Sea Front and Teign Spirit were screened at Force 8’s Methodist Church residency in West Bay, Dorset tonight. The programme Bodies of Water was curated by Kayla Parker, originally for RWA Bristol’s Power of the Sea exhibition.
Sea Front was filmed on Kodachrome 40 in 2006 and made into the film in 2011 using digital audio recorded around the same time and location, but not simultaneously with the film footage.
Teign Spirit used HD video material recorded in 2009 layered with 8mm black and white footage filmed over several years until the final summer of 1939 by the Jones family on holiday at Teignmouth in the interwar years. Just as war loomed ahead for the Jones family contemporary Teignmouth is threatened by the vagaries of a changing climate, particularly to the low-lying Back Beach area whose houses open onto the strand.
Jaimie Baron describes as ‘problematic’ the seamless compositing of ‘found footage’ into new works, or the insertion of new elements into archive footage. Teign Spirit leaves the ‘seams’ visible so the audience is aware of the overlaying of archive material – recognisable both by its being monochrome and the clothing, vehicles etc clearly belonging to the past – on to bright, crisp HD digital material. The two types of footage combined generates the archive effect by the temporal disparity. The beautiful cine footage grabs the attention one moment, then the underlying colour video material catches the eye.
There’s a paradox in that the HD digital footage is identifiable as ‘non-archive’ but the creation of the film hinged on the realisation that we were recreating similar shots as the Jones’ camera operator/filmmaker. We are separated from the film footage by 70 years of calendar time but also by developments in camera technology. In another 70 years who knows how archaic the HD AVCHD files will seem?