Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices by Kim Knowles

Author:Kim Knowles
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030443092
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Visual composition comes to play a key role in Baines’s series of double projections, where carefully choreographed movements from one adjacent screen to another again draw attention to the material confines of the film frame. Untitled (insertional) (2014), Untitled (#1 25/25 x 10/4) (2016) and Untitled (slackline) (2018) all use ropes of different sorts to create an illusory impression of spatial continuity. Actions that begin in one screen appear to cross the threshold into the other, carrying echoes of Deren’s linking of disparate spaces in Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land (1944) and A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945). In those films, seemingly fluid and unbroken movements ‘transcend geography’ through the use of matches on action, illustrating film’s inherent ability to manipulate space and time for poetic effect—what Deren refers to as the ‘creative use of reality’.94 In A Study in Choreography for Camera, Talley Beatty raises his foot in the forest in one shot and in the subsequent shot places it down in a domestic interior, whilst the famous sequence of Meshes of the Afternoon sees Deren traverse multiple spaces in only five steps. However, in a slightly different vein, Baines transcends not the imagined space within the shot but the material space of the frame. In each case, two 16mm Bolex cameras are placed side-by-side and angled in such a way that the same action is filmed simultaneously with a slight overlap. The tightrope of Untitled (slackline) stretches across the two images, with the filmmaker-performer appearing to step literally across the divide that separates them, transgressing representational boundaries and creating a dynamic tension between onscreen and offscreen space (Fig. 3.18).

Fig. 3.18Double screen actions in Untitled (#1 25/25 x 10/4), Jenny Baines, 2016

(Image courtesy of the artist)

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