p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I worked on the film on Saturday then spent Sunday trying to catch up on everything I’m behind on. It was okay. I still haven’t started ‘The Shards’. It’s long enough that I think I have to wait until we’re finished with the film because my concentration is too swallowed right now. Playboy Carti is playing at this huge venue, and I never go to those kinds of shows, so that should be interesting at least. I was crazy about his last album, so I’m pretty excited. Ha ha, you’re beset with the talkative, I suspect. Surely love has a mute button in his arsenal. Zac and I are watching our new cut of the film this morning, so love just has to make it work as well as we hope so we don’t have to go back and redo it yet again, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, he’s written really well about her work. I might’ve linked to one of his pieces, I can’t remember. ** Matt N., Hi, Matt! Welcome, and thank a lot for entering. I do like Nabokov, of course, yes. ‘Pale Fire’ is probably my favorite of his. I have a fondness for ‘Pnin’ too, which a lot of Nabokov-heads don’t seem to like so much. I’m not sure if I was thinking about him when writing ‘The Sluts’. Huh, thats a very interesting idea. Luckily we have a colleague who’s going to do a basic color correction for us for free. I mean for the festival submission version. We’ll hopefully have some funds to pay for a pro correction before we’re totally finished. How are you? What do you do, what are your interests, etc.? Really nice to meet you. ** _Black_Acrylic, Cool. Yeah, her ‘Peggy and Fred’ films are terrific. Here too, i.e. the heatwave. It’s supposed to start broiling today and keep broiling through the weekend. Fuck! Icy hugs. ** Misanthrope, Huh, I wish I had any time at all to watch the Open coverage. I’m most intrigued now, thanks to you. Whoa, add my crossed fingers to the bunch about Pizza Hut. Lil D’s about to become a respectable citizen at long last. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. I look forward to your song, thank you. Everyone, Here’s Mr. Erickson. Listen/read up: ‘I decided to scrap the album I was working on this summer and start over with a new project. Here’s the first single, âWriterâs Blockâ. While the songs will be written in different tempos, time signatures (âWriterâs Blockâ is a waltz), and scales, they will all use similar instrumentation, based in bells and tuned percussion.’ If we’re very lucky, we’ll have a locked edit (for the festival submission version) in place by Friday, but that might be optimistic. We need to get the color correction and sound cleaning started next week if we’re going to meet our deadline, and the edit needs to be locked before that can happen. Thank you for asking. ** Zak Ferguson, It’s a really good festival. Okay, cool, I’ll go find your youtube channel. ‘Big stories’, wow. That’s a goal. Zac and I go for minimal stories manifested charismatically, I guess. Anyway, your work in progress sounds fascinating, of course. I think no budget is great, but I also get wanting to make a film that needs a kind of help that requires some money to implement. Zac’s and my new film cost much more to make than we ever envisioned it would, but we wanted to make the film we wrote/imagined, and that’s what it took, and we were barely able to make it even with the big/low amount it cost. That wasn’t spam whatsoever, dude. xo ** Ollieđ», Do you generally look grumpy? I don’t how I look generally, and I don’t think I want to know actually. I personally agree close to 100% with your assessment of Burning Man. Your roommate is spooky. I wonder what’s going to happen to her. It seems like she has a lot of disappointment and unhappiness in her future? I never remember my dreams. Or I do sometimes for, like, three seconds and then they vanish. But when I do remember them they’re always about someone trying to kill me. Your mood is charm. ** Charalampos, Hey there. I think ‘An autumn afternoon’ is as good a place to start with Ozu as any. I like that title ‘Star Turn’. It’s very nice. Editing is relentless, and I think it’s going very well, but I’ll have a better idea once we look at our new cut of the film this morning. Thank you for inquiring. ** Corey Heiferman, Oh, great. Happy her work found a potential home in you and yours. Whew: suitcase reemergence. What did you buy? Hm, Markopoulos’s style. Kind of beautiful, kind of attractively humble, kind of a little pretentious? ** ellie, Hey, e. Even your level of French is enviable to me. My brain just won’t let me learn it. I often dislike what happens to French when I hear Americans speaking it, so that might be a subconscious resistance point. Cool you liked that thing in ‘PGL’. Yeah, I was happy that worked. I think in the new one the visual realisation of my writing goals is even better because we’ve figured more things out now, but we’ll see. Thank you a lot having the patience to repost the links. As soon as I get my next film editing break, meaning hopefully tonight, I can’t wait to see the goods. Thank you, thank you. You have an amazing day. ** Okay. I sort of really like this post today for some reason. I don’t know what you’ll think, of course. See you tomorrow.
