Slider extended Trailer
Part of a short series of experimental films using found footage, a City Symphony genre, and Structuralist style.
These films have a number of common elements
multiple layers
movement in contrasting directions
heavily treated and remastered source footage (colourised and stabilised), - - traveling pov shots (phantom rides)
the imagery of vehicles and bodies in motion.
repetitive music that matches the repetitive images and which is overlaid on the sound of a projector.
They are primarily non-narrative, although the music and the movements depicted sometimes imply narrative development. They can also, obviously, be read as elements of larger narratives.
The use of masks is quite effective in complicating the relationship between the different images so that it is sometimes hard to see them as discrete layers. I think this effect – where it becomes difficult to see the separate layers - is really effective as a way of capturing a certain experience of memory (where images, moments from different times are conjoined and confused as we attempt to remember the past).
Also, I think the image of movement – of moving bodies – is a good way of suggesting and evoking both the idea of the complex and unstable structure of memory, and the sense of history as something that is dynamic and ever-changing, ever-moving, rather than something that is stable and fixed. Water is therefore an interesting symbolic image in this regard.
I think the use of clearly remastered imagery is interesting. It means this is not about nostalgia for analogue film, or for some authentic past, but instead suggests that new image technologies can give us access to the past. There is a broader significance to this conceptualisation of the past – and history – as something that has to be revisited and renarrated continually. (Bennett. 2022)