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‘Denton Welch‘s A Voice Through a Cloud was written largely during the final racking months before Welch’s heart gave out. Echoing his own tragedy, it is a lyric, rebellious plaint of pain, fear and despair. The novel is also devastating in ways Welch did not intend. It breaks down painfully towards the end as Welch’s physical condition became so dire that he was capable only of writing one sentence at a time, and the exertion of doing even this would exhaust and sicken him so severely he would need to lie very still for hours afterwards with a cold compress on his forehead until he regained the strength to add another sentence. The last few pages become insensible and the novel ends abruptly with Welch’s final, inconclusive thought.’ — Michael de la Noy

 

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‘The Splendor And Misery Of Bodies, Of Cities was intended as Samuel R. Delaney‘s sequel to his classic novel Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand, but it looks like it will never see the light of day. Asked recently if he would ever finish and publish the sequel, Delaney’s answer was “Probably not, I can’t say for sure. Again, I haven’t written it off entirely. I did write about 150 pages of it at some point. But a number of things had come up to undercut it. I’ve explained it many, many times, and don’t mind explaining it again. I was in a major relationship at that time, that kind of fueled the first volume, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. And that relationship broke up, and that was the beginning of the Eighties, at the same time the AIDS situation came in. A lot of it, as the diptych was originally planned out, was a celebration of lot of the stuff I saw at the time in the gay world. Sort of in allegorical form, a lot of that was being celebrated. There was a lot of the gay situation that made me rethink some of that, not in any kind of simplistic way, but in a fairly complicated way. So between the personal breakup, which was an eight-year relationship that came to ane nd, and the changes in the world situation, there were other things that sort of grabbed my interest more. That made the second one a little hard to go on. I still think there are some valid things to be said about it, in that second volume. And it’s quite… I’ve got two or three more books, that I really would like to write, and at this point, my books take me three to five years. So that’s 15 years, and I’m practically 70 years old. So I’ll be in my 80s when those books are done, and I don’t know whether I’m going to be writing anything, or even if I’m going to be here”.’ — io9

 

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‘Throughout Jane Bowles’s letters, the unceasing lament about not-writing, “I have decided not to become hysterical, however. If I cannot write my book, then I shall give up writing, that’s all. Then either suicide or another life. It is rather frightening to think of. I don’t believe I would commit suicide, though intellectually it seems the only way out.” The book, a novel entitled Out in the World about a character whose goal is to “bed like God”, a follow-up to Two Serious Ladies, went unfinished.’ — dabney

 

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‘Campo Santo is a hybrid volume, a posthumous act of packaging by W.G. Sebald’s German publisher Hanser.When Sebald died December 14, 2001, very shortly after the appearance of his fourth work of prose, Austerlitz, he apparently had not begun a new prose project. The crucial part of this book is the first section, which contains the four prose four pieces. After finishing The Rings of Saturn in the mid 1990s, Sebald, we are told, began a book on Corsica, which he eventually set aside in favor of Austerlitz. According to the editor of Campo Santo Sven Meyer, the Corsican fragments form the only new prose pieces by Sebald we are likely to see. The Corsican prose pieces in Campo Santo pose interesting questions for the reader of Sebald.The most obvious issue to me concerns the lack of images in the three main pieces. All four of Sebald’s full-length prose works employ images as an essential part of the “text.”But, with one exception, and that including an image not chosen by Sebald himself, the Corsican pieces are devoid of images. Was this going to be an unillustrated work or would Sebald have added images before finishing the manuscript?’ — Vertigo

 

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‘When Dashiell Hammett died of lung cancer Jan. 10, 1961, at age 66, he was a broken man. The architect of the modern American crime novel and the author of five classic works, Hammett was nearly penniless at the time of his death, his income attached by the Internal Revenue Service, his health destroyed by a six-month stint in federal prison. Despite his fragile health, he smoked and drank heavily and was prone to alcoholic blackouts. As he grew older, he wrote less and drank more until, finally, he wrote not at all. In his letters, Hammett makes reference to dozens of novels in progress, books with titles such as Dead Man’s Friday, Toward Z and The Valley Sheep, all unfinished – or more likely never begun. The only incomplete Hammett novel for which any manuscript materials survives is The Secret Emperor. Working notes for The Secret Emperor, which was Hammett’s first, never-finished novel, show that it included elements he later used in The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key.’ — Wallace Stroby

 

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‘Novelist Terry Pratchett died at his home from complications of Alzheimer’s disease on the morning of 12 March 2015. He was 66 years old. Pratchett left “an awful lot” of unfinished writing, including a new novel in his famous and popular Discworld series. Pratchett told Neil Gaiman that anything that he had been working on at the time of his death should be destroyed by a steamroller. On 25 August 2017, his assistant Rob Wilkins fulfilled this wish by crushing Pratchett’s hard drive under a steamroller at the Great Dorset Steam Fair.’ — Stephanie Convery

 

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‘Michael Chabon began writing Fountain City as a follow-up to his fine 1989 debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. The story centered on an architect who dreamed of building the perfect baseball stadium. After five years, he gave up on the project. “Often when I sat down to work,” Chabon wrote later about the abandoned novel, “I would feel a cold hand take hold of something inside my belly and refuse to let go. It was the Hand of Dread. I ought to have heeded its grasp.” He also wrote in the margins of Fountain City: “A book itself threatens to kill its author repeatedly during its composition.” It was a novel, he added, that he could feel “erasing me, breaking me down, burying me alive, drowning me, kicking me down the stairs.” Upon abandoning the project, he immediately changed gears and wrote his next novel Wonder Boys in seven months.’ — A New Fiction Writers Forum

 

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‘A sniper, a black man, situates himself by an upper-floor window overlooking a street filled with white police officers busy overseeing a protest march. He proceeds to shoot and kill as many of them as possible from his vantage point with a high-powered rifle, before the police deploy an even more powerful weapon to retaliate and end his killing spree. these events are taken from Chester Himes’s novel Plan B, which he started writing in the late 1960s and which was finally published posthumously, unfinished, in France in 1983, and not in the US until 1993. By the time Himes began Plan B he had grown tired of depicting scenes of disorganised violence, and increasingly struggled with the task of reconciling his detectives to the demands of upholding racist laws. With Plan B, he envisages what a violent black uprising might look like and what its consequences would be. In the novel the knockabout brutalities of his two detectives are replaced with acts of straightforward political intent. “If there must be violence,” Himes declared, “I believe it should be organised violence”.’ — The Conversation

 

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‘The Temple at Thatch was Evelyn Waugh’s first attempt at a novel, and its failure temporarily derailed him. Waugh began writing the book in 1924 during his final year as an undergraduate. The plot, according to diary entries, is largely autobiographical and based on the writer’s experiences at Oxford, with themes of madness and black magic. So what went wrong? In 1925 he gave the manuscript to his friend Harold Action, who criticized the book (Action later said: “It was an airy Firbankian trifle, totally unworthy of Evelyn, and I brutally told him so. It was a misfired jeu d’esprit.”). Waugh was so distraught that he burned the manuscript and went to the beach and started swimming out. In his biography, Waugh said: “Did I really intend to drown myself? That was certainly in my mind.” But a short way out, he was attacked by a jellyfish and swam back. For a while afterward, he stayed away from fiction writing, but soon returned.’ — PW

 

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‘In the early 1980s, I started an epistolary novel called The Plant. I published limited editions of the first three short volumes, giving them out to friends and relatives (folks who are usually but not always the same) as funky Christmas cards. I gave The Plant up not because I thought it was bad but because other projects intervened. At the time I quit, the work in progress was roughly 25,000 words long. It told the story of a sinister plant—sort of a vampire-vine—that takes over the offices of a paperback publishing company, offering financial success in trade for human sacrifices. The story struck me as both scary and funny.’ — Stephen King

 

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‘Truman Capote signed the initial contract for the novel Answered Prayers on January 5, 1966 with Random House. This agreement provided a $25,000 advance with a stipulated delivery date of January 1, 1968. Distracted by the success of his “nonfiction novel,” In Cold Blood, the Black and White Ball, television projects, short pieces and increasing personal demons, Capote missed his 1968 deadline. In July 1969 the contract was renegotiated, granting a “substantially larger advance” in exchange for a trilogy to be delivered in January 1973. The delivery date was further delayed to January 1974 and September 1977. A final agreement in early 1980 would have yielded Capote $1,000,000 to have been paid only if he submitted the manuscript by March 1, 1981. This final deadline was not kept. Capote first envisioned Answered Prayers as an American analog to Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past that would come to be regarded as his masterwork.