‘Leslie Thornton has long been considered a pioneer of contemporary media aesthetics, working at the borders and limits of cinema, video and digital media. Such seminal works as her ongoing series Peggy and Fred in Hell (1985- ) operate in the interstices between various media-forms, often using simultaneous, interacting projections of film and video to address both the architectural spaces of media, and the imaginary spaces of the spectatorâs involvement. Thornton uses the process of production as an explorative process, a collective endeavor âposition(ing) the viewer as an active reader, not a consumer.â She is a contemporary of such fellow explorers as Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, Gary Hill, Michael Snow, Alan Sondheim and Harun Farocki, all artists who are opening up new spaces for media, re-mapping its boundaries within the projective spaces of the museum or gallery as well as within the public spaces of the cinema, television and internet transmission. Thorntonâs career to date has been a unique and unusual one. She was one of the first artists to bridge the boundaries between cinema and video, to explore their complicities and resistances, and to embrace their differences as positive, and even complementary, attributes. Thorntonâs complex articulations are both edifying innovations in media form and content and tacit deconstructions of the principles, presumptions and promises of technically reproducible artworks. Her projects are ongoing and provisional, and she had been unafraid to return to, and rework, and rethink, issues, topics, subjects. Her works have had a profound impact, and an enduring influence on an entire generation of media artists, critics and theorists.
‘”Her work found its first location, and inspiration, in what in those times was understood as an âavant-gardeâ film practice; the quoted term, suspiciously suspended, is rarely invoked in these times, but the rigor, the pure oppositional avowal, and the belief in moving imageryâs electro-shock potential evinced in her work insist on its essence and instincts to be one with those of what now seems undeniable as the classical genius of, first, American, and second, transnational, non-industrial cinema, in the questioning, ransacking mode familiar since having filled one of the spaces left vacant (gaping) after modernism moved away from here.” — Bill Horrigan
‘One of Leslie Thorntonâs earliest interests was mathematics, a fascination that was encouraged by her father Gunnar Thornton, a nuclear physicist and engineer, and her grandfather, an electrical engineer. During the Second World War both men hadâunbeknownst to each otherâworked on the Manhattan Project, the top secret development of the atomic bomb. Gunnar Thornton was one of the youngest scientists working on the project. He had determined, while still a student, that an important new frontier in scientific research was probably well underway, and that it would be his chosen area of research. His professors at Harvard were evasive or noncommittal, but inference and persistence paid off, and Gunnar Thornton was brought into the project early on. His father, Jens Thornton, was the electrical engineer whose task had been to design the electrical plant at Oak Ridge where the methods of refining radioactive materials were developed. It wasnât until after the cessation of hostilities that the men discoveredâthrough an article in a local Boston newspaperâthat they had both been working on the Manhattan Project. âI had always wondered,â remarked a family member, âwhy, for a couple of years, these two men, who were so passionately involved in science, only talked to each other about sports when they were home, a topic they werenât even very much interested in.â
‘Perhaps it is within this context that, even as a child, Leslie Thornton began to develop certain insights regarding technology and ethics, language and silence, and a sensitivity and attentiveness to the contradictions, ironies, and ambivalences between localized actions and global events. How was it possible to reconcile the brilliant, gentle man she loved and admired with the revelation of the consequences that ensued in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Both images are true: he, Gunnar, was a man of character and ethics, who believed in the peaceful development of atomic energy, yet whose work had played a role in the shaping of an anxious and dangerous future. Thorntonâs dark and magisterial Peggy and Fred in Hell, in its strange divarications between promissory terror and transcendence, might be read as a profound examination of the tropologies of cold-war apocalyptics, the vicissitudes of conflicting narratives, and what one might call a certain paratactics of the image. Peggy and Fred in Hell charts a troubled trajectory between event and mediation, with a profound skepticism throughout concerning the favored foregroundings of technical modernity: photographyâs verisimilitude and the index of the photo-chemical trace as guarantor of the real, the consequent presumption of a privileged link to the true and actual, and the promise of recuperability through ever-extenuating forms of technical reproducibility. She finds suspect the naturalization of prosthetic instruments, and the political interests behind certain orders of narratological closure. Thornton has an almost tragic sense of loss, of what is incommensurate in technologies of the image, of the impossibilities and aporias circumscribed by language and in media, a sense of what is profoundly irrecuperable and inconsumable. And a very strange relation to cinema, its histories and practices.
