Gorge, 2024
Digital video
Duration 5min 26sec
This is my second time working with Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film, Persona, in relation to mountains. The first was in 2016, in a short essay film that I made from a collage of still and moving scenes that jumped between silence and sound, that evolved from attempting to mirror a disjuncture that I had faced within my practice, when I was, rather bizarrely, trying to build a mountain out of hundreds of baking tins that, inevitably, kept collapsing and consuming me.
Working with Persona, as a material, Gorge 2024 works with several seconds of Bergman’s film, which I have flipped upside down and stretched. What emerges is a slow series of jumps between the individual frames of the celluloid film strip that Bergman used, before digital film was invented.
This intervention was an attempt to create some breathing space, by shifting the focus of attention outwards, towards the nature of existence, through an earth-shattering experience that isn’t tied to a particular person.
The sound that I have introduced is the effect of stretching it alongside the image, which is a quote, read by myself, from page 8 of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain: a celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland, published by Canongate Books, in 2008.