Travail's images rather than constantly look for subtext or meaning within them. The film's sensuality and quietness had an enrapturing affect on me as a result. This time I found myself intrigued by simple and quieter images, such as one where a flicker of light is seen in the dark as a cigarette is lit. The hands of two male legionnaires meet around the flame in one of the film's more direct expressions of intimacy. The camera stays on the cigarette, and all we see is a little dot of light bobbing around in the dark. I love how Denis renders seemingly insignificant things incandescent and alluring, often to convey a sense of the magic of solitude.  

Denis's habitual images of people dancing passionately on their own seems to exemplify this. I recently read an interview where Denis described these images as a 'solitary appeal to the empathy of the viewer', where 'unspoken correspondences' come to light. These images are a way of coming into contact with something 'intangible, mysterious and transformative.' I think this modest image of the cigarette in the dark can be read in the same way. It hints at an inarticulate solitude that is magical and beautiful, and it felt sublime to me.

A flicker of a cigarette: Beau Travail

The Brown Bunny, Vincent Gallo 

The Brown Bunny follows a man (Gallo) as he aimlessly drives across various American states, and contains subtly beautiful images that distill loneliness and yearning.  Many of the images are out of focus and awkwardly framed, often softly filtered through hair or a dirty car windscreen, to express the introspective fog through which Gallo's character views the world.  This creates an emotional distance within the viewer, a kind of numbing, which gives you the sense that Gallo is so overcome by melancholy and loneliness that he has become a shell of a person, only able to feel subtle textures and colours.  

Aimless driving: The Brown Bunny

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Rainer Werner Fassbinder

When I watched Ali I was struck by how simple, but powerful, the film's portrayal of loneliness was.  The film is about the relationship between an older woman and a migrant worker from Morocco, two outsiders who suffer the prejudice of postwar West German society.  A sense of stillness pervades the film's images, with many shots of people sitting alone in empty spaces and encountering their own loneliness.  A recurring example of this is an image of the woman resting on the staircase of her apartment building, which is where she encounters the judgement of her racist neighbours.  The staircase appears as this liminal space that lies between the woman's interior world and the alienation of the world outside.  The framing of the woman through the columns and pipes of the staircase directly communicates, in the most simple way, that the woman is trapped by her own loneliness.    

An excerpt from an interview with Fassbinder: 'the viewer has an opportunity to flesh out the relationship when the story is simple.  The simpler the stories are, the more the viewers can do with them... at some point films have to stop being films and have to come alive so that the viewers begin to ask themselves: what about me and my life?' 

  

An expression of loneliness in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

I've recently developed a fascination with tracking planes that fly over my house in the evenings.  

I see them from a distance as dots of light, and watch them as they edge closer and closer, until I hear them pass overhead. I think the obsession has something to do with a strangely addictive feeling of distant intimacy, or is perhaps related to longing for a world beyond Melbourne.

'Flightradar24' informed me that these two flights originated in the Middle East:

Two dots of light in the distance

An elegy for forgotten spaces

I've always been interested in the use of neglected spaces, such as disowned empty sites and laneways, to make something beautiful and thoughtful. As a teenager, I used the lane behind my home to display sculptures I made from locally found detritus. The lane was somewhere I could retreat to after a school day and provided company with neighbours who are practising artists. They would offer encouragement, critique and share books or the names of other artists I should seek out. It was an inspiring social and artistic antidote to my secondary schooling. I cared for the lane for five years until I gave up the project, and the space returned to its original wild and dishevelled appearance. When I pass the lane these days, and see it in its current state of neglect, I'm reminded of all the memories I had there when I was younger. Those memories mean a lot to me, and it wouldn't necessarily be apparent to anyone else that this modest lane holds such emotion. It has made me think about other forgotten spaces and overgrown old ruins that hold quiet memories and stories.