‘In the years prior to his death, Capote frequently read chapters from Answered Prayers to friends at dinners, but such was his gift of storytelling that few could discern whether he was actually reading from a manuscript or improvising. He attempted to sell one of the chapters to Esquire sometime in the early 1980s but balked and feigned illness when an editor asked to see the story. Capote claimed that lover John O’Shea had absconded with “A Severe Insult to the Brain” in 1977 and sued for repossession, but he eventually reconciled with O’Shea and dropped the lawsuit. At least one Capote associate claims to have acted as a courier for the full manuscript. According to Joseph Fox, four of Capote’s friends claim to have read drafts of “Father Flanagan’s All-Night Nigger Queen Kosher Cafe” and “A Severe Insult to the Brain”. Capote regularly cited dialogue and plot points from these chapters in multiple conversations with Fox that never wavered or changed over the years. In his editor’s note, Fox “hesitantly” theorized that the two chapters did exist at one juncture but were destroyed by Capote in the 1980s.

‘Shortly before his death in 1984, Capote informed his friend Joanne Carson that he had finally finished Answered Prayers and was preparing to die in peace. Carson allegedly had read the three chapters prior to this date and described them as being “very long.” On the morning preceding his death, Capote handed a key to Carson for a safe deposit box or locker that contained the completed novel, stating that “the novel will be found when it wants to be found.” When Carson pressed Capote for a precise location, he offered a myriad of locations in various cities. An exhaustive search for the manuscript after Capote’s death yielded nothing.’ — PBS.org

 

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‘Seth Morgan wrote his first novel, the blistering Homeboy, during a brief layover between heroin habits. But despite a decent critical reception and a promising literary future, Seth jumped right back up on that horse. Maybe it was that five-figure advance on the paperback, burning a hole in his pocket. Shortly after the book’s release, Morgan died in a drunken bike wreck. His second novel, Mambo Mephiste, was by his own account to be the definitive Mardi Gras novel. But only a few chapters and a synopsis exist, rescued from his apartment before it was tossed by the neighborhood junkies.’ — litreactor.com

 

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‘Lana Del Rey posted to Instagram this week to tell fans that a backpack containing her laptop, hard drives and three cameras were stolen from her car in a Los Angeles robbery a few months ago. In a series of since-deleted videos shared to the singer-songwriter’s @honeymoon account that’ve been reposted by fans, she informed followers of the incident and revealed a 200-page novel manuscript, as well as various unfinished songs and personal camera footage, were among the items lost. “I had to remotely wipe the computer that had my 200-page novel for Simon & Schuster, which I didn’t have backed up on a cloud,” said Del Rey, 37, who noted that she doesn’t have access to “any cloud systems.”‘ — Jack Irvin

 

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‘Philip K Dick‘s last wife has reworked the novel the legendary science fiction author was working on when he died in 1982. Tessa Dick, who described her self-publication of The Owl in Daylight as a tribute to her former husband, was Dick’s fifth and final wife, marrying him in 1973. She told online magazine the Self-Publishing Review that her version of the novel was an attempt to express “the spirit” of Dick’s proposed book. Little is known about the novel, which Dick mentioned in a letter to his editor and agent. Very little material exists and it might be more accurate (if poor English!) to say that it is his unstarted novel. Tessa points out, Phil “spent months working out the plots for his novels” before committing them to paper: “The typing, however, is not the writing.” According to Tessa, the letter to Dick’s agent revealed plans to “have a great scientist design and build a computer system and then get trapped in its virtual reality. The computer would be so advanced that it developed human-like intelligence and rebelled against its frivolous purpose of managing a theme park”. The letter also mentioned Dante’s Inferno and the Faust legend, she said.’ — Science Fiction World

 

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‘The Buccaneers is the last novel written by Edith Wharton. The story is set in the 1870s, around the time Wharton was a young girl. It was unfinished at the time of her death in 1937 and published in that form in 1938. Wharton’s manuscript ends with Lizzy inviting Nan to a house party, to which Guy Thwaite has also been invited. The book was published in 1938 by Penguin Books in New York. After some time, Marion Mainwaring finished the novel, following Wharton’s detailed outline, in 1993. The novel received positive and negative reactions from critics. It was often referred to as the “unfinished novel”. The main questions asked by critics were: “Is this really her legacy?” and “Was there enough left of the book to publish in the first place?”‘ — Percy Hutchinson

 

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‘Prince Jellyfish is an unpublished novel by American journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson. The novel was Thompson’s first, written around 1960 while he was in his early 20s and was working as a reporter for the Middletown Daily Record in New York State. Thompson had moved to Middletown from New York City, where he worked briefly as a copy boy for Time. Little is known about the book, although in Thompson’s obituary, The Guardian described it as “an autobiographical novel about a boy from Louisville, going to the big city and struggling against the dunces to make his way.” The book was rejected by a number of literary agents before Thompson moved briefly to Puerto Rico and then moved on to writing his next novel, The Rum Diary. The Rum Diary, too, was rejected by every literary agent to whom Thompson shopped it, and it remained unpublished until 1998, long after Thompson had become famous.’ –– collaged

 

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‘The writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide on September 12th of last year. His wife, Karen Green, came home to find that he had hanged himself on the patio of their house, in Claremont, California. For many months, Wallace had been in a deep depression. The condition had first been diagnosed when he was an undergraduate at Amherst College, in the early eighties; ever since, he had taken medication to manage its symptoms. During this time, he produced two long novels, three collections of short stories, two books of essays and reporting, and Everything and More, a history of infinity. Wallace in his final hours had “…tidied up the manuscript of a novel he had been writing for over ten years so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel. The novel had numerous working titles, some of them including ‘Gliterrer’, ‘SJF’ (‘Sir John Feelgood’), ‘What is Peoria For?’, and ‘The Long Thing’, although he had settled on The Pale King. The drafts tell of a group of employees at an Internal Revenue Service center in Illinois, and how they deal with the tediousness of their work. The partial manuscript—which Little, Brown plans to publish next year—expands on the virtues of mindfulness and sustained concentration. Wallace was trying to write differently, but the path was not evident to him. “I think he didn’t want to do the old tricks people expected of him,” Karen Green, his wife, says. “But he had no idea what the new tricks would be.” The problem went beyond technique. The central issue for Wallace remained how to in his words give “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”’ — collaged from various sources

 

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‘Robert Musil worked on his monumental novel The Man Without Qualities for more than twenty years. Some of Musil’s working titles were The Gutters, Achilles (the original name of the main character Ulrich) or The Spy. Musil’s aim (and that of his main character, Ulrich) was to arrive at a synthesis between strict scientific fact and the mystical, which he refers to as “the hovering life.” He started in 1921 and spent the rest of his life writing it. When he died in 1942, the novel was not completed. The first two books were published in 1930, the last and unfinished one posthumously by his wife Martha in 1942. He worked on his novel almost every day, leaving his family in dire financial straits. The novel brought neither fame nor fortune to Musil or his family. This was one of the reasons why he felt bitter and unrecognized during the last two decades of his life. Musil thought he had many years of productive work ahead of him, when he could complete his great novel. But the author died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, after an exercise session, on April 15, 1942. He was sixty-two years old. Critics speculate on the viability of Musil’s original conception. Some estimate the intended length of the work to be twice as long as the text Musil left behind. As published, the novel ends in a large section of drafts, notes, false-starts and forays written by Musil as he tried to work out the proper ending for his book. In the German edition, there is even a CD-ROM available that holds thousands of pages of alternative versions and drafts.’ — Ted Gioia, Exhuming Robert Musil

 

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‘A work in progress at the time of Piero Paolo Pasolini‘s murder, the novel Petrolio exists as a made up of a series of notes – some extended and polished narrative passages, others cryptic messages from the author to himself that consist of no more than a few words. At the novel’s center is Carlo, an oil executive who undergoes a profound personality split: Carlo 1 is a super-Machiavellian power monger; Carlo 2 lives only to satisfy his perverse and insatiable sexual desires. Carlo also experiences a sexual metamorphosis in which he becomes, at will, female. The story of Carlo is interspersed with re-visions of myth – Oedipus, Medea, the Argonauts – and of Dante’s hell. The teller of this story appears to have been intended to be dual in nature. There is the author – the external shaper of the novel – who interrupts the text to comment on its mechanics and its meaning. And there is the narrator, whose cynical and seductive perspective comes from within Petrolio’s fictional world. Fragmentary, deliberately self-referential, meta-literary, schizoid, a devotional exploration of the male libido, an ode to the lust for power and the power of lust and, above all, a failed, piecemeal by default yet wrenching attempt to define the intellectual and his responsibilities.’ — The Grand Continent

 

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‘Jim Carroll, the legendary Manhattan poet and punk rocker, died of a heart attack on Friday, Sept. 12, at the age of 60. Recently, Carroll, the author of The Basketball Diaries, had been working on a new novel called Triptych; his longtime editor at Penguin, Paul Slovak, said that it “tells the story of a hermetic and mystical 35-year-old painter who becomes kind of a golden boy in the late ’80s New York art world. It’s a very moving examination of spiritual bankruptcy and other themes in both art and life.” Mr. Slovak said Carroll had turned in revisions of the first two parts of the novel, but didn’t know how far he’d gotten on the third. He said it was possible something would come of the work, pending a conversation with Carroll’s literary agent, Betsy Lerner, but that it was too soon to tell.’ — The New York Observer