‘Recently Thornton has begun making larger scale installations related to Peggy and Fred in Hell, which she refers to as âenvironments.â Utilizing fragments from already accomplished sections of this work, mixed with newly produced sections from the 30 hours of archived footage she has shot, and with new or found footage, she has constructed a series of site-specific works. Using multiple screens and transmissions, they are a natural development of Peggy and Fred in Hell, which used simultaneous interacting film video and audio projections, which forgrounded their habitation of specific spaces. In these recent media installations she uses three registers (precisely edited loops of differing durations) which are âmixed,â almost as one would music, producing a resonant three-month-long para-narrative work. The different loops are precisely edited and set to play in a randomized phase pattern so that no repetitions occur between the three registers of images on screen over the course of their exhibition, producing a tacitly self-editing work, an âartificial intelligenceâ allegorizing itself.
‘Thorntonâs exploration of an intermittent episodic structure in Peggy and Fred in Hell, in her site-specific installations, and in The Great Invisible are, in an important sense, one of the most direct articulations of the problematics of mediaâs artifactuality in confrontation with its forms of transmission, dissemination and distribution. Mediaâs strange economies, reflecting a globalized and dispersed data-space far different from the traditional projective/consumptive spaces of cinema and television, become an integral axis of Thorntonâs formal and conceptual working. Her works are variable, âmixedâ and dispersed across time, they punctuate a given architectural space or context, they are permeable and plural, stable within their instabilities. In this they reflect, and engage, a deep substrate of media, one which has always been the case, and which has always been suppressed: that technical reproducibility in and of itself, is both uncontainable and uncontaining, and that, moreover, it becomes, in itself, a structuring principle of subsequent media. As Leslie Thornton is well aware, this does not abnegate what of the world passes through mediation, but inflects and reflects upon that passage in fundamental ways. In this sense her works are also a tacit and critical link between both contemporary digital dataspaces and the tradition of formal, technical, aesthetic, and theoretical innovation within and between media.’ — Thomas Zummer
Leslie Thornton. Looking and Seeing: “I Like to Watch”. 2012
Midnight Moment May 2014: Leslie Thornton, Binocular Menagerie
Serpentine Galleries Park Nights 2013: Leslie Thornton & James Richards
Cognac Wellerlane interviews Artist Leslie Thornton at Winkleman Gallery
_____ Interview
Irene Borger: Iâll begin with a quote from you, Leslie. âMy own interest is in the outer edge of narrative where we are at the beginning of something else.â What led you, at this time as an art maker, to de-stabilize the narrative?
Leslie Thornton: That grew out of a kind of dislocation for me. The way language works has been a life-long preoccupation, starting in childhood when I was painfully shy and had trouble speaking. The kind of extreme self-focus of shyness, the kind of analysis and appraisal that is nearly constant, and in a way objectifies language, even for a child. Language is something outside. Speech was like an object, an enemy, a barrier. It was externalized. Language was overwhelming, inadequate to describe or convey many things â I had a basic sense of this in childhood. Much later, when I began to study linguistics and also semiotics, I found an intellectualization of something I had already been struggling with â the point being that I didnât get there through a predominantly intellectual process. Then came more complicated questions about culture and language, how culture is embedded in language. Which led â itâs not a linear process exactly â to concerns about the dynamic nature of any one culture and cultural proximities and crossing-over, change. I think my own estrangement from speech has very much shaped all of my work, and may account for some of its qualities, because itâs deeply rooted emotionally for me.
IB: Iâm stuck on this phrase: âto de-stabilize the narrativeâ. To even question form in the way that youâre interested in is unnerving because it questions a core of the way we learn to think. The reason that [divergence] is so threatening to people is because it doesnât operate according to the conventional structures or habits of the mind.
LT: Yes, culture as narrative. The mind as narrative. Narrative reflects specific cultural presumptions. Recognizing that, one canât help but think: then there must be other possibilities for narrative â reflecting other times and places and agendas, past, present, and future. Iâm not capable of an involvement in the dominant forms of narrative in cinema, for instance. To study, it feels oppressive and limiting. I choose to be engaged on another, perhaps more critical and intuitive side. But on this other side, thereâs a potential for ecstasy that I donât think you find in conventional forms.
IB: Why is it that ecstasy becomes possible?
