by Jonathan Ali
Through mapping and metaphysics, sketches and surveillance, the seven films in A Place That Can Never Be Reached ruminate on perception and interpretation.
Proceeding from the liminal space between the filmmaker’s Dutch and Tunisian heritages, Raouf Moussa’s As Far As We Imagine is constructed as a meditative search for a personal sense of place. Employing maps, landscape paintings, projections and simulations, the film creates, through these mediated ways of seeing, a subtle tension between the innate desire for a rooted place to be and an estrangement from such a location. The result is less cartographic than contingent, a quiet embrace of place and identity as relational, never fixed.
In Morgan Sears-Williams’s through the bushes and the trees, you’ll find me, holes punched in sequential analogue frames act as peepholes that invite and interrogate spectatorship. As moments of queer intimacy unfold, the camera acts as a means of archiving queer love and resistance at Hanlan’s Point Beach, the site of Canada’s first pride gathering.
Kelly Gallagher’s handcrafted, cut-out animation collage Dance Film playfully upends the act of spectatorship as we watch, not a dance performance, but rather the act of a spectator watching that performance take place: the viewer being viewed. Louise Barrington’s similarly tactile Movement Memories presents fragments of workaday life across the seasons on Orkney. The grain, scratches and hand-processed textures of analogue film reflect a delicate, ever-evolving landscape, imbued with memory that yet refuses an easy nostalgia.
Across three embodied acts of performance, Xiaolu Wang’s Fallen Day explores falling as a form of letting go. From a dragon dance to a martial arts class to ice skating, each scenario mediated by asynchronous conversations between people and non-verbal conversations between bodies, falling is proposed as a positive mode of constant being: surrender as strength.
In the playfully kaleidoscopic Super-8 diary film Audry Lornacle or 14 Days in DJ’s House, the filmmaker Dagie Brundert (Alchemy Focus artist 2021) documents a residency at Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage on the coast in Dungeness, Kent. Structured loosely around a series of dreams, and braiding black-and-white and colour images, positive and negative stocks and the filmmaker’s own drawings, the film suggests various ways of seeing the everyday world anew, and of seeing anew as a mode of working through grief and approaching healing.
And in Angelo Madsen’s My First Structuralist Film, hypervisibility is subverted in relation to a trans person’s body. Departing from a detailed act of bodily documentation, the film interrogates both the internal need for visibility and the desire for the trans individual to be visible, questioning on what and whose terms visibility is performed.