 

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‘Richard Yates wrote at least three masterpieces: Revolutionary Road, Easter Parade (clearly recognized seminal novels of America in the second half of the 20th Century), and Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, a superb collection of his early short stories. Yates was a kind of F. Fitzgerald of the 1960’s, writing novels and story volumes about doomed post-WWII idealists colliding with reality. Yates’ first books were hailed, but his later efforts received mixed reviews, and were seldom read. He kept at his trade through illness, nervous breakdowns, and drink by editors like Sam Lawrence at Delacorte and Esquire’s Gordon Lish. Yates also wrote speeches for Bobby Kennedy, and taught creative writing at the University of Iowa. When the hard drinking, heavy smoking Yates died of emphysema in 1992, at the age of 66, none of his books remained in print. In the last month of his life, Richard Yates was working against deadline to finish his final (never completed andas yet unpublished) novel, Uncertain Times, based on his experience with Bobby Kennedy. He was in a skid row room (the kind he preferred to live and work in), surrounded by dead cockroaches he killed on work breaks, breathing oxygen for his emphysema from a huge canister, still smoking.’ — Zimbio

 

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‘Woes of the True Policeman is a project that was begun at the end of the 1980s and continued until Robert Bolaño’s death. A version of the novel was eventually published consisting sections collated from typescripts and computer documents. In a 1995 letter, Bolaño wrote: “Novel: for years I’ve been working on one that’s titled Woes of the True Policeman and which is MY NOVEL. The protagonist is a widower, 50, a university professor, 17-year-old daughter, who goes to live in Santa Teresa, a city near the U.S. border. Eight hundred thousand pages, a crazy tangle beyond anyone’s comprehension.” The unusual thing about this novel, written over the course of fifteen years, is that it incorporated material from other works by the author, from Llamadas telefónicas (Phone Calls) to The Savage Detectives and 2666, with the peculiarity that even though it features some familiar characters, they belong to Bolaño’s larger fictional world, and at the same time they are the exclusive property of this novel. The novel’s remains exuded a strong consciousness of death, of writing as an act of life, which was part of Bolaño’s biography, since the Chilean writer was condemned to write his limitless fiction against the clock.’ — Works in Progress

 

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‘Nikolay Gogol began writing Dead Souls in 1836 while living in Paris, finishing the first volume in 1841 while on a visit to Rome. After returning to Russia in October, Gogol, with the help of the critic Vissarion Belinsky, printed the first volume in 1842. Belinsky called it a “deeply intellectual, social and historic work.” The work on the second tome of Dead Souls coincided with Gogol’s deep spiritual crisis and mainly reflected his doubt on the effectiveness of literature, putting him on the edge of denouncing his previous creations. In 1849-1850, Gogol read parts of the second volume of Dead Souls to his friends. Their approval and delight encouraged him to work twice as hard. In spring, he made his first and only attempt to create a family. He proposed to Anna Wielhorski, who turned him down. On 1 January 1852 Gogol informed everyone that the second volume was “completely finished.” But at the end of the month, signs of a new personality crisis appeared. He was tormented by a sense of approaching death, worsened by new doubts in his success as a writer. On 7 February Gogol confessed and took communion and on the night of 12 February he burnt the clean manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls. Only five unfinished chapters remained from various draft editions, which were published in 1855. On the morning of 21 February Gogol died in his apartment in Moscow.’ — Russia Now

 

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‘Sylvia Plath is known primarily for her Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry. However, She also wrote short stories and journals that were later posthumously published in both abridged and unabridged formats, and a novel, The Bell Jar, using the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. It was published under her real name posthumously. However, this is not the only one she wrote. One novel, Falcon Yard, was burned by Sylvia Plath herself. Double Exposure is said to have disappeared in 1970, and her last two journals are said to be missing or destroyed by her husband Ted Hughes. Double Exposure was a novel for which little is known. Like The Bell Jar, it was reportedly going to be semi-autobiographical. Ted Hughes has cited figures of 60 or 70 pages up to as high as 130 pages. Plath’s literary executor, Olwyn Hughes, said only two chapters were completed. The plot was said to revolve around a woman discovering her husband having an affair culminating in the husband’s desertion of his family. Plath said it was a “dark comedy.”‘ — scholarworks

Some others

Gustave Flaubert Bouvard et Pécuchet
René Daumal Mount Analogue
Lew Welch I, Leo
Thomas Mann Confessions of Felix Krull
James Joyce Stephen Hero
Mina Loy Goy Israels
Ralph Ellison Three Days Before the Shooting
Brad Gooch The Silver Age of Death
Dale Peck Red Deer
Frank O’Hara (untitled)
Albert Camus Le premier homme
Herman Melville The Confidence Man
Henry James A Sense of Time
Ingeborg Bachmann The Book of Franza
Georges Perec 53 Days
Jack Kerouac Old Bull in the Bowery
Alain-Fournier Colombe Blanchet
Stendahl Lucien Leuwen
Robert Shea Children of the Earthmaker
James Dickey Crux
Alexander Pushkin The Negro of Peter the Great
Charles Bukowski The Way the Dead Love
Kingsley Amis Black and White
Fyodor Dostoevsky Netochka Nezvanova
Georges Bataille Ma Mere
Joe Orton Head to Toe
Alberto Moravia I due amici
Osamu Dazai Gutto Bai
—-