LT: It is probably the case that thought is largely structured like language. But, there is a kind of thinking outside of language that can surface sometimes, especially in art-making, probably in a lot of other arenas as well. Intangible, erotic, intuitive, pre-verbal, but precise. Those moments are extremely pleasurable, frightening, or stimulating.
Iâve been reading and thinking about mysticism lately, because of the film Iâm working on, The Great Invisible (2002) [about a 19th century woman, Isabelle Eberhardt, who passes herself off as a man and becomes an exalted Sufi in North Africa]. Every form of mystical practice involves techniques for reaching an ecstatic state. However, couched in religious or philosophical terminology, the process is usually body-related and could involve exhaustion, a lot of repetition, a lot of movement, and music or rhythms. Oneâs physical and psychic environment becomes de-familiarized. I think I use a related strategy in film to produce a heightened experience. I will work with a familiar trope like suspense, or anticipation, and then just keep pushing that button, without the expected next step or resolution. There is a familiar residue of narrative form. The exciting part is then bringing in other elements that arenât familiar at all but that are saturating to the viewer.
IB: Like what?
LT: Illogical things, mispronunciations, peculiar combinations of sound and image that are somehow startling, excessive beauty. Working with duration that seems inappropriate. The viewer has to deal with it; it stimulates the mind to cope with boredom, for instance. Generally, in culture these discomforts, stimulations, are blocked out; they are not speakable, packageable, or they are disruptive. The closest to transcendence that we get in pop culture might be violence, the lust for violence.
IB: There are many roots into trance-making but there are two poles, even in meditation practice. One is a saturation, the other is the ascetic. In our culture, you seem to be saying, we just use the mode of over-stimulation.
LT: Probably there are similar things going cognitively at either extreme. Iâm interested in boredom. My interest comes out of the experience of the most hardcore structuralist films from the â60s and â70s. I think these films often produced profound boredom, which forced you somewhere else. None of the artists or critics would ever say that [laughter] but in a way, watching three hours of the camera whirling around in a barren landscape, as in Snowâs La RĂšgion centrale (1971), you have a profound response, if you commit to stay. You feel youâve had a life-changing experience. A voluntary experience of boredom. The mind becomes very active. All kinds of images and scenarios begin to play. I think of John Cage too.
IB: I was just thinking of him.
LT: Thereâs a kind of mystical aspect to this.
IB: Are you saying that in your way of making films youâre very conscious of the experiential aspect for the spectator?
LT: I think thatâs my main focus. And, as the stand-in spectator, I have to judge by the intensity of my own responses. Itâs a thinking and feeling moment, where the thinking and the feeling â we donât have a word for it â when they canât be separated. Thatâs the moment Iâm always looking for. Itâs not something that comes back to rational formations or very focused arguments or ideas. Itâs about a spreading out, spreading and coagulations, chemical reactions in the work that can produce surprising moments and thoughts for the viewer. Itâs also important for me that the work not just be addressed to an âenlightenedâ or experienced audience. Iâm trying to make things that are stimulating to watch at the same time that a critical voice is operating.
IB: If people are not used to looking at structures that differ from the beginning/middle/end of the classical Aristotelian scheme, how could they learn to enter your work?
LT: Seeing things more than once helps. Seeing that there is a kind of pattern or structure across several works. Talking about it. Relaxing. Often the people who are having the most difficulty are my colleagues, and not, letâs say, an audience off the street.
IB: Why?
LT: Conflicting agendas or aesthetics. The crowd that bothers me is the visual artists, the art people who donât get into this kind of work and say they watch films for entertainment only. And the fine arts system that supports one-liner video installations, but canât deal with anything more complex. Avant-garde film and video take up similar issues to those in the art world, yet thereâs very little acknowledgement of this. The film or video work can be more sophisticated, more developed conceptually, yet media remains the most marginalized of the art forms. Itâs an orphan. Because media is associated with entertainment and information systems, itâs not perceived as a formal artistic medium. The apparatus per se is limited by the conventions for its use. Photography went through this stage in the 19th century. Experimental media belongs within the history of art. Photographers fought for recognition. I think media artists havenât done enough to try to change the system, but they are up against something huge. And now the preoccupation with ânewâ technologies â that has really become the bandwagon. It will take a long time to sort out whatâs of value here.
