For those of you who may or may not be interested, in all my Uni work, I like to take my time and mull over ideas before committing to anything in particular. While not quite believing in ‘divine intervention’, subjects have a way of finding their way to me, rather than the other way around. I’m big on osmosis. As a part-time Honours student, I won’t be working on my project until next year, so have the luxury of floating along the academic ‘Workshop A’ wave, picking up morsels and storing them in the ideas file in my head.
Things have a way of pulling me in. I’m big on cinema. I’m interested in found footage, home video, broken damaged film, margins. I’m fascinated by fragments, the relationship between time and space, collective memory, collage, the mundane. I love the films of John Smith. His oeuvre is ordinary life – seemingly simple films, which are actually quiet complex.
Funnily enough, this heady mix lead me to John Foxx, who founded the ’80s English band Ultravox. John was in Melbourne last week for a gig at The Corner, and to present Tiny Colour Movies at ACMI. This is a collage of home videos and found footage, accompanied by a live electronic score performed by Foxx. The screening was followed by a (far too short) Q & A. I vaguely remembered John Foxx (my brother is a big fan), knew that home videos are an area that Adrian Danks is researching, and was curious to see if Foxx’s work would resonate with my interests and could possibly provide me with some direction in determining a (sustainably) interesting Honours subject.
It was a revelation – poetic, simple, meditative and for some odd reason, kept reminding me of the photographer Edward Steichen. John Foxx thinks of film as organic matter and celebrates bad colour, fuzzy images, heat damage, scratches and editing ‘hiccups’. He believes that digital technology has rendered film dead and therefore the material is now limited – a collector’s item and ripe for ‘re-purposing’.
Somehow, somewhere, I think there’s a project in there for me. Time will tell. I’m not totally convinced, but I am quietly excited…