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** James Bennett, Hey, James. I think it’s highly possible to get a lot out of Bangs and Meltzer by just sticking to the prose and the passion/dispassion and making assumptions about the topics. It always amazes me to know that Flaubert wasn’t a critical establishment darling in his day. A hopeful sign. I’ve only been to Cork in Ireland. There was a kind of seminar on my work there that I attended. I don’t know why I haven’t made the effort to get to Ireland otherwise  since it’s so close to where I’ve ended up and in the EU, for goodness sake, so hassle free to enter/exit. Recommendations? Because I really should target it. Hug of considerable warmth back to you. Oh, and Uday asked me to convey his thanks because he doesn’t know to use the reply function. ** Lucas, Hi, Lucas. Thanks, yeah, I’m post-stress today. It was just a thing. I’m happy I got you revved up for the amusement park. Hopefully the hopeful attitude will add some romance to the place when you’re actually there too. I’m on the cusp of digging into the character ai. Hopefully after I get an annoying meeting done this morning. Thank you for the link. I’m not on X, and X is very fascist about not letting non-X people look at anything there, sadly. That’s very interesting about the stronger taboo amongst the currently young driving the ai option. Huh. I wish I understood why those taboos have taken hold of people, but I can’t, or not without further research, which I’ll do. Such a huge difference from the hunger for the wild that was considered cool when I came of age. Zac happily liked what I wrote, so now we can continue building the script, so that’s exciting. I’m really jonesing to get a new film on its way. Making films is strangely addictive. I have some artist friends who work a lot with ai visual generating apps like Midjourney, and it’s the same thing with no sexual content. They try, but when they try to circumvent the rules and get sexy, it just looks very hint-hint 1950s. Gigantically positive vibes are on their way to you. What are you up to, life-wise, at the moment? Oh, jay talked to/about you in their comment if you didn’t see. ** jay, Hi. Big congrats on being post-school for at least a while. Do you have a particular summer in mind? I may actually take you up on your advice offer one of these days. I think people think because I do the blog I have tech savvy, but I’m really just very basic and feeling my way along. Thanks! Have a Thursday of note. ** Jeff J, Howdy, Jeff! I saw on FB that you were back in your hood. How great that you had such an awesome time after all that body rebellion you were going through. Funny you mention Pasolini’s novel given what’s above. No, I haven’t. Making the post made me realise I need to. Did your friend have any tips on where to start? Wow, I did not know that about a new Pinget! Holy shit. Or that Dalkey is actually back alive like they had seemed to be promising. Whoa, I’ll get the Pinget asap, and the Queneau too. Thanks, buddy. The film is finished but for the minor, needed special effects which Zac and I have been waiting to do for months, thwarted by our producers, but we intend to force the issue at a meeting with them this very morning. Otherwise, it’s under consideration at four big festivals. Two are maybe hopeful, two are very unlikely. Sure, Zooming sounds good. Hit me up. ** Black_Acrylic, Cool, thanks, Ben. ‘Fargo’ is my favorite Coens for sure. Lightning in a bottle, that one. ** Huckleberry Shelf, Hey!! You studied with David! That’s awesome. You probably know he and I are very old friends and colleagues, although colleagues is such a boring term. He let you use that Ouija board! He must really like you. That makes sense re: your attitude towards the sun being from SF. I’m from LA, so escaping the sun still feels like a success story. Although I lived in Amsterdam for a couple of years, and Amsterdam is like SF to the nth degree, and that was too non-stop gloomy even for me. Great that you’re writing. And ‘hopefully’, that’s the key. I totally get your interest in your work feeding off the Craigslist source. Your story idea sounds great, of course. I learned how to write prose as a poet, and it actually seemed like a really good way into prose, so keep your hopes and trust your instincts, and you’ll likely come up with something really yours and unique. I actually just read a very positive review of the Cronenberg yesterday. I feel like a lot of people just want him to stay on the body horror track, but most of my favorite films by him are when he diverges from that. My pleasure about the post, of course. I hope your day holds some amazement. ** Tomás, Hi, Tomás! Wow, to fully explain the sculpture influence would take more room and brain power than the p.s. pacing allows. At the simplest, I try to think of my fiction, and fiction I read as well, as being 3-dimensional. That there’s the surface, which does certain things and can have a certain effect, but there’s also a roomy interior where I can try to make things happen that the reader can either notice and follow or which enlarges the reading even if you don’t see the internal machinations. I like to try to write thinking of the prose as something you can sort of walk around and view from difference angles. It helps me get excited about the possibilities. That probably makes no sense. Consolidation problem. And also thinking about positive and negative space, so what’s written and there and solid is no more important than what’s missing. Someday let’s have a coffee and talk about our methodologies. That would be super interesting. What you say about your thinking about your writing makes total sense to me, and maybe is not so difference than my thinking that I just confusedly attempted to describe. I don’t have a daily routine about approaching films. Or about my fiction either. I’m kind of a workaholic. Once I get my head inside a project, I get very fixed on it and driven to finish it. And I try hard not think about the hellish part of getting the funds to actually make the film because that’s so daunting and beyond my control. Thanks very, very much for the links to your work. I’ll go over there(s) today when I finish this and get through a film-related meeting I’m due at shortly. Excited to find your work. Thanks again! ** Harper, Hi. Your name is clean again. ‘Accidental postmodern’, ha ha, nice. That doesn’t surprise me about Pratt. It’s interesting to have a bead on what his stoicism thing is about. Parisians don’t have AC in their homes either. Like you guys, I guess, there was no real need until about five years ago when Paris started cooking in the summer. Ugh. Enjoy your calm. I hope it extends and extends. ** Steve, Troye Sivan is so not otherworldly looking. Well, neither is Chalamet, of course, although hordes would troll me for that statement if hordes read this blog, which happily they don’t. Everyone, Steve has weighed in one Richard Linklater’s new one ‘Hit Man’ right here. A couple of the Cannes films have already opened. Paris holds an annual little festival where most of the Cannes films play for one screening each, so that’s next in a few weeks. ** PL, Hi, good to see you. Dump stories are both inherently interesting and not so much, straight or otherwise, I was interested. That guy in that group you describe does sound like a character I might devise, or at least like a slave on a slave site whose profile I would put in one of those posts. I obviously can stand guys like that and find them interesting. I like the combination of trashiness and pretension. There can be a lot going on there. It’s just a matter of regulating the real life dosage of them, I guess. But, yeah, get out of the group if the cops are eyeing its doorway. Better safe than whatever else. Hm, I can’t think of any great musical finds of recent days. I need to go looking. I’ll check out that Panchiko album, thanks. I’m good. You sound lively. Nice to get to talk with you. ** Justin D, Hi, J. Cool, glad you’re liking his stuff so far. I do remember about your Koi feeding gig, and that’s a strange outcome. The fountain being empty sounds a little odd, no? Alien abduction maybe? I hope the owners don’t blame you. Yikes. I’m an overanalyser too. I think, push comes to shove, that’s preferable than, say, airheadedness, although airheadedness has external beauty at least, unlike the overanalysis-beset. Mostly. Sometimes. ** Jamie F, Greetings, Jamie. Cool, happy Scott’s stuff intrigues. I am confident, I think, but much less so in crowds, or disorganised ones at least. I’ve figured out how to deal with, say, doing readings or events when my work is ‘on show’ because I can just becomes its spokesperson, and I’ve learned how to do that. But generally I’m not so good at adopting a kind of superfice of personality to negotiate groups of folks. Or something. I don’t know. No, Zac isn’t my boyfriend. We’re very close, and we’re kind of soul mates, but it’s not romantic or sexual at all. Bon day. ** Darby🐼, There was a parrot in a box. My roommate found it injured in a park, brought it here, washed it, put it in a box, and it eventually felt better, started freaking out, and yesterday it was successfully released into the park. Happy ending. Google wouldn’t let me see the photo. It says I don’t have access. So, … I’ll daydream. In purple. Fucking google, I swear. I hope your classes are enriching and that your screen does not irritate. ** Nicholas, Hey there. Uh, last night I had very delicious vegan sushi at this new vegan sushi restaurant I found. And today … my food intake is still a crapshoot. Nothing fancy for sure. Your intake sounds enviable. Yes. ** Uday, Hi. I actually swore off using one word titles after the Cycle, and I’m kind of shocked that I agreed with myself to use one again. But it fits. I think the editor of TPR at that time was kind of a perv, and he got me-tooed and fired later, so there you go. Oh, yeah, everybody has their own powers from their art or skills or beauty or age or whatever, and individualist hierarchies are natural in that case, I guess as long as the bearer doesn’t work the hierarchy. Hierarchies are something I’ll be negotiating forever. They’re inescapable. And I conveyed your thanks to James. ** Oscar 🌀, I’m imagining us on adjacent mountaintops with our hands cupped around our mouths. ‘Whump’: what a nice category or at least word. Underused, that word. I’m going to start using it. Listen, I’m so happy my early writings were pre-internet and are just yellowed papers that are evermore yellowing and increasingly unreadable. ‘Naïve. Super.’: I’m going to try to locate that. In the meantime, I will pick up one of the zillion of books in my to-read pile and hope it’s keeper as you wish, thank you. I hope someone with very baggy jeans crosses your path today and asks you to autograph their skateboard. ** Okay. Sorry this is so late today. A meeting interrupted me. A few of the examples up above in the post are rather well known already, but what the hell, right? See you tomorrow.

* (restored)

 

‘Like the great Jean-Marie Straub, Scott Barley creates striking images by returning us to the basics of cinema, the natural world, but abstracting it through profilmic means by reducing the landscape to pure, basic forms. The sky at night becomes a grid of uneven white points like a pin board; an abstract, grainy image of trees, green hued, are obscured into strikes of painterly lines; the sunset, seen through clouds, is stained with a natural purple tint that makes the image look as unreal as the skies in John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon; a deep-focus landscape shot slowly becomes obscured by a patch of fog in the foreground. After a few beats, Barley tends to then situate these abstractions within a clearer sense of space and time. Barley, an installation artist and filmmaker from Newport, South Wales, has gained ecstatic admiration for his short films within certain cinephiliac circles, and makes his feature debut with the exhilarating Sleep Has Her House. The film begins with a characteristic bit of misdirection: a static frame, the view consumed by shadows, the locus of the image a jagged streak of turquoise bisecting the composition like a stroke of paint. The following two shots, also static, further and further outward, revealing to us that we’ve been looking at a neutral view of a sloping waterfall. The landscape we were introduced to as an impressionistic wash of pure color is now given specific shape and form.

‘The entirety of Barley’s astonishing feature is built on a fascinating push-pull between digital clarity and pictorial abstraction. For the most part, Barley constructs his lengthy, deep-focus compositions with a static HD camera, capturing landscapes that are almost jarring in their motionlessness—the only source of motion is often the lightly undulating ripples of water or the shifting hues of the sky, which at times leads the viewer to question whether they’re looking at a still or a moving image. Barley foregrounds the centrality of the natural elements to shaping the image, adding texture and dimension and determining pacing. Removed from any degree of linear forward motion, Barley’s lo-fi cinema readily recalls actuality cinema, but the overall effect is far from documentary. Unlike a filmmaker like James Benning—to whom Barley has been compared—this filmmaking doesn’t so much seem to be calling for a return to the basic properties of nature to form a resistance against modernity in cinema practices as to suggest how painterly abstractions can be created through the simplest of means. Barley crafts images that are extremely sensual in their materialism but minimal in every other sense. Although each works in isolation, when placed in succession they take on an intense emotional weight, layer upon layer of painterly compositions in a rich tapestry of gentle motion.

‘Although Barley incorporates many techniques traditionally associated with the documentary into his filmmaking techniques—natural light, real world locations, minimal post-production effects—his films are far from ethnographic. For one, despite rigorously surveying a specific, restricted space, his images are spatially vague: there’s rarely any clear sense of how one shot spatially relates to the next, and we’re left with an uncertainty regarding the geography of the landscape as a whole. The film’s landscapes are removed from any temporal markers, almost seeming to exist outside of time, creating an odd mesh with the ultra-modern digital technology used to craft these shots. Not so much an exploration of space as an exploration of the properties of the digital image, the land rendered hyper-real, almost resembling the surface of some lost planet. A land that looks abandoned, forgotten, drained of life.