______ Show
Ground, 2020 ‘Ground was filmed during Leslie Thorntonâs residencies at Caltech (California Institute of Technology) and CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), layered atop scenes of a sprawling LA. The voice of a scientist â his body reduced to frequency lines â theatrically narrates his lifelong work at the station. The video centers around his mode of address and the increasing presence of technology in shaping and organizing human thought and perception. An ever-more anxious society is one of the invisible and omnipresent effects of this rapid takeover, countered by the gargantuan machinery that operates technologies. Thornton traces the duality in human advancement and knowledge creation with the inherent disruptive effects on human existence itself.’
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Cut from Liquid to Snake, 2018 ‘Thornton evokes the instability that humankind acts upon through a combination of several voices â from cold to melancholic to anxious â all at textural odds with one another. An entry point into the work is the artistâs metaphorical use of the Higgs Boson, first encountered during her recent residency at CERN.’
They Were Just People, 2016 ‘They Were Just People is a broad homage to Bruce Conners’ work Crossroads, using an archival recording of an eyewitness account of the atomic bomb dropping on Hiroshima during WWII.’
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w/ James Richards Crossing, 2016 ‘Richards and Thorntonâs collaborative video, Crossing (2016), alludes to Connerâs film in its title. It is collaged from footage the artists had shot but not yet used. The crossings in the work are the intersections in meaning that emerge where their sensibilities overlap. The work is built from ordinary or innocuous images that together obliquely evoke some danger: solarized footage of ants and bodies, tight close-ups of scaly animals, digital kaleidoscope effects.’
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Binocular Menagerie, 2014 ‘In Binocular Menagerie, Thornton plays with vision, perception and transformation. A series of images of animalsâa virtual menagerie of birds, reptiles and mammalsâis framed within a format of two circular windows. Each animal’s movements on the left are remapped into an elegant abstraction on the right, transforming the “real” into a digital kaleidoscope. In this unexpectedly profound meditation on the minutiae of perception, the smallest shift in the animal’s movement ripples into resonant motion, multiplied, recast, and folded back upon itself. Thornton’s manipulations intensify the viewer’s focus, offering revelatory ways of seeing and perceiving the ordinary that are both strange and beautiful. Binocular Menagerie premiered as part of the 2014 Midnight Moment Series, a project of Times Square Arts and Times Square Alliance, in which an artist’s work takes over the giant LED billboards in the heart of New York’s Times Square every night for a month, just before midnight.’
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LUNA Trance, 2013 ‘”Coined the âEiffel Tower of Brooklyn,â the legendary Parachute Jump at Coney Island was built in 1939 for the Worldâs Fair in Queens. In a moving image triptych exploring nature and technology, memory and place, Thornton follows swarming seagulls through three iterations of the same image to her imaginary spaceâa whole new universe, sheâs said, thatâs much different from the world we live in.” – Artsy. LUNA is based on a single image of the decommissioned Parachute Jump in Coney Island, with seagulls swarming the structure. The iconic image is digitally re-processed to embody different eras of cinematic and televisual imagery, beginning in 1900 and leading into our present. The artifice of the digital image is accompanied, haunted, by actual (authentic) archival sound recordings spanning the same period, beginning with early Edison recordings. LUNA moves through six variations on a theme, in poetic traces that cross the span of a century.’
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The Last Time I Saw Ron, 1994 ‘Made in memory of the actor and my friend, Ron Vawter. Ron passed away shortly after the opening performances of the play “Philoktetes Variations,” directed by Jan Ritsema and co-authored by Ritsema and Vawter. It was produced by the Kaaitheater in Brussels. All of the images in this video were originally created for the play.’
Strange Space, 1994 ‘Thornton asks viewers to question how one sees âspace”âwhether literally or figurativelyâ and what is being revealed? Images of a sonogram session grant viewers access to what is typically reserved for medical analysisââinner space.â The body, probed and revealed through technology, is collaged with imagery from lunar probes, drawing parallels with how technology also allows us to see where we were previously unableââouter space.â A poem by Rilke about the interior quality of thought is contrasted with the clinical voice accompanying the images.’
Photography is Easy – Version 2, 2010 ‘In the ongoing project Photography is Easy, Thornton continues her investigation of the production of meaning through media such as photography, film and video. Thornton and a companion are seen hiking through a desert, photographing and recording the journey. Shots of desert landscapes are overlaid with the artist’s running commentary and text about Thornton’s experience of making a photograph. Questioning the value of the rarified image, Thornton investigates the porous boundaries between the still and the moving image.’
