Ecology proudly straddles the mediums of film and art to show a family holiday in Spain from the perspectives of the 3 vacationers. Innermost thoughts are revealed through luscious soundscapes and an inspired use of split screen filming techniques.
3 for 2 Screening Offer
Watching Ecology is a unique experience, our three screenings – Mon 27, Tue 28 & Thu 30 July – will feature the segmented stories in a reordered pattern each time; delivering a different viewpoint and perspective, through the same initial footage. To take advantage of this original way of viewing film we’re offering you tickets to all three screenings for the price of two! Please visit Box Office or call 0161 200 1500 to take advantage of this offer.
Ecology by Sarah Turner
artist’s statement
Ecology is an experimental, single screen film composed of three parts. The work is derived from three short stories (written by myself). Each story is an internal monologue from the POV of three family members; a mother, daughter and son, and set in the same location, Andratx, Majorca, though not all at the same time. The three monologues equate to three separate sequences that together comprise a long form film . However, these sequences can be screened in any order, therefore, challenging and questioning narrative causality. In each sequence fairly anodyne family rituals of showering, cooking, eating, cleaning are re-enacted and repeated. However, the family’s presence in the location is the result of a central event which remains avoided and unspoken; a moment of alcohol-related violence which has led to the son’s detention. This repressed violence or violent repression erupts differently in each sequence – a glass is smashed, there’s blood in the food. A glass is crushed, food is vomited out.
Ecology takes the three themes of the environment, familial psychic structures and technology as critical sites of crisis and change in the present moment, and insists that we consider them together. The location of Majorca invokes the optimism of ‘holiday’, but the site is in fact a drought zone where the sun is oppressive and water is a scarce and rare resource. The ‘holiday’ is a literal relocation, but one where the conventions of the everyday are overturned, the primal needs for survival mirroring the psychic needs struggled for within the family. The inevitable recycling of water is conceptually mirrored in the recycling of emotional violence, requiring that we reconsider ‘waste’, ‘need’ and ‘survival’, and suggesting that familial existence is as precarious an ecology as the environment.
The use of film technologies consolidates this theme. Shot on multiple formats including stills, Super 8, DV and mobile phones – technologies that live inside one another as they evolve – the imaging of the film is a struggle for stability and consistency. Filmic conventions are played out in digital form, but the effects of recycling old methods of framing, lighting and focus are allowed to misfire. Circularity rather than linear progression characterises a new way of understanding technologies, psychic structures and the environment. Importantly, this is reproduced in the exhibition of the film; the three separate yet interdependent sequences are mastered on DVD and authored to run on autoflow – the sequences can be screened in any order and exhibitors determine the sequence progression. Thus, the instability and circularity of the film’s themes is played out at every screening.
Process: Production
Ecology was filmed on over 20 different cameras using 10 distinct formats, including DVCAM video, Mini-DV, Micro-MV, Super 8 film stock, digital and 35mm stills cameras and mobile phones. Low-cost digital technologies were dissected and pushed far beyond their supposed applications, sitting alongside traditional film-based approaches. These disparate analogue and binary systems are unified in the digital realm through the editing process, where these technologies are manipulated to harmonise or contrast.
The stories themselves take the form of a poetic stream of consciousness that disrupts syntax and ruptures causality. On location we used both their form and content as a framing device, in order to approach a series of extended improvisations with camera, sound design and composition. The improvised ‘sketches’ were continuously extended through process based editing . Edited sequences were viewed by the collaborators, and responded to in subsequent improvisations. In this sense, the storytelling became the story; the performance of actors, sound, camera, rhythm, time, abstraction and landscape, were all a telling, not a told which was re-performed.
Process: Post Production
Crucially this use of improvisation and contingency is extended through the editing as core uses of texture, grain, framings and formats evolved. Key patterns are repeated, with variation, in each of the sequences. If we think of technology (grains and gauges) as a family of slightly different molecualr structures, how can we describe or exploit their likeness or their difference? Psychic sequences and experiences are reconfigured and repeated as in DNA – in genetic code there’s an equivalence to DATA and imagery; another technological and visual code.
Furthermore a real ‘ecology implies a recyling of imagery, not just of symbolic imagery, – ie, the glass that’s smashed, crushed, drained, and cycles of emotional repetition; a psychical recycling of emotional structures that’s played out through repeating patterns of camera framing and movement, – but a literal recyling. Literal imagery from one story being recycled and reworked in another, revealing the muliple meanings of any image; narrative, causality and perspective is therefore reconfigured through a phenomenology of perception.