‘Barley’s filmmaking seems to be essentially apolitical, surveying the natural world with a paradoxical combination of awe and a muted sense of fear, as if recognizing not only the minuscule scale on man in the face of the elements, but also the sway nature holds over the cinematic image itself. This takes over in the final stretch of Sleep Has Her House , which sees the initially tranquil tenor Barley’s montage being replaced by a sense of destruction, as a storm is portrayed with the grandeur of a rapture. The screen is plunged into darkness, periodically illuminated by lightening like impromptu strobe lighting effects. This is also the first time life is introduced into Barley ’s mise en scène, in an extended close-up of a horse’s eye reacting to the destruction, captured with a haphazard, lightly drifting, uncharacteristically handheld shot. The images are increasingly consumed by dark negative space, with the eye being drawn to a few salient details pushed into a small section of the screen.

‘If Sleep Has Her House at first calls to mind the expressionist landscapes of Peter Hutton, Victor Sjöström and, yes, Straub, the formal apocalypse of its final act recalls the smeary digital cacophony of Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan, and Sleep Has Her House similarly foregrounds the forceful capacities of DV cameras. By removing his filmmaking from any traditional sense of narrative, character, and, even temporal/spatial unity, Barley invites us to see the world—and the cinematic image—anew Sleep Has Her House is a vital reminder that the most potent visual abstractions can be created through something as simple as the shifting colour of the sky reflected in water, and the most jarring shock can come from a change in lens.’ — James Slaymaker, MUBI

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Scott Barley Website
Scott Barley @ Vimeo
Scott Barley @ bandcamp
Scott Barley @ Twitter
Sleep Has Her House @ THE ART(S) OF SLOW CINEMA
“Film is an illusion, but hopefully an illusion that can speak a truth.”
Scott Barley: Creating in the Digital Era
THE EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA OF SCOTT BARLEY
IN OTHER WORDS, NOW PLAYING: Sleep Has Her House
ACONTECIMIENTOS: 2013 SCOTT BARLEY
On SLEEP HAS HER HOUSE @ cinelapsus
LIMA INDEPENDIENTE 2017: SLEEP HAS HER HOUSE DE SCOTT BARLEY
dark is more
Onscreen/Offscreen: The “terrible sublime” of Sleep Has Her House
A transcendent film worth experiencing.
Scott Barley @ revolvy
“And the dark is always hungry.”
Review / analysis of Scott Barley’s “Sleep Has Her House”

 

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Extras

The Sadness of the trees by Mikel Guillen & Scott Barley

the schnüdlbug show – episode 2: Scott Barley

SCOTT BARLEY: COME MEET YOUR MAKER

In Qonversation with Scott Barley

 

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Interview
from 25fps.cz

 

I first encountered your work through Vimeo and it appears as if online viewing is something you work with consciously in your creative process. For example, you recommend watching your 2015 short film Hunter “in complete darkness, with headphones.” Could you say something about the role the internet plays in your filmmaking practice and aesthetics?

The internet is an interesting place. I like how I can democratise my work, make it available for free… how I am able to reach such a wide diversity of people, and in some cases, create a dialogue with these people from around the world. If it wasn’t for the internet, we would not be having this interview. I have often said that once I finish a film, and I put it out there in the world, it is no longer mine. It is yours… anybody’s. And I think that the internet nourishes that; this ongoing dialogue, this continuation. But as far as my own aesthetics and interests in how my own work should be contextualised, the internet is not perfect. There are many problems. The internet succeeds on the foundation that it is predominantly a place for instant gratification, but from another vantage point, this very foundation condemns it to its own failure as a platform. The internet has been shaped to satisfy our needs, often in a swift, superficial, “dopamine rush” manner. When the internet is utilised in tandem with the moving image, with art, with patience, with time, with work that challenges us, the failings of the internet and the way we have come to utilise it (and of course, how it is coded for us to utilise) are lamentably apparent. The internet is a world built upon instant gratification and distraction.

My work is all about immersion. It is antonymic in that way to how the internet predominantly operates. The potential for networking with others however, of creating an ongoing dialogue between my work and the people who experience it is huge, and exciting, and is something I am really pursuing right now. But I am still very much a person who believes in the power, the intensity, and resonance of the auditorium; the cinema space, and the immersion that it uniquely offers. So in that sense, I feel like I don’t fully belong in either place fully; not the internet, not the cinema. And I don’t believe this will change any time soon. But one can look at this and perhaps regard this ‘problem’ as not the real problem at all. Instead, the true problem is behind all of this, and that problem is us. It simply reveals the inherent, reductive trappings of the way we, as human beings have been rendered to think – desiring to compartmentalise, to label, to categorise, to create borders, which are inane, reductive, and pointless when we are talking about complex matters. There is little use to discuss the problems between the internet and the cinema dialectically, because it leads us down a path of false truths, and empty confirmations. There is perhaps more truth to be found in understanding the tension that holds disparate elements together, in this case, the internet, and the cinema. Both are necessary, and both are true, and in the end, there is only the indeterminable whole and the tension within.

I know for certain that my films work best as a large screen projection, in complete darkness, with good sound equipment – not a computer, and I wish everybody had the opportunity to see the films as they were truly intended. But I don’t have full control over that, and I think it would be bad, ultimately, if I did have control over these things. My interests do not lie in pecuniary matters, and I do not wish to deny anyone from being able to see my work. So I’m in a sort of twilight world between the old (the cinema, the dark, immersive auditorium) and the new (internet, distribution channels etc.) in that sense. I embrace the internet, knowing full well that it is not perfect. I make films because I feel I need to. I genuinely feel a need. And so regardless of whether the distributive aspect is perfect, or not, I will continue to make films, with money, or no money. As long as I feel I have something to say, I will continue making films.

Your output is very eclectic. Every film I saw is different from the others, and you also write poems and paint. Is there anything particular you enjoy about experimenting – be it with different media, different cameras or different techniques?

I like feeling lost, and being in uncharted territory with my praxis. I don’t preconceive my films often. I don’t work with preconceived images. I experiment and build upon things, and see what works. I want the act of making to be a journey for me. I want to be surprised and scared sometimes. When I work, I try to occupy a place where I can doubt things; a precarious place where I feel on the precipice of failure. I want to feel the sensation that the work is its own entity, that it is alive, and seemingly a step ahead of myself. The journey is for me. Once the film is finished, it is not mine anymore. It is for everybody else. That is how I feel. Sometimes, it takes a long time for me to really begin to understand what it is that I have made, what it is that I am trying to express. But my intuition seems to know best. I never think too much. I just focus on my feelings. Also, each medium has its own unique powers of expression. As a consequence, I do shift between mediums such as writing or painting, and different ways of seeing (and hearing) within my filmmaking. Perhaps you could say that a certain idea, or a feeling can be better communicated through film than painting, or writing… or vice versa. They are just different modes of expression. I love making music too. Sound is incredibly important to me. I love all of it. I want to always feel that the work is two steps ahead of me.

I read somewhere that you used to be very obsessed with language, when you were small, but now your films are generally silent when it comes to spoken words and use only ambient sounds. How come?

I am still obsessed with language, and I adore reading and writing so much – and it’s that very reason why I don’t like to use it in my films. They’re different mediums. I see language as sacred. And I see images… the world as sacred. But we are facing a time where language is increasingly becoming an objectifier, an itemiser, an explainer of what we see before our eyes. When we use language to describe, or explain an image, we are in a sense, objectifying it, and in turn, we are killing it. We kill its mysteries and silent beauty through our inane objectification. Let’s just bask in the sonorous silence of the sunset, of the moon, the stars, the lake, in the presence of the horses, the deer, the owls, in the mountains, and the forest. Let’s not, through folly, attempt to claim the Unknown as known to us. Let us leave the unknowable to be what it is: unknowable. Beauty lies in the things that are not fully known to us. I would rather look upon the world with silent wonder and awe, rather than savage it with all the words in the world, that in this context are meaningless and hideous. Words conjure images. If the image already exists, there is nothing to be conjured. Instead, we are only using words to conquer the image. And I am not interested in conquering anything.

Amid the eclecticism, there are underlying aesthetic and thematic preoccupations in your cinematic output that can be noticed easily. Among others, there is your nyctophilia, biophilia and a certain, dare I say, cosmic sense in how you work with nature. These themes, together with what I assume is low-budget film-making practice, make me think of your films as cinema for the Anthropocene. Is there such a conscious political dimension to what you do, or am I reading too much into it?

I think all works are directly, or indirectly, political. We bring so much of ourselves into our work, through making. But also, spectators read and utilise a piece of work in multifarious ways, sometimes a political one; and work lives on, and continues to grow, taking on new meanings, long after they have been “completed”. I would say that I have, since the very beginning of my filmmaking, been making an anthropocenic statement. A statement on anthropocenic, metaphysical, and existentialist issues. I remember one critic describing my work, not as a “cosmogony”, but as a “cosmo-agony”. When I read the latter, I exclaimed, ‘Yes! that is it!’ A lot of my work is a lamentation of our disconnection with nature, or our destruction of nature, our foolishness. I am, through my own films, trying to re-establish a connection. And in a way, I guess that could be interpreted as political.