The AIDS Memorial Garden is nestled in bushland alongside the Yarra River in Fairfield on the site of a former infectious diseases hospital. The garden first came to my attention in John Foster's 1993 memoir Take Me to Paris, Johnny, which recounts the intriguing life of Foster's partner Juan Cespedes until his death due to an AIDS-related illness. It was described as a rambling 'secret garden' set amongst gum trees and rose bushes, providing quiet repose for AIDS patients and their families. I was interested in visiting the garden, but I wondered what state it would be in or whether it even still existed as the site had since been taken over by a new institution. An old website that documented the garden's history revealed that the bare bones of the garden still remained, but it had otherwise fallen into a state of disrepair.  

On my first visit, I walked for ages through an eerily quiet polytechnic campus in hopeful search of it. I felt as though I was trespassing. When I eventually made it there, I followed a sign that led me into an obscure clearing. There was a dilapidated rotunda that was falling apart, with a wild rose climbing up its side.  Native grasses had grown tall and unruly and rustled in the wind like faint whispers. There are only subtle reminders of the immensity of the garden's history, such as the golden plaques attached to park benches. Each one reads as a dedication to the lives of the hospital's AIDS victims who had their ashes spread in the garden. Another weathered plaque, hidden by foliage, welcomes you into the garden: 'This garden area, a joint project marking the relationship between Fairfield Hospital and the Victorian AIDS Council in caring for people with AIDS, is for the use of all patients and their visitors at Fairfield (April 1988).' The garden's history, and its setting for sombre contemplation, as documented in passages from Foster's book, and also in Timothy Conigrave's 1995 autobiography Holding the Man, seem to be most felt in depths buried amongst overgrown foliage.  It can be felt, too, in the almost-silent shifts of native plants in the breeze.  Whenever I visit the garden I think of all the people I admire who have succumbed to AIDS around the world: Derek Jarman, Arthur Russell, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar,  Conigrave, Foster— just to name a few. Regardless of whether the garden has been forgotten or not, for me, it is loaded with their presence and links together all of their stories; their work and activism.  

A rugged corner of the AIDS Memorial Garden, Fairfield 

I was recently moved by Michael Snow's 1967 structural film Wavelength, which I saw projected in 16mm in a little room to the side of a bar. Wavelength is a film that plays with perception through pushing the boundaries of cinematic space and temporality to transcendental effect. The film represents a single space (a New York City studio loft), with a zoom that gradually lurches across it over a 45 minute duration. A few events partially occur within the frame: furniture is moved, two women listen to the radio, and a man later collapses on the floor. These events never imply an explicit narrative meaning, they're instead markers of particular points of time in the course of the zoom. While the fading in-and-out of daylight through long windows suggests the rapid passing of days within the image, time feels prolonged for the viewer. The zoom is so gradual that we're often held in place and subjected to a static image of the loft. In an essay on the film, Michael Sicinski describes the Wavelength experience as being akin to being in a 'slow moving car.' This sense of slow chronology is occasionally disrupted by the changing of film stock, superimpositions, and coloured filters that are reminiscent of a sunset or an overexposure of light. While space gradually narrows as the zoom moves inwards, it ultimately comes to rest on a photograph of expansive space; the sea, before eventually fading to endless white.  

After the screening I slunk past people drinking in the bar and got some fresh air outside. I ended up walking five kilometres, mulling the experience and readjusting my sense of space as I went along.  Everything felt more expansive and sensual. Within the film's rigid boundaries, I had become conscious of the space I was held within. The rackety sound of passing trams outside and the aromas of perfume and red wine around me had added tangible layers to my experience of the film. I could feel myself becoming consumed by the sensuality of space. The essay by Sicinski provided context to this: 'Wavelength dramatises our bodily location in space, thus bringing to light our spatial existence within the cinema. Wavelength asks us to physically dwell within the cinema.'  

A still from Wavelength taken from towards the beginning of the film

This blog feels like a room with a grey-coloured wall where bits and pieces of writing and images are pinned up like bricolage. 