Novel City, 2008 ‘In her new work, Thornton confronts the economic and cultural transformation of contemporary China, evoking a new spectacle of capitalism run amok. Thornton shoots from her window of the Jin Jiang Hotel in Shanghai, the site of Mao’s 1972 meeting with Nixon, and projects images from the earlier movie, creating a layered landscape of alienation and dislocation.’
Peggy and Fred Go to Kansas, 1989 ‘Peggy and Fred, sole inhabitants of post-apocalyptic Earth, weather a prairie twister and scavenge for sense and sustenance amid the ruined devices of a ghosted culture. The improvised and playful dialogue of the children provides a key to understanding the tape; their distracted sense of make-believe floats between realities, between acting their parts and doing what they wantâpatching together identities that, like fidgeting children, refuse to stand still.’
Dung Smoke Enters the Palace, 1989 ‘An anti-narrative adventure traveling through a phantasmagoric environment void of stability. The video presents a bizarre compendium of archival and industrial footage accompanied by a noisy soundtrack of music and voices from the past, as if echoing the ether of the viewerâs mind. Thorntonâs distinctive visual style of collaging random elements elicits an eerie sense of being lost amidst past and present, breeding a confusion that complicates any clear reading of the image.’— Video Data Bank
There Was an Unseen Cloud Moving, 1988 ‘Isabelle Eberhardt, born in 1877 in Geneva, died in 1904 in Algeria, while she was visiting the Maghreb disguised as a man. She related her journeys in numerous writings published after her death. Several of Leslie Thorntonâs projects are based on the surprising career of this explorer. There Was An Unseen Cloud Moving is the first sequence based on this research. Her interest in this historical figure is part of the overall questioning of gender issues in her work and the role of women in society, as well as on the emergence of modernity and the notion of documentation that resulted from it, in the form of photographs, films and other media. The film uses fragments, forming a collage of reconstitutions of various actresses playing the heroine, archives from the era, but also press photographs, documents, extracts from films and so on. By presenting interventions of several actors playing the same character, the spectator is directly confronted with the problematics of representation. The different faces of the actors are superimposed, destroying the identification mechanism inherent to the film, which obliterates the actor in favour of the character. This multiple portrait reveals a flaw in the possibility of a reconstitution, both on the historical and the personal level.’— New Media
Peggy and Fred in Hell: The Prologue, 1985 ‘Peggy And Fred In Hell is one of the strangest cinematic artifacts of the last 20 years, revealing the abuses of history and innocence in the face of catastrophe, as it chronicles two small children journeying through a post-apocalyptic landscape to create their own world. Breaking genre restrictions, Thornton uses improvisation, planted quotes, archival footage and formless timeframes to confront the viewer’s preconceptions of cause and effect. “At its most distinctive, as in the endless and eternal Peggy And Fred In Hell cycle, Thorntonâs work wanders past the mediumâs limits and finds the mediumâs origins.â âBill Horrigan, Wexner Center’— collaged
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Jennifer, Where Are You?, 1981 ‘Jennifer, Where Are You? is structured by a speech-act, a constant proleptic call, a manâs voice which has been edited and recut into a repetitive and pervasive presence. The insistence of this male voice, which repeats the phrase âJennifer! Where are you?â every 30 seconds, parodies the authority conceded to voice-overs in the cinema. The voice is patriarchal, relentless, and runs the entire length of the film. Cut-aways to a small girl, glancing at the camera as she plays with lipstick and matches, reapportion the relation between patriarchal phonocentrism and masculine gaze. But is this small child subject to either? No. Not really. There she is, hiding in plain sightâours, not âhisââa âpurloined subjectâ successfully evading subjugation through response or acquiescence. âJennifer,â whoever she might be (a cipher, a pseudonymous textual marker of gendered cinematic presence) is never apprehended, and the film, for all of its suspense, simply ends.’
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X-TRACTS, 1975 ‘This was my first 16mm film, made with Desmond Horsfield. For the image we created a gridded score of movements, both within the frame (‘subject moves right to left’) and between the camera and the subject (zooms, pans, tilts…,) using this as a shooting script. The sound was derived from an old journal, read out loud and then cut-up into the same units of time as the image, ranging from 3 seconds to 1/4 second. Assembling the material was largely mechanical, following the predetermined score. That a tonal portrait of a person emerges was an after effect; we thought of the film as a structural or indexical system of sound/image relations, and viewed the soundtrack as a linguistic experiment, working with the building blocks of speech.’
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