You mentioned in another interview that your art is strongly influenced by avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Phil Solomon, Jean-Claude Rousseau, and Nathaniel Dorsky, as well as some feature-length artists like Béla Tarr. Your references appear to generally come from the Euro-Atlantic tradition. Are there any non-Western filmmakers or artists in general whom you would explicitly count as an influence?

Absolutely. There are many. I would not compartmentalise myself to being specifically influenced by Western/Euro-Atlantic cinema. I just don’t think in these terms. If I had to think of specific non-Western filmmakers, I would say I have been influenced by Yoshishige Yoshida, Jan Němec, Wojciech Wiszniewski, Aleksei German, Akio Jissoji, Kaneto Shindô, Konstantin Lopushansky, Věra Chytilová, Artavazd Peleshyan, Xu Xin, František Vláčil, György Fehér, Veiko Õunpuu… there are many more.

Watching your films, I sometimes think of films by František Vláčil, because of his baroque sensibility towards landscapes and what I feel as a strong presence of atmospheric phenomena. And, since this is interview is conducted for a Czech film magazine, I feel impelled to ask: Are there any Czech directors or films you enjoy?

Jan Němec… he has been a huge influence on me. I adore his films with all my heart. He realised that cinema is in many ways, truly about childhood, of memories. Vláčil… I like Vláčil very much. The mood and atmosphere of his films is very haunting and evocative. I like Gustav Machatý a lot. Chytilová. I also love Juraj Herz. The Cremator is a favourite of mine.

What role did institutionalized film education (film school) play in the development of your practical skills and aesthetic sensibilities?

Very little. I have had poor experiences from universities. Too many philistines; both teachers, and students. If you are passionate, driven, and you love art, you’ll go out and and make art regardless. It is not about the equipment. It’s how you use it. This is what so few students understand. The only good thing about university was the few people I met who saw the world in a unique way. In my view, there needs to be less teaching, and instead, they need to cultivate more. The system is broken. Instead of forcing an ideology on to a student, a teacher must observe what makes each student unique, and nourish that, i.e. they observe what the student sees on their horizon, and then in turn, they make that horizon bigger. They shouldn’t stamp out their creativity. Instead, they should help them realise their full potential. Many universities don’t realise they are stamping out an individual’s creativity. Teacher is the wrong word. Cultivator describes it better.

I have almost always learnt auto-didactically, or through my peers; not teachers. I do know some very talented teachers though, like Phil Solomon – an incredibly gifted filmmaker as well as professor – and I had some great teachers when I was younger, but for the most part, I haven’t had many good ones during my time at university. A lot of students and tutors saw my work as pretentious, or considered me a maverick. Until the system changes, my work will never be fully welcome in a film school. And I don’t want to be part of a system, or an industry that tries to nullify unique creative sensibility. A large part of the world that we live in is a world of selling out, of spinelessness, of denying yourself true existential nourishment; a world where courage, vision, and conviction count for nothing. I do not ever wish to be moulded into an anonymous, shapeless, soulless piece of plastic, ready to be churned out on corporate conveyor belts for the instant gratification of gormless morons. In short, the world of spinelessness, of creative censorship can get fucked.

Have you ever encountered negative feedback, by critics or people around you, to what you do?

Of course! Who doesn’t? You have to take the bad with the good. A polarised reaction is a healthy reaction. I am lucky in that the people who like my work are very passionate supporters of my work. The main reason for negativity seems to stem from an unwillingness to submit to the work itself. But I also have seen some very sad people negatively review films that I haven’t even completed or released. These people have decided to troll my work. What sad, boring lives these people must have. All I really care about is the work, and the hope that it will leave an impression on just one person. I make films out a need. I don’t do it out a desire to please others. It’s less superficial than that.

What prompted the creation of a feature-length film (SHHH)? Did its length influence the way it was made?

The idea for doing a feature-length film was an organic one. It was the right time. It was born from a desire to go deeper, darker, and narrower. I made Sleep Has Her House exactly the same way as I have made my previous, shorter works. I feel my way in the dark. I feel what feels right, and never question it, and never deviate from it. I feel, and feel alone. I love not being fully in control when making. I want the film itself to have its own autonomy as it is being made, and for it to always be a few steps ahead of me. I want it to give birth to itself.

For me, making a film is largely the same as watching one. You must not resist. Once you let go, you are no longer a captive. Just let it wash over you like an ocean. Swim with it. Drown in it. I think that my approach is more visible in Sleep Has Her House than any of my previous works, partly due to the longer running time, but also because of the stronger presence of the liminal, the mystic, and the unknown, which I feel took root with my short film, Hunter (2015), but is also there much earlier, in works like Nightwalk (2013) for example.

Can you tell me something about your upcoming projects? Do you think it could become possible to see your films at the cinema or art spaces even in the Czech Republic?

I’m working on many projects. About eight different projects right now. Another feature film is in the works, but won’t be completed for a long time. As for the less distant future, there will be lots of short films and installation-based pieces coming. Mouths in the Grass, Lustre to Void, Starless, Fugue – a film I am making with my partner, Gabrielle Meehan – and lots of other things. I am always working on multiple things at once.

As for screening my work in the Czech Republic, I would love that. But I do not have an established network in the Czech Republic. To people who want to see my work, I say, go to your local independent cinemas, your festivals, your galleries, and tell them. Something similar has started to happen in the USA with my work recently, and it’s all down to passionate spectators, who want to see my work in an auditorium setting. Of course, I do network with festivals, curators, and programmers, but that will not bring my films to everybody. There is much to do!

Any last words you could address to readers who are eager to create experimental films of their own?

Don’t think too much. Just feel. Always be curious. Always be resilient.

 

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17 of Scott Barley’s 18 films *

* Scott Barley strongly suggests that these films be watched in the dark if at all possible.

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Sleep Has Her House (2017)
‘Sleep is a film that goes deep, very deep. It is not just a film. It is not just visuals. And it is not just a combination of visuals and sound. It is a journey. It is an experience. It digs deep into your soul, into your dreams. It takes you into another world, into the underworld, but it’s not a scary journey at all. On the contrary, Barley is always there with you. You’re never really on your own. Barley’s film is certainly the strongest film I have seen in years. There have been many films which touched me, but not in the same way. Sleep stands out. This is as far as my words can take it. All I can do now is strongly recommending the film. Words cannot adequately translate experience. You naturally lose most of that experience because you try to find words for something that has no words. So please watch the film, and experience this magnificent journey Barley takes you on.’ — Nadin Mai, THE ART(S) OF SLOW CINEMA

Trailer

SLEEP HAS HER HOUSE: essential conversation

 

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The Green Ray (2017)
‘A Green Ray that never features. Instead, we sense it, seeing beyond our own eyes, beyond the hills, we sense it for an instant. We are plunged into the unknowable, beyond the horizon, beyond seeing altogether. In a single 11 minute take, Barley takes us from lush sunsets. to beyond the green ray, and into the gloaming, into the heavy night’s darkness, where we, transfixed, can do nothing but await the impending storm.’ — SB

the entire film

 

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Passing (2017)
‘A Silence. Two deer. Mother and child. Curiosity and the World. Being and responding. Love and courage. A gesture. Alone in the woods inside an imperfect image. A film of three shots. A passing.’ — SB

the entire film

 

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Womb (2017)
‘The Mouth screams. Like a shadow, it looms on the event horizon. It swells, hunting the night like a snake in the dark. The laceration tears through the stars, devouring its meal. Within the nothing swims something of a memory of movement. Far beyond, something out of the black reveals itself. In the infinite womb, limbs drift suspended, like flies in a giant spider web. An infinite sea of pale flesh. Bodies without organs. Death’s renewal awaits, as the bodies pass through the void.’ — SB

the entire film

 

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Closer (2016)
‘Only five films into Scott Barley’s filmography and I’m already completely struck down by what I’ve seen. Barley blows away so many cinematic rules with his creations. He seems to answer the questions I’ve been asking myself so often these past years but to which I never found right answers. He’s basically a one-man show, running direction, editing, cinematography, sound design and with this one even poetry for his films. I’ve always longed to know how I could achieve things on my own. I always wanted to find out how I could create those images in my head without driving myself mad with the productional issues that those big blockbusters have that I dreamt of making as a kid. Scott makes his films on his iPhone. He embraces the lack of quality in his work and creates abstract paintings out of the pixels that come forth out of his heavy editing and grading of the images. He bashes lighting and embraces the dark, something oh so many filmmakers are so terribly afraid of. At one point in Closer, he even stops portraying the film as a moving image and changes it into a slideshow of loose pictures, only connected by completely black intervals. I am so awestruck by how freely Barley seems to make his pictures and how open he is to the flaws of film. I’ve been dreading making films for a while and I’m quite scared to make my documentary this year and finish film school, but discovering his work has been an absolute eye-opener and a serious reassurance of what one man can achieve if he only puts his passion into it.’ — Leo (Willem) van der Zanden

the entire film

 