I never engaged in blogging as a teenager. The only space that I had control over, aside from my bedroom, was the disused dead-end lane behind my family home. For about five years, the lane became a 'gallery' for sculptures that I made from rubbish and detritus gleaned from the neighbourhood, particularly from along the nearby train line. The exhibitions rotated every second week and I ensured that each one focused on a different theme and utilised a different part of the lane. Sometimes objects would hang from the overhanging sheltering branches of an oak tree, other times they'd be dotted around on the ground. Previous works would be dismantled and the materials reused for new sculptures. At the time I wanted to surprise people who walked past and allow them to see the lane in a different light. I don't think it was so much attention seeking borne out of loneliness, as I kept the project completely anonymous, but was simply an opportunity for teenage self expression.

Over the years, I was joined by neighbours who generously contributed bits and pieces to the project. Louise installed some of her geometric paintings on triangle-shaped pieces of wood to the side of a wooden shed that overlooked the lane. Ros pasted up some little etchings of old trees under the canopy of the 100-year-old oak tree. Thinking back to it now, I feel like the project was also a way for me to find company and collaborate with my neighbours who are artists I admired. At around the age of 18, I grew out of the project and never returned to it. Although I feel like this blog is an extension of that lane, and perhaps even the longing, that was seeded as a teenager. 

☞www.facebook.com/trianglelane

Atiéna R. Kilfa's exhibition 'The Unhomely', which I saw in February at the Camden Art Centre, left a lingering impression on me.  

As I approached the exhibition's main room, I recall feeling unsettled by an eerie drone-like noise. The emanating sound was like the hum of an overworked fan, intensified to make the viewer feel deeply unwelcome. Upon entering the room, the initial sight of electrical cords exposed behind a wall of LED screens, exacerbated the hostile welcome. Having previously been shown at KW in Berlin, I was interested in seeing how the installation would translate to the space at Camden. I was also interested in experiencing how the work would deal with both cinematic and perceptual space through the union of film and installation. Integrated around the LED wall is a wooden stage which elevates and delineates the viewer's movement through the work. Once placed on the stage, you feel compelled to walk across it towards the film on the screen at the other end. 

The film unfolds across one continuous shot in a stairwell where two figures dwell in an unnerving state of tension. It was the uncanny stillness of the man and woman and their avoidance of each other's presence which startled me at first. They appear stilted and somewhat mannequin-like, but then not entirely fake either, which makes their avoidance feel even more strange. Their body language, especially of the woman who rests in a gentle position on the steps, suggests absence and loss. I was given the sense that these two people had been rendered inarticulate by trauma, perhaps inflicted by the stairwell's memory of something horrific. It's unclear whether the memory is recent, or even whether the film itself is located in present time. There are only a few incidental details within the frame that hint at the past, such as the ornate detailing of the stairwell railing and the 1950s-like formal attire of the figures, while the occasional ring of an old landline phone is left ignored. The work seems to deal with overlapping states of time: the frozen state of the figures, the languid time that flows over the course of the film's continuous loop, and the viewer's time as they navigate the work.  

The controlled formal quality of Kilfa's film made me think of Chantal Akerman's work, particularly Jeanne Dielman. Both films force the viewer to feel the flow of time over a long take confined to one domestic space, while showing little details that express tension. In Akerman's film, the tension is fulfilled with a final act of violent revenge at the end of the film. It feels overtly fictive in contrast to the literalness of the domestic scenes which come to define the film. The violence in Kilfa's film never reaches a climax, it's continuous and ongoing: present.   

There was something that compelled me to navigate the work by moving across the stage in time with the camera's movement. It was as though I was the camera itself, attempting to make sense of the tense drama before me. With every step that I took, the loud creaks of the stage's recycled floorboards added further animation to the film's drama. I felt self conscious of drawing attention to my lonely presence within the installation. As a subsequence, I guess the presence of the creaks added another overlapping tension to the film's blurred distinctions between space and time. The 'unhomely' gallery environment made me feel complicit in the violence implied by the film.   

View from stage elevation

Shadows of late autumn