Ngland: Exposure Festival

Abstract

This short film is a companion work to A Profound Difference and presents a visual meditation on the political events and social environment that arose due to the UK Referendum on EU Membership. The film was made with a clockwork 16mm camera, centred on an England flag, flown in the garden of a suburban house in the Midlands, England.

The film consists of an entire reel of 16mm cine film, with no cuts or edits. The film was made with the camera in a fixed position with a change in the frame rate to suggest a sense of misplaced elegance in the slow-motion footage, against erratic action and confusion in the fast motion sections as the flag becomes tangled on the pole that supports it. The legend “ENGLAND” never quite reveals itself in full, with the “E” remaining partially concealed throughout. The film has been hand-processed and is presented with all the faults, glitches and mistakes as evidence of the physicality of film.

The work was exhibited in two parts for Exposure Festival 2020, Calgary. A large-scale sequence of scanned sections of film was exhibited at 621 Gallery, University of Calgary. A digital transfer of the film was exhibited at Calgary Contemporary. Where the projected film presents the flag though the cinematic illusion of time and space, the scanned segments decompose the film into discreet fragments. The behaviour of the flag, with the faults, marks and scratches that occurred through hand processing the film, act as metaphors for the impact of this political process on the social fabric of the country.

The work was supported by a public presentation at Calgary Contemporary, 3rd February, where I explored the use of analogue media for exploring issues of politics. The presentation provided the foundation for the published paper.