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Hinterlands (2016)
‘Begins broadly Benning-esque but steadily goes full Tscherkassky (or maybe Robinson) before settling into a fitting state of arrant, idiosyncratic abstraction; just as, if not more viscerally and sensorily frightening than Grandrieux’s White Epilepsy, only it manages to provoke the same sort of pure, physical panic in a tenth of the aforementioned film’s runtime.’ — Eli Hayes

the entire film

 

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Hours (2015)
‘Shot in a grainy black and white – with the pixels of the images producing a costant flickering – and deeply contrasted, Hours is soundless and simply “assembled” in post production: no filter, no effect. Once again, Barley uses the repetition of signs as an authorial mark and, at the same time, as the center of a formal structure conceived as a score. By repeating one or more signs in the short (the moon that ties the different shots, the clouds and the window from which the director watches the sky) Barley inundates the film with mystery, like the unexplainable experience of deja vu. At the same time, Hours is a little essay – like The Ethereal… – about the mysticism of time and the impossibility to stop it unless one freezes it with, once again, signs: the fog in The Ethereal and the moon in Hours. Moreover, if compared to Retirement, Hours shows Barley’s desire to build a shelter for himself, a spiritual isolation in another time, different and out of history, in an ethernal, threatening night.’ — Alberto Libera

the entire film

 

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Evenfall (2015)
‘Evenfall was filmed in late January, up in the snowy hills of Abertillery. I see this film as a companion piece to my first film, The Ethereal Melancholy of Seeing Horses in the Cold. Evenfall is the sister film. Like ‘…Horses’, it was all filmed in one location in less than an hour, using stream-of-consciousness. It is silent, set in the cold, and features one of nature’s most elegant creatures: the horse. It is the metaphors themselves that are not the same; Evenfall is a silent poem to celebrate the winter light and the sense of solitude that it brings. It is also my first film in 2.35:1 aspect ratio, and it was shot entirely on an iPhone.’ — Scott Barley

the entire film

 

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Shadows (2015)
‘The crew I was working with had to come up with an idea for our graduation film in university. We came up with what we all thought was a very strong idea. The lucidity and minimalism of Bresson was a huge influence on us. We worked on the pre-production for months, and then we were told by the university that we had to do a presentation for the film, and explain our idea to the class in two weeks. We began working on it, but in the back of my mind, I was losing faith in the idea. It didn’t feel like I was letting myself become vulnerable, or that I was risking something – and I think that is incredibly important as an artist. You must dare yourself to fail. Anyway, the presentation was drawing closer and closer and I didn’t want to tell the group how I felt, as we had already put so much work into it. Then, three days before the presentation day, I received a phone call from my mother. She was worried about Doris – my grandmother. No one had been able to speak to her on the phone. Nobody would answer. I quickly drove up there, and it seemed that her legs had stopped working, and she was trapped in the bath. We called the police and we waited. It felt like ages. I could hear my grandmother crying from upstairs, and I tried my best to reassure that everything was OK, all the while I was thinking, what if she has hypothermia? How long has she been trapped in there? Eventually, the police arrived. They had to break the glass on the kitchen window. We had access to Doris’ home, but Doris had left her keys in the lock on the inside of the house, so were unable to get inside. We rushes upstairs and carefully eased Doris out of the bath and comforted her. With a few hours, everything seemed OK again, but in the back of my mind, I felt incredibly guilty. I hadn’t seen my grandmother that often since embarking on my film course, and as is the case in these situations, it makes you truly value the moments you have with your loved ones. It wasn’t until that evening that the idea came to me of making a film about my grandmother. I rang up Matthew Allen – my friend and colleague – and told him what had happened, and what he thought about re-creating the trauma as a cathartic exercise. He approved of the idea, and so the following day, I came clean about my concerns to the rest of the crew about the previous film that we had been working on for months. We had just two days before the presentation. Thankfully, the crew were behind me on the idea, and we raced to create a script that would recreate the scenes I had witnessed only the day before. The aesthetics and overall “narrative” came very quickly. Almost immediately. I knew that the film had to have no camera movement, entrenching this feeling of entrapment and isolation. The camera would be a silent observer, remorseless and unrelenting to the scenes that unfolded. Repetition was another big point for us, to instil the sense of monotony when one lives alone and is unable to walk far, and so cannot travel outside. This would then build up to the bath scene, which as close to a re-creation as to what happened as we could do. It was all about authenticity. Human authenticity. We managed to get a good presentation together in 48 hours. The presentation went well, and Grace Mahony – who was one of the production designers from a different course that was in synergy with ours – could really understand what we were trying to do, and so she joined our group, and really helped realise the vision for Shadows.’ — Scott Barley

the entire film

 

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Hunter (2015)
‘An enormous, but shielded Explosion of chasmic light from the depths of a death; a small death in the darkness of a silent Somewhere, until a musician shouts his song during the stalk, and Someone writes with light. The death of the chase is avenged way west of our world, within the Cyclical cosmos, through the striking of a balance between the Chaos that shadows create and the tragic action of a soul being stripped from its shell.’ — Eli Hayes

the entire film

 

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Blue Permanence / Swan Blood (2015)
‘Above all, an experiment. Two identical films mirror each other. The only thing that differentiates between them is colour and sound, which is simply reversed. Through the use of just colour and sound, each part invokes unique sensations in the viewer; one of sorrow, and one of fear. Not a single identifiable object features. Instead, the films focus on repetition, texture, movement and light.’ — SB

the entire film

 

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Polytechnique (2014)
‘The ways in which Barley makes the real feel unreal are astounding. It almost feels like La Region Centrale in its sheer disorientation, but instead of a landscape slowly gone berserk, Barley leaves little time for any sort of full image. Instead, it’s all abstract enough to never feel fully interpretable, but plentiful enough to see things within it. The only issues I saw were when an editing effect was obvious enough that the illusion was briefly ruined. But the amount of effects and tricks used make the likelihood of finding any really difficult. And the score from Easychord only adds to the uncertain atmosphere, with the ambiance of his composition helping to form images in your own mind, rather than either director or performer handing them to you. It’s a terrific film to make your own through what you see out of what’s in the frame. When the waves turn into mountains or caves, crushing or erupting, surrounding or expanding, it’s almost certainly a different experience each time, and a personal one for each viewer as to what they find from the images.’ — olympic puffin, letterboxd

the entire film

 

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Ille Lacrimas (2014)
‘Waves run across the surface of the sea. A blanket of fog has descended, shrouding the far side of the water in dark mist. We hear a disturbance in the sea’s surface, out of our line of sight. A man staggers into view. He is stranded. Alone. He searches for answers; in the water, in the woodland, in the hills. He finds none. As he wanders deeper into the darkness of the forest, questioning his fate and destiny, he thinks back and reminisces over fragments of his life, and what has been lost. As time passes, the man finds a cabin. He feels uplifted at the thought of shelter from exposure to the elements that he has endured. Inside the shack he encounters a book that he had lost days before. He attempts to find solace in the book’s pages; memories of days passed by. It consumes him. He accepts his spiritual end. It comes full circle.’ — SB

the entire film

 

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Retirement (2013)
‘Retirement. My retirement. After a long stretch of intense work on a project that I wasn’t passionate about, I finally had a little time to make something I truly wanted. Solitude. A subtle use of machinima alongside HD video.’ — SB

the entire film

 

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Irresolute (2013)
‘A semi-socio-political work. Influenced by the work of avant-garde filmmakers, Stan Brakhage and Philip Solomon. Nominated in Senses of Cinema 2013 World Poll.’ — SB

the entire film

 

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Nightwalk (2013)
‘Waves of clouds and the ocean slowly crash in on one another, as do the blacks and whites of the image, and even the layers of landscapes. An unstable camera shakes to the heavy winds, and genuine unease is felt even in how vague Barley’s storytelling can be. It’s not a concrete short, with interpretations and story feeling more like smaller details to a more important whole. That whole is the immediacy of Barley’s imagery and soundscape, something he proves here as wholly unique. It took him a few shorts, but with old and new motifs of his combining wickedly into one short, Nightwalk seems like a brilliant opening to an auteur fully discovering himself. His image, his sound, and his voice.’ — olympic puffin, letterboxd

the entire film

 

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The Ethereal Melancholy Of Seeing Horses In The Cold (2012)
‘A silent short, focusing on the melancholic beauty of horses in the cold fog, and the metaphors that manifest, as time passes.’ — MUBI

the entire film

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Hm, yeah, not sure about ‘Challengers’. Better to know than not, I guess? No ‘Tarot’ yet. Love didn’t manage to persuade me (yet). And yesterday got eaten up. Hm, which Violette? I don’t have room for any of them, but, if I did, that burning chair looks fun. Love helping me order my roommate to take the wild parrot currently and very unhappily imprisoned in a cardboard box in our apartment back to the park where he found it and let it go free, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey. No, I don’t know Eva Rothschild, but the work looks very interesting at a first glance, and I will educate myself, thanks. Okay, all the luck beginning now and extending through Sunday. ** Lucas, Hi, Lucas. I actually have a few art things lying around that I can put on the walls, I just have to go buy a hammer and nails basically. Right, established group dynamics, yes, that’s hard. Me too: I’m totally fine one-on-one or even in very small groups, but crowd socialising is very stressful for me. Going to parties is like going to hell, and I’ll come up with every excuse imaginable to avoid them. Cool, yes, imgur I can access. Thank you in advance if you manage some photos you feel like sharing. I didn’t get to Character.AI yet because yesterday was a bit of a stress fest, but I’m super interested while having some of the same qualms in theory about it that you do. But then the flaws and inexplicable aspects should be interesting too, I think? Scrunch from me to your cat the next time it cuddles up. I can’t really say much about the new film yet because, one, it’s still really early, and, two, Zac hasn’t read what I’ve written yet, and he might not like the direction I’m proposing which would mean starting over. But we’re supposed to go over it today, so hopefully I’ll have at least a sketchy idea to tell you ere long. I will just say that, at the moment and subject to Zac’s approval, the made-up person thing involves one young character who always has a hand puppet on his hand and a teenager who steals a ventriloquist dummy and gets obsessed with it. Thank you for asking, pal. ** James Bennett, Hi, James. I’m alight mostly, thanks. Music critics … Off the top of my head, I’ve really liked Lester Bangs, Nik Kent, Simon Reynolds, Paul Morley, Jon Savage, Richard Meltzer, Byron Coley. You like any of those? I have seen ‘ABC with Gilles Deleuze’, and I agree with you, it’s wonderful. Deleuze is such the man. And I def. and obviously agree with you re: the lowly seeming status of integrity and truthfulness in and about things these days. They’re there, but what a hunt. Same virtues boomeranging back to you from about-to-rain Paris. ** Tosh Berman, Wow, nice, serious Italy time. Occasioning some lovely writing to boot. I need to do more than dip, but I don’t know when or how. Gotta figure that out. ** Tomás, Howdy, Tomás! I’m excited to think about architecture’s influence on your work. Is it possible to describe how that manifests? My writing is very influenced by my great interest in sculpture, which is kind of similar possibly? My way(s) of writing fiction definitely shape my script writing. It’s mainly the difference of writing something that’s to be visually filled-in in a set, non-negotiable way in the future rather than something that has to figure out a way in and of itself to trigger/create everything for a reader, if that makes sense. I definitely don’t see them as entirely distinct things. I think after we write the new film and there are three narrative feature-length scripts, publishing them might be interesting, yeah. Is it possible to see your films or installations anywhere? Do you have a Vimeo or anything? How’s the feature screenplay going? How are you approaching that vis-a-vis your shorter works, if that’s an answerable question? Bed-Stuy is pretty okay, from what I’ve seen of it, and central enough. Thanks, pleasure to speak with you. May the day cause excitement-provoking word spillage should you use it to work. ** Mark, Hi. Paris Ass was okay. Like I was saying yesterday, there was a whole lot of stuff being sold and proferred there that looked interchangeable, which was kind of dulling, But it was packed, and the energy was good. Whammy sounds like a treat. I didn’t know about that. Enjoy the Kraftwerk gig. Can’t imagine it being possible not to enjoy. I’ve seen them a fairly bunch of times. And ‘Bullitt’. Car chase! That’s all I remember about it. ** Huckleberry Shelf, Hi, hi. ‘Victim’, yes, for sure, he’s amazing in it. In ‘Providence’ he’s more doing his effete, fussy thing, but it’s great too. God, financial aid. I have a few friends trying to get that sorted at the moment. High hopes that they’ll pony up sans any more torture. I put off reading ‘Sentimental Education’ for the same reason, but, wow, is it great too. I’m good, thanks, just working on future things and enjoying spring while it gradually peters out. (I hate summer, I hate heat). I hope that, living in Chicago, you don’t mind it so much. My pal/collaborator Zac went to university in Chicago. Northwestern. Do/did you know the poet David Trinidad? He taught there until just recently, I think at Columbia? Anyway, I hope you’re doing great. Are you writing? What are you working on, if so? ** Sypha, Hi, James. I’m spotty after their early-ish phase too. I liked ‘No Country…’ and ‘Llewyn Davis’. And here and there. ** Charalampos, Mm, the parrot is not okay in the sense that it’s still in a box here, but I’m forcing my roommate to return it to the ‘wild’ today, slightly messed up wing and all, because its struggles and unhappiness at being trapped here are very disturbing. Alarm clock perkiness to Greece from at least semi-perky Paris. ** Steve, Hey. Everyone, Steve just published his May Music Round Up including his judgement on that new Billie Eilish, so … here. It is too bad, very certainly, but there’s nothing we can do except adjust the percentage downwards if possible. No, I knew nothing about Criterion being bought. That’s very strange, or maybe not. I don’t know how Criterion pays for itself. Fingers crossed, that’s for sure. ** HaRpEr //, Hi. Visconti comes off especially terribly at that Cannes press conference. Wise words re: the film’s gestion. Gosh, no way that film could get made in that form today. Unless, like, Chris Pratt or one of those Marvel actors played Gustav and Chalet was Tadzio, but even then. Shudder to think. Nice cockatoo story. The parrot trapped in our place barely squeaks. It just claws and claws at his cardboard surroundings with never ending desperation. But, like I said, my incarcerating roommate is going to free it today, period. Grr. That said, happy day to you! ** Zbornak of the Jackal, Hi, Zbornak. Happy that Banks lured you in. Well, you said it yourself about smoking something you really shouldn’t have, so I won’t add my two cents. Score: the magic powers though. I wish I had them. That would really help. Thanks for gracing here, sir. ** Cletus Crow, Awesome, glad you liked it! ** Jamie F, Agreed: that sign/work is awfully tempting. Oh, sorry, brain malfunction. Alton Towers it is! I will plan accordingly. Horniest? Hm, that does add a plus to its column. Oh, what the fuck, right? Race you to it. Dennis C. ** ANGUSRAZE, The one and only! Hail, maestro. Congrats on the finishing, and my fingers are crossed. You should see them. They’re, like, gnarly looking. Okay, I’ll go find the video. Great, been a while, thank you for clueing me in. And if I had even more fingers, I’d cross them too. Love back outta me. ** Justin D, Cool, happy you liked the work. I’m positive I’ll like Alton Towers. I even like those shitty traveling carnivals they set up in the park. I’m easy. ‘Shallow’: that has certainly been my expectation based on his earlier films. My week has been solid on some fronts, stressful on others, and, on balance, kind of par for the course. Yours? If I had a time machine I’d go back to Powells, magically figure out who you were sitting out there, and walk up to afterwards and say, ‘One day you’ll be very surprised by how shy you feel around me, and can I sign your book?’ I’ll use the The Marias link when I’m done here, thank you! ** jay, Hey, I definitely will look into it, probably today. It really sounds fascinating. I mean, you see my fascination even with the commentary to and fro the largely ‘imaginary’ escorts/slaves in just that basic context, so … Your thoughts on it are great. I copied and pasted them in a TextFile to consult once I’ve gotten my ‘feet’ ‘wet’. IOW, no, no ramble at all. I was gobbling it up. Week’s okay thus far over here. Yours? ** Uday, A year is way long time to spend in the US, under the current circumstances especially. Yeah, the word ‘best’ just irks me. I have a big problem with hierarchies in general, being an anarchist and all, so I just try to be verbally anarchistic as well, which is hard, btw. I just read something about Patty Waters. Strange. I’ll listen to her. It must be fate. Oh, uh, yeah, I’m a pretty sincere person. I just am. I never think about it. I don’t know why that happened. It seems to work okay, though. Thanks for reading that interview. I feel a little weird about talking about rimming in it, but TPR literally said that they would only interview me if I talked about rimming. Isn’t that strange? ** Oscar 🌀, Hi … (*yodeling*) …, Oscar! No, I haven’t gone there yet due to yesterday’s sneak attack of preoccupation with other, less interesting things. But I’m about to. Of course I’m going to ask futilely if it’s possible to read your fanfiction about Petyr Baelish. Yes, I suspect you’re right that the unforeseeable is more likely found in an aerial location than at our feet. Let’s both look to the heavens then, shall we? I could use an easy-peasy Wednesday actually, so thank you? You want one of those too? If so, my imagination bequeaths you one. ** Okay. I’ve revived this old post dedicated to the beautiful films of the young Welsh filmmaker Scott Barley, and I highly encourage you to experience his work in some respect while the opportunity is right in front of you, should you feel so inclined. See you tomorrow.